Good morning, brothers and sisters. Let us read a few Scriptures before we go to the Lord.
Starting with verse 17. Now, some of you might have been studying this on Friday.
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened;
that you may know what is the hope of His calling,
and what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.
Then in 1 Peter, chapter 2, starting with verse 5. First Peter, not Second Peter here.
You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood,
to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Then down to verse 9.
But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people,
that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light;
who once were not a people but are now the people of God,
who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy.
Our Father, we want to thank You again for the table that You invited us to this morning. I want to thank You for the richness of Jesus Christ that was there this morning. To see Him afresh in our own hearts has made us come out of ourselves and give You praise and worship.
We want to thank You for our Savior. And now we want to thank You, Lord, that You have given us Your Word and Your Spirit. We ask that You will open the Word to us and speak to us in a way that will draw us again from ourselves and put us on that path that walks with You until You come back again. We ask for Your help in this, in Jesus’ name.
Just to give a little synopsis of what went on last week: last week, I was sharing that I have been really enamored, really caught, by a Golden Candlestick pamphlet that Lenium Otto gave me. It was on Sparks’s The Way. In it, seeing the man Jesus Christ has really caught me. For some reason, just looking at Him has really caught me.
I know I gave some ministry on it in some other places, but it just has not left me alone. Last week I was sharing that, even in the New Testament, the three men who did most of the writing—Paul, John, and Peter—look at the man Jesus in different facets.
Paul, who never met, as far as we know, the physical Lord Jesus as He walked the earth before He was crucified, is really caught up with the risen Jesus. Matter of fact, in the last letter he writes, he tells Timothy, “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.” Through Paul, we see all that Jesus Christ risen from the dead means for us.
Then, when you look at John, John sees in Jesus Christ—in the man Jesus—deity revealed. He sees deity in Jesus. He sees deity expressed through Jesus Christ, the man, the eternal life.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
But I was concentrating last time on Peter. In Peter, the thing that I think caught Peter—and the reason why I say this is because in Peter’s last letter, 2 Peter 1, he speaks of the transfiguration—that really had caught hold of him.
When I think of Peter, I would think that what caught hold of him most would be the Lord Jesus forgiving him after denying Him. But I think that was something very private for Peter. Peter’s failure in sin was not to be known to the whole world, but he knew it himself. The Lord Jesus came and ministered that forgiveness to him personally, just as He does for us when we come to find Him.
But I think that when Peter looked at Jesus and saw Jesus, what he saw in Jesus was this new man—this new man that is the new creation.
Last time, that is what we talked about. We talked about being born again to a living hope. That living hope is us being transformed into this new humanity, this humanity that Christ has, this new man.
We are born again to a living hope, meaning it is something that grows day by day, year by year. It endures. It endures all our failures and all types of times. A hope is an expectation. We are expecting to be transformed into the image of this new man, the likeness of this new man.
The reason why we can expect that is because Christ has been raised from the dead and lives forevermore to make intercession for us.
We saw just a few things about the new man. The new man was not under the control of the self-life. It is not that Jesus did not have a self-life, but that self-life did not control Him. We talked about things in the Gospels that showed that.
We also saw some of the characteristics, or qualities, of the new man. In 2 Peter 1:5-7, it speaks of adding to your faith virtue, and then knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love.
The whole thing starts with virtue. Virtue is just a Greek word meaning excellence. What is the excellence of man? A great example I read was that the excellence of a knife is that it cuts. What is the excellence of a man? The excellence of man is that he shows forth who God is, because we are created in His image to do just that.
In Jesus Christ, in this new man, we see excellence. All these other things—patience, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness—speak of this excellence: the excellence of what man is to be, what man is meant to be. Because we are born again, we have this life in us.
That is another reason why we can have an expectation. When you plant an orange seed, you can expect to get an orange tree, right? The same thing is true here. This life has been implanted into us, and God can expect something from this life: the image of His Son.
So that is what we talked about last week.
We left off by saying that we are living stones. I think Linda Pittman, in her prayer, mentioned being living stones, and that was so appropriate because that is what we have become. We have become living stones. We have this life in us.
We are stones to be made into a building, a spiritual building. In other words, a building that is not so much material in nature as it is Spirit-driven and Spirit-guided. So we are living stones.
Now, this week, I would like to consider something. We always look at things and ask, “What’s in it for me?” You know, that is our first thing because that is our natural man, isn’t it? “What’s in it for me?” If you are trying to sell me Girl Scout cookies, what is in it for me? If I am going to do this, what is in it for me?
Last week, I think that is what we said. What is in it for us? It is this new nature, this new man. That is what is in it for us.
But now we have to ask this question: What is in it for God?
What does God get out of having a new man? When I started looking at this, it went right with Ephesians 1. That is why I read that verse.
Ephesians 1:18 can be translated or looked at in two different ways. Most of my time in preparing for this, I was looking at Ephesians 1:18 and seeing what all these people had to say about it.
A lot of the time, we stop at, “The eyes of our understanding being enlightened, that we may know what is the hope of His calling.” Well, we know right now that the hope of His calling is that we are transformed into this new man. That is the hope of our calling. That is why we have been saved. God has saved us so that we can be transformed out of this lowly estate and into the estate of His Son.
But the other part says that we may know “what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” A lot of people go one way, and a lot of people go the other. One writer I read, Eadie, was saying this is talking about the inheritance that the saints have. Someone else says, “No, this is talking about the inheritance that God has.”
Well, which one is it? Martin Lloyd-Jones said it is both, so I will take that.
I want to look at it not as what we get, because I think we looked at the inheritance we receive last time. If you want to hear about that, you can listen to it. Don’t get the one that shows the pictures, okay?
But today we want to look at what God gets out of these living stones. What does God get out of having a new man? What is His inheritance? Or, even more than that, what is His expectation? What is He expecting from having a new man?
If we look at 1 Peter 2:9, we see these things:
So what does God get? This is what God gets. Notice that everything here—elect race, chosen generation, royal priesthood, holy nation, people for His own possession—is plural. It is not just individuals. It is something plural, but at the same time it is one: one new man, a race after that one new man.
In John 12, when the Lord was going to the crucifixion, He said:
If a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies,
it bears much fruit.
This one seed goes in, and the fruit that comes forth is many. We have been brought into something much greater than merely individual salvation. I am not putting that down. Individual redemption is a wonderful thing. But as great as it is, it is small in comparison to the wholeness, the bigness, of God’s eternal purpose.
It is not just God’s purpose for me. It is His purpose for mankind and all of creation. It is His eternal purpose. It includes all, and I am included in it. Hallelujah for that.
We want to look at these things as God’s inheritance, not just to say, “Okay, I know what these things are,” but to see what it is that God really wants. What is God really getting out of this? Let us consider what God is really after, because these things are what God is after in having a new man.
An elect race: a race of men, elect. It is chosen. It is different from all others. He has selected this race above all others.
When we talk about race, we are not talking about ethnicities—“I am African,” “I am Polish,” “I am Mexican,” whatever. We are talking about a race of man. There are only two races of men: the race of Adam and the race of Christ.
Now the Lord has a race for Himself: a humanity of Christ, the likeness of Christ. God has His building material with which He is going to build His house. It is all built out of Christ.
God’s eternal purpose is man born again into the humanity of Christ, not merely as individuals, but as a corporate man made up of many individuals who are all under the direction of the life of Christ in them.
This is a race that is no longer bound to sin, but free from sin and able to walk with God and know God. This is what He is after: man in this way, an elect race.
Secondly, He will have for Himself a royal priesthood.
If you remember Exodus, when the people came out, before He gave the law—in Exodus 19:6, I believe—He wanted every Israelite to be a priest. All of them were supposed to be. But there was failure there, so only one tribe became priests.
What is a priest? What is it that God is after with priests? Why would He want everybody to be a priest? Why can’t it be just a certain few?
When you think of the idea of priesthood, this was one of the biggest things recovered during the Reformation: the priesthood of all believers. But rather than merely giving definitions, think about the priests and their ministry.
First of all, priests are those who come into the holy place. God wants those who come into the holy place because that is where He is. He is in the holy place. He does not want to keep Himself away from us. Remember, He wants to dwell among us. God wants a tabernacle among us.
But more than that, these priests come into the holy place. They serve in the holy place. They handle holy things, and they understand that the things they handle are holy—they are not common. That is a big thing.
Priesthood carries the idea of a fellowship that is maintained: fellowship that you never have to be apart from. It is maintained fellowship, always there.
Can we say it is like being married, in a sense? I carry my wife with me everywhere I go. I know her. I want to please her. I want to do the things that are going to keep me in relationship with her. I do not want to do things that will cut off that relationship.
It is the same thing here. As priests, we carry with us that fellowship. We carry with us the presence of God. Even though we may not say that we feel the presence, we carry that presence. It is in our hearts, it is in our minds, and it carries everywhere we go: unbroken fellowship, a fellowship that is maintained.
Not only is it an unbroken fellowship that is maintained, but out of that fellowship comes continual service. It is not that Group D serves today and then we are off for five weeks. It is continual service, because I am continually in fellowship with Him, and He is continually pointing things out to me—how to serve Him.
What does a priest do inside that holy place? There are two things that really struck me. I am not giving you everything about these things, but two things struck me about a priest’s service.
First, he maintained the light. He was the one who maintained the light in the holy place, making sure the oil was flowing and trimming the wicks. He maintained light.
In maintaining light, I think, for us and through the generations, it means maintaining a standard of truth that is in the Word. The truth in the Word has a standard. Sometimes we go below that standard, use the Word for what it was not meant to be used for, and lower its standard.
But those priests were in that holy place, maintaining the standard of the Word. When light shines on things, it exposes things. A lot of times, it exposes the flesh. So these men were always trimming wicks. The light exposed things, and they dealt with things. They cut things off as the light was shown to them.
They walked in the light that was given to them, and because they walked in the light given to them, the light continued to shine. That is an important thing: it continued to shine.
So the standard of the truth of the Word was maintained. Because the standard of the Word is maintained, more light is given and light is sustained. Light was always supposed to be sustained in the holy place. When you have light, you walk in light.
The second thing is that they burned incense. Incense is usually looked at as praise or worship, and it is also looked at as prayer.
What is worship? Worship is how we see God, what we have experienced of God, and what we express back to God from what we see of Him.
Where does worship come from? Why do we worship the Lord? This morning, why was there real worship going up? It is because we saw something of the Lord afresh. It was made fresh to us. Worship comes out of what we see and what we experience.
How many of us, when Roger was talking about the weight of sin, felt a weight lifted off us as we thought about that? When that weight comes off, all of a sudden you are able to express things that have been bound up, because you see that things have been lifted off.
Then it is no longer about what other people are thinking about what you are saying. It is a direct expression to God: “Oh, thank You. Oh, I praise Your name for what I see, for what I know.”
My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought—
my sin, not in part but the whole,
is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.
Have you seen that? When you see that, things roll away. Things roll away. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul.
Worship comes from something genuine. Genuine means real. It is not something that can merely be passed on. Worship cannot be passed on.
You can look at hymnbooks and say they are books with songs in them. When do they become worship? They were worship when those people wrote them. When do they become worship again? When we are reading them and we say, “That is my experience.”
Here is someone who has had the same experience as mine, and all of a sudden that hymn becomes alive. You begin to praise the Lord out of that. It becomes worship as you enter into the experience of that hymn writer.
Worship comes from a genuine knowledge of Him. Then it comes from a genuine appreciation and affection for Him. Worship is not merely singing songs. It is because I have an affection for Him.
Affection is not love, but it is close to it, and affection can lead you to love. I had an affection for my wife before I married her. That affection led me to love. Because I have an affection for You, I can be led by You. As I am led by You, I find out more and more about You.
That is where worship comes from. We are led into worship because we have an affection for Him, because we experience Him in real life. We are not just reading books about Him; we are experiencing Him in real life.
Incense also speaks of prayer. We do not want to get weird about prayer, because if I say some things about prayer, you may think that is the only kind of prayer there is. Sometimes, because I am standing up here, you may think that what I say is the only way.
A lot of times, we belittle some prayer. We do not want to be at a prayer meeting praying about little things. There are times to pray for such things. But when we are talking about a race and a priesthood, the priesthood is not concerned much about itself, per se, as it is about the whole nation.
This incense is prayer that inquires concerning the will of God. We want to know the will of God because we want to follow Him as a nation. We want to do this for a whole body.
It is also petition that the will of God will be done. That is what Jesus taught us to pray. The disciples asked Him, “How should we pray?” He said:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.
Prayer for His will to be done—that is priesthood. I would call these kingdom prayers, but then I think you would run off with that and say, “Yes, we need to pray kingdom prayers.” We need to pray as the Lord moves us to pray, for situations He moves us to pray about.
But as we are in His holy presence, this is where we find out what the Lord wants—what the Lord really wants. Priestly ministry always begins in the holy place, and the holy place is the unseen place. It always begins there.
If we do not have a life in the holy place, then our life outside the holy place does not carry much authority. Our authority comes from being in the holy place.
That brings us to the next point. These are royal priests.
Some people translate Revelation 1 as saying that we are kings and priests, but I think the better translation is that we are a kingdom of priests. What does that mean? It means that we have a royalty to us.
Kingly, royal priests carry with them, in their prayers and in maintaining the light, the insignia of God—His signet ring. The Lord allows us to bring about executive action.
Executive action is like a president enforcing what the laws are to be. Through our prayers and through maintaining the light, we enforce God’s rule among His people and in the world.
This is what it means to be the priesthood God has for Himself: a royal priesthood, a people who know Him because they are in the secret place. They know what is holy. They know what is not common. They maintain those things that are holy.
That is what God wants. God wants a holy nation.
What is a nation? What holds a nation together? When I teach, we talk about nationalism, and nation is the root word of nationalism. What makes a nation?
There are five things we think make a nation: the same language, the same religion, the same customs, perhaps the same experience, and being hemmed in by the same borders. But even if you have all those things, you still will not have a nation.
What makes a nation is that they all come under one government. That is what makes a nation. Here we have the United States. We are one nation because we are under one government. A nation is held together by its government.
They say that the United States Constitution makes us a nation of laws and not of men. But in Christ, God has a nation that is governed by the Spirit of God.
In Christ, we are bound together not by outward laws, but by an inner life. We can see that in Romans 8, starting with verse 2.
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh,
that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.
So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.
Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.
And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness.
But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
And then, skipping down to Romans 8:14:
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear,
but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry, “Abba, Father.”
So we are a nation ruled not by an outward law, but by an inner life. That is the new covenant. This inner life is the new covenant. That is what Jeremiah 31 is all about. We now have the law written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
The other thing it says is that we are a holy nation. What does holy mean? Holy means separated from the world. But what do I mean by separated from the world? Does it mean we all live in a commune, away from everybody? What does separate mean?
It means distinct from. We are distinct from the course of this world. We are distinct from the other nations of the world. We are not subject to the world and its ways. We are distinct from the thinking of the world and from the things that are acceptable to this world.
We are not governed by this world and what this world thinks. We are governed by the Spirit of God who lives in us. We do not do business with the world; we do business with God. We do business through God’s methods.
In other words, we do not imbibe many ways of the world at all. That is not to say we are not in the world. We are in the world, but the world does not have its influence over us. We are influenced only by the Spirit of God in us.
As holy people, God has salt in the world. Salt—we do not think much of salt today. Matter of fact, many of us do not use salt much because we think it is bad for our health.
But salt in the day of Christ had great value. The word for salt pay was salarium, and out of that we get the word “salary,” because soldiers were paid in salt.
Salt preserves. It stops decay. Why does the Lord want a people? Because He sees the decay in this world, and He stops that decay.
How many times has revival come into a country and all of a sudden the decay of that society is stopped? God has come into that place and into those people.
We are holy to be light. What is right cannot be hidden because it is light. You can try to put light out, but light exposes everything. That is why people do not like light: it exposes.
A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Why do people get baptized? It is to expose something: to expose that they are no longer going to be part of this world, but that they are exposing themselves as being the light of the world because the Light of the world is in them.
It is interesting that Jesus said to His disciples, “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” This is the new man who is the light of the world and the salt of the earth. It is in us.
You cannot expect holiness in those who are not followers. That is why He spoke this to His disciples. You cannot expect holiness from those who are not maintaining light through a priestly ministry. But in the new man, God can expect this.
God can expect to have for Himself a royal priesthood. God can expect to have for Himself an elect race. God can expect to have for Himself a holy nation. This is what He expects when He sent Christ, when Christ died and rose from the dead. This is what He was expecting out of that sacrifice.
Jesus Christ did not come here alone simply so our sins could be forgiven, but so God could have what He wants: an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a people for His own possession, proclaiming His praises and showing forth His light.
What does it mean that He has a people for His own possession? It simply means that He has a testimony on earth—a people in whom men and women can see who God is.
They can see the new nature, the new man. They can see God because this is the excellence of the new man: that they see God and who He is.
As people follow and walk with God, they see the goodness of God. They see the righteousness of God. It is not a relative righteousness; it is an eternal righteousness, shown forth in people who follow the Lord as He wants them to.
The testimony is that they do His will. Remember Ephesians 2:10:
We are His workmanship, created for good works, that you walk in them.
You are doing His will. Good works abound. Remember, Jesus was known because He was a man of good works, mighty deeds—not merely words, but mighty deeds.
In His new man, God can do the works that He wants to do. Jesus Himself said in Luke 12, “I have a baptism to go through, and how straitened I am until it is accomplished.”
Now that it is accomplished, and He has died and risen from the dead, He has a body. We are that body, attached to His Head. He can do the works that He wants to do because He is free. He is not limited merely to that little area of Palestine. He has the whole world, and He is working in His whole world.
In this new man, He has a whole man. He does not just have the ears of people, the eyes of people, or the mouths of people. He has all those, plus their hands and their feet.
We are meant to walk with Him. We are meant to do His deeds, to do His will. Doing His will means we actually do things.
We do things that are not merely meeting-oriented. We are out and about doing His business, and His business is not just in the assembly.
How do we expect to draw people to the assembly if we are never out doing the works of God? How do we expect to evangelize if we are not out and about doing the will of God—doing what He shows us to do, showing mercy where mercy needs to be shown, correcting where correcting needs to be shown, and standing for righteousness where righteousness needs to be stood up for?
People need to see a real man, a new man, so that they are drawn to it. People will either be drawn to it or they will want to kill it. We know that from looking at our Lord Jesus: they were drawn to Him or they wanted to kill Him.
God gets a whole man, a man who will do His will. What did the psalmist say about Jesus in Psalm 40:6-8?
In the volume of the book it is written of Me:
I am come to do Your will.
Proclaiming the praises: Jerry read that hymn, and I read that same hymn right next to the other one. That struck me also. I almost read part of that hymn.
It is an amazing thing: proclaiming what Christ has done for us, proclaiming the goodness of God because we were once darkness and now we are light. It is a big change.
How many of us have lost that since we were first saved? Remember when we were first saved? What a dramatic change it was. How we could not help but want to tell our friends that Jesus had come into our lives.
That should be stronger even now. Why? Because we are further into the light. It should be stronger. That is not to say that we should not see darkness, but hopefully it is a dimness. We are in light, and we should be sharing that.
Now I want to come back to two things, because this is really what I want to talk about. Took a long time to do it then, huh?
We talked about it being an elect race, but the other word was “a chosen generation.” When I talk about generation, first of all, young kids, do not think I am just pointing you out, okay?
A generation is a group of people. It can be a period of time. Sometimes they say a biblical generation is forty years. A generation can also be a group of people.
But I think that in saying “a chosen generation,” Peter is combining the two. It is a chosen generation for a period of time: a group of people raised up for a particular time.
Peter is talking to people who were probably living in Turkey, and they were going through the beginnings of suffering. This first generation of Christians to whom Peter was speaking was going to go through horrific persecution. Horrific persecution.
This persecution was going to last for about four hundred years, off and on. Not total persecution for four hundred years, but it would be off and on. You can read about it in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or in history books.
Consider the persecution during Nero’s time. Nero was the one who martyred Paul and Peter. Consider Diocletian’s persecution. You read these things, and it is horrendous persecution. Here was a generation that would face that, and Peter was writing to them.
God raised up a generation when the church was so corrupt in the late 1400s and early 1500s. We think of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli—people brought up during that time to face the church’s corruption and have things changed.
That generation was raised up for that very purpose at that very time. It had come to the fullness of time. The corruption of the church was so bad that God raised up people who recovered His standard in His Word.
There was another dark time in the 1700s, when Christians were Christian in name only, not doing anything, just saying, “Well, I pay for my pew.” Then the Methodists came up.
The Methodists were servants. They went out and did prison ministry, converting many as they went to the gallows, even in front of great mocking. Then you had another holiness movement: the Wesleys, Whitefield, and, in the United States, the Puritan movement and Jonathan Edwards. A generation was raised up for a specific time.
Or take the great movement in the middle 1800s to evangelize the world. A generation was raised up: Hudson Taylor, Groves, and others who were sent out to various nations to preach the gospel. They were raised up by God, a generation for this very purpose.
I can even say in my own time, in the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a great calling out of young people during the Jesus generation to come out and follow the Lord. Everything had become so rote and so stodgy, without life, and all of a sudden there was a great movement of the Spirit.
In it, the Holy Spirit in His ministry came back into the church through a generation. I think of people like Ern Baxter, Mumford, and those people who came through that way.
There has been a great ebbing since that time, a great receding. You have the ebb and the flow. The waves come in, you have high tide, and then you have the ebbing going back to low tide. I think right now we are at the place of ebbing, low tide.
Who is to say that the Lord is not seeking to raise up a generation to restore something today?
I wrote here that I believe before the Lord comes back, there will be a great calling back. It is not just of youth, because it is not the youth who have receded. It is my generation.
Tom Brokaw wrote a book called The Greatest Generation. The greatest generation was not my generation; it was my father’s generation. He was talking about the greatest generation in America, not in the whole world.
That generation was born in the 1920s, into great prosperity. The 1920s were a very prosperous time for the United States—the Roaring Twenties. Of course, that led to a lot of illegal things and such, but it was very prosperous.
Then they were raised in the 1930s. The 1930s were a time of great trial because they had to go through the Great Depression. That was a great trial they were raised through.
They came of age in the 1940s, during World War II, when they were called into sacrificial service. Because of that sacrificial service, the whole nation and the whole world were brought into great change in the 1950s. That is why Tom Brokaw calls them the greatest generation.
Now what about us? Is God looking to raise up a similar generation? Like I said, I believe before the Lord comes back, there will be a great calling back.
It will be much like the days of the Jews who were in Babylonian exile. The prophecy of Jeremiah concerning seventy years had been fulfilled. Brothers and sisters, many prophecies about the Lord’s return have been fulfilled.
Daniel was reading the book of Jeremiah, and he saw that the days were fulfilled. He began to pray. He was not going back himself, but he began to pray. I think he was praying for the raising up of that generation. God has an intercessor.
Then anyone who wanted to go back to Jerusalem was free to go, and all provision was made for their going back. They were called back to Jerusalem for a purpose: to do a work and rebuild the temple that had been razed during the Babylonian captivity.
I think the last call before the Lord comes back is going to be very much like the one that happened in Babylonia. In Babylonia, the call went out to everybody, but very few answered the call. Very few.
In Babylon, you probably had a couple million people, and perhaps forty thousand came back. That is not very many. It was not even ten percent.
But I think that last call will be very much for the same purpose: “Come back. Finish up My house.”
I think the Spirit will be calling to these living stones—those who have an ear, those who do not reject the life that is in them.
We talk about the stone the builders rejected. How many of us are rejecting that stone? Not in the sense of not being saved, but in rejecting the calling of that stone to line up according to the Cornerstone.
We feel that calling in us. We sense the Spirit calling us to line up with that Cornerstone, which is Christ. Christ in us is calling us to line up with Him and to line up with others as they are moved by the Spirit.
These people are not coming back to a teaching. They are coming back to that life which is in them. They are coming back to this life, this new man who is being created in them in Christ Jesus.
It is a calling out to prove that life in them. They are being called out, and that life is going to be proved. Proving means trial. It means tribulation, because that is how all metal is proved: you have to go through something tough.
Brothers and sisters, the 1950s and 1960s made the 1920s look poor. In the 1920s, you had all this decadence because of prosperity. In the 1950s and 1960s, look what prosperity has bred here. The same thing.
Do you think God is saying, “Where is My salt? Where is My light?”
They are not coming to a teacher. They are going to come back, and they will want this life proved. They are going to say, “Lord, I want the new man living in me.” He is going to prove that new life, and He is going to draw out that life unto sacrificial service.
Sacrificial service, even to the laying down of your life unto death. It could be our generation, this generation right now. Like I said, I am not just referring to kids. I am talking about us.
All of this—the chosen generation—this is what God has won in Christ. God has won back to Himself a race, a priesthood, a nation, and a generation.
We know that this has all come through the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:28, I think, He is going to bring everything back to His Father and say, “It is Yours.”
This is what He has won. He has won all these things for Himself. Like I said, all these things are God’s inheritance. This is what God has won for Himself in Jesus Christ, this new man.
I am going to close with this. In verse 10, it says, “You are now the people of God.” I want to hit on this word now.
Now you are the people of God. This is not something we have to wait for. It is not, “Oh, when I die and go to heaven, this is when it is.” No. It says, “Now you are the people of God.”
Some of us feel that we have blown it, and we have. So how do we respond to this now? “Well, maybe it is not me. Maybe it is the generation coming up. I just do not have this. I am so underneath this. I am so sold out to the world. All these things are against me.”
But it is like the Lord said to the man who was paralytic at the pool of Bethesda: “Do you want to be made well?” Remember, he gave all these excuses: “There is no one here to take me to this thing.” That is us, isn’t it? You get that little shaky voice: “Oh, it is just not me.”
When the Lord is showing us this, He is showing us for a purpose. The purpose is not to shame you. Well, maybe that might be part of it. But He is trying to say, “Look where you are. You can see where you are, but look what I have done for you.”
He is saying this: Leave your baggage. Leave your past. Leave yourself, right up to this point, at the foot of the cross.
Because the cross takes care of that. And now, get up. Get up and walk.
He is saying that you are not moved by what you can and cannot do. You are moved by faith. Do you believe what Christ has done for you and what He has called you to? Then let that move you.
That is what faith is. Faith is being moved by what you see. Do you see what God has called you for? Let it move you. Let the Spirit move you in that way.
That is why we can leave that other stuff with the cross behind us. Forgetting what is behind, I press forward to what God is asking us to do as a generation—this generation.
He lets you see something, and then He says, “Rise up and take hold of it. Go forward from here.”
So, brothers and sisters, God is going to have what is His. He already has this new man. It is for us to be a part of it. He is expecting us to rise up.
When we start thinking, “Oh, it is not for me. I cannot do this,” what are we saying to God? We are saying, “Not this time.”
We need to be careful, because the most horrible words that I think Jesus ever said in the New Testament were when He was weeping over Jerusalem. He said that all these things were going to be taken from them because they did not recognize the time of their visitation.
“You did not recognize Me. You did not recognize the new man.”
All the things won for us—not merely the forgiveness of sins, but all these things won for us—that we would be royal priests, that we would be a new race, that we would be a holy nation, that we would be a chosen generation—can be lost because we are not recognizing His voice to come forward.
It is a hard thing to think about, isn’t it? But it is something we have to put before ourselves. Even if the Lord does not come back in our lifetime, does that make a difference concerning what God has done for us and what God wants for us? It does not, does it?
We need to consider that. God has laid out this thing and said, “This is yours, so you can be Mine. You can be these things as Mine, and this is your inheritance as well.”
We need to think. We need to have this fight with God and say, “Lord, I do not want it. I want to stay in Babylon. It is good here. I like it here. Life is easy.”
Or we have to say, “Lord, I do not see how I can do it, but I want to. Grant me the grace.”
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You. I want to thank You that You have given us so much in Your Son. We thank You for this new humanity. We thank You that this humanity is in us.
Lord, we want to ask forgiveness for burying it, like that one guy who had the mina. He buried it and did nothing with it. Or, like I heard it said, some people had the mina but just went their way.
Lord, some of us are there. We have gone our own way. I am asking that You will stop us. Stop us in our tracks, and help us be like that leper who returned and said, “I cannot be happy with just this. I have to come back and give You Your due.”
Lord, You are due so much. You are worthy of having these things. You are worthy of having a race, a priesthood, a nation, a generation, and a people who show forth Your glory. You are worthy of that, Lord.
Lord, help us in having dealings with You so that You have what You want in our lives. We are asking this in Jesus’ name.