Well, it is a hard ministry to follow—the young people. Some of those original songs were very precious and spoke to us a lot about endurance. The wonderful thing about those songs is that these children remember them years later. The Lord really can do a wonderful work in their hearts as they have learned about Joseph this week.
We are sharing in this matter of endurance, and the book of Hebrews is our text. It is a prophecy, and nobody really knows for sure who wrote the book. Several people have opinions. I think probably everybody who has studied it at some length has an opinion. But the brother obviously was, first, apostolic and, second, prophetic. He is speaking a prophetic word.
A prophetic word always comes from the Lord before something is about to happen. This prophetic word is a word to encourage the saints to endure. We have looked at the endurance which comes when we see our Lord in heaven. As many times in the Bible—even we remember the apostle Paul, at times when he was in prison, and the Lord came to him at night—just seeing that encouraged him as he went through difficult times.
We have not had the time to share a lot about these saints who are being written to. We know they were Jewish believers, but one thing we know: they truly were going through very difficult times. I doubt any of us have gone through the times that they went through. These saints had been standing with the Lord, and they had been through a lot. We know from reading that, in the beginning, when they were first enlightened, they had a certain amount of endurance, and they endured a lot of persecution.
But endurance needs to be stretched, especially as they were waiting for the Lord to fulfil His deeper purposes. So this is an encouragement to us, and the brothers, as we considered this conference, felt like this was a word for all of us—which means the Lord is about to do something. We need to be those who have an enduring faith.
So that is what we are going to share about tonight: endurance and living faith. We have some Scriptures here from Hebrews. If you will just look at them with me, we have three different sections we want to touch on as we begin. The first is from Hebrews 6:10.
After the grave warning that is given to those who have tasted of the things of God and have fallen back, he says in verse 10:
God is not unjust so as to forget your work
and the love which you have shown toward His name,
in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints.
So there they have continued on in love. You notice in that verse:
And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence
so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end.
Now there is love and hope:
So that you will not be sluggish,
but imitators of those who through faith and endurance inherit the promises.
So there is our theme verse for tonight: those who through faith and patience—endurance—inherit the promises. Faith needs endurance.
Then a couple of verses from the section we have been looking at all week, from Hebrews 10:36-39:
For you have need of endurance,
so that when you have done the will of God,
you may receive what was promised.For yet in a very little while,
He Who is coming will come and will not delay.
This is a promise.
But My righteous one shall live by faith.
Is that not interesting? There you have the promise: He will come and will not delay. Now, what do we do about it? Well, the righteous live by faith as we are waiting in this little while.
And if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him.
But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction,
but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul.
Can you keep your soul by faith through difficult times? Keep it steady. Preserve your soul. This is what the writer is encouraging.
Then we want to go over to Hebrews 12 and look at some verses there, beginning in verse 18:
For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched,
and to a blazing fire, and to darkness and gloom and whirlwind,
and to the blast of a trumpet, and the sound of words
which sound was such that those who heard begged
that no further word be spoken to them.For they could not bear the command,
“If even a beast touches the mountain, it will be stoned.”And so terrible was the sight that Moses said,
“I am full of fear and trembling.”
But you have come to Mount Zion,
and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and to myriads of angels,
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn
who are enrolled in heaven,
and to God, the Judge of all,
and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect,
and to Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant,
and to the sprinkled blood,
which speaks better than the blood of Abel.
Let us have a word of prayer.
Lord, we come to this last time of ministry together, and we know there is so much that could be said in this whole matter. We pray that You will help us to gain in our understanding Your deep desire for us to continue on with endurance in faith, hope, and love.
We thank You for these graces given to us, and for their power in the church of Jesus Christ. We have been encouraged by the love of the saints, by that blessed hope that we share together, and now we pray for that enduring faith that could encourage one another as we run the race and wait for Your return.
Help us now as we share the word together. By the Holy Spirit, instruct and teach us, we pray. In Jesus’ precious name, we pray. Amen.
Faith is a gift of God, and it is a mystery. Lance always used to say—and when I heard him first say it in 1974, it stuck with me, and every time he says it, it still sticks with me—“Faith is that which connects us with the living God.”
Now, I can say amen to that because, back on April 1, 1964, I walked into my father-in-law’s office. I was going to college at the time and working part-time in his business. After hearing testimony and people witnessing to me for a long time, I said to my father-in-law, “You know, if I were interested in getting saved and being a Christian, what should I do?”
My father-in-law, a godly man who loved the Lord, wrote down in his own hand Romans 10:9-10:
If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus,
and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead,
thou shalt be saved.For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness;
and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
He gave me those two verses on a piece of paper with his terrible handwriting, but I could still read it. It was that very night, April 1, 1964, that I got down on my knees and prayed to God. I confessed with my mouth, with tears in my eyes, that Jesus was Lord. And I made a connection.
Now, who can explain that? Suddenly, I was connected to God in a nanosecond. God received me and saved me.
There was a little Baptist church having a revival meeting. It had gone on all week long with no results. Friday night, this poor old preacher was all burnt out; he could hardly talk. They gave the final invitation on Friday night, and there I waddled down to the front. I talked to the pastor, took his hand, and said, “I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.” Everybody in the place just went crazy.
One of the things you do not know as an unbeliever is that everybody in the place has been praying for you all year long. That was ten months of travail. These people had been praying for me. So, of course, when I got saved, they erupted and considered it the most glorious evangelistic meeting they had ever had. One sorry guy gets saved.
But that faith connection—who can explain it? Hebrews 11:1 gives us this. It is not really a definition, but it tells us something about faith:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.
There are some things that arise in us, and we hope for something. Then suddenly it goes beyond hope, and we see that hope is substantiated. We see it almost materialised, although faith does not see, right? We walk by faith, not by sight. But somehow that which we hoped for seems so real to us that we hang our hat on it.
Somehow Abraham just believed when God said, “You are going to have a child,” and he hung on to that thing for several decades before it came about. Faith is the conviction of things unseen, which makes us look like such fools until it turns out that what we thought was right.
Faith is such a wonderful thing. Hebrews 11 is, of course, the great faith chapter. It says that by faith men of old gained their testimony. Is that not wonderful? They gained their testimony. As Jeremy would put it, that was their legacy. They believed, and it turned out to be true.
It goes on to say that you cannot please God except by faith. If anyone would please God, he must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. So faith is so, so important in our life. We all know this, even though it is a great mystery. Faith connects us to the living God, just like that.
Now, the writer of Hebrews accepts, of course, that connection of faith. But primarily he is burdened that we find a faith that endures—not a faith that gives up. How many of you have faith that lasts about two seconds, like the man who says, “I believe; help my unbelief”?
Well, the Lord wants to stretch that faith. It is no surprise that James 1:3 says:
Knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
Now I believe, and then it gets tested with time. If I keep on believing and then it comes to pass, my faith was no longer just a nanosecond connection; it was a connection that endured through the period of time until it was answered. We need that kind of enduring faith.
One famous old preacher here in the United States always used to say, “Faith grows between the time you think God should answer your prayer and the time He does.” It is never quite your timing. You want the quick answer, and sometimes God stretches that out and tests your faith.
So in Hebrews 6:12 we have this:
Those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
We are not going to go through the list in Hebrews 11, because you have all been through it before. But this is the list of those with the legacy of faith. Faith itself is mentioned thirty-one times. So the emphasis of this prophetic, apostolic writer is that we need enduring faith.
He names twelve people, then a few more later on, and then some faithful actions without giving names. There are probably twenty people in that chapter that he speaks about in connection with faith. Each one had a different experience in their encounter with God, but there are three things in common with this enduring faith.
First, the source of enduring faith was often that connection with heaven. There is Abraham, walking under the sun, as our brother shared from Ecclesiastes. Abraham is walking under the sun in Ur of the Chaldeans, and suddenly he sees the glory of God. In that moment, his life was changed forever.
That vision of the God of glory set him out on a sojourn that took him up to Haran, down into Canaan, down to Egypt, and back all around. During all that time, something about that touch of heaven kept him going. Even though every time Sarah said, “Well, where are we going now?” he would say, “I do not know where we are going, but I know Who I am going with.”
He went from place to place. He learned many lessons and made many mistakes. God blessed him, and the promises God made with him came to pass. He became rich. The funny thing is, the richer he got, the less he cared for riches.
The testimony of his life at the end was this: “I, in Ur of the Chaldeans, saw the God of glory. He has blessed me with a child and with so much. But you ask me what I am looking for now? I am looking for a city whose architect and builder is God. I am looking for a heavenly city.”
Is that not something? He was touched by heaven, and it never left him. It enabled him to endure. When we see these men and women, we see that faith, when it sees something in heaven, causes endurance.
Secondly, most of the witnesses mentioned in Hebrews 11, all with different stories, had their faith tested. Do we want our faith to grow and gain endurance? It comes through testing, right?
Here again Abraham and Sarah come to the forefront. They were waiting for a child. They were tested. But Abraham’s main test came after he had his child, when the Lord said, “Give him up to Me as an offering.” Abraham believed God and went ahead in obedience. That is why God said, “Abraham, you are My friend. Your faith endured the test. Tell Me anything. I will give you anything you want, because you are My friend.”
Moses also had a destiny in his heart to be a deliverer of the Hebrew children, but he had to wait forty years for that to take place. He waited, and he kept waiting, and his faith grew. God tests our faith sometimes. He tells us something, and we pray it and say, “Lord, I claim this promise which You have told me.” Then nothing immediately happens.
The third aspect we find of faith is that there was always, it seems, a reward. Now, what was the reward? Do we serve God so we can get rewards? “Lord, tell me what to do. I need some more rewards. The ones You have given me are not enough. I need some more.”
No, really the reward, as it says in Hebrews many times, is that He will do what He has promised He will do. That is our reward. “Abraham, in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply.” That is My promise. Do you believe it? So it is the promises that the Lord gives us that are our rewards.
You will remember how it says of Moses in Hebrews 11:26:
He considered the reproach of Christ greater riches
than the treasures of Egypt;
for he was looking to the reward.
What was Moses’ reward there? What was it exactly? I suppose it was that the Lord would be with him as he delivered the children out of Egypt. Many of these people endured looking to the promise. This was their reward.
It says in Hebrews 11 that some of them died in faith without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance. It is possible the Lord will give you a promise, and it will not be fulfilled in your lifetime. But it will be fulfilled. The Lord will give us, by His grace and mercy, perhaps a vision of that promise. We see it from afar.
Many of these in the Old Testament saw the promises, but they could not lay hold of them. In fact, the Lord was waiting for another time to fulfil these things. So these are our lessons of faith. My, my, my—these Hebrew believers, these Christians, were really going through it, and they needed a faith that endured.
So we see this prophet speaking to these Hebrew Christians. I want to pose the question: Why is the prophet speaking with such urgency, encouraging them to an enduring faith? Why is he doing this?
We have seen the first picture, from the first night I shared: there they are as the house of God going through the wilderness. He encouraged them to put their complete trust in Jesus in their heavenly calling. Put your complete trust, your boast, and your confidence in Jesus—your Apostle and your High Priest. He is the One who is going to get the house of God into the promised land.
Then last night we had a second picture given to us: the picture of discipline. It was the picture of running the race with endurance. We all know that a race takes discipline. If you are going to run the race, it will take discipline in order to fulfil the race.
Here is what you need to do: fix your eyes on the goal. That is Jesus, the Author and Finisher of your faith. Fix your eyes on Him when you are running the race and going through discipline. As you are going, know that the Father will discipline you and, through circumstances, bring you into sonship.
Paul could say that no matter where you start out, the Lord will show that He is true in Romans 8:28. He will make everything in your life—all your circumstances—work together for good, to bring you into the image of His beloved Son. He will take everything.
When we talk about the Father being the One who disciplines us, we are talking about Somebody Who has the use of history, circumstances, earthquakes, and a blessed year of good crops. Our God can use all these things to discipline our lives. We are talking about a Father Who really knows just what we need.
How do we know that? Because the writer calls Him the Father of spirits. He is talking about how fathers discipline their children. Your fathers discipline you as seems best to them. They look at your body and see what you can endure. They look at your soul and say, “Well, he needs to do this, and we need to correct that.”
The Father of spirits knows everything about you—your spirit, the real you. He knows exactly how to discipline us and bring us into sonship. As we are running the race, there are entanglements we have to get rid of. We are stripped of those. We have to find victory over besetting sins, and the Father disciplines us as we are on this race. The faithful God.
But now the urgency of the prophet’s encouragement has to do with something bigger. When we talk about discipline, faith, and endurance, of course we realise that this is on a personal basis. Even when we talk about overcoming, you do not have an overcoming group; you have to overcome as an individual. You must be faithful to the Lord. You must stand under the victory of the blood of Jesus Christ. Nobody else can do it for you.
This matter of endurance is an individual matter, but there is something larger going on here. The prophet knows that something is about to happen. This prophet has a sense in his spirit that something is about to happen. So he makes this prophecy in Hebrews 12:25-28:
See to it that you do not refuse Him Who is speaking.
For if those did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth,
much less will we escape who turn away from Him Who warns from heaven.And His voice shook the earth then,
but now He has promised, saying,
“Yet once more I will shake not only the earth,
but also the heavens.”This expression, “Yet once more,” denotes the removing
of those things which can be shaken, as of created things,
so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.Therefore, since we have a kingdom which cannot be shaken,
let us have grace, by which we may offer to God
an acceptable service with reverence and awe.
Now the prophet senses something. Something large is about to happen.
The whole basis and foundation of these Jewish Christians’ lives is about to be stripped away. We believe that this letter was written just before the great destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, and the shakings were already visible. Things were about to be stripped away.
So a warning is given from heaven: take grace. Be faithful as you go through these difficult times. Now, the Jews are no different than any other people. We love to settle down where we are, and we do not like being thrown up in the air, moved somewhere else, and having to start all over again. How many of you like to start all over again? It is just not easy.
Even when the Jews left Egypt, some of them wanted to go back because they were comfortable being slaves. They were used to Egypt, and they happened to like what they ate there. Then they got into the promised land and had struggles there, being what they were supposed to be in the promised land. When they went away into captivity, they had trouble in captivity. But when they were called to go back to the promised land, they were now comfortable in captivity.
That is the way we are. But the Lord God, our Father, was about to move and end an epoch for these Jewish believers. They were going to go through something that would tear everything away that had previously been their foundation, until they were left only with Jesus Christ.
They had lived, we do not know, in some sense between two worlds. They were Jews; they were Christians. They knew Jesus was the Messiah, and they had been saved—enlightened, is what the writer says. But maybe they were still meeting in the synagogues. Or, if they were in Jerusalem, perhaps they were still going down to the temple and offering sacrifices.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Jesus was your sacrifice.” “No, but for the sake of community,” they continued to join in the feasts and the fast days. They were sort of in between two worlds. This was to their liking. This was what they tried, despite the fact that, just because they believed Jesus was the Messiah, they were persecuted intensely. But they tried to balance between the world and their faith.
Our God would have nothing of it. He would tear those props away. After warning them that Jesus superseded anything in the Jewish religious scene, the writer realised this was about to happen. These things were going to be stripped away, and they were going to be left without anything except Jesus Christ.
That sounds like a terrible thing, does it not? Except to you and me, until we go through it. When we are stripped down to Jesus Christ as our total sufficiency because we have nothing else, this is the kind of trauma they were going to go through.
Why would the Lord God destroy Jerusalem, the holy city? Why would He allow it to be destroyed by the Romans, of all people? Why would He strip all the stuff out of Judaism? No more sacrifices, no more altar, no more priesthood. All those feasts where you had to go to Jerusalem—there would be no more Jerusalem. God was about to pull the rug out from underneath this whole thing.
Why would He do this to His chosen people? That is the hardest thing to understand. These were Christians, and they were Jews. But you are a Christian. You are one of His chosen people. Why would He ever do something so catastrophic as allow Jerusalem, the whole centre of their culture, belief, and customs, to be torn apart?
Here is why God does these things. This is why God brings an epoch to an end: it is to bring things back to their original purpose.
God will tear down those foundations that have gotten away from reality until all there is is reality again. Sometimes, in an epoch-changing moment, all the foundations of those things we have become comfortable with as believers get pulled out from under us, so that we have to start with Jesus Christ and Him alone as our all-sufficiency.
That sounds like a traumatic experience, but brothers and sisters, that is exactly where we need to be. Why the Lord did this was because He wanted to recover His original purpose.
Here is what the prophet reveals. He gives them one more scene from the heavenly point of view. First, there was the walk through the wilderness. Then there was running the race. Now he brings them to one last scene so they can get the point. He puts them between two mountains.
It is sort of like looking at Sodom being destroyed. The Jews would have to turn and watch Jerusalem be destroyed. He talks about that mountain called Mount Sinai. It is the mountain that the Jews had depended upon. It is where their covenant came from. It is where the tabernacle came from. It is what they had been trusting in all this time.
Yet, even with this covenant that they were under and had gotten accustomed to, the writer says that when you look back and see what was really involved in Mount Sinai, it was darkness, clouds, lightning, thunder, trumpets, and a voice that shook from heaven in such a way that people said, “Please, please tell God to stop speaking.” Even Moses himself was terrified when he heard what was going on.
Now look. That is your life. That is being destroyed, taken to the ground. Jerusalem is no more. Now turn and look the other way. Look—you are at Mount Zion.
“Wait a minute. Mount Zion is Jerusalem.” No, no, no. Jerusalem is destroyed to restore Mount Zion. You have to explain that just a bit. He says, as you turn around from that mountain, “No, but you have come to Mount Zion right now.”
If the Lord can strip away all those things that we have set up until we are dependent on Jesus Christ alone, we lose all that stuff, but we gain Mount Zion. You have come to Mount Zion. This is a heavenly vision.
Jerusalem, the physical place, is destroyed. But you have discovered Mount Zion. Now, what is Mount Zion? Physically, it was the focal, central point of the kingdom of Israel—of David’s kingdom.
The first place David took as king was Mount Zion. He took that for his city. When he took that mount, that outcropping of rock, he said, “I am taking this for God.” Then he said, “Let us go and get the ark and bring it in.”
They brought it in, and as soon as David brought God’s ark, which is God’s throne, into Mount Zion, immediately David began to win all his wars. God’s throne was in Zion. David was sitting on the throne of God—not sitting on the tabernacle, sitting on the ark—but sitting on the throne, and God was blessing him. God’s throne, David’s throne, there in Zion.
It became the centre for all that was done in the kingdom. Eventually they brought worship there. David brought all the singers before they even built the temple, and they had worship in Zion. The people loved Zion. As they built Zion, it was beautiful because it was full of God.
Whenever you touched Zion, you touched life, authority, government, righteousness, worship, and holiness. Every time you went to Mount Zion, you were blessed. You look in the book of Psalms; it is full of songs that bless the fact that we can go up to Zion. “Oh, Zion, how wonderful it is for brethren to dwell together in Zion.”
Zion: the centre of God’s government, the centre of God’s kingdom. They turned from what they had lost, and they found what they had gained. The Lord always wants to recover the spiritual reality.
I know the Jews put a lot of love into the temple, the singers, the choirs, the sacrifices, and the feasts. I am not going to say that God hates those things. But if they cannot be done in reality, God has no use for them. What He wants is a people who live in the spiritual reality of Mount Zion.
For Christians, we are looking at something larger than just the individual, because Mount Zion speaks of a corporate testimony that testifies to the fullness of Jesus Christ. Mount Zion is Jesus Christ in fullness. It is Him as Priest in the holy place. It is Him as Lord and King.
This is the reality that the Lord wants to recover and is willing to bring Jerusalem to the ground if that is what it takes to gain. It is a corporate thing.
Notice what it says here, beginning in Hebrews 12:22:
You have come to Mount Zion,
to the city of the living God.
Now, just think about this: the city of the living God. Brothers and sisters, I know everybody here assembles someplace. How about a place where the living God is present?
They testify in the Psalms that when you walked into Zion, you sensed the very presence of God. The Shekinah glory was there. It was the city of the living God. As great as Hebron was, or Bethlehem was, or any other city in Judah, there was no city like Zion because God’s presence was with the city of the living God.
God will shake any church, any assembly, any denomination, any work, in such a way that He can get reality there—His living presence. That is Zion.
These Hebrew Christians lost everything. Even if they were living in Jerusalem, they had to flee. We know many of them went to Pella, as it turns out. But in any case, when they had to flee, they lost everything. As they turned, they gained everything. Their loss was their gain, because they came to the city of the living God.
That city was different from what they were used to. If they were good Jewish Christians, maybe they did not fellowship with Gentiles too much. But Mount Zion, the city of the living God, involves all of God’s children—Gentiles and Jews. They were going to have to learn a whole new way of life, no longer a synagogue existence and just hanging out with the Jews.
No, no, no. The city of the living God is too precious for that. He throws us all in there together—Jews and Gentiles—and says, “Now I can be alive here.” What a wonderful reality they came to as soon as they were stripped away from these kinds of things.
What else is involved there? It says they came to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. Now wait a minute—they were not at the heavenly Jerusalem yet, right? Jerusalem in heaven has yet to come down to earth.
But this Zion that they were experiencing—I am going to call it the church in reality—had a correspondence with the New Jerusalem. There was an open heaven between this living city and the eternal city. Things done in this living city were being built into that eternal city. Of course, that is something to come, but somehow by faith they were living in it now.
Then it says, “And to myriads of angels.” It goes on to say, “To the general assembly.” I do not know what your translation says, and I do not know what the Mandarin says, but a lot of scholars today say this is actually talking about thousands of angels in festival array.
Remember how the Jews had to let go of those angels. Jesus is above those angels. All right, they let go of it. They turned to Mount Zion. Now there are angels, and they are all worshipping Jesus at the centre of the mountain. You do not lose anything. You lose this, but you gain the reality.
What the angels were doing was ministering. They are not to be worshipped. Jesus is in the centre of Mount Zion. He is the One to be worshipped. But they did not lose anything. There are still angels, but the reality is that it is all coordinated in Zion. The angels go out to minister according to the governing decision of Jesus from Mount Zion.
Then it goes on to say, “And to the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.” Now, this firstborn does not mean that they are born again. This firstborn means these are saints who have gained their inheritance. He is talking about the inheritance of the firstborn.
In other words, these are saints who are dwelling there in Zion, who are enrolled in heaven, and their inheritance is there. There are saints who really love the kingdom, love the Lord, and have served the Lord.
Then, “And to God, the Judge of all.” We might say, “Oh boy, that has got to be tough. Mount Zion, and here is God, the Judge of all.” But no, it is not talking about God judging you when you come to Mount Zion.
What it means is that you have come to Zion, where God sends His judgment out from Zion, and you are part of the thrones and part of the governing of what is going on in Mount Zion. Is it possible, even in this lifetime, to be part of Mount Zion’s government? Or is that just something for another world?
Is there such a way that we can be united to the will of God and under the will of God, so that we can hear and, in our prayers, pray prayers according to the will of God and see God do His judgments and His works according to His will while we are here on this earth?
Here in this wonderful place, there is God, the Judge of all, and the spirits of righteous men made perfect. There are the witnesses who have gone on before. They are not in their bodies; they are awaiting the resurrection, the first resurrection. But here they are, spirits alive there in Mount Zion as witnesses to encourage us on.
Of course, now we get to the central theme here. Mount Zion, at the centre, has Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant. Look at that old Mount Sinai and how terrified people were. They saw smoke and fire and heard a loud voice. Now look here in Mount Zion. You are living in Mount Zion with Jesus, the Mediator of a better covenant.
God comes within you. God speaks His law within you. God forgives your sins and remembers them no more. You know the essential parts of this better covenant. Jesus is there as the Mediator, mediating this new covenant in which you exist.
Finally, you are under His precious blood—a blood that speaks of your covering, your forgiveness, and your safety. You have come to Mount Zion.
This is something that could even be applied to us: discovering Mount Zion as we are stripped away from things we have trusted for so long. Right up to the end, the Lord wants to recover the original purpose of our being called out as ecclesia, the church, the called-out ones.
He is always working to recover that original intention, that original purpose. Why have we gathered together? He wants the church to be recovered, to be a living assembly where the living God is evident, where the Lord Jesus is mediating His covenant, where there is justice and judgment and life, and people who have gained their inheritance.
This is the purpose of all that stripping work that God may do in our lives. Whatever traumatic events happen in our lives, behind it there is a recovery back to original purpose: to stand in the Lord Jesus Christ—Mount Zion, the fullness of Christ.
In all His offices and in all His administration, to know Jesus as our full mountain, as it were, is so wonderful. On Mount Zion, they worshipped with holy worship.
When I got saved—well, it is a long story—but I ended up playing guitar and leading worship services of what I would call a charismatic style. That is to say, I would play guitar, we would sing, and everybody could throw their arms up in the air. I would say, “Okay, now praise God,” and then sing another song. I was used to serving God in this way.
Of course, there was some blessing in it and all, but I will never forget the day I walked into a place that had Spirit-led worship—not human worship, even good charismatic human worship—Spirit-led worship.
I had only been there for a couple of weeks before I felt the Lord say to me, “Dana, why do you not put down your guitar and stop leading people all the time, and let My Spirit lead people?” Now, that is quite a unique concept in most places. They totally reject that. “Are you crazy? That would cause chaos. If you just let anybody ask for any song or pray any prayer, it would just be chaos. No, no, no, we have to lead from the front.”
But when you touch Spirit-led worship—and sometimes, when we let everybody sing or pray whatever they want, we do have chaos, unfortunately. Sometimes people are asking for their favourite songs, and people have specific axes to grind. Things can go wrong without the authority of the Holy Spirit.
But what I am suggesting is, if you taste Zion in worship, it spoils you. Suddenly, I went back to my charismatic worship, and it was not quite so charismatic as I thought. It was a little more engine-driven by human designs, if you might put it that way. If we are going to meet on Mount Zion, some of these things have to be stripped away.
One of the wonderful things the book of Hebrews lets us know is this: sometimes, in order to really live before the Lord, He asks us to meet Him outside the camp. When we meet Him outside the camp, we discover Mount Zion.
This is taken from Hebrews 13:12-13:
Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people
through His own blood, suffered outside the gate.
So let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach.
Outside the camp. Now, for the Jews, they knew exactly what their camp was. But we have many camps today, and those camps obscure the reality of Mount Zion. Sometimes the Lord would have us go outside the camp.
What happens when somebody has been used to the camp, and suddenly they are led outside the camp and discover Jesus? Well, it is hard to explain.
John Wesley was a good Anglican minister, and he was also an Anglican missionary. He faithfully served God as best he could. But when he fell in among those Moravians, he touched Mount Zion outside the camp.
Not only was he saved in that little church building in London, but after being saved in that Moravian group, he went immediately to Herrnhut in Germany and spent a few months with them for the summer. As a newly saved man in 1735, he spent a few months with the Moravians, and he said, “This is heaven on earth. This is the church. This is the reality. This is what the church is like in the Bible.”
He could not believe it. All those years, he had grown up as an Anglican minister, but he touched something outside the camp—the reality.
We know the story in the nineteenth century of those dear brethren who started meeting in various places around the Lord Jesus, breaking bread on Sundays and studying the Bible. Some of these people came alive as they met with the brethren on Mount Zion.
Some were rich people, some nobility. In England, you have Lord So-and-so and Duke So-and-so. Some of these men and women of money, means, position, and title had gotten saved. They opened up their fancy homes, and every Tuesday night at the fancy home of Lord So-and-so, they would have a Bible reading.
The brethren would go over there. Some were just tinkers, cobblers, and regular folks, but they would all go over. The lord or the lady would prepare a nice tea—an afternoon tea. Then they would sit down, and a couple of men would lead a Bible study with some initial thoughts, and they would begin talking.
There is an incident that happened somewhere outside London where one of the rectors—that is, a reverend from the Anglican church—went to one of these Bible readings. He went one time, then left his position as clergy and left the Anglican Church because he said, “This is real. This is the real thing. I met Jesus in that Bible study tonight.”
Mount Zion sometimes is outside the camp. If people get a taste of that thing, there is a price to be paid—bearing His reproach—as the brethren did, and others did, for sure.
Our dear brother Lance had so many stories. When he was a young teenager, along with the other teenagers in London, they had been meeting, having evangelistic meetings, prayer meetings, and other things. Eventually the churches in the city did not like what they were doing. In the end, they had to decide whether to stay or go.
It is a very difficult thing if your parents are all going to one church and the Lord is leading you out. There was a lot of misunderstanding. Lance was part of a very famous Baptist church in Richmond, Surrey. When he decided to leave with his sister, it caused a real commotion.
These folks left. They left everything behind. They started meeting, breaking bread, and learning about the Lord together.
It was twenty years later that I came and visited that place on Halford Road in England, where Lance and his brethren had been meeting. That was the place where I saw the reality of Jesus Christ among His people. I said, “I found home.” I left my denomination, my ministry, and the whole thing because I saw reality outside the camp.
It is such a precious thing. The Lord is always looking for the original purpose He intended for His Zion—for Christ in fullness. These opportunities come. It should not surprise us how much God is willing to shake and shake things apart to find the reality of Mount Zion.
I look out over this group, and there are so many pretty young people here that I do not know how many people remember this. But a lot of years ago in Richmond, Virginia, God shook up the whole business here.
A bunch of brothers and sisters left their churches. Some left their Christian ministries and everything to join together in an assembly outside the camp. Out of this little group and the burden that developed came this Christian Family Conference.
I remember the first Christian Family Conference I went to. I had been a Baptist minister, and I had spoken in conventions with a couple thousand people in Montreat, North Carolina, where our Baptist Convention held its annual meetings. There were all these big meetings with singing and everything.
I will never forget the first time I came to the conference. It was up there in Ashland, at Randolph-Macon College. I walked into that place, and they were being led by the Spirit in their worship. Then our brother Stephen spoke, and our brother Lance spoke, and I thought I was in heaven.
There was not an axe to grind. Every time I used to speak as a Baptist minister, there was always something about money in there somewhere. That is just the way it is. “While you have a tear in your eye, let us take up a collection.” It was always something.
But in a larger way—not just in an assembly, but in a larger way—that first Christian Family Conference, I tell you, I touched Mount Zion. I could not sleep at night as the message went on and on in my head. It was so full of the presence of God. It was absolutely precious. How could I want to go back into the camp?
So I left the camp. I tore up my reverend paper. I was Reverend Dana Condon—no more. I started the wonderful ministry of driving a school bus while I joined this fellowship and learned what it means to live in Mount Zion.
Oh boy, there was stripping that had to go on in my life. You could take the Baptist minister out of the Baptist church, but to take the Baptist out of a guy, that is a whole other story. I will not go into my story, but all I want to say is that sometimes it takes that stripping and that final moment where you stop playing between two worlds, leave the camp, and discover Mount Zion.
God’s purpose is not just for our endurance by faith on an individual basis. He is up to something large. That Mount Zion, one day, will meet in Revelation 14, on Mount Zion in heaven. We heard that story this morning from our brother. Mount Zion in heaven is where those overcomers will be.
But dwelling here in Mount Zion takes enduring faith. You and I have to be willing to sacrifice and allow the Holy Spirit to work endurance into us.
Really, that is all I had to say, except for one more thing. The fact that the burden this week has been to endure, and the messages that we have heard from our brother Stephen during the mornings, is to me an indication that something is about to happen.
So I just want to say: do not hold on to stuff that is shakable, because it will be shaken. I do not know what is going to happen. It may be the rapture. It could be tribulation. It could be a national disaster. I do not know what is going to happen.
But when the Lord speaks in this kind of way, I get this feeling that something is about to happen and that we should be prepared to have grace to serve God as we go through this next epoch-changing episode.
So we need to have faith. The Lord will do what He wants to do. Even now, He is beginning to shake things and warn us.
I want to appeal to you: if you want to have this endurance, this faith, this discipleship, and this life, do you realise you have come to Mount Zion? Is Mount Zion real to you?
There is so much we could say theoretically about it, but I do not really want to go there. You know if you have touched Mount Zion. We walk by faith and not by sight. Even as you and I fellowship together on Mount Zion, it does not mean that every moment is a heavenly experience. We walk by faith, not by sight.
But we will know by the shaking, the stripping, the need for repentance, and the work of discipline in our lives that the Lord is doing something. On Mount Zion, He is doing and governing there.
It is better to be governed by the Lord, even under discipline, than to be somewhere where there is no discipline at all. It may be nice and easy over there on the east side of the Jordan, but the Lord does not have Mount Zion.
The Lord will shake in order to recover His original intention for us. May we find ourselves before the Lord, worshipping Him, gathered with saints who are pursuing their inheritance, all of us looking to Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant.
You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God. May that be our experience as a result of coming here. Let us pray.
Lord, You say that You will once again shake not only the earth but the heavens, and that everything that is shakable and unnecessary will be stripped away in order that Jesus may be our all-sufficiency and all-supply.
That He may be Head and Lord and King and Priest and everything—the fullness of Christ is what You desire. Oh Lord, we know if it is that final shaking, where the ground will shake and the rapture will take place, we want to be ready for that.
But if there is any other shaking to be going on in our lives, we want to hold on to Jesus. We want to learn how to walk through the wilderness looking to Jesus. We want to learn how to be disciplined by running the race, looking to Jesus. We want to know how to go through the shaking, holding to Jesus on Mount Zion.
Teach us these lessons in these days. We thank You for warning us and preparing us. Help us to be faithful, we pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.