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Turn in your Bibles and prepare your hearts tonight for Judges 6.
We were talking a little bit before the time this evening, but how about Monday morning? Everyone in this room has had a certain experience and background. Many of you have had it many, many times. You have been on a mountaintop, and you have heard wonderful messages over the years.
As I said this morning, one of my burdens since ’71 has been this word: reality. A weekend retreat, and then we drop off the cliff, is not reality. We are facing dark days.
I am afraid many of us have a Hezekiah spirit. It is one of the saddest commentaries, I think, in the Bible. There are many, but this is one of them. Those of us with children and grandchildren, this strikes a chord in our hearts.
Hezekiah received the judgment of the Lord, and the Lord said, “I am going to stay it until you die.” And he said, “Whoopee. I am going to get off scot-free. I am going to be able to live in peace.” Very selfish, very foolish, very stupid.
But I am afraid this is where much of the church is today: as long as we can get by a few more years, we will let the next generation take care of it.
There are two things in handing off the torch of the testimony: the one who hands it off and the one who receives it. To us who are older, with children and grandchildren, we have to make a perfect handoff—going at full speed. We cannot stop. We cannot drop the baton.
And that takes spiritual muscle. It takes walking with the Lord moment by moment.
A word we mentioned this morning, and I will mention it once again tonight, is being intentional.
Man does not usually learn even from going to retreats. As Helen brought up in her testimony this afternoon, it is suffering. I asked Helen after I met her, “So what was going on in your mind six months before your husband came home from work, had a massive heart attack, and did not see midnight that night?”
I do not want to scare anyone. She said, “I was asking the Lord”—and she mentioned it twice this afternoon—“I want to go deeper.”
The Lord does shake, and He is shaking now, and He is going to shake more. There is only one way to ride this wave, and that is in Christ. He has already ridden it. None of us will ever be able to. We cannot take the charge of a mosquito, much less the charge of an elephant.
So we have to be prepared. As I have been before the Lord, asking Him this question, I have been very concerned. I have seven grandsons who are exposed to a world absolutely different from the one in which I grew up—totally different in every way.
The protection that we had, coming out of the Depression and into the middle of the war—I was born in the middle of the war—was that everyone was humbled. Every family had lost either a father, a grandfather, a brother, or an uncle. There was a humility. There was a sense that humiliation allowed the Lord to cover.
That has evaporated. Now the church has to get on its knees. May we take the word to heart.
Turn to Judges 6:15, just in preparing our hearts.
And Gideon said unto Him, Oh Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel?
Behold, my family is the poorest in Manasseh,
and I am the least in my father’s house.
What do you see there as far as preparation of the heart? “My family is the least, and I am the youngest in my father’s house.” That is how we go through, brothers and sisters.
We wake up every single morning, even as we approach the word tonight, with no ability—absolutely no ability in any physical way. How are you going to guarantee yourself against disease? How are you going to protect against impatience, things that happen by ten o’clock in the morning, and all the pressure that comes in?
It is through humility. It is through knowing that we are nothing. This set the stage right there at the outset in Gideon’s life. Oh, the Lord would do more and make him smaller. He thought he was the youngest there; he could get younger. He was going to get smaller.
That is what the Lord does: until there is no ability in our lives. Then the communication is open. Then we are saying, “Lord.”
The answer is Hebrews 4:12. We shared it a couple of times today. Helen shared it.
For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,
and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow,
and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
It is not a dead letter. It is living and active. It can get to something that we cannot get to, but the Holy Spirit can. We have been singing these songs: “Holy Spirit, shine Your light afresh on us, even as we gather tonight.”
Father, only one Person was truly humble, and will ever be humble, and that is Your Son. We see it over and over: the spirit of a lamb. Lord, we need that spirit. We need to live in that spirit, not just for an hour now, but every minute of the day.
Lord, give us the spirit of the Lamb—not reacting, but allowing the Spirit to flow through us each minute of the day. Thank You for this time again this evening. Give anointing to the speaking; give anointed ears for the hearing, Lord, that we might come into the communion that You so long for. Thank You in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Our verse that we have been looking at—I am just going to read the one verse in 1 Corinthians 1. Verse 9: “God is faithful.”
There is the answer right there. As we get into this sharing tonight and tomorrow, we will see that everything hinges on this: God is faithful. We know our unfaithfulness. Our unfaithfulness tries to creep in and tries to be faithful, but it does not work. It never will work.
It is strictly one hundred percent His life filling us every minute, not allowing anything to extinguish that light and life.
God is faithful, through Whom you were called into fellowship. This is our heavenly calling. What is our on-high calling that Paul talks about? To come into fellowship with the Lord; to come to that place where Christ is absolutely all in all.
It is no longer my plans, no longer my goals in life, no longer my desires, no longer my body. It is on the altar. And that is when it becomes a sweet smell perpetually. It is a consecrated life.
I have an Old Testament question. When they put the consecrated whole burnt offering on the altar in the morning, when in the next twenty-four hours was it not a pleasing fragrance to the Lord? When was it not?
The fact is, there was one in the morning, and it was a sweet smell for those twelve hours. In the evening, another one was placed on, and it was that sweet smell during the evening.
The point is this: Jesus has this constant communion with the Lord. He is that sweet-smelling savor. As we are stayed in Him, we are that sweet-smelling savor.
To summarize this morning—which surprised me, because it was an hour and a half—I will read one verse: 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. Just listen.
Or know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you,
which ye have from God?
And ye are not your own;
for ye were bought with a price:
glorify God therefore in your body.
Again, only Christ can glorify the Father. We are that temple. He has come to dwell. We have all the pictures of that in the Old Testament: the tabernacle and the temple. Finally, God gets to the end of the story and says, “This, for four thousand years, I have been aiming at one thing: you being the temple, Me being in you.”
That is the only way this new creation is going to be accomplished: by Christ Himself.
Tonight, for the next few minutes, we would like to speak, on the negative side, about the opposition to fellowship.
I do not like to spend too much time on the negative. I do not think it is healthy. If we get into trying to flog the enemy, we are in trouble. There is a much easier way: enthroning the Lord. Every time we enthrone the Lord, the enemy is neutralized. That is much more positive.
But we do stop for a minute to recognize who this opposition is. It is severe. This is why, even among us here—who have gone together to hundreds of conferences and retreats and have heard thousands of messages together corporately—I dare say not one of us, beginning with myself, has begun even to scratch the surface of what the Lord wants.
What I am saying from my introduction is that this is going to have to change because of the situation.
At the end of Malachi, we have Zacharias and Elizabeth, who would bring in John the Baptist. We have Simeon, and the Lord could come in.
At the end of Judges, we have absolute chaos. I will give you a little secret: two of my favorite chapters in the Bible, being a father and a grandfather, are 1 Samuel 1 and 2, because they say so much. Here I call it the Hannah spirit.
Here is a situation that mirrors where we are today. One woman had a personal problem: barrenness, in a time when this was very unacceptable. She was also chided by someone else in the household who did not have any problem having children. That pressure mounted and mounted.
She prayed and prayed for her personal want, and nothing happened. Then the Lord opened her eyes. God began to whisper, “I want My Son to be recognized.”
She caught it, and she began praying for the Lord’s interest. It comes out in her prayer. When she did, she said, “Lord, it is You Who have a need.” The Lord dealt with her personal needs.
It is a principle of life, brothers and sisters. We talk to a lot of people, starting with singles who are looking for a mate or deciding on a career. It is often the case—and I would say one hundred percent—that we answer this way: seek first the King.
You know what the first commandment is. Make that your one goal: to love the Lord your God with all your heart. Just concentrate on that one area. The other will take care of itself shortly.
Every problem in life is resolved by first seeking the King. Again, this is communion taking care of self. Seek the King.
When Hannah prayed, we see her heart come out very clearly: “Give me a son; I will give him back to You.” We know Samuel had a great part in bringing in the king—exactly what God wanted, King David.
We are in that position today. He is looking for the Hannah spirit in each one of us. We need to move from elementary school, kindergarten, praying selfish prayers.
We get up and pray, “Lord, help my children to do well today. Help my children to pass this course. Help my children to get into college. Help them to get ahead. Help me get over this sickness.” Everything is for ourselves.
We start there. If we have had children, we know where children start: “Give me that, Dad. Mom.” That is where they start.
But it is a wonderful day when our children get to be fifty or sixty, and they say, “Thank you. Thank you for being tough.”
We need to pray kingdom prayers, thinking again: what is on the Lord’s heart?
It takes care of everything temporal, everything physical, everything material. It is very clear. How many times have we heard messages on Matthew 6:33?
But seek ye first His kingdom, and His righteousness;
and all these things shall be added unto you.
We say, “Yes, mm-hmm,” but we do not see the King and His interest. He wants a bride.
I know a brother who received a strong word regarding his health, or ill health, from the doctor. When he heard the word, he said, “It is okay. I am ready to go home. What does the Lord want?”
This is how we deal with illness: “Lord, what do You want?” It changes things. It releases God, either to heal or to take home.
I had that experience with my wife during her two and a half years of cancer. We were about six months into it. Some of you have heard me say this before, but it dawned on both of us about the same time: what does the Lord want?
We were praying about healing, doctors, and what to do. “Give wisdom.” It was the freest thing. I can remember right where I was sitting. My wife and I realized it and turned to the Lord, saying, “Lord, what would glorify You? What would please You in this whole thing? Taking her home? What would bring in the kingdom?”
That is how Hannah prayed, and that is the spirit the Lord would give us.
There is opposition. Without saying, sin is the greatest opposition we are faced with. It is real. We are defiant. There is rebellion—the Old Testament calls it iniquity. There is a rebellion and lawlessness implanted in our hearts. We resist.
Though we are born again, this thing did not just evaporate. God did not wave some fairy dust over us at the time of our salvation and say, “Sin has gone.” No, He had something much deeper in mind. He wanted to save the soul.
We thank Him for that quickening of the spirit, but there is a work in the soul that has to be done. This is what is going on right now.
Yes, Christ, as I said this morning, can be inside of us. But we know from Laodicea that He can also be knocking at the door. We have not lost our salvation; is that clear? We will go to heaven sometime.
But there is not that fullness, because sin grieves the Spirit. As in Cain’s case, sin crouches at the door.
Taking it a little further and making it more practical, sin exaggerates our self-life. Adam and Eve had a self-life. They knew who they were; they were not robots. But they surely were not in charge.
They were under the authority of God. God said, “Name the animals,” and they obeyed. They did what the Lord said.
But when self rose up in them, there was that exaggeration. They became self-centered rather than God-centered. Their eye was no longer on the tree of life, moving toward it to eat of it.
No, it was, “I do not need God. I have my own knowledge. I will be like God, and I am like God”—an answer to Satan’s own wish. The spirit of the enemy came into them.
There was self-love, self-sufficiency, and a desire for self-realization: “I want to become someone.”
We feed this into our children when they are babies. “What is the baby’s name?” Gabriel? Thank you. Or when they get a little bigger, “Gabriel, what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be?”
It has nothing to do with Gabriel. We are brainwashed by the world. We were not created for ourselves; we were created for Another.
What does the Lord want as my avocation? Our vocation is loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. But our avocation is what? Tentmaking.
We have to pay the rent. We have to have transportation. We have to buy food and drink. We have to have clothing. So we make tents. But it is not to get ahead. It is not to retire at fifty. It is not to become financially independent. We are not the ones to decide that. That is not our choice.
Our choice is one thing: “Follow Me.”
It is very simple. But you can see how this self-life has come in and inundates our lives. It fills us: “I can do it.”
Especially for us believers, the harder we try, the further we get behind. The Lord does not bless us. The Lord can bless so easily when we are surrendered.
He can take ten and make it a thousand just like that. It is so easy. That is what the five loaves and two fishes are all about. These stories are about multiplication.
Jesus tried to teach things through miracles, signs, and parables, but they did not get it. “You just want food. You do not want Me. I am the bread of life, but you do not want Me. You got the physical.”
Do you see how we slip into that so fast? Oh, how the Lord would elevate us out of this poverty level so quickly, if He is first and self has been crucified.
But your iniquities have separated between you and your God.
— Isaiah 59:2
Another thing that hinders and opposes this fellowship is ignorance. We are often not aware of what God has brought us into or what He desires.
In groups, I believe this becomes a plague in this way: we hear wonderful messages. A lot of you have been exposed to the writings of Brother Sparks and messages by Brother Kong.
It breeds an exclusivity in our hearts. “Look at that ABC Baptist church down there on the corner, that Lutheran, that Anglican, that Presbyterian, that nondenominational.” We have heard from Brother Sparks.
Some of the most arrogant gatherings in this country are found in house churches, just because of that very reason. It plagued the Israelites all along—or God’s people.
Jeremiah was talking to a wall. The simple word was always, “Bear.” It is not going to always be this way. We are going to be judged.
God’s people will be judged for mediocrity, for lukewarmness. That is who is going to be caught up in the judgment—Israel, God’s people.
There is a difference between God’s people and Rome. There is a difference between the church and the United States. A big difference.
At this time, I think there has become a greater awareness, thank the Lord, that there is a difference between the United States and Israel. I am talking about Old Testament Israel.
Old Testament Israel was the church in the wilderness. We are the church today, and God is dealing with His people. Who does the Father deal with? The neighbors? The Father deals with His children.
I often wanted my father—I was the oldest of seven—to deal with a neighbor’s situation. He would not touch it. He would not think about it. It was here: we are the ones.
This is why we often come under discipline—harsh discipline. It is good. Helen gave her testimony: all of a sudden, her husband was not there. That was not easy. But what was God’s intent? To get more. To get more.
The Bible is full of godly characters who went through some of the most difficult discipline. Job—he was the man of God. He was the righteous one. He was the one God could use.
“I look at My man Job.” Then God put him in a test tube, put him in a crucible, and look what came out: refined, beautiful testimony, ready for God’s return. It is worth it.
I was privileged in school to have tough coaches in basketball and football. About the time you thought you did something good, they rubbed your nose right in the middle of it.
You win a game. You did not win in a good way. In football, what did you do Monday? It was blocking and tackling, because that is what always slips: blocking and tackling. You get lazy.
That is what the Lord does. Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord.
So we have this ignorance. There is more than just, “I am saved and going home.” God wants sons.
Next, there is superficial familiarity. We know the lingo. We know the language. We know the doctrines. We know the theology.
But let God allow just a little pressure. Let someone look at us cross-eyed. Let the boss promote someone whom we think is dumber than ourselves.
Maybe you go home and tell your wife, “I cannot believe it.” We are like Haman, crying to his wife about what happened with Mordecai. We are no different.
Babies. We correct our children as they are growing up in this kind of thing, and here we are—fifty years old, seventy years old—still allowing this to prevent fellowship.
Much knowledge, little reality.
Next, there are the systems of the world. These are systems that the enemy has set up to run this globe without God.
It was always God’s intention for this to be a theocracy, for Him to rule. When man said no, the enemy—the prince of this world—came in and set up political, economic, cultural, entertainment, social media, religious, educational, and even health systems.
All of these things are systems that man has put in place to take the place, first of all, of God. But the church—you and I—we have bought into these things.
The excitement generated this last year in the election among saints—the nervousness, anxiety, anger, and frustration—it is not even our kingdom, brothers and sisters. We are of another kingdom. Kingdoms come and go.
You know what God is doing right now regarding the election? He sits in the heavens and sees the foolishness of man.
How can we get pulled in? When we get pulled in, we are not on the winning side. The winning side is enthroning Him.
Cyrus was a wicked emperor of that Persian Empire, and he started writing everything on God’s behalf, for God’s purpose. “I want God’s purpose fulfilled.” He outlined what to do. “I will support it. I will support God’s purpose.”
God is just waiting for us to quit moaning and groaning and crying, and to say, “Exalt Me during this time.”
Pray for the leaders, but humble them. One of the quick prayers that comes to my mind when I think of government is: “Lord, humble them, or they will continue doing only the things that are part of them.”
Again, it is totally separate from the kingdom of God. That is what we want to bring in. That is what we are concentrating on. That is why we are praying for one another: that we can all be kingdom people.
Two or three—you see, we get deceived. The numbers are always with man. What was David’s big sin? Numbers. How many people?
See how pride comes in, even in a godly man like David? Oh, it can sneak up. If it can sneak up on David two or three times in his life, it can sneak up on us very quickly. Sin crouches at the door.
The economic system—oh, how many Christians are concerned about Wall Street. It is nice to be poor and not have to think about that, not have any investments.
But poor people are ensnared just as easily as rich people, with a dollar. It is the spirit of the world. It is what gets us up in the morning and gets us thinking, “How can I save?”
What if we thought more, “How can I give?” There is only one person to be frugal with, and that is ourselves. We should be so careful with ourselves—not flamboyant—but saying, “Lord, here is a hundred. Where do I give it?”
That is how the Lord multiplies. It is wonderful.
But the world has come in. When the world comes in through money—and this is one of the strong ways the enemy uses it—communion is lost. We can become consumed with money instead of consumed with the Lord Jesus.
Culture. As Americans, we say, “Well, we do not really have any cultural ties like the Asian countries.” There can be strong cultural strongholds. Oh, we have them, just in the words “American dream.” Materialism—huge.
Two homes, you name it—always moving, wanting to move up.
In a materialistic country like we have, entertainment becomes a real opposition to fellowship. It is very difficult to be in an entertainment environment and, at the same time, be meditative.
We often go to a movie to escape, to kick back, to vegetate, just to be entertained.
I think the French word is amuser: without thought. Zombie-like. Deadening. It is another way of deadening our senses.
It may be beautiful, but it is a very adequate platform for the enemy to intrude. We have to stand guard. The military understands this even in the world: you back off for a second, and the enemy finds a weak spot.
More than ever in the spiritual world, there has to be watching and praying, watching and praying. Those who are watching when I come—the Lord is going to take.
To finish that thought, in this type of society we have time that poor countries do not have. We have access. We have money to do these things—Saturday night, Sunday afternoon. This is going to have to change, and judgment will change it.
We have to be right. Is it not encouraging when you read Jeremiah? That might sound a little crazy. How can Jeremiah sound encouraging? You know what is encouraging about it? Jeremiah made it through.
It did not matter. When they went down to Egypt, he made it through. Nebuchadnezzar said, “Take everyone out of here. We are going to take all these people out. Take care of Jeremiah. Make sure he gets resources. Give him some money.”
Jeremiah was taken care of. That is how we are going to make it through. But why? Jeremiah had a relationship.
There were others—Baruch, his amanuensis, the person who wrote down everything he dictated—but not very many. That percentage does not change.
We are living in trying times. Time to wake up.
Of course, social media and information technology have, I believe, counterfeited this relationship with the Lord.
We now have relationship and access to our friends, to the world, and to information as we have never had before. We just reach in, and there it is.
Instead of this, this is taking more and more time. It satisfies the curiosity of the soul: information.
Go back to the first sin: the knowledge of good and evil. Man has always desired information. It puts him above.
This is why, when we are in a conversation and someone says something, we need to come back with something, and then we share our opinion. Then someone else does. It becomes one on top of another—one story, topic after topic.
Now, since we have access, we have a lot of information, and we can keep this story going for a long time. It can rob and destroy the communion we are to have with the Lord.
Then there is religion—not true religion, but false religion.
Jesus said to the Pharisees:
Ye search the scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life;
and these are they which bear witness of Me;
and ye will not come to Me, that ye may have life.
Here, even searching the Scriptures can be something that hinders our relationship with the Lord.
Next, there are these little foxes. Song of Songs 2:15 speaks of “the little foxes, that spoil the vineyards.” They kill the vine, abort the fruit, and allow no harvest.
These foxes seem innocuous, a little playful. I have watched them out in the field. I have hunted them and trapped them. They are sly; they are not easy to trap.
They wait until you have forgotten to close the henhouse out on the range. It is dusk. They always come at dusk. They come when no one is aware.
They do not kill one—that is all they need to haul back to their pups. No, they kill fifty in five minutes. Snap, snap, snap. It is a playful thing, just like a dog playing. You hear this ruckus, run out there, and off it goes.
These things plague us. What are the little foxes in our lives?
There is our tongue. Bring the tongue from idle talk, empty chatter, gossip, maligning, and exaggeration.
There is vain imagination—vain imaginations of the heart, the Bible says. Oh, how we imagine ourselves to be something that we will never be.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, if you have ever read that short story. Walter Mitty would walk down the street, come to a lamp post at the corner, grab it, and think he was the captain of a big ship.
How easy it is to imagine ourselves. Fancy imagination separates us from the Lord. It is unreality. It is a lie. It is not true.
We are to remain in the truth. We are sinners saved by grace, and we want to keep communing with the Lord. It is simple.
Wool-gathering goes along much like vain imagination. Someone does not greet us, as I said this morning, and all of a sudden our minds go, “What is wrong with them?”
We do not realize they may have just had a loss in their family. Something has happened. Something has happened at home. They definitely have something else on their mind.
But we go wool-gathering. Something happens at work, we go home, and by midnight—or usually, we do not wake up until two o’clock—we replay the whole thing.
It gets this big: “I am handing in my resignation tomorrow. That is it. No more.” There is not even a reason to do it.
And if there was a reason to do it, and if the reason was a great reason, oh, wait to respond. Turn the other cheek.
Your boss is the Lord’s delegated authority. Romans 13:1-4. I do not care if he is unbelievable; the Lord has put him there, and we are to honor him.
Another fox is the good. The good is always the enemy of the best. Our good is not good. There is only One Who is good. It is His good.
So never be satisfied. Never rest on our laurels.
Sickness and death are also things that hinder. As Helen testified this afternoon, she is in that state; her husband has died.
Many people turn their backs away from the Lord. “Where was God?” How many times have you heard that? We might even have been guilty ourselves: “Where is God in this thing?”
God has not moved. The worst thing we could say is that God is not love. God is love—persistent forever and ever, deep and wide. I never get to the end of it.
Sickness and death are something the Lord allows. They are part of life. We are to seek the Lord through them. The Lord uses them.
I have had some of my best times with the Lord through physical ailments: “Lord, what are You saying? What do You want?”
Nine years ago, I lost the eyesight in this right eye. It was February, at a retreat. I was supposed to speak that evening. The speaker in the afternoon got up—it was Dana.
Before he got up, the song leader got up. I looked down and said, “Who is that?” I could not see him. I knew I was losing my sight here.
So I went back to my room and went through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, reading the portions on blindness. I got to Bartimaeus. Jesus said to Bartimaeus, “What do you want?” Bartimaeus said, “I want to see.”
It clicked in my heart at that moment: “I want to see Jesus.”
That is the way I have been praying ever since that day, February 11: “I want to see the Lord.” Within two months, I could read again. I do write things out large so that I can see, and I changed my Bible.
But secondly, I said to the Lord, “What do You want?” Number one, I want to see Jesus. What would glorify You? Blindness? What would bring in Your kingdom?
That is the opposite of depression. That is the opposite of worry. Excuse me for using my own example, but it has been dear to me because it is traumatic.
My life has been threatened before with disease, and it is traumatic. You wake up at two o’clock in the morning and you are faced with that. You have family. You have your wife.
You open the Bible and start reading the Psalms. All of a sudden, there is this peace. You can say, “Lord, I am Yours. Who am I to call the shots?”
How do I know what would be best for the kingdom? Keeping me alive for another year? The Lord knows. The Lord knows how to build.
He needs yielded, surrendered building blocks—stones that He builds with—not those who are allowing little foxes to spoil the whole thing.
Worry, fear, superstition, comparing oneself with another, self-pity, discrediting God’s delegated authority, coveting, envy, anger—there is universal anger.
Approbation lust. What is approbation lust? Approval. Approval lust. How many in here want approval from everyone?
Approbation lust will cut the wire of communion with the Lord.
Self-ambition and vindictiveness. We often cannot take pressure. We get vindictive when someone has treated us wrongly. We can become defensive. It is a natural instinct.
Even in a born-again believer, it is a natural thing that comes up. It can easily become sin. Communion with the Lord stops right there.
“Lord, I am crucified.” That is the first thing I like to say when that thing starts crouching at the door. “I am crucified. It is Christ Who lives now in me.”
Hide in Him, and anything vanishes. Three cars in a row can come in front of you. Go ahead, back up. Let them go.
You know what the result is? Peace. Joy. “Father, I do not know what their situation is. Lord, bring them into Your kingdom.”
That is where we are supposed to be—not upset, but praying for them. It changes everything. It changes us, changes the whole environment, and, if we mean it, that prayer can change them.
If we truly care.
Passivity is another one of those little foxes: just floating, vacillating, uncertain, questioning.
No, we have to deal with things right now. Just as I used the example of being cut off in traffic: now.
Then the wisdom of the Lord comes to deal with something in the household—God’s wisdom. The Bible speaks of a spirit of wisdom: His Spirit.
Daniel and Joseph—how did they respond? They went to the Lord. Jeremiah went to the Lord ten days, and then He spoke. We have the same access, brothers and sisters.
Of course, behind everything that I have said is Satan.
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood,
but against the principalities, against the powers,
against the world-rulers of this darkness,
against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
In other words, “heavenly places” should put us on red alert. It is above us. If you know anything about the military, the person who has the high ground is going to win.
The enemy, the prince of this world, operates in the air around us. He covers it. If we do not have access to the Son moment by moment, we will lose. We will lose every time.
There is this shroud around us. It reminds me of living in Texas for thirty-five years. At four o’clock in the afternoon, we would get these horrendous half-hour thunderstorms—two inches of water.
It could be a beautiful, sunshiny day, and there would be a cloud, then another cloud. It would actually become dark. You had to turn on your headlights if you were driving. Then, boom.
Has the sun moved? The sun is still there—one hundred and two degrees, just like it was. But it is interesting: on the ground it is now eighty-five. In half an hour, it has dropped fifteen or twenty degrees. But the sun is still there.
Communion with the Lord pierces that—a shaft of light right through that darkness. We have to keep that shaft of light open all the time.
Any time we get loose, this is why we lose it so easily. We get casual. The enemy comes in and closes that one place where we have an opening, and things get dark just like that.
Then we snap at our spouse, get mad at someone at work, or become offended. Jesus warned us about being offended. John the Baptist could easily have become undone by being offended.
Jesus warned that if John the Baptist could become offended, we know where we all are. It is very easy. But communion with the Lord prevents that. That is the only way.
You are not going to move that by positive thinking. Positive thinking is not going to work. That is the best you are going to get in your seminars, business, school, and psychology: “Well, you have to think this, you have to do this, you have to do that.”
No. We are going to say, “Lord, I cannot. But You already have, and You are in me. Keep that open.” Then the power of Satan does not have an opening.
I am going to close there. Tomorrow morning, we are going to get into this subject of recovering fellowship.
My emphasis this weekend is personal. When personal fellowship is taken care of, the corporate will take care of itself. We will come in.
We will be washing one another’s feet, including our enemies, including those who do not like us. God will give us a way.
We will be a plus, a positive, in the fellowship. When I say “we,” I mean Christ in us. I want to keep emphasizing that, because this gets gray real quick.
It is never anything about us. There is nothing in the human life—no virtue, no character—that will carry us through. It is only His life.
As He communed with the Father, that is what we will get into tomorrow: how He kept that line open. Now we can.
Father, we are thankful that we have been called into fellowship. We recognize there is an enemy. He is real.
But You have proved through Your Son that there is a way—only one way—only through Your Son.
We thank You that, though everything we have said tonight in one sense has been negative, we can declare right now that we can have victory in Christ. We can have this communion, this fellowship, as we wait on You moment by moment.
Each hour of the day—ten o’clock Tuesday, noon Wednesday, three o’clock—all through the day and in the practical things of life, You want to teach us not to get under the cloud anymore, but to live and abide in the presence of God, in the Holy of Holies, and commune with You.
Thank You in Jesus’ name. Amen.