It is good to see you. Could you please turn with me to the book of Matthew, Matthew 10?
Matthew 10, beginning in verse 37:
He who loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me;
and he who loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
And he who doth not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.
Then, if you could turn with me back to the book of Habakkuk. We are going to read beginning in chapter 1. Habakkuk is after Nahum, which may or may not be of help to you as you find the book.
Habakkuk 1:1:
The burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see.
O Lord, how long shall I cry, and Thou wilt not hear?
I cry out unto Thee of violence, and Thou wilt not save.
Why dost Thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance?
For spoiling and violence are before me:
and there are that raise up strife and contention.
Therefore the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth:
for the wicked doth compass about the righteous;
therefore judgment goeth forth perverted.
Habakkuk 2:1-4:
I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower,
and will watch to see what He will say unto me,
and what I shall answer when I am reproved.
And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision,
and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
For the vision is yet for the appointed time,
and it hasteth toward the end, and shall not lie:
though it tarry, wait for it;
because it will surely come, it will not delay.
Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him;
but the righteous shall live by his faith.
Then, if we could turn back to the New Testament, Hebrews 10. The Holy Spirit will tell us the same verse again, with a deeper view.
Hebrews 10:36-39:
For ye have need of patience, that, having done the will of God, ye may receive the promise.
For yet a very little while,
He that cometh shall come, and shall not tarry.
But My righteous one shall live by faith:
and if he shrink back, My soul hath no pleasure in him.
But we are not of them that shrink back unto perdition;
but of them that have faith unto the saving of the soul.
Romans 1:16-17:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel:
for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth;
to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.
For therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith:
as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith.
Finally, Galatians 3, beginning in verse 1:
O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you,
before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified?
This only would I learn from you:
Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit,
are ye now perfected in the flesh?
Galatians 3:10-11:
For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse:
for it is written, Cursed is every one who continueth not in all things
that are written in the book of the law, to do them.
Now that no man is justified by the law before God is evident:
for, The righteous shall live by faith.
Let us bow for a word of prayer.
Lord, we are thankful to You this afternoon that we can gather together in Your presence. Lord, Your presence gives us life. So, Lord, as we have met together around Your Word, we pray that You would have a way to speak to us.
Lord, we pray that Your hand would be upon our hearts, to touch our hearts. Open our eyes to see what You are saying. Lord, give each of us a sense that You are here in our presence, and give us the vision that You are speaking to us.
So, Lord, we pray that You would give us open hearts, ready to hear what You have to say. From the speaker to the listener, Lord, we are all before You. We pray that You would be glorified and magnified. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, this time the Lord has put upon our hearts the matter of Christ, who is our vision. The focus assigned to me has been following after the vision.
We know that vision is so critical to the people of God. The Bible tells us that without vision, the people perish. That is, we lose restraint, go our own way, and pursue our own things.
We remember that Paul, in 2 Corinthians, gave a short description of what happened to him after he began following after the vision. The intention is not to discourage us, brothers and sisters, but this is what Paul said: “I endured labors, imprisonment. I was beaten, whipped, stoned, and shipwrecked.”
What kept him going? What allowed him to keep following after God? How did he do it? We think of these things, brothers and sisters, and we think of our own lives and many of the challenges that we are all facing in these days.
About four years after Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, he stood before King Agrippa. It was nearer to the end of his life. He told King Agrippa, “Thirty years ago, I saw a vision,” and he described that vision in detail to the king.
He said, “I had in my heart, breathing threats and murder, to stop this movement.” He was traveling to Damascus when, one day, a light shone around him. He fell to his knees, and he was blinded.
He told the king that at that moment he heard something that opened his eyes to see something he had never seen before. Paul was, at the time, the brightest shining star among all the Pharisees and their students. He was learning at the feet of Gamaliel, and he knew the Word of God back and forth.
He knew of this man Jesus, and in his mind he thought that Jesus was phony; He was false. He set out to prove that this man and His followers could be destroyed.
On that day, when the light shone around him, he heard a voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” He asked this voice, “Who art Thou, Lord?” And He said, “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.”
Now Saul was a phenomenal student of the law. Should he have wanted to make this argument, he could have said, “How could this be? I have never met You before. You died. Even if I believe that You resurrected, even if I believe that You ascended to heaven, I have never been to heaven. I have been only persecuting people on this earth. So how could what You are saying be true?”
But what Saul saw in this moment was that the Lord Jesus had been resurrected and raised to heaven. Yet what he saw, showing the greatness of God and what God was doing, was that the life of Jesus was still on the earth, hidden in the hearts of His people.
For a moment, he saw something that had never been seen before, never been explained in writings or teachings. He told the king that this vision was like a commandment from heaven. From that day forward, he could not live any other way. He could not ignore it. He could not pretend that he could go on with what he was doing before.
“My physical eyes were blinded, but the eyes of my heart were opened. From that day forward, this vision influenced every decision in my life.”
So he said to the king in Acts 26, “Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” That is to say, this vision was a commandment to him. He could not escape it, and he obeyed the vision.
Now, brothers and sisters, the only way Paul could have been released from this was to cast off the vision he had seen and pretend like it had not happened. But the vision became his life. He lived this life for the next thirty years, to the point where he stood there and said, “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.”
Vision is important for all of us. We might suggest that that was for Paul and that it is not for me. But the Lord’s intention was that all of us would see vision, and that He might be our vision, so that all of us—no matter who we are, what we have done, or how we have fallen—might be able to follow after the vision.
His intention was not that this would be for simply an elite few. He wanted all of us, where we are in our current situation, to be able to follow after the vision.
In the morning, when we wake up and labor to get ready for work; when we go to work and go through our days; when we come home and take care of the responsibilities of our families; when we brush our children’s teeth, then brush our next child’s teeth, and then that child goes and eats another cookie again—in all of these things that we do every day, the Lord’s intention was that we might be following after a vision.
His intention was not that the vision might be something only for this particular group. His intention was that it might be for all of us. That is what we are about in these days.
Now, the temptation with my topic, brothers and sisters, is that following might become more practical—and I say “practical” with quotations—because there are things that we can do.
The Lord has charged my brothers with the responsibility of sharing about seeing the vision and knowing the vision. Without seeing the vision and knowing the vision, following can become simply outward religiosity. Brothers and sisters, that is dangerous. At best, it is outward religiosity; at worst, it can be idolatry.
So we want to make sure that, as we think about practical things—which I pray the Lord might reveal to us—we always have in our hearts the vision that we might see Him carrying us forward.
In Revelation 21, the Lord gave us a great vision at the very end. As our brother shared some of it this morning, He said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
Our brother shared this morning that it is not simply from the point of view of timeline. It is also that He is the first One and the last One, in the sense that He is the only One in our hearts.
Well, brothers and sisters, He was from the beginning. But in my life and in your life, I suspect there was a beginning with Him. For me, when I was thirteen years old, the Lord came into my heart. I am not quite sure I knew everything I believed in, but I knew that I believed in Jesus. I knew that I believed that He died for my sins and that He was my Lord.
I think all of us had that beginning. Now, to be clear, when the Lord said, “I am the beginning,” He predated when I was thirteen years old, and we know this. But in the experience of my life, and the experience of your life, He was a beginning. He was an Alpha in my life.
Have we ever thought that all of us are so different? We all came, perhaps, from different backgrounds. In each of our lives, the Lord was Alpha in a different situation. He met some of us when we were younger, when we grew up in the church; others came by a different path. But to each of us, He showed a faithfulness and a love to find us where we were.
He saved us, and we had a beginning. In one moment, life was born into our hearts. We can thank the Lord that all of us perhaps had a different kind of Alpha, in a different situation.
But have we ever thought about what Omega means—that He is Omega? Brothers and sisters, when He is Omega, it will be a common story among all of us. We started in our own situations, perhaps different situations, but the Lord’s work is ongoing. What He is doing is that He is Omega.
There will be one day when He will finish what He is working. Brothers and sisters, we share the same Omega: He is bringing His people together. All things will be summed up in Him.
When I was a teacher, I remember we were taught how to evaluate our students. We were told that you have a formative evaluation and something called a summative evaluation. I had no idea what this meant. I was just trying to teach.
But when we were teaching students who were supposed to become doctors, there were six core things they wanted us to teach. You had to know your science—the science of medicine. You had to be able to take that science and apply it to the patient’s life. You had to learn how to communicate. You had to learn how to be professional. I do not remember the last two, but there were six of them.
The summative evaluation was not concerned with just one of those things. It was that all these things we were learning would be summed up at the end in one final evaluation.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord is summing up all things in Him. He is doing a work among us, and His work is going to be finished one day. We believe that it is coming soon.
All of us have an Alpha. He came to us. Brothers and sisters, are we waiting for Omega? Are we waiting for Him, for the fulfillment to be made real?
I once asked the Lord, “What does this mean, the Alpha and the Omega?” There was a movie I watched once with Mel Gibson in it. He was a soldier in charge of a group of soldiers in Vietnam.
When they were about to leave for Vietnam—his first battle there—he said to the crowd of graduates from the training program, and he promised their wives and parents, “I will be the first one to step onto the battlefield, and I will be the last one to step off the battlefield.”
What he meant was not that the helicopters would fly in, he would step off, all the soldiers would jump out, and then he would step back on the helicopter and fly back to the rear. Then, after the battle was done, he would fly back, pick up the remains, and be the last to step off the battlefield.
What he meant was, “I am going to be the first there, and I will be there the whole way. Then I will be the last to step off.” Brothers and sisters, the Lord is doing a work. He is the Alpha and the Omega.
I do not know that many Greek letters, but we could say that He is the Delta and the Gamma. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Greek letters comes from walking by fraternity row in college. I do not know all the others.
But, brothers and sisters, His promise to us was that what He started, He would bring to the end. He is here with us now in our lives. Do we have the vision of Omega in our hearts? Do we know that He is doing something to the end? Has that driven us, commanded us, in our lives?
In these times, brothers and sisters, sometimes it is hard to see that the Lord is still doing something. It is hard to see that He is at work because we see around us that there is quite a bit of difficulty. I do not mean superficial things. The enemy is at work in a deep way.
There is something that he is doing to undo our vision of Omega, to undo the vision of the fulfillment of what Christ has in His heart. What the enemy has convinced us of is that Alpha is the end: once we are saved, is that not the best?
In Galatians, Paul wrote that we were saved by faith, and then afterward we live our lives by the law, trying to be good and moral. The suggestion is that we are saved, we try to be good moral people, but then we feel that there is no further walk to walk and no further direction to go.
But what the Lord is telling us is that if we do not see the vision, we will just roam in circles. Not only that, we will cast off restraint and destroy what He is doing. So, brothers and sisters, this is important for us in these days: to have a vision and to hold on to that vision in the dark times.
In the book of Habakkuk, the time was not too different. We read it together. Habakkuk was a person of God, and he saw with his eyes what was going on in the world around him.
He saw that the Chaldeans, this wicked people who had no regard for God and no regard for righteousness, were rising in power and defeating the people of God. Habakkuk decided he was going to do something about it. So he went before the Lord and said, “Why is evil triumphing over good?”
“Why is it that with our eyes we are seeing that all of Your people are being destroyed, being made a mockery of by these people of the world, these Chaldeans who are so wicked? How, Lord, are You allowing them to triumph?”
Brothers and sisters, we might similarly ask that today. How is it that we are in a situation as we are, where it seems that the world is triumphing over the Lord as He is moving us forward?
Habakkuk was really straightforward with the Lord. The Lord said, “I am doing something that you could not possibly imagine. I am using these Chaldeans to raise up a people for Myself, to restore them to Myself.”
But then He went further and said to Habakkuk, “Write down the vision. Write it down so that those who read it may run.”
What I think He meant was: write down the vision so that those who read it may run and tell other people about the vision in this time—that I have not forgotten what the evil ones have done. In the end, I will have My righteousness, and My people will be protected.
The Lord showed Habakkuk the vision and said, “Habakkuk, write it down. Write it down and remember it.”
Let us turn again to Habakkuk 2—again, right after Nahum. You can find it.
In verse 2, the Lord said, “Record the vision, and inscribe it on tablets, that the one who reads it may run.” Then He says, “For the vision is yet for the appointed time.”
He tells Habakkuk, “It hastens toward the goal, and it will not fail. Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come. It will not delay.”
So He was telling His servant, “Wait for it. We may not see it in our time right now, but continue to hope in it. That day is certainly coming.”
But, brothers and sisters, how shall we live between this day and that day? The Lord tells him, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Brothers and sisters, we know this verse: “The righteous shall live by faith.” It is a verse that is very familiar to us, and it changed the history of the world when Martin Luther read it.
It is repeated three times in the Word of God: in Romans, which we read; in Galatians; and in Hebrews. In Romans, it tells us that our righteousness is by faith. In Galatians, it tells us that faith is critical. In Hebrews, it tells us how we live by that faith—how we follow after Him.
By the Lord’s grace, this time together may we consider these three things.
When we see the Lord, the Holy Spirit, repeat this verse in Hebrews, a really wonderful thing happens. The Lord translates it for us into our times.
He says in Hebrews 10:37, “For yet in a very little while, He that cometh shall come, and shall not tarry. But My righteous one shall live by faith.”
Brothers and sisters, here a vision is given to us: “He who is coming will come and will not delay.” Here we see a title of the Lord: He who is coming. That is His name. It is His identity. He will come, and He will not delay.
What does this mean? It means that in His heart He is longing to come. He is waiting to come. He is prepared. But we all know, brothers and sisters, that He is now waiting for a bride to be made ready. When she is ready, He will come.
He is waiting to do it. He is longing to do it—to come back for His own. His identification tells us that this is who He is. It is in His heart. He is longing to come back.
Brothers and sisters, how might we become ready? How can we follow Him so that He can prepare us for that day?
The righteous shall live by faith.
In Romans 1, let us begin looking at this one statement together: “The righteous shall live by faith.” In Romans, Paul tells us that the power of the gospel is how we become righteous. Those who believe are saved.
In Romans 1:16, he begins telling us about the power of the gospel: we are saved by faith. We believe in Him, and no matter what we have done, no matter where we have gone, we become righteous.
This is an amazing thing, brothers and sisters, because the statement, “The righteous shall live by faith,” tells us that our starting point is that we are righteous. It does not happen that if we are faithful, then we become righteous. What the Bible is telling us is that our starting point is that we are righteous.
This is almost too good to be true when we hear it this way. But, brothers and sisters, the Bible is very clear that we were saved by grace through faith, and our starting point is that we were made righteous.
But if our starting point is to be made righteous, what is our endpoint? Is righteousness not supposed to be our endpoint? What the Bible tells us in Romans 1 is that the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.
That means we start out being saved by faith, and we were made righteous. Somehow, that righteousness of God has an increase, a progression, in our lives. The Bible sometimes says it this way: grace upon grace, faith to faith, glory to glory.
What we see is that the Lord is always at work. He started us by making us righteous because of the blood of the Lamb, and we were saved. Then, as we go on with Him, there is an increase of that life in us. Our starting point is righteousness until we reach that endpoint.
What does it mean that our starting point is to be made righteous? To Habakkuk, this must have been beyond belief, because during their time righteousness was by works. If you were not a good person and said that you were righteous, that was blasphemy, because righteousness was through the law.
But now, all of a sudden, righteousness by faith was introduced into the mind of man. It was, and is, a heavenly thought introduced to men.
It was not understandable until one day a young man and a woman came into Bethlehem. They came to an inn for the census, and we remember that there was no room in the inn. So the innkeeper showed the young man and the young woman to the shed for the animals.
In the shed for the animals was born the Son of God. He came perfect and righteous. He was born in that city, at that time, and on the day that He was born, He was put in a manger. He came from heaven to this earth for us.
We remember that this little boy grew up, and He lived a perfect life. When He grew up, all those who came into contact with Him were drawn to Him.
If I had been walking down the street at the time with my little daughter, she would have seen Him and run to Him. He was that kind of person.
If a sinner had seen Him, and his whole life that sinner had been made to feel condemned and an outcast, when the sinner saw Him, he felt all of a sudden that he had a home. He was no longer an outcast.
If a blind man was sitting on the road and others said to him, “Jesus is coming,” the blind man felt, for the first time, hope in his heart.
Brothers and sisters, it was as if heaven came down to earth—like the Lord lived in a three-dimensional world and came down to a two-dimensional world to meet us. He gave up everything.
When He came down and we saw Him, we realized there was something about Him that was so unique. How could Someone who was so righteous make someone like me feel so welcome?
Brothers and sisters, you know this story. You have experienced this in your life, when He was our Alpha. When we were sinners and had failed, when He came into our lives, we saw righteousness before us. Somehow, those of us who were sinners and had fallen felt so comfortable in His presence.
We came before Him and found that He wanted us near to Him. I say this, brothers and sisters, and it tugs at our hearts, but we know that this is a matter of fact. This was not simply an emotion or a sensitivity. This was a fact: righteousness came down to sinners, and we had the liberty to be drawn into His presence.
He came for a purpose. He wanted us to see Him. He did not want someone else telling us about Him; He wanted our eyes to be opened to see this Person.
The ones who saw Him at the time had their lives changed. They were one way, and they thought, “This is how I will always be.” Whether it was a paralytic waiting for a miracle, or a Pharisee who thought he knew the Word of God perfectly but heard Him and saw Him and thought, “I have to come out in the middle of the night to find out if He is what I am hoping He is in my heart”—the vision of Him changes our lives.
On that day, when the earthly vision could not keep us going, the Lord was turned over to His enemies, the ones who desired to eliminate Him. He was crushed for our sins and crucified.
What we remember, brothers and sisters, is that at that moment, in the end, all of our sins and all of our failings were put upon Him. He became for us a replacement Lamb. The wrath of God poured down upon His beloved Son.
In that moment, His righteousness became my righteousness, and my sins fell upon Him. He was punished for my sake.
Brothers and sisters, this was the critical moment in all the history of mankind. Perhaps you have not found Him yet to be that Alpha point in your life. May I say, if you have not yet believed in Him, He is the One who can save us. He is the One who can lift the burden of our sins off of us.
All of the punishment that we have earned for what we have done, He has taken. Then He says, “Believe in Me.”
All that it takes, dear friends, is to say in our hearts, “I believe You are my Savior.”
At this point, for all of us who have believed, this transaction took place: our sins were transferred to Him, and He became our righteousness. He gave us a starting point.
The fact of the matter, brothers and sisters, is that this righteousness which He bestowed upon us was not the end, as the enemy would have us believe. The righteousness bestowed upon us was the beginning. It is the starting point of the journey of our lives.
When we have claimed that He belongs to us, that this perfect Son of God’s life was given for me, it has given me a chance to walk forward and know Him more—unto the vision of who He is, my Omega, what He is doing, and where He is going.
In Hebrews, brothers and sisters, it tells us that once we have seen the vision, we cannot shrink back. After we have been saved, after righteousness has been imparted to us, it cannot be that we stay stagnant in our lives—that we go through life walking in circles, knowing that we are saved but not seeing that He saved us for a purpose, that He is after something in our lives.
It tells us that we need to move forward. We need to follow Him. The righteous shall live by faith. This first righteousness is a starting point, brothers and sisters. It is a starting point in the journey of walking forward.
There was a city in the Old Testament that I have been thinking about for quite some time: Gilgal. Gilgal was very much like this. It was the first city in the promised land.
When the people of God had left and come to the border of the promised land, they came to the River Jordan. If you remember the story, the ark of the covenant went into the River Jordan, and the waters parted.
When the waters parted, all the people of God were able to set foot in the promised land. This journey was forty years in the making. When they stepped foot in the promised land, it was in a place called Gilgal.
Gilgal was a starting point for moving forward into the fullness of what the Lord had planned for them.
In Joshua 5, when Joshua was about to lead the people further on, he came before a man with a sword in his hand. He was the captain of the armies of God. He told Joshua, “Now you will follow Me. You will follow Me forward into claiming the fullness of what was coming.”
But before they departed, brothers and sisters, the Lord taught them several things. He taught them lessons in this home base of Gilgal, this starting point. He wanted to prepare them for what was coming.
What was taught at Gilgal was very much like an attitude of the heart. They were heart lessons. Then, as they moved forward, there were more physical lessons.
What are the lessons the Lord is teaching us before we can really step out to follow Him?
Gilgal was like their first home base. They went out, they came in, there was a battle with five armies of five kings, and they would always come back to Gilgal to regroup, re-energize, and recuperate.
Brothers and sisters, in these days we all need to know the lesson of Gilgal. Home base, if we think about the Middle East right now, is where we have many home bases. Our soldiers are in the Middle East, and home base to them represents home. But, brothers and sisters, it is not home.
Home base is a place from which they are going to move forward toward home. For us, we are in a position in our lives where we have been saved and made righteous. Yes, we have a home in the Lord, but we also believe that the Lord is preparing for us something of eternal value: a home where we might be with Him forever.
So what are the lessons of home base? Let us start and look through the four together.
Joshua 4, as they stepped into Gilgal, beginning in verse 1:
And it came to pass, when all the nation were clean passed over Jordan, that the Lord spake unto Joshua, saying,
Take you twelve men out of the people, out of every tribe a man,
and command ye them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan,
out of the place where the priests’ feet stood firm, twelve stones,
and carry them over with you, and lay them down in the lodging place, where ye shall lodge this night.
Then Joshua called the twelve men, whom he had prepared of the children of Israel, out of every tribe a man:
and Joshua said unto them, Pass over before the ark of the Lord your God into the midst of Jordan,
and take ye up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder, according unto the number of the tribes of the children of Israel:
that this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask hereafter, saying,
What mean ye by these stones?
Then ye shall answer them, that the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord;
when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off:
and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever.
The first thing that happened in this city, Gilgal—this place of preparing to move forward—was that the Lord put a bulwark, a place of protection. He asked one from each tribe to get a stone from the River Jordan and set it up.
He set this up so that every time they saw it, they might remember. No matter where we are, no matter where we go forward, and no matter what happens to us in the journey of our lives as we try to follow the Lord, there is a fallback point.
If, as we are trying to move forward, the difficulties of this life have caused us to fall back, at some point we will come to these twelve stones. These stones remind us that the Lord Jesus opened up a way for us into the promised land that no one can take away.
Brothers and sisters, this is a promise that cannot change. What He has done, no one can undo. The enemy would delight if we felt so defeated that these stones could be removed from our lives. But somewhere in the soil of our hearts, we have to have these stones standing so that we can see them.
None of us is so strong that every so often our faith does not waver and we do not stumble. But there is this point of protection: when we see it, no one can steal this from us. It has been done, and it cannot be undone.
What the Lord told them was, “When your children see it and they ask you a question”—and the question was, “What do these stones mean to you?” This, brothers and sisters, is a very personal question.
Later on, when Joshua repeated it, he left out the last two words. I do not know if he forgot them, but the last two words, which I think were so important when the Lord said them, were these: “What do these stones mean to you?”
This is a question we have to answer before we move forward. If we do not have this question somehow answered in our hearts, we will have no grounding, no footing upon which to brace ourselves. What does it mean to you?
Each of us, as we mentioned earlier, has a testimony. A testimony means a personal, firsthand account of what is true in my life. I saw it with my own eyes.
What this moment was telling us was that my story is a part of His story. He has a testimony. He has a story. His story is moving forward. By His incredible grace, your story and my story are a part of His story.
When I see these stones, I see that the Lord is doing something. He is doing something huge, and my story is a part of that story.
This testimony of Christ, this story that the Lord is telling us, is the firsthand account of what is in His heart. It is the vision that drives all of us forward.
We can separate our story from His story except for this tiny thread, to say that I am saved. But, brothers and sisters, why would we give up the glory? Why would we give up being part of the glory of what He is doing?
He is doing something of such great value. When we are saved at the starting point, we have a choice. We can choose to say, “My story is part of His story,” or we can say, “I have no monument to Him at all in my life. He saved me so I can do whatever I want. I can go wherever I want, and I will live with no other vision than the sins of my past.”
His intention is that we would follow Him forward. But in order to follow Him forward, we have to have in our hearts an attitude that my story is part of His story, and the memory of what He has done is alive to me. It is not just a dead tradition of what other people did.
One of the great challenges for us in these days—and I am speaking as a second-generation child of our circles; I was born into this—is that those who came before us saw something they felt was worth giving their lives for.
Young men and young women, who are now older men and older women, gave their lives for something they felt, and knew, was real.
Somehow, as time has gone on, that story, when it is told again, can sound like a fairy tale—something that has no life or breath, or is just beaten down upon us. Brothers and sisters, it was not meant to be like this.
The story of what the Lord is doing is so real. We need to ask the Lord to show us what His story is, so that I can know that I choose for my story to be part of Your story.
This does not happen by accident. It does not happen simply because we were born into it. It is something that, in some conscious way, we have to decide: “My story, Lord—I want the story of my life to be unto the fulfillment of Your story. Your testimony would be mine.”
Do we see how important this is, brothers and sisters? We cannot go on if it has become a lifeless tradition. It has to be real.
I have a patient who comes to see me at work. Whenever he comes, he always shows me a picture. He is such a lovely patient of mine. He opens up his wallet and shows me a picture of a young lady.
The young lady is clearly from the seventies. She has horn-rimmed glasses and long hair parted in the middle. She reminds me a little of Joan Baez. She just looks like she is from the seventies.
When I first saw the picture, I thought it was of his wife, who was with him. He tells me, “This is a picture of my daughter, who passed away in an accident.”
He tells me, “I remember exactly how she looked the last day I saw her. I remember how her hair was done, what clothes she was wearing, and what her glasses looked like.”
Every time he tells the story, I realize that this is not just a lifeless story to him. It is real. It is alive. He remembers her with a fondness.
Brothers and sisters, our Lord is alive. He is longing to be close to our hearts. He is not longing to be merely words in a song or in a message that come in one ear and never lodge in our hearts.
He is longing for His story, for what He has done, to be real to us. The day that what He has done becomes old to us is a day of great danger, because that is the day we no longer can sense where He is leading us, and the importance of Him in our lives becomes lost.
So, brothers and sisters, we have to resist this: the temptation of the common, the temptation of the casual. The first lesson we are taught is this: remember with life. Let it be the foundation point for us. We will not be allowed to fall back past that.
The second thing that happened was that they were circumcised. This whole generation who entered into the promised land had not been circumcised, save for Joshua and Caleb. Everyone else was uncircumcised.
Circumcision was a reminder to them of the promise, the covenant. When their fathers were not able to enter the land, the next generation came forward, and none of them had been circumcised.
When they entered into the land, the first thing Joshua was commanded to do was make flint knives and circumcise the people. Essentially, the promise is unchanged, and My covenant with you will still go forward.
What does this mean? The covenant of circumcision represents that our flesh was going to be removed—that something of the old man still in us needed to be removed.
It is important for us, before we move forward to follow Him, to have a heart attitude about our flesh. Brothers and sisters, our flesh is dangerous.
I can tell you that the flesh manifests itself in many ways: pride, anger, selfishness, anxiety. The flesh is in all of us. We know it, and we feel it every day.
The flesh causes something in us that is dangerous to following after the vision: it gives us another vision. The flesh causes us to think about ourselves, where we want to go, and what we think is right.
When we gather together, if I were to ask about opinions about politics or sports, there would be so many different opinions. Our flesh tells us what we think is right.
In the house of God, our flesh can be so damaging. Sometimes the flesh is obvious—when something really terrible comes out of me and I see it right away. “How could I do that?”
Sometimes the Lord shows it to me the next day. I will even say, “Lord, in the shower, why did I do that? Forgive me.” My wife will hear me outside. This happens because there is something in me that is not okay, something that has set itself up against the work of God.
We need to recognize that. But sometimes, brothers and sisters, it is so subtle. It is the holy flesh, the flesh that looks like it is unto the vision of God. Once that sets in, it is so hard for us to battle against it.
What we are taught in Gilgal is that we may or may not be able to resist the flesh; in fact, the flesh needs to be put to death. But we have to have a heart attitude that the flesh will have no part in my story as I follow after His story.
This is important because when we have in our hearts this attitude—that the flesh should have no place in this promise to me—then the Lord is allowed to come in and point out to us when our flesh is rearing its ugly head, which happens so frequently.
The second warning given to them, a little later on, concerns Gibeon. The Gibeonites were people who lived in that land. They were part of the world.
The people of God were told, “You need to expel them from the land. They do not belong.” The Gibeonites thought, “We are going to fool them.” They dressed up, went to the back of the closet, took out their oldest clothes, and brought out a worn-out lunch box—which was an old wineskin.
They came to say, “You know, we have been on this journey for so long from another place. This place is not our home. Can we stay here among you?”
Where circumcision warns us about our flesh, the Gibeonites warn us about the world. We would like to think that the best of our flesh and the best of the world can play a part in our moving forward toward the vision of God. But the Lord would have no part of these things.
The world, even the best of the world, cannot be a part of what the Lord is doing. When the Gibeonites came, they were allowed in. When they came in, they became like an anchor to the people of God.
As the world creeps in, it is like an anchor to us. My heart chases after the things of the world.
Yesterday evening, as I was preparing for the message, I kept telling myself—I should not say “I kept telling myself”; the Lord was telling me—“Do not check the news.” I said, “Okay, I really do not want to check the news.” And you know what I did? I checked the news.
Of course, somehow, in those two hours, the whole world turned upside down. Then there were twenty articles to read. I was reading the articles, and of course, I was reading about baseball, which I should never do.
What happened to me that night was that I did not have such a good sleep because my heart became anchored to the world for just a moment. The anchor is so real.
When the world creeps in, I do not mean that we are going to separate ourselves from the world and not have an understanding of the ways of the enemy against us. But if we allow the world to anchor into our hearts, it is like our feet got caught in quicksand and it dried.
If we are to follow after the Lord, we cannot move. We are saved, but stagnant. This is all over our lives.
At the beginning of our careers, may I say to my brothers and sisters who are now deciding how we are going to live our lives moving forward: we have to choose by inquiring of the Lord.
This is what the Bible tells us Joshua did not do. When the Gibeonites came, the Bible tells us Joshua did not inquire of the Lord. He did not ask.
Brothers and sisters, what happens when we do not ask is that the world enters into our lives and anchors us where we are. Nothing can steal our salvation, but the world causes our story to become anchored in the world, and we have a hard time moving forward.
The world is very tempting for all of us. Each of us has our own weakness. But before we step out to follow, we have to have a heart attitude: the world is not a part of the journey that I am on.
This is really important. As we are choosing our careers or what we are to do in our daily lives, we need to have some sense that I need to ask the Lord what He wants for me moving forward.
This is such a huge temptation for my children’s generation and for my generation. The world is so open to us in all of our opportunities. Brothers and sisters, inquire of Him so that we might not be anchored in this world.
The third lesson is about manna. We remember that for four decades, every day except for the Sabbath, the people of God would wake up and find this white stuff on the ground. They could go out and gather it.
If they gathered two days’ worth, on the second day it was moldy—except if it was the day before the Sabbath. Then they could take two days’ worth. For so long, the manna sustained them.
The day they entered Gilgal and were circumcised, the day after was Passover. The day after Passover, the manna stopped.
Why, brothers and sisters? Manna was a story of faithfulness. Every day when they woke up, there was grace for them. The Lord sustained His people. He allowed them to continue on.
When they came into the promised land, having been used to manna their whole lives, they celebrated the Passover, remembering the Lord’s deliverance for them. The next day, the manna was gone.
What is this to us? When we have been saved and the Lord has given us our starting point in the journey with Him, the Lord has an intention for us even from the first day: we need to grow.
Manna was the Lord’s provision. It was grace. But if every day the Lord continued to provide manna, what would have happened is that we could stay in Gilgal the rest of our lives.
What drove them forward? One reason was that, for that many people, if you had to harvest the land, you needed to go out to claim the land. The land was out there to be claimed.
It was not that faith stopped playing a role. Faith was going to introduce us to the grace by which we could stand. Faith would cause us to go out there and claim the land that the Lord had given to us.
We look out there and realize there will be opposition, suffering, and difficulty. But in our hearts we know that the Lord’s intention is that the people of God might grow.
If we had been given manna continuously every day, we could have stayed in our own place, in our own tents, waking up in the morning. The manna would be there; we would take the manna, and we would be very comfortable staying where we were and never following onward.
But, brothers and sisters, the Lord’s intention was not this way, and it has not been this way for us. Sometimes we think, “Why is it that the Lord is asking me to go on this way?”
Life is difficult. As we battle against the flesh and deny the world, the Lord introduces moments into our lives where it seems like the Chaldeans are winning. The enduring is difficult.
But the reason the Lord does this is because He meant for us to grow. In growing, there are growing pains. We have to grow up, brothers and sisters. It is normal to do this.
In order to grow, we need to put our faith in Him, and we need to go out into this land and be willing to step forward by faith.
It is understandable that we might choose the path of least resistance. In the house of God, there are often ways we can just choose the easiest way out.
But if our story is to be a part of His story, we need to have our heart’s intention to follow after Him wherever He goes. The Lord does not just stay in the easy parts. We know this.
We know that when there was the hardest way to save us, the way of the cross, the road to Calvary, was not the easiest way. But our story is to be His story.
Our lives—brothers and sisters, think about this. Think about you and me. Think about who we are for just a moment, and think about the invitation that has been made: “Your story, part of My story.”
If this is in our hearts, it could cause us to have some degree of joy moving forward. We have to be willing to grow. We have to be willing to accept the manna being gone and then moving forward by faith.
What will happen is that we start to realize there is something more than this. If we hear the same thing about the Lord in a superficial way over and over again, we realize: how could such a great God have such a short story?
But what we realize is that we are part of what He is doing, and we are willing to move forward. Do we see, brothers and sisters, the need for a heart desire that we might grow with Him?
Finally, at the end, when the story of Gilgal was done, when the Lord had prepared them in these ways, Joshua came to Jericho. Joshua was in Gilgal, looking at Jericho.
Jericho is like the faith killer, right? Everything you think about the world: big walls, lots of armies, sharp swords, spears. You look at Jericho and think there is just no human way that we can take that city.
As we think about our own lives moving forward, we realize, with our human eyes, how can we possibly go forward to follow after Him when the entire armamentarium of the enemy is pointed squarely at us to stop us moving forward?
How can we go forward? Joshua was looking over this land, and we read this passage. A man approaches him, with his sword drawn.
We know this story, brothers and sisters, and it is a wonderful story. Joshua comes to him in the anxiety of his heart, thinking for a moment about his flesh against that gigantic walled city.
This man comes to him, and Joshua asks, “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?” He says, “Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come.”
He was saying, “You are for Me.” He tells Joshua, “I have come as captain of the armies of God.”
What this tells us, brothers and sisters, is that as we follow after Him moving forward, He is our Captain. We do not follow after a man, and we do not follow after a movement. We follow after Him.
Who is He? When Joshua came near, He said to him, “Remove thy shoes from off thy feet.” We remember, as our brother shared last night, that when Moses approached the burning bush, the same words came forth: “Remove your shoes.”
That is to say, you are coming into the presence of God—holiness. So Joshua removed his shoes.
These shoes, brothers and sisters, are very interesting shoes. In Deuteronomy 29, they were told, “Those shoes, for forty years, never failed you. For all that journey you walked, the shoes never failed.”
By grace, they never failed. But now, as we move forward into this land, that is not enough. “Remove your shoes. Follow Me.”
Brothers and sisters, in moving forward and following after Him, we have to be clear: we are following after Him, the greatness of who He is. He is our Captain.
He is going to lead us forward into claiming those things that might be for His glory, the fulfillment of those things. What we see is that His story is a huge story.
One day, He is going to be Omega. All things will be fulfilled. All things will be summed up. Our story is part of that story.
Before we head out, brothers and sisters, we have been given this wonderful home base: this righteousness in which we can stand, this salvation that was given to us into the promised land.
We have been saved. What will we do with that salvation? What will we do with the life, the years, that we have ahead?
May it be that we have a heart to follow forward. What we must realize, brothers and sisters, is that home base is not home.
We are journeying unto that day when His heart, His desires, and His purpose will be fulfilled.
Let us bow for a word of prayer.
Lord, we thank You for the grace, the miracle, that in Your heart of love and in Your design, You have caused us to play a part in Your heart’s desire. Not only that, Lord, You love us so much.
Lord, we thank You. We thank You that You are preparing for Yourself a bride. We thank You that You have made a way for us to be a part of this testimony of Yours.
Lord, thank You. We worship You. We pray that You would put in our hearts a desire to follow after You, and, Lord, to go on with You until that day.
We are waiting for it, Lord. We know it will come. We know that You are not delaying. Make us ready.
We thank You, Lord. In Your precious name we pray. Amen.