Okay, now I was asked to give you the names of those books. One was the biography of Watchman Nee, Against the Tide. What was the other one by Stephen Kaung? The Full Growth of Christ.
Now I can say good morning, Happy New Year, and all those wonderful greetings.
I have the Scripture up on the ceiling. If you’ll turn to that, we’ll read it, starting in Genesis 28:10.
Now Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.
So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set.
And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep.
Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants.
Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, to the north and the south; and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Behold, I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.”
Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
Then Jacob rose early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it.
And he called the name of that place Bethel; but the name of the city had been Luz previously.
Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and keep me in this way that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on, so that I come back to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God.
And this stone, which I have set as a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that You give me I will surely give You a tenth.”
Then, in Genesis 35, if you go a couple of pages, just read verse 1. This is probably about thirty years later.
Then God said to Jacob, “Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there; and make an altar there to God, Who appeared to you when you fled from the face of Esau your brother.”
Let’s pray.
Father, we want to thank You. I want to thank You this morning that we have access to You—access to You at great cost to Yourself—that You have bought a way for us to come to You, so that You can make Your presence known to us.
Lord, we just want to thank You. I want to thank You that You love us in such a way that You want to make Yourself known to us. Lord, that is what we are asking today: that in the time that we share, You will make Yourself known to us in the way that You want to be known; that You will draw us out from ourselves to meet You; and that You will be able to speak to us in our inmost parts.
Lord, we want to thank You that You are able to do this because You have given us Your Word and Your Holy Spirit. Lord, we want to tell You how much we depend on Him—on You—for these things.
Now, Lord, some of the things that we are going to talk about, we have been talking about for the last few weeks, and they can seem very boring to us. So, Lord, we pray that You would help us. Just help us in being open to You. That is all we ask, Lord. Make us open to You and speak to us, we pray afresh, in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.
You guys are awful close.
Okay, this morning, as you can see, we have read these things, and we are considering a new topic. I brought some ministry in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and they gave me this topic to speak on. It is not something that I asked to speak on or wanted to speak on. But they asked me to do this, and I felt very, very out of my league, because so much has been said on the house of God.
I have not experienced as much. You know, sometimes it is easy to teach something: you read a book and you teach something. You can do those things, but that is not really what we are after.
I remember when Jeffrey was talking about his ministry. He said the first thing he did was start to look at old ministries, and I did that too before Beaver Falls. I listened to Stephen Kaung and Lance Lambert. Sonny Bradley sent me a tape that he did. I read some of the things that I remembered from Floyd Pyle. You get all these different things.
But it is not different things that we are after. What we are after is the Lord speaking to us.
In a sense, there are some of us who have never seen the house of God. I am speaking to you because you have never seen it before. It is not that by listening to me you are going to see the house of God, because the house of God is only given by revelation.
You can hear things about it, and you can know things about it. That is the danger in a meeting like this and in assemblies like this. You hear it all the time, and all of a sudden, that is all it is—it is just a teaching.
Then there are some of us who have seen it. We embraced it at one time, and then all of a sudden, life happens. Just like Jacob, we have to be called back to it. That is some of us. I am speaking to some of you like that.
Why is God so concerned about His house? There are three people who really saw the house of God in the Old Testament, and we just want to take a look at them.
There is Jacob. He is the one who had that dream, and he had the original vision of what the house of God was.
Then we have Moses. Moses was known as the servant of God. If you read, I think starting in Exodus 25, Moses was given the pattern for how the house was to be constructed.
Then you have David. Now, that is what I used to look like in high school. I have been sick, okay?
David was a man after God’s own heart. The thing about David was that he sensed God’s desire for a house. Not only did he sense it, but he was moved by God’s desire for the house. He wanted to build it for Him, even though God did not let him build it.
David was the one who stored up all the things, all the riches that went into it, prepared the way, made plans to build it, and all those types of things. David, being a man after God’s heart, knew the desires of God’s heart. God’s desire was to have a house.
Now, I want to focus on Jacob this morning for a couple of reasons.
For me, it is hard to relate to Moses because Moses is too good. You look at Moses—even though he had his times of this and that—but you read most about Moses, and he is just too good. He is the servant of God. He is a faithful servant. Hebrews says that he was faithful in His house as a servant. Unwavering faithfulness—that is hard for me to relate to, because I do not see myself in that way.
David was a man after God’s own heart, and that too is hard for me to relate to. I know my own heart, and I do not see it as being toward God like David’s was. Even though David had his failures, his heart was always toward God. I do not see that all the time in myself.
But Jacob—I can relate to Jacob. As a matter of fact, James is Greek for Jacob. It was a weird day when I found that out. I was reading a book about Jacob by a rabbi, and with all the things going on, I said, “That is me.” Then the next line was, “You know, Jacob is James in the New Testament—the Greek.” It is me. I have been found out.
I choose Jacob not just because I can relate to him, but because he had the initial vision. Some of us, like I said, need to see things for the first time. Also, he had to have this vision renewed, like some of us. That is where Jacob was.
It is always good to consider the one to whom God shows something first—to look at them and see what they are like. In one way, I think it is very encouraging. When you look at Jacob, you do not look at him as being so good that only he could have this kind of revelation.
I do not even want to call it a revelation, because I think it is a revelation, but we get caught up with these words. They become higher than they are, and then we think they are really unattainable. I want to stay away from that. I want to bring it down a little bit.
It is interesting that, even though Hebrews speaks of those who saw a city whose Builder and Maker was God, it does not mention that Abraham saw this, although I think God really showed him this at the beginning.
But it was not Abraham to whom this first vision came. I think part of that is because in Abraham, what we see is God calling out a person to Himself. It is almost like we get in Abraham a picture of initial salvation: being called out to God for God’s purposes.
It was not given to Isaac, either. In Isaac, what we see is a person who dwells in the land that God has given him. It really is a picture—if you remember, Isaac was going to be sacrificed. Hebrews talks about that as a picture of resurrection, because Abraham had to believe that if he killed Isaac, God would raise him up.
Isaac laid his life down, even though Abraham did not kill him. It was as if he were going to be killed, because if God had not intervened, Abraham was going to kill him. Isaac had laid his life down, so he was given new life—resurrection life.
In Isaac we see a man who finds everything that Christ is for him individually and lives in the good of it. That is a wonderful thing. Those were the things that really inspired Jacob as he lived. I think that is one reason Jacob wanted the blessing so much: he saw the richness of everything that Isaac had, and it inspired him to say, “I desire these things.”
When we look at Jacob, we want to see what he was like before he had the vision, because that is important. What you are like before you have something—that is the encouragement to us.
If we see what they were like after, it is like Moses. When you watch The Ten Commandments, the old version, after Moses sees the burning bush, he is a different person. He has that glazed look, his hair turns gray, he is different. That is the Moses you cannot relate to, right?
But Jacob—what was he like before he had this vision? There are some things before he was given this dream, or this glimpse, that give us hope.
Jacob was spiritually minded. He grew up in a nice spiritual home, and he was spiritually minded. He sought out spiritual things. He was not merely intrigued by them. Intrigue just means we are curious. But he was interested in spiritual things.
You see the difference. If you are intrigued, you say, “Well, I want to check that out.” But if you are interested, you pursue it. When I met my wife, at first I was intrigued. But then I became interested. You see the difference?
Not only did Jacob seek spiritual things, he obtained spiritual things. He obtained the birthright. He desired that birthright, because in it was the blessing. You can say that too: he obtained the blessing. Those were things he really sought after.
He was spiritually minded. He sought after spiritual things, and that is good. But at the same time, he was so unspiritual. Look at the way he got these things—very unspiritual.
Isn’t that just like us? We desire spiritual things, and yet we are so unspiritual. We say, “What hope is there for me?” Well, our hope is not in ourselves. That is the wonderful thing. God shows us things. God reveals things to us, even though we are like Jacob.
Jacob was given this vision. God had given him all these things—the birthright and the blessing. But I think the reason God did these things was that we get caught up just with ourselves and getting things for ourselves. We want things just for ourselves: “I want the blessing for myself, for what it does for me. This is what is going to enhance my life.”
We get very self-centered, and that is really what Jacob was most of all. He was self-centered. That is just like me, and probably like you.
He had the blessing. He had the birthright. But why was God giving these things to him? I think He was drawing him out to see something even further than that. God wanted to show him that there was a purpose behind getting the blessing and a purpose behind getting the birthright.
That purpose had nothing to do with Jacob, but it had everything to do with what God desired.
Sometimes when we give gifts, it is not just because we want our kids to be happy. There is something we are trying to get through to them. There is something bigger behind the gift. If I give someone pen and paper, maybe I want them to write me letters more. That is the purpose behind it. I want them to be more engaged with me.
In other words, the end of this was not all about Jacob. Jacob was getting those things in order to find out what the purpose of God was.
There is something in it for God when He gives us these things. When God gives us salvation and saves us, there is something in it for Him too. I think we overlook those things. Why has God saved me?
We get caught up with all the blessings, and we do not get to the point of asking, “Why am I getting these blessings? What is really the purpose behind all these things happening?” I think this is what the dream is all about—this heavenly glimpse that Jacob got.
In blessing Jacob, what is in it for God? We could say the same thing in blessing Isaac and Abraham: there was something in it for God. In God saving you and me, there is something in it for God. That is what the house of God is all about. It is something for God. It is something that God desires.
Another thing about this was that Jacob got this vision before he went to a foreign land. He was going out. He was not going to be in the land that God had promised.
Brothers and sisters, we can say that we live in Christ, and that is the land of promise. But in another way, we live in this world, do we not? We need something to anchor us. We need something to keep us close to God.
God gave Jacob this vision. Just like the dreams that held Joseph in Egypt, this dream held Jacob, I believe, the rest of his life, even though it was not at the forefront of his life.
Remember, Jacob was self-centered, just like us. God has to work and work and work to bring these things—to bring God’s own desires—back to the forefront.
Most of Genesis is about the life of Jacob. Is it not wonderful that God takes pains to bring through what He wants? Does that not bring hope to you? Does it not encourage you that God knows who we are, and He goes through pains?
He dealt with Jacob and all the self-life. That is the whole story of Jacob: He deals with him and gets him into the place where He wants him to be.
Now we need to ask this question, which we are all waiting for, right? What is the house of God?
You get people taking notes. When I am talking, I am going to put a list of things here. Do not tie yourself to these things. I am just saying that when we think of the house of God, it is a many-faceted thing.
I am going to say some things fast. This is not an exhaustive list. But in thinking about the house of God, these are the things the Lord has brought out to me. Do not tie yourself to these things and say, “This is it, and it is nothing more than this.” God will show you what it is.
That is the whole thing: it is not what I say that it is. God will show you. These are things God has shown me, but they have to be for you. You have to see them for yourselves. They have to be revealed to you.
The house of God is not something to speculate about. If we go back, there is the house of God: two stories, two-car garage, gabled roof, shutters, storm door—the house of God. No.
There is nothing we really need to speculate about, because God showed us what the house of God is when He showed Jacob this dream. It is recorded for us. It is the house of God. It does not look like a house; it is a ladder.
We see the house of God in this image, and we are meant to behold it. That does not mean you just give it the once-over: “Oh yeah, it is a ladder,” and then you are gone. It is not that you merely glance at it, leave, and forget about it.
James says that we can read the Word and it is like looking in a mirror; then we forget what we look like. We have to come back and look at it again.
The whole thing is this: when it says, “Behold”—and I think the Lord says “behold” three times in that dream to Jacob—it means to really look at it.
Who goes to Virginia Tech here? The only reason I say that is because Virginia Tech is technical; it is science-based, right? It is not that I like it or do not like it. It means nothing to me. I am a UCLA man—the real school out West.
Oh, come on. Look, look, look. I know you are thinking Harvard, Yale, but in the same breath you are thinking Cal State Fullerton, UCLA, right? I know how it goes. The big ones are out West. Incidentally, UCLA, I think, lost in their bowl. It is okay; so did USC.
But when you do a lab, how do you observe your lab? Do you just glance at it? You stare at it for a long time, okay? It is like the first time you see the one you really like—you stare at them for a long time.
You look critically at things because you are looking to see what the lab is trying to show you. You are looking at something critically.
When we look at the house of God, we are to behold it. We are to look at it critically. Critically does not mean we are saying, “This is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong.” That is the wrong kind of critical.
Critically means, “I am observing to see all that I can. I want to keep it in my mind, in my memory, in my heart. So I am going to look at it very carefully.” That is really what it means. As Rocky and Bullwinkle said, “I am scrutinizing it.” You guys remember Rocky and Bullwinkle? I am talking to kids my age.
Now, I am going to give you a few things. Like I said, I do not want you to just grab these things and say, “Oh, this is what Jim says the house of God is.”
When we look at this image, we see that it is a ladder. What we notice is a ladder that goes from heaven to earth.
In other words, it brings heaven down to earth, and it brings earth up to heaven. Commentators say that this dream Jacob has is a picture of Christ, and it is.
But is that not what the church is supposed to be? Is not the church supposed to be a picture of Christ? Is it not the body of Christ? In the same way, the house of God—not just the Lord Himself, but the house of God—is like that ladder coming down from heaven and touching the earth.
Heaven and earth meet in this place. Heaven meets earth at the house of God.
Secondly, it is a ladder that allows God to dwell with man.
In Revelation 21:3, it says:
Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people.
That is what we see in John 1 as the picture of Christ, right? God took on flesh so He could dwell with man.
God’s house is a place where God can dwell with man—dwell, live with him, be Himself with him. It is where He wants to be.
Why does a man build a house? Because he wants to live there. Why does God build a house? Because He wants to live there. It is the same way. It is no different than us.
The third thing: it is where God communes with man.
When I commune, I communicate who I am and what my heart is. I share with you who I am and what my heart is. I do not share that with everybody. People I meet on the street, I do not go up to them and say, “Hey, let me tell you what is on my heart.”
But I can tell my wife that, and I can tell my kids that, because they live in my house. I communicate with them. They see the very person that I am—who I really am—because they live with me. They dwell with me.
Just like God shared His thoughts with Abram when He was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, He shared what was on His heart: “I see these things happening. I have to act on it.” He drew Abram out because He showed him what was on His heart. He shares His desires with him.
If you remember Acts 10 and Acts 11, Peter had the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven with all the different animals on it. The Lord said, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” Peter said, “Oh no, Lord, these are unclean animals.” The Lord said, “What God has made clean, do not call unclean.”
He did that three times because the Lord was sharing what was on His heart. He was sharing, “I am sending you to the Gentiles.” After he had that dream three times, there was a knock on the door. There were men from Cornelius, and the Lord said, “You go with them, because this is on My heart.” God was sharing His heart with Peter.
It is also where God can sit down with man. In Revelation, it says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens, I will come in and sup with him.” In other words, “I can come down and we can sit down together.”
I think Gunther brought up the verse from Luke, when the Lord was having the disciples come for the Passover, and He said, “I have desired with desire to have this Passover with you.” How much the Lord desires to dwell with men in this kind of way: “I want to sit down with you. I want to be Myself with you, and I want you to be yourself with Me.”
There is a wonderful song from a Catholic community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called the Word of God Community. It came about during the charismatic movement in the Catholic Church, and they did a number of albums and songs.
One of the songs was “God and Man at Table.” That is God’s desire: to sit down at table with man. If you listen to that song, it talks about all the people who are called to this table—sinners, saints, and prophets. They are all called together to sit at table with God, because this is what God desires. This is what His house is about: where God can commune with man.
It is a place where God can rest with man. By “rest,” I do not mean that He just lounges around on the couch, falls asleep, and takes a nap.
I mean that He can rest with man because there is nothing more He has to do. He has finished His work totally. There is nothing more He has to do for man. He has redeemed them by sending His Son, and He can be at rest now.
He is not worried about what they are going to do if they fall in. He is not worried at all. He is completely relaxed and at rest because everything has been done.
It is like how busy you are, especially during the Christmas holidays. You cannot sit down, right? But for those of you who celebrate Christmas, when you sit down for that dinner, everything is done. You can rest. You are not worried about something going off in the oven or something not being ready. Everything is done, and now you can enjoy the ones you are with.
It is the same with God. This is the place where He can rest, and He can enjoy all those that He has saved.
Finally—as far as this picture goes—we see angels ascending and descending, going both up and down. What does that mean? It means there is heavenly activity.
His house is where the purpose and the will of God are found and known. Because they are found and known, it is from here that they go forth to be accomplished.
It is in the house of God where we find His will as well. Remember Acts 13, where Paul and Barnabas are meeting with the other prophets and believers in Antioch. They are all meeting together and worshiping the Lord. At that point the Lord says, “Set apart Paul and Barnabas for the work to which I have called them.”
He reveals His will in His house, and it is from out of that house that you go out to do the will—whether it is among other Christians or work outside what we would call the walls of the church, out in the world.
The will is found in the house. Dad tells you in the house what to do; then you go outside the house and do what he told you to do. “I want you to go get a loaf of bread. I want you to mow the lawn.” It is taking care of the house, whatever it is.
This is where we get to know the purpose and will of God, and this is from where we are sent out.
One thing I do not have on this list, but I think it is probably the most important of all: it is in this place, in this house, that God is loved.
God is not loved in the world. But in His house, He is loved.
It is a wonderful thing, as a father, to go home after work, because you go home to a place where you know people love you. It is the same with our Father, our heavenly Father. He likes to be loved too.
What is the greatest commandment? We heard it this morning:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
That is what He desires. He desires our love and our affection. In His house, that is where He has it.
Those are some ways we can look at the house of God, but there are some other things I want to draw attention to.
First of all, what is that picture up there for? What do you see? Is that all you see? It has something in it, okay? Is that all you see? It has a name on it. That is right.
In other words, the house of God is where God puts His name. That is an important thing. He puts His name there. In other words, He takes ownership of it: “This is My house.”
He takes care of it. He does not want the neighbors to look at it and say, “God, You are a lousy housekeeper,” or, “You built a lousy house.” He takes ownership of it.
Israel is a type of the house of God in this way, because He took ownership of them as a people. When He brought them out of Egypt, He took ownership of them. He knew what He was going to do. “These are My people. They are called by My name. They are Mine. Let My people go.”
The temple is another type of the house of God. It was in that place that God said, “I will put My name.” He was taking ownership of it.
What does it mean to be known by His name or called by His name? When the believers in Antioch were first called Christians, what did that mean? Why were they called Christians? Because people were seeing something in them.
If we look at 2 Chronicles—I know that is your favorite book in the Bible, 2 Chronicles, probably next to 1 Chronicles, because I know you guys like to read genealogies. You probably like to read them before you go to bed, do you not? Nothing like a genealogy: begat, begat, begat.
This is when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon. She wanted to test him in all these things. At the end of her visit, this is the Queen of Sheba’s testimony.
And when the queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants, the service of his waiters and their apparel, his cupbearers and their apparel, and his entryway by which he went up to the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her.
Then she said to the king, “It was a true report which I heard in my own land about your words and your wisdom.
However, I did not believe their words until I came and saw with my own eyes; and indeed, the half of the greatness of your wisdom was not told me. You exceed the fame of which I heard.
Happy are your men and happy are these your servants, who stand continually before you and hear your wisdom.”
This gives us a whole different idea of the name—being called by His name—because the attention here is brought to the servants, not just to Solomon’s wisdom.
Part of the whole wisdom of Solomon was the way his servants served him. That showed his wisdom. It talks about their service and it talks about their apparel—what they wore. Then it says, “Happy are they,” or “Blessed are they,” because they serve you, because they do your will.
They are clothed with his character. The things they were wearing showed something of the character of Solomon.
These servants reflected, in their service, the deeds of Solomon. In their apparel, they reflected the person of Solomon, just like our Lord Jesus Christ reflected those things about His Father: “I only do the things I see the Father do.” “The Father and I are one.”
It is the same way. To say that it is where His name is means we wear His name. We wear His name in our character, and we wear His name in our service. That can be seen outwardly.
It is not that we are making a show of it, not that we are pinning on a name or wearing a cross or Christian earrings. I do not know. But it is seen in how we act, what we do, and actually who we are. You see His name written all over us.
In Revelation, He says of one of the churches, “I will write My name on their foreheads.” When something is written on your forehead, how do you hide it? Girls, you might have bangs, but you cannot hide it. It is on your forehead. Everybody is going to see it.
God takes ownership of you. He writes His name on your forehead. He puts you into the clothes of His character—righteousness and holiness—because that is who He is. He works that out in you. It is not that you have to work something out; He works that out in you as you serve Him.
Where God dwells—let me make a statement about this. When I talk about where He dwells, what I mean is that His presence is known there.
It is not that His presence is merely there, because God is omnipresent, right? He is everywhere. So it is not just that He is there. I say “okay” again—somebody stop me. I love it.
His presence is known there. It is not even simply that it is acknowledged there. He manifests His presence in His house. He makes it known.
Let me give you an example from my own life. When I really started to follow the Lord, I was about twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-two. I remember going to a prayer meeting at Puente Valley Fellowship. It was in the Tailors’ house, and we were praying.
You know prayer meetings are hard to go to, are they not? Most of the time we do not pray. We are just sitting there listening, so we listen a lot and then we go. It is a long prayer meeting—especially if people are not praying. That is really long, right?
But there was a sister there. I am not saying it was because of her or anything like that, but this sister started praying. Her name was Catherine Roberts. She was an older saint. Later on I found out that she was one of the people who had some spiritual weight.
Anyway, she was praying. When you are in a prayer meeting, you have your eyes closed and everything. She started praying, and all of a sudden, I sensed that God was there.
I did not have chills or anything like that. I did not have some funky feeling or something like that. But there was a sense that God was there. It was like He just stepped into the room. Like if I had opened my eyes, I would have seen His feet.
It was such an awesome presence. It is indescribable, because it is what God is—holiness. That was there. It was so different.
It was frightening. That is what I mean by awesome. It was an awesome sense of God being there. It was frightening—not in the sense that I was terrified and thought, “Oh, I never want to see something like this.”
It was one of those awesome things where you are frightened, but you do not want to be away from it. That is what I mean by manifest presence.
Is that not what happened to Jacob? Why did Jacob awake? Because all of a sudden he sensed that God’s presence was there. God was speaking to him, and Jacob awoke and said, “God is here. God is right here. I sense Him here, and I was unaware of it.”
Is that not the key, especially for you who have never really experienced or seen what the house of God is? You have been in it all the time. Jacob was in Bethel. He was there all the time. He was sleeping there, for goodness’ sake.
That is the whole thing: he was sleeping. He was in the place where God was, and he was asleep. How many of us are like that? We have no sense that God’s presence is really here.
We go here because this is where our parents go, or because Christians are supposed to go to church, or whatever. But we have no real sense that God is right in the place where we are.
Can you believe it? God was at a prayer meeting. You understand what I am saying?
Jacob was unaware of it, and he awoke. In other words, he became conscious that God was present. It was a consciousness, and it scared him because God was different from him. He was holy. He was just other.
Now we have to ask the question: where is the house of God? Is it in a specific place? Is it here? What do we call this place? “4424.” That is the code name for this place. “Where are you going?” “I am going to 4424.”
Maybe I am going to St. Mark’s United Methodist. Maybe that is where the house of God is. Maybe it is in Jerusalem.
No. According to Scripture, Matthew 18:20 says:
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.
So we get two or three people together in His name. That is the whole key: in My name.
What does it mean to gather in His name? It does not mean that we all just agree around someone’s teachings, like Lutherans gathering around the teachings of Luther, or Reformed people gathering around the teachings of Calvin.
It is not because we gather here because we like the order of the service or the music. A lot of people come here—I have talked to them—who have no idea about the house of God. They come because of the freedom of worship here, how you can come here and freely worship. That is a draw, but that is not why we come. That is not what it means to meet in His name.
It might be why we come, but that does not mean we are meeting in His name. It is not because we generally like the people who are here. You know, we are all yuppies, and we feel this is where the yuppies go.
Let me give you another story. In 1974—I was twenty-one—Lou Pyle, who was Floyd’s son, my best friend Jerry Lineberger, a guy named Eddie Lee whom I went to high school with, my brother Bill, my brother Mike, and myself—there were six of us.
Some of us had just rededicated ourselves. Lou and I had just rededicated ourselves to the Lord. Jerry and Eddie had just come to the Lord.
We met in a park—a church that met in the park. It was a little hippie church run by a Methodist college group from Azusa Pacific. It was known as Agape. We started to meet there, and that is how we got to know each other.
Here is what happened. The six of us started just to get together because we wanted to know what to do with ourselves now that we were following the Lord. We did not know what to do with ourselves.
We were all young men. Some of us were in college; some of us were not in college and were not working. We just did not know what to do. So we started getting together, saying, “What are we supposed to do now?”
We wanted to glorify the Lord with our lives. We had been saved. We had gotten right with the Lord. We wanted to know, “What do we do with our lives now? How can we glorify Him?”
We wanted to find out what God’s will was for us. Not only did we want to find out what the will of God was for us, but once we found out what the will of God was, we wanted to do it. We wanted Him to be Lord of our lives.
Now that is what I think is gathering in His name. You get people to come together for those purposes—that is where you gather in His name.
“We want You to be Lord of our lives. We want to know Your will, and we want to do it. That is why we are getting together. We are coming together to find Your will for us. What do You want us to do? How can we glorify You?” That is meeting in His name.
Where is the house of God? Sometimes it is in places you would never think it would be, like trees in a desert. What are those trees doing there? They do not belong there. Do they not look out of place?
That is okay, because God builds His house where He builds His house. You find His house in places you do not expect to find it.
Jacob was in a desolate place, and he found the house of God—a desolate place.
Isaiah, when he was prophesying about the coming Messiah in Isaiah 53:1-2, said:
Who hath believed our report?
And to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of a dry ground.
A root out of dry ground—that just seems like it does not fit, does it? It is like saying, “How can the Messiah come from Israel?” when you look at Israel at that time.
It is like Nathanael. Philip came to Nathanael and said, “We have found the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.” What did Nathanael say in John 1:46?
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
We find His house in places where you would not expect to find His house.
Like I was saying, the six of us who got together—and there were two other sisters—we found the house of God in a little three-bedroom house that belonged to a high school math teacher on Pima Avenue in West Covina, California, about twenty miles southeast of Los Angeles.
We all came together to start a Bible study. It was there that God manifested Himself to us in the Word and in one another. All of a sudden, God was manifest to us. It was just a different thing.
It was not just that He manifested Himself and we became conscious of Him. Because we became conscious of Him, we started to live differently. We started to care for one another.
We are getting to the place where, when we use the word function, it sounds so mechanical: “We all need to function.” Function means we need to care. How do we care for one another? That is how we function. How do we care for the Lord? That is really how we function.
Our experience was that we started to care for one another in a way we never thought it was in us to care for anybody. We stopped thinking about ourselves.
We would go visit one another. Those who were hurt or going through bad times, we would visit them, pray for them, and give our money to things. All of a sudden, we started caring for them. This is the house of God.
This was my first experience of it. It was not something I read in a book. It was something the Lord showed us there, and it changed my life. It had that kind of effect in my life—it changed it.
You do not get change in your life merely by reading a book. Reading a book might bring you to a place where you are open to God revealing something to you, and that is a wonderful thing. I am not saying do not read books.
But when you read that book, ask, “Lord, show me. What are You trying to get after? What are You trying to make me see? Because I want to see it.”
Now we come to the last little goody here. We come back to Genesis 35.
This whole thing that I have talked about before—this is what some of you younger ones need to see. You need to see the house of God. You need to see it. That is for you.
For those of us who are older, who have seen it but have to be called back to it, like in Genesis 35:1, Jacob is told, “Get back to Bethel.”
Why does God have to call him back? Because life happened.
All of a sudden, our vision at first becomes like this because we have experienced life. We have seen who we are, and we have seen what the other saints we are meeting with are like. All of a sudden our rose-colored glasses are off, and we get discouraged.
Either we are discouraged with the people in the fellowship, or we are just discouraged with life itself. Look at Jacob’s life for thirty years. What happened to him?
For twenty years he worked for Laban, and Laban was no piece of cake to work for. Then he had four wives. If one is not enough. Oh, you think that is funny? Thirteen kids. Did I mention he had four wives?
Then his brother Esau was out to get him. And did I mention he had four wives and thirteen kids? I mean, what kind of effect does that have on you?
It takes us to the place of saying, “God, I will just settle here in Shechem. I have Your blessing. I have the birthright. I will settle for that. The rest of it is something You read about in books. I know it. I can preach it. That is all there really is to it.”
But is it not wonderful that God does not let him stay in Shechem? Then He calls him back and says, “Jacob, come back to Bethel. Remember when I said I would be with you? Where did I say I would bring you back to? I said if I brought you back to this place—where is this place? Bethel, the house of God. Come back to the house of God.”
In order to do that, Jacob had to clean up his life a little bit. If you read Genesis 35:2-7, he tells all his people, “Get rid of your idols.” We have to clean stuff up.
Then the Lord says, “Build an altar.” Let us reconsecrate. Let us reconsecrate to the things that I am after for Me—not reconsecrate your life so you can be a better Christian, but reconsecrate to My purpose. Let us get back to that.
We are so apt to have our own individual Christian life and forget about what God is after. God is after something much bigger than just our individual life.
We have to come back and say, “Okay, I have to reconsecrate my life to that,” because that is what God says: “Build an altar.”
Jacob built an altar in Shechem, and he called it El-Elohe-Israel—the God of Israel, the God of me. When Jacob rebuilds this altar, it is to the God of Bethel: El-Bethel. A whole different slant on life now.
Come back to this. Get away from just yourself, and I will take care of you in that way.
Life has a way of getting us down, and God calls us back. Why does He call him back? This is what happens in Genesis 35:9-13.
After Jacob had come to the place, put away his idols, come back to Bethel, and built that altar in response to God calling him—he got back and said, “Okay, God, I will do this. I will respond to You”—God responded back to him by saying these things:
Then God appeared to Jacob again, when he came from Padan-aram, and blessed him.
And God said to him, “Your name is Jacob; your name shall not be called Jacob anymore, but Israel shall be your name.” So He called his name Israel.
Also God said to him: “I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall proceed from you, and kings shall come from your body.
The land which I gave Abraham and Isaac I give to you; and to your descendants after you I give this land.”
Then God went up from him in the place where He talked with him.
There are just a couple of things here. God did not appear to him as the God of Abraham. He came and said, “I am God Almighty.” He got a new revelation.
As a matter of fact, it was a new revelation, but everything God had told him thirty years ago, He reconfirmed it. “Everything I said to you thirty years ago, Jacob, still holds today.”
Nothing has changed as far as God’s view of things. You might feel jaded and everything like that, but as far as He is concerned, everything is the same.
That is what we need to understand. Those of us who have let life do this to us need to come back, put away our idols, reconsecrate ourselves to God, and let Him come again and restore these visions to us.
The wonderful thing about the Lord and His people is that Romans 11:29 says:
For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
They will not be taken away. We can turn our backs on them, but as far as God is concerned, He is not going to take them away from us.
That is a wonderful thing. No matter how much we miss out, no matter how much we turn our backs on Him, if we will come back when He calls us back and says, “Come back to Bethel,” and we come back, He reconfirms everything.
That is our God. That is how much He desires a house. He saved you to be in the house—to be a part of the house. That is the whole thing. He wants us to be in this building.
Next time we talk, we will talk about how God builds His house. This is just a way of saying, when we ask, “What is the house of God?” here are some things to think about.
For those of you who have never seen the house of God, ask the Lord, “Lord, show me what this is about. Show me what Your bigger purpose is.” Not so that you can preach it, but so that you can see it, experience it, and be a part of it.
For those of us whose view has been jaded because of life, we need to come back to the Lord and say, “Lord, I hear You calling me back. Restore. Restore the things You said to me.”
I am coming back to put away the idols and build the altar afresh. Let God come to you, because it says, “If we draw near to God, God will draw near to us.”
Let’s pray.
Our heavenly Father, we want to thank You. I want to thank You for so much grace that You have for us. We want to thank You that You did save us and gave us blessings and birthrights and all those things. You gave us all this stuff for us to enjoy individually.
But in another way, Lord, You have let us plan these things without realizing that You desire something too. Lord, this is what we ask this morning: that You will open our eyes afresh to what You desire—not what You desire for us, but what You desire.
All these things that we talked about the house of God being—these are the things You desire. Lord, open our eyes to see them.
Help us to know that You are a living God, not just One who gives all these rules, but You are living and You want us to have fellowship with You. You want to commune with us. You want to dwell with us. Lord, You want to be loved by us.
Lord, we want to have our eyes open to those things. We want to have our hearts and our spirits invigorated by that. We want to know Your presence in a way that shows us that You are great and makes us bow the knee to You.
Oh, Lord, we cannot do these things on our own, and so we look to You. Let me just ask: show us what You want us to see. Then, Lord, help us respond the way You want us to respond. We ask this in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.