Good morning, brothers and sisters.
Let us read a few Scriptures, and then we will pray.
1 Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I spoke as a child;
I understood as a child;
I thought as a child.
When I became a man, I put away childish things.
Luke 2:49, 51–52—this is from the New King James Version, so it will be a little different from last week.
And He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?”
Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them.
And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.
Genesis 35:1, 7
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.”
And he built an altar there.
And with that, let us look to the Lord.
Heavenly Father, we do want to come into Your presence through Jesus Christ. We thank You that is what the table said to us today: to come in, enter in, and have our place before You. And that is what we do now, Lord. We come before You and worship You because You have allowed us into Your presence at great cost to Yourself, to forgive our sins.
We thank You, Lord, for the judgment that fell on Him who had no sin, for us. We praise You for Him. We say, Amen, that You raised Him from the dead and set Him at Your right hand, because it is only right. He is worthy. We bless Him, and we bless Your name for giving us such a Savior.
And now, Lord, as heaven has been opened to us, we come to You and ask that You speak to us and close out this last time that I am doing. Close it so that it would be sealed completely and be right.
Lord, only Your Spirit can take Your words and make them real to us, and only You can speak what is on Your heart. Lord, we need You for this time. We do not want to just look at pictures, read verses, and say a few things. That is not what we are after, Lord. We are after the eternal God speaking from heaven into our hearts, showing us what You want, drawing us into what You want, and letting us be those vessels that You want us to be in Your house.
Lord, how we need You to show these things to us. How unable and weak we are without You. So, Lord, we commit this time to You. We commit Your word to You. We commit all these things to You—our hearts, our ears, and our mouths. We ask, Lord, for You to speak through Christ Jesus. Amen.
Well, you know what I have to do as a good teacher. That is right. There you go. Wow, you guys have learned a lot. See, it takes a few weeks, and you train.
I am not going to review everything. I am not going to review the first two weeks. Those are embedded in us now. But I do want to talk about last week just a little bit.
We talked, basically, about what the house of God is in a very objective way. But last week we started talking about our place in the house of God. What is our role in this?
The house of God is the community. When the God of glory appeared to Abraham, I believe He showed Himself to Abraham in a city. Hebrews 11 says that they searched for a city. I think that through all the wandering in the land of promise, Abraham was looking for that city which has foundations.
It is very important that God, I believe, revealed Himself to Abraham in His glory in a city, because a city is two things. First of all, it is a community. It is a community of people gathered together.
We talked about being living stones. We are all individuals. We are all called as individuals, as living stones. We come to Christ as individual people. But we are not left as individual stones. That is not God’s purpose for us—not just to have a rock collection. He wants to build a house.
He wants us to be built together into this house in which He can dwell. In other words, it is not just about an individual experience or salvation, but about something much bigger. Individuals are put into something that, by themselves, they could never become. But by being built together, they become something no one could ever have imagined: a house for God.
Even Solomon said, “Who can make a house for You?” God is building a house for Himself, and He is using living stones to do this, of which we are. We start as individual stones, but we are brought into something bigger.
We also talked about who is in this community: little children, young men, and fathers. They are all in there, all traveling together, all growing together, all spurring each other’s growth together. We come to Him as living stones, and we are built together regardless of our age. We are all one. We are all brought into that place together.
Brothers and sisters, we are not left just as children. It is not God’s will just to have children. He wants sons. Sons means the capacity to do His will, the capacity to know what His will is, and to be concerned about His will.
Children are self-centered, all thinking about “me.” But when we come to be a man, we put away those childish things. We know that we are not the center of our lives anymore.
Copernicus found the heliocentric theory. We find out that God is the center, and we are not the center, and everything does not revolve around us. It is a great discovery. Think about that.
When we come to that place in our spiritual life and understand that this is not a me-centered salvation, we are on the verge of coming into something very great, which is what God is after in all of us. He does not want us to remain me-centered.
So today, in closing out, we have to come to the practical part—the part that hurts. I have to be honest with you: it hurts.
I remember, I think it was 1994, when they had a leadership meeting here. Some of us came from Ponder Valley. We were supposed to prepare on a couple of verses and give a ten-minute talk.
The first man who came up was from San Diego—Dave James. Dana Congdon, Ernie Hile, and Stephen Kaung were helping. Dana was very light in his critique, not being too harsh. Ernie was very practical, a little harder than Dana. Both were trying to encourage.
Then it came to Brother Stephen to speak. I just remember his first words: “I must be faithful.”
Those of you who know, when Stephen says, “I must be faithful,” you know what that means. “I am just going to tell you like it is.” After that moment, the fear of God was in the rest of us sitting there. I remember praying, “Lord, do not let me be called this weekend. I do not want to get up there.”
But Stephen is gracious, and he is faithful. So we want to look at the practical: What is our part?
What is the foundation of our being built and taking our part in the house of God? I made a big thing last time about being brought out from the individual into something greater, which is true. But that does not mean you throw out the individual. The foundation of our being built into the house and taking our place in the house is this: our personal relationship with the living God.
This is foundational. There is no place for us in the house of God if we are not personally related to Him, if we do not have that personal relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son and by the Holy Spirit.
The whole Godhead is involved in this. We get to know the Father because we have been brought into His presence through Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit takes those things and makes them real to us. He leads us and becomes our Teacher and our Tutor.
So we have to have this personal relationship. We can fake it. We can come to meetings, read books, pray things, and have a “churchianity,” so to speak. We can fake it. But to fake it that way is to be empty inside. There is no substance to it.
We are like one of those chocolate Easter bunnies that are full of air. You look at that chocolate Easter bunny and think, “Oh, this is going to be great.” Then you bite into it, and the whole thing falls. You feel, “This is cheap,” because it is.
You have been fooled into something. But you cannot fool the Lord, because the Lord is after a solid chocolate bunny, if you understand what I mean. He paid for a solid one, and He is out to get a solid one.
Do you think He is going to leave you in that condition without trying to fulfill the travail of His Son in you? No. The value of His sacrifice is too great for Him to just say, “I am going to let it slide.”
He will always be after you. You do not have to respond, but from His side, He will not turn away from what His Son has done. It is of too great a value for Him. You need to understand that.
This personal relationship that we have with the Father is really, really, really important, because out of this relationship we grow.
In this personal relationship, we learn to hear and discern God’s voice speaking to us. Generally speaking, it is first through the Word, unless we have no access to the Word. When we have the Word, and we have that tool with us, He has given it to us for a purpose: that we would open the Book and read it.
In it is God. The revelation of God is in this Book. For us not to open it—shame to us. For us not to read it and think about it—shame to us.
He has given us this as a gift, and blood has been spilled—not just the blood of His Son, but think of all those who have died trying to get the Word of God translated into the vernacular so we could read it for ourselves and have access to God through the Spirit, His Word making His Word real to us. Think of that: the gift, the expense of this gift that He has given to us.
When we look at the Word, we first encounter graphe. Graphe is simply the written word. It is the ink on the paper—the verbs, nouns, adjectives, gerunds, and all those kinds of things. It can be just dead letter to us.
But the Lord has given it to us and says, “Take it, read it, look at it. Look at it.” Because if we read it, God has an opportunity to reveal Himself to us.
Another word for “word” is logos. It is like a logo, such as the Coca-Cola logo. What happens is that we begin to receive concepts. We begin to see things with our minds, and in our spirit they begin to take shape. We begin to grasp what is true.
God begins to reveal Himself in a way that we can grasp in our minds and in our spirits, and we start to take it in. It is like swallowing food. You are able to take it in.
Then the third word we have for “word” is rhema. Rhema is the word that is quickened to us. It applies to our situation right now. The Lord is speaking to us, and this is the way He speaks a command to us.
We can read graphe and read a bunch of commands and say, “I had better do these things.” But when rhema comes, that is like the Lord speaking directly to us and commanding us, saying, “This applies right now. It is for you to use.” It is supposed to move us to action.
It is a word for that moment, that circumstance. It directs, comforts, and convicts. It is the one that speaks to our hearts. So many people say, “I was reading the Word, and this just jumped out at me.” Rhema.
We learn by use. We read the Word, we read the Word, and the Lord begins to speak to us. This is how we learn to discern His voice.
You will understand when there is a rhema. There will be no mistaking it. You will know it is speaking directly to you. You will understand what the logos is because suddenly it is like light coming in: understanding. “Oh, I had never seen that.” Suddenly, logos has been revealed to you.
When rhema comes, saying, “This is for you right now,” it may come at a time when you are afraid, and the Lord speaks a word to you: “Be still, and know that I am God.” It speaks right into your life and circumstance, and suddenly you are flooded with the peace of God.
Or it may be something like, “Go and do this.” Suddenly, as you move, you find that you are empowered to do those things because God is speaking for you to do them. But you learn to listen.
We are not saying that you must always go to the Word in order to hear Him. As you discern His voice, the Lord has your attention. He has you on a wavelength. Then, when a brother or sister is speaking, you can suddenly say, “That is the Lord speaking to me.” Or a circumstance comes up, and you say, “This is the Lord.”
There is a greater discernment of the eternal purposes and values of the things that are happening and the things that are being spoken to you. You have to have that personal relationship because that is what connects you to God first. You are connected to God first, and then He builds you together.
“I must be faithful.” Romans 12:1:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
I read that verse in Genesis 35 where the Lord says, “Arise, go up to Bethel.” But He says, “Arise, go up to Bethel, and build an altar to Me.”
An altar has to be built. This altar is so that you can present yourself as a living sacrifice. The building of the altar is not the offering itself; it is the preparation for that offering.
We present ourselves to God in Christ. I want to liken it to the Lord Jesus being baptized.
When the Lord Jesus was baptized, it was not because the people around Him needed to see Him baptized. It was for two purposes. First, John the Baptist could see that He was the Christ. In John 1, John said that he was told, when he saw the Spirit come down upon Him, that this was the Christ.
The other reason was that the Lord Jesus was saying to His Father, “I am here to do Your will.”
That is it. That is it. This is the way we present ourselves.
When Jesus went down to Nazareth and lived there for another eighteen years, He was honing in on what was to be in the last three years of His life. He was discerning His Father’s voice as life went on. It brought Him to the place of offering up His life.
Without the personal relationship, we do not become aware of what God wants at all. We just live our little Christian lives to no purpose. But we are called into a purpose, and the purpose is the building of the house of God. That is God’s purpose, and we are included in it.
So He says, “Prepare an altar for Me.” That is what we do: prepare an altar. We make an altar. In other words, we say, “We are ready to make an offering.”
Hebrews 10:7, drawing from Psalm 40:6–8, says:
Lo, I am come
(in the volume of the book it is written of Me)
to do Thy will, O God.
This is it: “I am about Your will. I have come to do Your will.”
But we translate that differently. We say, “I want to do Your will. I want to be in Your will for my life.” It is always, “What is God’s will for my life?” That really puts us back into the center. It is for my life.
I was sure it was God’s will for me to be an NBA basketball player. What else? How else could I serve Him? Think of the access I would have to people, people who would want to hear what I had to say. Great things I could do for God, do you not think? But He gave me thumbs. I just could not go far enough out.
“What is Your will for my life?” No, that is not what He says. It says, “I delight to do Your will.” There is no “for my life” in this. “I delight to do Your will.”
It is not about me. It is about Him, about what He desires. The only place I play is, “I want to do Your will.” That is the only place for the “I.” The focus is on doing Your will. The focus is not on me; it is on who He is and what He wants.
“I must be about My Father’s business.” That is the key. I must put on the altar my ambition, the things that I want. There goes my NBA career.
I must put on the altar serving in the way I think I can best be used, with all my gifts and talents. I have to put on the altar serving the people I think I should be serving or want to be serving. “I want to be a missionary to Hawaii. Actually, the Lord using me there—could You not?”
We always think that when we give the Lord everything, He is going to take us someplace horrendous—the place we hate. But we find out that when we are in His will, it is good, acceptable, and perfect. That is Romans 12:2.
This is the cost of serving God in His house: I must submit my will to His will. That is what you find the Lord doing. Even in Gethsemane, what is He praying?
Not My will, but Thine, be done.
That is what He is saying, and this is baptism right here. He is saying, “I am about Your will. I am bowing. I am submitting to You so that Your will can be done.”
Now let us get to the more practical things—the things we think about more. We have to get out of this meeting mentality, the idea that these things are only taking place in a meeting. We have to get out of that. We have to have our horizons expanded by the Lord.
This is how we serve in the house of the Lord. This is our service. Once we lay ourselves on the altar and say, “I want to do Your will,” then the Lord says, “Good.” And He says:
From whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.
Brothers and sisters, what are we? We are joints of supply.
I know you are probably looking for pictures of pipes—or maybe worse than that, knees and fingers and things like that. But I chose farms and trucks and places where farm things go, because all of these are joints of supply.
How do we get farm goods to where people can access them? Look at all the things involved: the sprinkler system, the farmer weeding and fertilizing, the tractor harvesting, the truck taking the harvest to the store or restaurant. You can see the chain of things. There are many different joints of supply.
Just because you are the sprinkler system does not mean you are any less a joint of supply than the truck. We are all joints of supply. That is what we are called to be.
What is being supplied? This is where we get mixed up. A lot of times we think that, as a joint of supply, what we are supplying is our gift to the assembly. That could not be farther from the truth. We are not supplying gifts. The gift comes from God. We do not supply gifts.
No, we supply Christ. That is what we are supplying, because Christ is in us. Out of our personal relationship with the Lord, out of our personal knowledge of Christ working things in our lives, we bring that with us wherever we go.
Wherever we go, we become a joint of supply, supplying that life into every situation and circumstance—whether it is a meeting, whether we are out with friends, or whether we are at home with our wives and children. We are joints of supply of Christ in every way.
Do not get caught up in, “What is my gift?” No, no, no, no, no. God will show you where your gift is in due time. You simply have that personal relationship with the Lord, and that relationship will overflow out of you. It will overflow in ways in which gifts are manifested, and you will see that.
Do not worry about that stuff. Get into the place where you are having that relationship with Christ, and then bring that relationship with Christ into everything. That is what it means to be a joint of supply. We are just joints.
Here are my embedded hymns. Hymn 461, “Channels Only.” Has anybody heard that hymn before?
How I praise Thee, precious Savior,
That Thy love laid hold of me;
Thou hast saved and cleansed and filled me,
That I might Thy channel be.Channels only, blessed Master,
But with all Thy wondrous power
Flowing through us, Thou canst use us
Every day and every hour.
Read the rest of that hymn. All it is saying is that we are channels, or joints of supply, for God to come through us into this world, into this meeting, into our lives at school, and into our lives at work. We are joints of supply.
Within the body, joints of supply are for the building up in love. It is a wonderful thing.
Because we are joints of supply, we are to be at His disposal. We are to be at His service. We are always on call.
Remember beepers? Technology has made beepers obsolete, and now we have smartphones. Mine is not too smart, as you can see.
But the whole thing is being on call. Floyd Pulis used to say to me, “Jim, you have got to be ready to preach, pray, or die.” That is great advice. What is he saying? You have to be on call. You have to be ready all the time. You never know where you are going to be called on to preach, pray, or die.
Another thing: it says joints. There is an “s” on it. It is plural. I am not the only joint. Hallelujah. It is not all dependent on me. Praise the Lord. I am only one joint of supply, but Christ is in every member. Every member has Christ in them to supply to the rest and to this world.
The functioning of the joint is not confined to the meeting. We need to understand that because, brothers and sisters, that is going to free you. It is going to free you. You carry Christ with you everywhere. It gives so much worth to your life. I am not kidding you. It gives so much worth to you when you realize that.
There are problems and difficulties with joints. Some of us are getting older; we know the problem with joints. We have joint replacements today, do we not?
One problem is that we are preoccupied with other things. We have other interests that distract us from our service and from being joints of supply. Look at the world we are in. What preoccupies us?
The number-one preoccupation is the computer. How many of us are preoccupied with a computer? We get everything from the computer. The first thing people do in the morning is probably turn on the computer, check email, or check something else. Or they are preoccupied with games.
When you start playing a game on the computer, all of a sudden you find out, “My goodness, it is five o’clock now.” Are you with me on that?
I like to play a little card game. I like Spider Solitaire. I love it. But I limit myself to five games—five games—because I know I will keep going until I get that final victory. You have got to go for that. I do not know where the rest of you are, but it just sucks you in.
You know what the synonym of “preoccupied” is? It is “absent.”
When you are preoccupied with other things, with the things of this life, you are absent from the service you are supposed to be rendering to God as a joint of supply. You are absent. You are not there.
He can fill that space with someone else, and if you are going to keep being absent, He will. But you are meant for this service. You have been redeemed for this service. He has called you into this service. It is His desire that you fulfill the service, and He will give you everything it takes to fulfill that service.
But if you are not there, you will miss seeing what a wonderful thing it is to be a joint of supply.
Another problem is that we are too casual in our Christianity. This is not just for kids. Some of us are casual about our testimony.
When we are casual in our relationships, especially in that personal relationship with the Lord, casual means this: “I can go in and go out as I please.” That is what it means.
When I do that, I find that when I come to a place of being a joint of supply, I am not prepared. I am not prepared for all that I could be for this time, this moment, this meeting, or whatever.
I am not prepared because I have looked at things too casually. “Oh, yes, I can get that later.” No. It is now.
We are not to have a casual relationship with the Lord. He is Lord. How can you be casual with someone who is Lord? You cannot. He is Lord, and He wants to be Lord.
Then we talked last week about feelings of inferiority or insignificance. The whole thing is this: Who called you? Whoever called you—and we know it is Almighty God—has put Christ in you. It does not matter how you feel. You go and do, and you find out who God is.
That is how you cure inferiority and insignificance.
Think of the twelve apostles. Peter, James, and John are prominent. We know Andrew, Matthew, Bartholomew—also called Nathanael—Thomas, Judas Iscariot, Philip, Simon the Zealot, James the son of Alphaeus, and Judas, the son of James.
But some of them seem so insignificant. James, the son of Alphaeus—he was not even known by his own name. “Oh, he is Alphaeus’s kid.” Yet Christ called him into fellowship, intimate fellowship with Himself, and then sent him out.
Are we any different? Come into that personal relationship with the Lord, and He will send you out as a joint of supply.
Ephesians 2:10 says:
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Another part of our service is good works. These are not good works that earn us salvation. Only the blood of Christ earns salvation; only that work of Christ. But these are good works that prove that we have been saved, that prove that we have been called into fellowship with Christ.
Luke 4:18–19 records the Lord reading in the synagogue:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
The operative phrase is this: “He has anointed Me.”
He has anointed me for this service. What does anointed mean? It means I have been equipped for these good works that have been prepared beforehand for me to walk in. I have been equipped with the Spirit of God. I am under His enabling to do that work and under His guidance to lead me into that work.
I am not just going about doing good stuff because I think I should do good stuff. You can do a lot of good stuff, and that is fine. I am not telling you not to do good stuff. But the stuff that really counts in the kingdom of God is the stuff into which you are directed through your personal relationship with the Lord—at His behest, by His enabling, and under His guidance.
If He has given me work to do, He will show me out of my relationship with Him the work that I am to do. This does not mean some long-range plan we have imagined for ourselves.
Remember the Lord Jesus Himself. He would go out early in the morning and pray. Why? That is where He got in touch with His Father. Out of that time, He could say:
I only do the things that I see My Father doing.
If the works are prepared beforehand, that infers that you will be prepared for those works. He does not call you to do work that is out of your league.
It may be that He has prepared you through some circumstance in your life, something you have read in the Word, or something that has been quickened to you. He has prepared you for this work. You will be there, and it will be the perfect fit. Even if you stumble in saying things, the Lord will be there because you have come to the right place, because you are being the joint of supply He has called you to be.
Good works are part of the testimony of who Christ is. When Christ came to earth, did He not say, “If you do not believe Me for what I say, believe Me for the works I do”?
In Luke 24, the men from Emmaus described Jesus as “a Man mighty in deed and word.” Peter also spoke of Him as a man attested by God through mighty works.
These are not works that win us salvation. They are works that come because we are saved, because Christ is in us.
Some works are for edification, for the building up of other people. But build them up in their faith, not in their ego. You may come alongside someone who has failed in their service to God. You want to get them back to the place of trusting the Lord, not trusting themselves. Build their faith up.
You can only do that when the Lord sends you to do that. When you do stuff on your own, it always backfires. I remember trying to set up one of my friends with a girl. Oh, what a miserable evening. You are trying to do something God does not want you to do, though you think it is a good thing.
Sometimes, before you build up, you have to tear down. Sometimes you have to admonish before you build up. It is all part of building up. If you are admonishing just for the sake of admonishing, your spirit is not right. But if you are admonishing because the Lord is saying, “This brother needs to be told this so that this can be torn down and he can begin to build up,” then you are doing it by the Lord.
Then there are works of love—agape love. Phileo is the love we like to give to our friends because we have affection for them. There is nothing wrong with phileo, but there are works of agape.
Agape means there is nothing you can do that makes me do something for you in love. There is nothing I see in you that makes me want to do this for you. I do it because it is in my nature.
That is God’s love. It is His nature to love. Love is the bond of unity. This is the love that cares, that goes beyond whether I am related to you or whether I like you. It simply cares for you because the love of God is in my heart.
It does not matter who you are. I do not say, “I like this person, but I do not like that one, so I will help this one.” No. God causes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust, the lovely and the unlovely. It is His will.
Revelation 19:8 says that the bride is arrayed in fine linen, and the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. Good works. Righteous acts of the saints. God’s righteousness is manifested in the good works of His people.
That is what people do not see much in the church today: the good works of the people of God. I wonder why that is.
I want to close with this. I want to go back to Jacob, since Jacob had that first vision of the house that we started with.
Genesis 43:1–14 is, I think, the most beautiful part of the life of Jacob. We can look at Jacob’s life and say that he had spiritual desire. We can say that he wrestled with the angel. His flesh was dealt with in many ways. He had all these problems.
But I think the most beautiful part of Jacob’s life is found in Genesis 43. That is when he gives up Benjamin. I think there is nothing more beautiful than that.
This part of our being in the house of God is necessary. It will bring itself into our lives in some way or another, where we have to choose it. And that is the cross.
We hear a lot about the cross—or maybe we do not hear much about the cross. I do not want to say there are three crosses, but there are different facets of the cross that we need to see.
To take the cross means that you will submit, but you do not have to submit to it. If we could see, as the Lord Jesus saw when He went to the cross, that it was not merely submitted to but embraced, there is a difference there.
It was embraced not because it was a lovely thing, but because He saw the gain of it. He could embrace it.
We all know the cross of Calvary, and we all have to experience the cross of Calvary for ourselves. By experiencing the cross of Calvary, I mean that we see the work of Christ is for us, and we take it for ourselves. We take the life He lived, the death He died, and His resurrection from the grave as ours.
That, brothers and sisters, becomes the seed of our eternal life. This cross of Calvary, with everything included in it, is the seed of our eternal life. This is where we start off as little children.
We will never get away from this as long as we live as Christians, because there will always be a need for us to come back to that cross. It is like coming back to Gilgal. They were always coming back to Gilgal. They were not living at Gilgal, but they always came back to renew things.
We come back to the place of saying, “This is where the reproaches were rolled away.” When I fall into sin, when I fail, I come back to this place, and I am assured of my place and my standing in Christ and in God’s eternal purpose.
Then we have what I will call the cross of discipleship. Do not think there are three crosses with official names, as though I read them in a book or had some great revelation. This is simply the way I have seen it.
Matthew 16:24 says:
If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
This is the cross of discipleship.
The cross of discipleship makes our individual walk and individual testimony strong. We decide to be disciples. It is like the stalk of grain. Look how rigid that stalk is, holding up the wheat that is growing. It is the stalk of the grain.
We deny ourselves, and there is gain for us in this. The gain is that we begin to see the power of God in our lives. We begin to see ourselves being separated from the world.
This kind of cross is a cross of separation from the world. “I have decided to follow Jesus.” At the same time, we are separated to Him.
Because we are denying ourselves, getting into His presence, and seeking to do His will, we find ourselves knowing Him more. Our relationship with Him is strengthened. We go out and do things in His name. This is a lot like young men growing in Christ.
When we first hear, “There is a cross. Deny yourself. Come after Me,” it is like a march. It is wonderful.
But there is another cross. I do not know how else to describe it other than this: it is a corporate cross.
By “corporate cross,” I do not mean one that the whole assembly has to bear. I mean this cross is borne for the sake of the assembly. Those who bear it do not bear it for their own gain. They bear it for the sake of the assembly, for the brothers and sisters.
The people who bear this cross are moved to do it. Nobody tells them. Nobody commands them. They are moved because they see something—perhaps another brother or sister, or perhaps the Lord Himself. It has made them say, “I will take up this cross.”
This cross is the mature grain. Generally speaking, not saying this is only so, the mature people who bear this cross are fathers: those who have a deep experience and personal relationship with the Lord Himself. They are the ones who see beyond themselves into what God really desires.
This corporate cross can be summed up in two verses. The first is Philippians 3:10:
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death.
Most of us, when we read that, focus on the resurrection: “I want to know the power of His resurrection.” But what about the fellowship of His sufferings and being conformed to His death?
What does it mean to be conformed to His death? Does it mean you actually die on a cross? No. I think it means this: the Lord Jesus did not die for Himself.
In discipleship, the reason we are dying is so that we get something out of it. We want to get closer to the Lord. There is something in it for us. But in this cross, you cannot see, in a sense, that there is something in it for you in personal satisfaction. You are going to receive something greater because it is not about you. It is about the will of God—something beyond you.
This cross says, “It is not for me. I am taking this for You, Lord, because I see what You desire.”
It is like the verse that says, “I looked for a man to stand in the gap, and there was nobody there.” I think the Lord is looking in this day, in this age, for people who would take up this cross for Him.
In the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation,” it says:
The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.
Generally speaking, we think, “He died so that our sins may be forgiven.” He died for our sins. But brothers and sisters, He died for the life of the church.
Those brothers and sisters who enter into this cross are looking for the life of Christ to be manifested in the other brothers and sisters, or strengthened in them. They are the ones who go to the cross and say, “Lord, I see the weakness. I see the lack of life. You have put it on my heart that You are grieved, and I am here for You.”
“I am here to pray Your prayers. I am not here to pray what I think should be prayed. Lord, I am before You for them. Give me the words for Your people so that I can pray them. I am here for You to do this.”
Jacob, in Genesis 43, did not send Benjamin for himself. He sent him for the whole community that was still there in the promised land, for the sake of the whole community.
That is why this is so beautiful. Jacob was always thinking about himself: “I want the birthright. I want the blessing. I want this. I am a grabber.” Yet here is Jacob letting go.
Even when he wrestled with the angel, he said, “I will not let You go.” But here Jacob lets go—letting go of his very life. They said that his life was wrapped up in this child. Yet he lets him go for the sake of the community.
That is why I think this is such a beautiful story. Is it not natural that fathers deny themselves for their children so that their children can have life?
This is what God calls us to, if we are aware of it. It is only those who see, become aware, and are moved by the Spirit of God. I am not trying to put a trip on you and say everybody has to be doing this. I am saying that this is part of the building of the house of God. This is the part for those who see it.
Galatians 4:19 says:
My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you.
Why am I laboring? That Christ may be formed in the brothers and sisters.
This is not a lecturing thing. I think this is something that is really a prayer burden that God gives. Sometimes it comes out in ministry from those who are truly exercised by this burden.
This is what God is ultimately after. That is why I said this is the mature grain. Mature grain means that everything in the seed—the life compacted in that seed—comes to full fruition.
You see Christ as more than Someone who is merely powerful. He has the heart of His church upon Him, to give up His life.
Notice when grain is heavy, it bows over. Those who bear this cross are bowed over—not with burden, but with worship—because they have entered into something great. They have seen God’s heart in such a way that they are moved by it. They bow to it, and they say, “Thy will be done.”
This is what God is really after.
I told you this is practical. It is not the easiest stuff.
So let us close out. God said to Jacob:
Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there; and make an altar there to God.
Brothers and sisters, we have heard all this about the house of God. The Lord says now, “Arise. Go up to Bethel.” It is time to get up. It is time to get into that personal relationship.
You young people, are you learning to discern the voice of the Lord so that, in discerning that voice, you can go and be a joint of supply?
You young men, are you taking that cross of discipleship, denying yourself, and coming into that relationship that sends you out to do His bidding, to be about His business—your Father’s business?
You fathers, are you seeing what is on God’s heart? Does it move you to do something, to be about His will?
Arise, go up. It is a higher thing. It is something more than an individual thing. Go up to Bethel and build an altar. This is God’s desire for us. This is what God is calling us to, and He is looking for a response.
This is the response He is looking for:
And he built an altar.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, first of all, we want to tell You how unaware we are of what You really desire. We have to tell You that we just did not know. Forgive us for not seeing, for being caught up with our own selves and with what we think Your will should be for us.
But Lord, we ask that You call us afresh. Speak afresh into our hearts, Lord—not merely to our heads, but into our spirits. Let us hear You say, “Arise, and go up to Bethel.” Let us hear You say to us, “Build an altar there to the God who appeared to you.”
Lord, these things we talked about today are hard things. Most of us have failed at doing these things, and to hear them can make us go deeper into our own slough of despond. But Lord, that is not Your desire, and that is not Your purpose for us.
Your purpose for showing Your house is to say, “Arise. Arise and go up to Bethel.”
Lord, strengthen our feeble limbs to stand up, to go out and follow You, and to go to the place where You want us to be—to Bethel—and to dwell there, and to build an altar.
Lord, we have been like Jacob at the very beginning. We have given You ten percent. We thank You that You did not begrudge him that. But we want to be those who, in giving that ten percent, increase in what we give You until You have us in full measure—until we give up Benjamin, and You have it all.
Lord, You are worthy of these things. You are so great and worthy. You have called us into such a great thing. Forgive us for being in a tide pool when we should be in an ocean.
Lord, we love You, and yet our love lacks so much. Give us grace—grace to come after You. Thank You, Lord, that You have already started that work in our hearts. We pray that You complete it until You come back.
Do not let us, Lord, be preoccupied. Do not let us slide off the altar, but help us, we pray. In Christ’s name, amen.