Good morning.
First, I’d just like to read a little Scripture before we start everything, in Colossians. You don’t have to turn to it; it’s not part of the message.
But in Colossians 4, Paul is giving greetings. You know, Paul is always greeting people at the end of his letters. Starting in verse 10, it says:
Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, greets you;
and Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him;
and Jesus, that is called Justus.
These only are my fellow-workers unto the kingdom of God, men who are of the circumcision; and they have been a comfort unto me.
Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, saluteth you, always striving for you in his prayers, that ye may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God.
For I bear him witness, that he hath much labor for you, and for them in Laodicea, and for them in Hierapolis.
Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas salute you.
Salute the brethren that are in Laodicea.
First of all, I want to acknowledge, because this is what Paul is doing, the brothers and sisters here in Toronto who are fellow servants in Christ for the kingdom of God. Without them, there would be no conference. Without their prayers, I know I would not be able to stand here.
I know help for Dana. I want to acknowledge all those who have done these workshops, who are called into this work, and who have faithfully come and humbled themselves to do these things.
Things like this do not happen without the whole body—the entire body, everything that is going on. Even some of you guys, when you knew you were coming to this, started to pray. You started to pray for this time.
So you are part of this whole work, and you are part of the workers who put this on. Paul and God always acknowledge those who are working for His kingdom, and I just want to take a moment and acknowledge that God has His workers here.
I am grateful to God for His workers. I am grateful for the prayers, I know, that have upheld me and carried me through my own weaknesses, and I am very grateful for that.
I just want to thank the folks in Toronto for inviting me again. It is always a pleasure and a privilege to be among you.
I am grateful for the times from this conference. I think it has been since 2001, something like that, since it has been in Toronto—so, like, seventeen years, sixteen years, something like that.
I have made connections with many people who have been at this conference, whether they are from Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Maryland, or wherever. I am grateful for those bonds. I am grateful to be included in something that God is doing. It is a wonderful thing to know.
I just want to let you know how grateful I am and acknowledge that your service to God is a help and a blessing.
Now, with that said—I’m sorry. Let’s read the Scripture for today.
Incidentally, I did survive the volleyball. Okay? I did sleep well without any pain, so you’re off the hook, Amy.
John 17. John 17, and verse 17:
Sanctify them in the truth: Thy word is truth.
Let’s pray.
Lord, I want to just thank You. We have so great a cloud of witnesses that encourages us to go on, encourages us to seek after You because others have found You. Lord, I am grateful for that.
I am grateful, Lord, for Your bringing me into something larger—bringing us all into something larger than ourselves. It is not just about ourselves, but something You are doing on a much larger scale.
I am amazed, Lord, that the cost You paid is enough. It is enough. As a matter of fact, it is more than enough. I thank You for bringing me, and us, into this great thing You are doing: the redemption of man to Yourself through Jesus Christ.
How we thank You for Him, who turned away from heaven for a moment and came down to earth and took on flesh. In flesh, He lived to You wholly, perfectly, and purely, and offered that pure life up to You for us who are sinners—for us who had no interest in You at all.
But we thank You that You have interest in us, and You would not have it that we would be away from You. We thank You that You sought us out. You gave us the Savior.
You raised Him from the dead after He paid that horrible price—that wonderful price. You raised Him from the dead, and You rightly set Him on high at Your right hand. He deserves to be there. We worship Him. He is worthy.
We thank You for His ministry, even now interceding for us, praying for us, that the purpose You had in Him coming to earth and in Him being raised from the dead will be fulfilled in us, and that we will all be brought back to You as His bride.
Oh, Lord, we thank You. Now we turn to Your word. We want to ask that You will complete the thought upon the hearts You put here—the hearts that have asked for these things to be brought out.
I pray You will complete those thoughts, and in completing them, Lord, You will give us Your Holy Spirit to illuminate the things that are on Your heart, that You want known to us, that we might be encouraged, that we might want to walk, and that we might find out that, really, we are Yours.
Lord, we cannot have these things unveiled unless You unveil them to us. We are grateful, Lord, that it is You who wants to unveil them to us.
And, brother, you draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Lord, we thank You that even before we drew near to You, You drew near to us. We are grateful for that.
Now we want to draw near to You and find You drawing near to us afresh. We ask for Your blessing on this time, Your illumination on this time through the Holy Spirit, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Amen.
Okay, sorry again. At least I did not blubber. That is good. Okay.
One verse today. I did not even give the conference verses. What about that, huh? Is that okay? I just did not give the conference verses.
We have been talking about truth. I have been sharing about truth; Dana has been sharing about truth—and just the idea that there is that ultimate truth. There is that ultimate truth that there is a God, He has a purpose for us, He has given us a Savior, and He knows who we are.
That is why He has given us a Savior. He knows the purpose He made us for, and He wants to bring us into that purpose afresh. He has given us knowledge of what He wants to do. He has shown us that He has redeemed us, and the way He has done it satisfies Him.
His redemption satisfies Him. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to know? He is satisfied with His own redemption. His plan is perfect. He may have given the highest cost, but to Him it was worth it. It is worth it to Him to have given His Son in this way for us.
Now, we are supposed to be talking about, “What is truth?” and then, “Who are You, Lord?” and, “What should I do?” I kind of feel that the first two I combined—“Who are You, Lord?” and “What is truth?”—it kind of got combined.
But this last one is, “What do we do?” I hate stuff like this, because you know what it does to us, right? “Oh, now we have got to do this.”
Then we go home, we are gung ho for a week or two, and then we lose steam. We lose steam not because we are worldly; I mean, it is just life. Life happens. We go to school, we go to work, and these things drain us of our vitality.
Then we get into that place of saying, “Oh, I am so unworthy,” and we go into cycles and cycles and cycles. So I hate talking about, “This is what we do.” I am not going to talk about that. Okay? I am just not going to do it.
I want to deal with this where Jesus prayed. This is what Jesus prayed. He is our High Priest, right? And isn’t it wonderful that He did not just give us the Lord’s Prayer—“Our Father who art in heaven”—showing us how to pray? This is His prayer.
This is actually what He is asking the Father for. It is so wonderful to have this recorded for us: John listened to Him praying for His disciples and for those who would come after Him. He was actually pouring out His heart to His Father and saying, “This is what I want.”
“I am Your Son. You are pleased in Me. So let Me tell You: this is what I want.”
We did not read the whole prayer; I just left this one verse. He said, “I want You to set them apart. I want You to set them apart by the truth.”
In other words, “I want that truth about who You are to be so ingrained in them that it has an effect on their life, that it sets them apart. It sets them apart from the whole rest of the world, that there will be no people like this people.”
That is when He pulled the people out of Egypt and said, “You are My people. You are My peculiar people. You are going to be peculiar.”
Now, “peculiar” to us does not sound like a great word, because when we think of peculiar, we think of odd. “Oh, that is peculiar. Isn’t that person peculiar?”
But what He means is, “These are My unique ones. These are the ones that have My name on them.” That is what makes them unique.
“Father, I want You to set them apart like that. I want You to set them apart in Your truth.”
Now, how many are expecting that we are going to read Romans 12:1-2? You always do that. That is the good sanctification-consecration verse.
But when you think of sanctification, sanctification does not start with you. All right? It does not start with you.
It starts with the One who sanctifies you.
Let me just give you an example—a worldly example—of being sanctified, being chosen, being set apart for something.
When I was in high school, I played basketball in high school and in college. When I was a sophomore, I was such a stud. I was six foot three, one hundred and forty-five pounds—but all muscle. It was all muscle, okay?
I was a geek. Now, geek to you guys means something else. It means you are like a computer person. But geek in my time meant, yeah, you are like a scarecrow, man.
Matter of fact, I think one of my coaches in middle school called me a stork, and another guy called me Ichabod. Ichabod. If you know Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and if you have ever seen Disney’s cartoon of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane was this really skinny dude.
The whole thing was, here I was, this stud of a guy, and I was playing basketball, but I was so uncoordinated. My feet were so pigeon-toed that I would trip all the time because I would catch my foot behind my leg, all over the court.
But you learn to live with it, right? When I was a sophomore, I was playing junior-varsity basketball, and all of a sudden the coach said, “No, you are playing varsity this year.”
I was freaked. It just freaked me out because here I am, what, fifteen years old? And I am playing with guys who are eighteen. They are seniors, right?
Fifteen and eighteen is like, these guys are adult, grizzled veterans, you know? Here I am, this little skinny—well, not little; I am a big skinny dude. What am I going to do? These guys are going to beat me up.
But all of a sudden I was set apart to this. I wanted to play junior varsity. That is where my friends were. Now I am brought into a place where I go, “I do not know if I fit in here. I do not know if this is going to happen. I just do not know how this is going to work out.”
But the coach who chose me, who picked me out, who sanctified me, who set me apart for this—I guess he said, “You know something?” He did not say this to me, but he probably said it to himself: “Over time, as he is here, he will find out that this is where he belongs.”
That is what I mean by sanctification. God sets us apart, and we think, “Oh, I do not know. I can be this and that and the other thing.” But what happens is, He uses the truth of who we are, of who He is, and circumstances to uncover the truth that is really in us.
That truth in us is the life of Christ.
Now, I want to use a verse, because when He says, “Sanctify them in the truth; Thy word is truth,” this is the word that I think really tells us that we are sanctified by His truth.
We read it the first day, or the first time I spoke, and it is in Isaiah 43. I am just going to read the first verse:
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
and He that formed thee, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee;
I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine.
There are just a couple things here that I think are really, really good. Number one: He calls Jacob by two names.
He calls him the Jacob he is, and He calls him the Jacob he will become. Jacob—we all know the Jacob that we are. It is hard for us sometimes to say, “I do not see the Israel.”
But the other thing He says is, “I have called you by name. I know who you are. I know everything about you. I know your weaknesses. I know the things you think are your strengths, but are just your flesh. I know everything about you.”
Then He says, “Do not be afraid, because I have redeemed you.” In that redeeming cost—and this is a wonderful truth that I never let go of—God will never forsake you because the cost He paid for you is so great.
He cannot just say, “I am just going to let this be a wash.” He will never say that, because that cost is so great to Him. He cannot say, “I am wasting what I paid. I am just counting it as a loss.”
He is not going to do that. He is never going to do that. We should be able to rest and take hope in that, even in our darkest times. We should be able to rest in that truth: He will never forsake me because the cost He paid is so great.
His Son is so much to Him that He will not turn His back on what He has done and just take the loss.
Then the final thing He says is, “You are Mine.” You are Mine.
I just want to say that this truth—where He says, “I have redeemed you” and “You are Mine”—is the truth that we are sanctified in. Yes, we can say it is about who God is, but when it gets down to brass tacks, it is this very thing: “I have redeemed you. You are Mine.”
He wants to uncover that to you and to me. He has ways of doing it. I am not going to give you methods, but I am going to give you ways that He does this.
I am going to give about five examples of things when we talk about being sanctified. For the most part, they are all Old Testament.
The reason I chose the Old Testament is because I took them out of the storybooks. The storybooks are the ones that are easiest to assimilate, aren’t they? They are the food that we can easily take in and easily digest.
That is not to say you cannot look in the epistles and find deeper truths about this, but I just want to take it into that realm where we say, “Yeah, I can see that.” It is not like, “Oh, I have really got to meditate and think on this” at the very forefront. We can say, “I see this. I see it.”
I want to talk about Abraham, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Joshua, and Caleb. We will look at those guys very briefly—but briefly to me means something else to you.
So, we look at Abraham. Abraham being sanctified—being sanctified in the truth—means this: when Abraham was called by God, he was brought into the realm of truth.
He was brought out of Ur of the Chaldeans—a metropolis, a city, a very materialistic place. They had all these idols and everything, because that was the way of the world at that time. That was their religion. That was the way they went.
He was brought out of that and brought into the realm of truth, where he saw God. The God of glory appeared to Abraham. He saw God. He knew that God was real.
God said, “Now I am going to separate you so that you can really find how real I am.” If you look at the life of Abraham, Abraham begins to become a sojourner.
He is a sojourner in the kingdom of God. It is all new to him, and he does not know where he is going or anything. But everywhere he goes, he starts to find that God is there.
It is like when we first become Christians, especially those of us who really had no idea who God was. We are like Abraham in that way. We had no idea, and all of a sudden God came to us and said, “I am here. I am real. I want you to know that.”
Then what happens is, we go through life, and everywhere we go, we start seeing God. Abraham’s life is that he sees God in this way, then in that way, then over here. He sees God doing all these things.
So it does two things. First of all, he begins to see God in different ways. There are about four different names by which God revealed Himself to Abraham.
El Elyon: God Most High. El Shaddai: God Almighty. El Olam: Everlasting God. He is going through all these things, and he is seeing God.
It is just like when we are born again. We are seeing God everywhere. We go, “Oh, I cannot believe that God is like this. Oh, I cannot believe that God is like this.”
The other thing he does is set up altars. He sets up all these altars, and every time he sees God, he says, “Oh, man, I am going to worship Him because I see Him in this way. Oh, I see Him in a different way. I am going to worship Him this way.”
He is really excited. He has found something that is very, very real to him, and God is revealing Himself.
Those of us who came out of the Jesus generation remember when we first got saved. It was like God was brand new, and He was everywhere. We were just so full of it. We were just going, “God, I cannot believe it. I prayed for Him to do this, and He did this. I cannot believe that God is like this.”
Then, as God brings in the reality—“This is who I am. I am showing you who I am”—God reaches down and says to Abraham: Abraham built these altars on his own. They were just responses. As he was seeing God, he was just saying, “Oh, man, I want to set this up. I want to worship You. I want to tell You how grateful I am that You showed this to me about Yourself.”
Then God asks Abraham to build an altar.
That is a different story. That is a real different story, because we find out a different name for God.
It is wonderful to know that you have been brought into a kingdom. It seems like everything is about you, like you are a baby. God is showing you all these things, and it is all about you.
Then, as you get further on, God says, “But you know, there is something in it for Me too. I want to show you what is in it for Me.”
So He asks Abraham to build an altar. Do you know the altar He asked him to build? It was on Mount Moriah.
He said, “I want you to take your only son and offer him to Me.”
This was a hard thing because, all of a sudden, instead of seeing God as all this blessing and all this blessing, God is saying, “I want you. More than you want Me, I want you.”
Abraham, I am sure—and just like us, when the Lord starts laying His finger on us, saying, “I want you,” and starts to say, “I want to pull you out toward Me”—we have to build that altar. It is a hard thing.
It is a hard thing because it is our life. A lot of times we feel, “God, You are asking too much. You are putting too many restrictions on me. I do not know if I could really do it.”
That is really the bottom line: “I do not know if I can do it.” I am sure Abraham, going up that hill, was going, “I do not know. I do not know,” up to the final time when he was lifting the knife.
But the last name for God that he found out was Jehovah-jireh: the Lord will provide.
The thing is this: when he was ready to offer, and he got the will in himself to offer up that offering, instead of God being merely high and lifted up—as he had seen all these things—all of a sudden Abraham finds God stooping down.
God says, “I have another life. I have another life for you. You are giving up this life, but I have another life for you.”
God provides us with another life. That is the big thing. We do not understand it until we are ready to give up our life.
Even Jesus said this: “He who seeks to save his life is going to lose it.” You say, “I want to keep the things that I have.” These things in this world perish.
“I want to keep my good looks.” Well, you get old. “I want to keep my strong physique.” Well, you get old. That is it.
“I want to keep my pretty brown eyes.” Well, they are hidden behind my glasses. I do not see like I used to. I cannot even eat the things that I used to eat.
We were talking last night about Golden Corral. You guys know what Golden Corral is? It is a kind of buffet of things you should not eat.
It is an all-you-can-eat thing. It is no good to me anymore because I cannot eat like I used to eat. If Golden Corral was around when I was twenty, they would be out of business. But I cannot do that anymore because it just does not work.
You lose it. You are going to save your life, and you are going to lose it. It just happens. That is what life does.
But he who loses his life for My sake will find it, because He provides a life in the place that you are giving up. That is a big thing.
We are brought into this reality not just that God is this wonderful, big Being who provides everything for us, but that we see Him stooping down when He has asked us to do something and saying, “I have asked you to do this, but I am going to help you even in giving in.”
He stoops. He stoops to help us. He comes down and gives us this life—not some ethereal life, but the life that actually came down from heaven, took on flesh, offered itself up for us, was raised from the dead, and is now given back to us in seed form.
The Holy Spirit is the One who activates it in our life. We are generated. We have this new life.
Daniel 1—you have to put it in perspective here. Daniel is a teenager, and he is going into captivity. He is going into a land that is not God’s land.
It is a land where there is nothing like him, where everything is what you could picture the world to be. “This is what we are, and you are here, and this is where you are going to live.”
That is what God says with us: “I am not taking you out of the world. I am leaving you in Babylon. I am leaving you in Babylon.”
But you have that life in you. You have that life in you. What I am going to do is uncover that life. I am just going to uncover that life.
Daniel gets into Babylon. He goes to the king’s table, and he is being schooled in all the ways of that kingdom, just like some of you guys are being schooled in all the ways of the kingdom that we live in—the world.
You might think accounting is not about the riches of the world. Accounting is all about the riches of the world. Come on. You are counting up all the little pennies, making somebody wealthy.
Everything is of the world. So you are there and learning all these things. Daniel is going to learn the literature, even the religion and the magic—the witchcraft and stuff like that.
He is not going to do the witchcraft, but he is going to learn about it because that is what they want him to learn. All the customs, all this—you are going to learn all this stuff.
Daniel comes to the place of saying, “How can I live in this world without being defiled?”
It says in Daniel 1 that Daniel purposed in his heart not to be defiled.
Now, I want to put this in a way that does not denigrate Daniel, because Daniel is one of the highest men in the Bible. You do not find sin in Daniel. He is one of these guys.
I think one time God said, “Even if Moses, Daniel, and Samuel were here, I would not listen to you.” That is the high esteem that God had for Daniel.
But I think when it says he purposed in his heart not to be defiled, it was not like a New Year’s resolution: “I am going to show them. I am not going to be defiled. I resolve not to be defiled.”
We know what happens with New Year’s resolutions, don’t we?
I think what happened is this: if you read Philippians 4:6, Paul says, “Be anxious for nothing.” I think Daniel, when he got into Babylon, was anxious.
I think he looked around him and saw, like Paul said, a city full of idols. It disturbed him in his spirit. I think the same thing was with Daniel: it disturbed him in his spirit, and he was looking for, “How can I not be defiled?”
I think he took that anxiety to God. He said, “Lord, I do not want to be defiled. I know You have certain things, and I do not want to be defiled. I do not know how not to be defiled.”
“I know You are not supposed to eat this, but all this stuff is here. Am I going to starve? What is going to happen to me? Am I going to die?”
But it says he found grace.
I want to talk about grace in a little different way, because a lot of us look at grace as just unmerited favor—the love of God for us, right? God loves us, and that agape love is coming out, and that is it.
But why does the writer of Hebrews say you come to the High Priest and ask for grace in time of need? What does that mean? You ask for unmerited love in time of need?
What does that do for you? You already have unmerited love, don’t you? I mean, isn’t that already established—unmerited love? So why are you asking for unmerited love?
I think there are two sides to grace, just like any coin. You have that side of unmerited favor. It brings us to see that God does not care about who we are in the sense that we do not have to merit anything.
He says, “I love you, and it has nothing to do with you. I am going to save you.” That is unmerited favor.
But, on the other hand, there is grace that enables you. There is grace that enables you. That is the life of Christ in us.
There is enabling grace. It is just as amazing as the grace that redeems us—no less amazing. It just makes grace bigger to us.
We are saved by grace. Not only are we saved from the penalty of sin by grace, but our souls are saved through grace because it enables us to overcome.
Again, we see God stooping down and giving favor to Daniel. There was a eunuch who had sympathy for him.
Even he doubted some of the things, but then he said, “I am going to give you something else to eat. We will try this, okay?”
Escaping defilement is not just about refusing or denying yourselves. It is also about replacing—finding a replacement for that which defiles us.
It is not just that we give, give, give. We are also given, given, given something.
What we see, then, is that Daniel’s separateness—his being separated unto God—remains intact. His holiness is kept, and that holiness becomes a fiber of his character.
He does not become a prude: “Oh, you guys, I am just eating the vegetables, and you guys aren’t.” He does not look down his nose at people. No, that is not it.
But the holiness of his character has been worked into his character. He is given something, and he takes hold of it, and it is woven into him.
Now, Joseph is another one. In Genesis 39, he is a slave for Potiphar.
What happens is, in this case, we see holiness uncovered—brushed away—in Daniel. In Joseph, what we see is righteousness, or morality, brushed away and made plain to him and to the world around him in his character.
It becomes another fiber of his character. Truth establishes morality in his life—and morality, just morality.
Even though this is a matter of sexual promiscuity on behalf of Potiphar’s wife, trying to tempt him in this way, morality is not just about sex. It is not just about that.
Morality is doing what is right. That is what morality is: “I am doing the right thing.”
Whether it is, “I love my neighbor because it is the right thing to do,” or, “I give to the poor, not because I have to; I give because it is the right thing to do.”
“I stay physically pure, away from illicit sex, because it is the right thing to do.” That is what it is. I am doing the right thing.
Now I want to take this a little deeper because we hear people say, “Well, I do not commit adultery, and I do not kill people,” and stuff like this.
But this situation in Genesis 39 was not done in the open. It was done in secret. Potiphar’s wife went after him in secret.
Brothers and sisters, he did what was right in secret.
I think for some of us, there is a secret life that we have, and there are secret things that we do that are not right.
Some of it, especially for guys, is internet pornography. Done in secret.
Even though the world considers it normal now—“Oh, that is my porn”—what about for Christians?
Or how about this? I know you guys are stressed about school and everything. What about cheating? It is not right. It is just not right.
God desires truth in the inner part, not just on the outside. What is the truth on the inside, too?
Here we have Joseph, who takes the secret part. He could have done this, and no one would have known. Right?
He could have just lived in that situation as a happy camper in Potiphar’s house, because he was at the top of Potiphar’s house as servants, wasn’t he?
Could he not have just stayed there and said, “Hey, I have got my life. My life is comfortable. I like this”? But he did not.
One of the reasons he did not was because he felt that he was called to something greater. Those dreams had instilled in him, had shown him, that God had called him into something greater.
That is why, when he did this, it was not like, “I am not sinning because I am not going to do this because it is not right.” He said, “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”
He knew it was God who sees. It was God who had called him to this purpose. To say otherwise would be to turn his back on God’s purpose.
He established a right morality in his life. He did what was right, not just on the outside, but in secret he did what was right.
Again, this establishes righteousness as another fiber of the character.
Daniel 2 talks about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. You remember the story: they brought this big idol out there and said, “Everybody, we want you to worship it, or we are going to throw you in the fiery furnace.”
You know what? Today there is something going around in Christian circles, especially on college campuses, and probably even in high school: the idea that there is not just one way to God; there are many ways.
“You can go through Buddhism to get there. You can go through Islam to get there. They are all the same God anyway.”
What happens is, “Let us bow down to this ecumenical god, the one who is god for everyone.” We lose our separation; we lose our holiness in doing this.
These guys said, “No, we are not going to. We are not bowing. We are not bowing to this. We are not bowing to what the world says is goodness in religion.”
“We are not bowing to a religion that says we tolerate everything. God does not judge. These things are okay. It does not matter. We are going to twist the truth.”
They said, “No, we cannot do that. We cannot do that.”
In them, we see steadfastness in their faith. They are faithful. They are faithful to their God, and they will not do it.
You know something? They got punished for it.
We think sometimes that if we stand up for Christ, there are going to be no consequences to it. There are going to be consequences to it, because the world hates Him.
He even said that: “The world hates Me, and if they hate Me, they are going to hate you.” Count on it.
You are never going to be accepted in that way. You are not going to be. So do not seek to be.
That is what the world wants. The world wants you to accept them in that way. They will never accept you, but they want to say, “You come in here and be acceptable to us.”
They said, “We are not going to be acceptable to you. That is just the way it is. No hard feelings. We have no hard feelings toward you, but we are not going to dance the dance. You are playing the wrong music. We are not doing this.”
They were steadfast. They were faithful in that.
It is like Martin Luther when he stood before that Diet of Worms. He said, “I am standing on the word of God. I am not moving. I am faithful. I am not going to be moved. I am not going to go against my conscience.”
That faithfulness, that steadfastness, is another fiber of the character being uncovered through these things that are happening.
Joshua and Caleb—if you look at Numbers—remember, they were the two spies who were faithful, who gave the good report and said, “Let us enter into this. Let us go.”
The other ten said, “No, this is too tough,” and stuff like that. God then said, “You guys are not entering in.”
Not even those two faithful men at that time could enter in. They were faithful, though, weren’t they? Shouldn’t they have been allowed to enter in?
No, because God wanted to take His whole people in there. But these men survived when the other ones did not.
The whole thing about this is that these people held to the minority report. The minority report.
Do you know what the minority report for Christians is? Jesus is Lord. Not just saying it, but Jesus is Lord.
We do not want Jesus as Lord. We want to rule our own lives. We want the fire insurance. We want the peace of mind that comes through that, but the rest of the stuff? No.
“I will read my Bible. I will go to church.” But Jesus is Lord—I am talking Christians.
But they held to the minority report.
Because of that, they had to walk with those people for the next thirty-eight years in the wilderness wandering.
What happened was that it showed that, since they knew it—they knew that Jesus was Lord, they knew that they should be in there—they suffered long. Longsuffering was built into them so that they could bring the next generation in.
In other words, they were an example. Their peers may not have accepted them, but the generation that was coming up was looking at them.
Brothers and sisters, especially you older ones, you do not know what an example you are to the younger generation, because they are looking for truth. They are starving for it. They are looking for reality.
I was reading something about ten reasons why millennial Christians are losing their faith. One of them was because they do not see reality in the church.
They do not see the truth—not the truth of doctrine, but the truth of life in the church. They are looking for it, though.
They said something like three-fourths of the kids who leave for college lose their faith. One of the reasons is that there is no reality in it. No reality.
But these brothers suffered long because there was reality in them. They knew what they saw was good, and they said, “We want that. We are going for that. We are living our lives for that, and we cannot wait until we get into that place.”
“We will lead the rest of you guys in, as this old generation dies out—the people who say, ‘We just do not believe it.’ The rest of them who are seeing reality, follow us. Follow us.”
It always used to bother me. As a young Christian, I disliked Paul. First of all, I thought he was a hothead. He was just so hot, argumentative—even to Peter.
He would say things like, “Follow my example.” That used to bother me. “Self-righteous,” you know?
But the more and more I have read, the more and more I have known about Paul. You see him talking in 1 Thessalonians, saying, “We were like nursemaids to you. We were like nursemaids to you, to help you get on your way.”
He said, “We were weeping over you. We did not know when persecution would come to Thessalonica, and we were away. We were at our wits’ end. Are they okay?”
It gave me a whole other view of Paul.
Brothers and sisters, that is what we need. We need Pauls who say, “Follow my example. Follow my example.” Not my thinking, so to speak, but follow my example.
Then in Daniel 6, we have another one. Daniel is thrown into the lions’ den because he will not hide who he is.
Remember, they made an edict saying, “We know Daniel prays all the time. He opens those windows, and he prays all the time. So let us make an edict.”
They had the king sign an edict: “Anybody who prays to a different god will be thrown into the lions’ den.”
They make the edict, and they read it. I am sure they have the court there, and they are reading it, looking right at Daniel. “Anybody who prays…”—making that eye contact—“anybody who prays, Daniel…”
Daniel could have just gone back to his house, shut the windows, and done his regular prayer, right? He could have been what we would call a closet Christian.
But no, he opened up the windows and said, “This is who I am. Your edicts are not going to stop me from being who I am.”
“God is my God, and I will pray to Him. You cannot stop me because this is who I am.”
Not in a belligerent, in-your-face way—just to say, “I see the edict, but it is not going to stop me.”
Because in my character is this idea: “God openly saved me. How can I not openly worship Him? How can my life not be an open book for everyone?”
Daniel opened this up and said, “I am not going to hide.”
If you look at all these little pieces of character—these character fibers—you know what you have? You have Jesus.
That is what it is. This is the life of Jesus. He is holy, faithful. He did not hide that His God was His Father. He was longsuffering.
He lived a life that was right in the eyes of men. All of these things were open, and they were all uncovered.
So what happens is, we go through things and say, “I do not know about me,” and stuff like that. The Lord uses all these circumstances, and He unearths who you are.
He brings you to a place where you have to claim, “I know this is real. I cannot deny it, and I will not deny it in my life,” because He has given you the grace to do that.
In Isaiah 43, we talked about all this, where He says, “I know I have created you. I formed you. I have redeemed you. I called you by your name. You are Mine.”
That is God’s side of sanctification. What He uncovers is this.
There was a Catholic community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the 1970s. It was a charismatic one, during the charismatic movement, when the Holy Spirit moved into the Catholic Church. It was wonderful.
There was a group in there, and they started to sing songs. They wrote songs, and then they started to record. You can find something called the Word of God Community. If you look on their website, you will find some of their albums.
They had this one song based on Isaiah 43, but they sang it differently. It was not, “You are Mine.” It was the response to it.
Instead of saying, “I formed you. Fear not, I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are Mine,” they said it this way:
“Lord, You have created me.” In other words, “I am acknowledging who You are. You have called me by my name, and I am Yours.”
This is the response God wants in His setting us apart to Himself. As He sets us apart for Himself, He says, “You are Mine. You are Mine.”
“Whatever you do, you are not going to be able to get away from Me. You are Mine. I paid for you. I am not going to turn My back on you. I paid such a price for you. I am never going to turn My back on you.”
But the response He is looking for, and which He is uncovering through the circumstances of life—because He leaves you in this world so He can uncover what He has done—is that response of saying, “I understand.”
“I know You have created me. You have generated me. I have been born again. I have seen that. I have had the light on that. I have the life in me. I know it.”
“I know it in my heart of hearts, that I am Yours.”
That is the response back to Him: “I know it, that I am Yours, and I am not going to fight it.”
A lot of us get to the place of fighting it because we want to hold on to our individuality, our life, our own life, and stuff like that. We want to have that life that everyone wants—the American dream, the Canadian dream, I guess. You know what I am saying?
But this part where I say, “I am Yours”—that is the fruit of sanctification.
It is not just, “Oh, the fruit of sanctification is holy life.” We have looked at all these things, but the real fruit of sanctification is where we say to God, “I am Yours.”
“This is what You wanted.” It is not like, “This is what You wanted. Well, here it is.” It is a humble thing.
“I did not know how much You have done to make me Yours, but now I do. I just want to tell You: I am Yours.”
That is what a bondservant is. A bondservant sees the goodness of that master and says, “I do not want to be free. I want to be Yours.”
In the end, what happens is that life being uncovered in us is being uncovered not just to us, because we see the life of Christ in us, but it is being uncovered to the world around us and to the church around us.
All of a sudden, there is a recognition: “I see Christ. I see the life of Christ there.”
That is what speaks out of us. That is what speaks out to the world, and that is what speaks out to the church.
It is like in 2 Corinthians 3, at the very beginning: we become that letter of God to the church and to the world that says, “You want to know what truth is? Let me tell you what it is.”
It is written all over you because it is written in who you are and what you are doing.
This is the end God is after in our life. This is the end.
He is not trying to make you something you do not want to be. He is trying to show you His Son in such a way that you desire Him—not just desire Him on the outside, like, “I want to see Jesus.”
But you say, “I want to give my life up to that life that is in me, because I know when that happens, I am going to be satisfied.”
When I see Him, I will be like Him. I will be satisfied. That is glory.
Glory is when you are satisfied. If you win a championship, you are satisfied.
The end of our life is to be in glory. That does not mean just to have this bright light shining out of us. It means to be satisfied with the life of Christ that is in us and being worked out through us, so that everyone sees. It cannot be hidden.
You are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. That is God’s plan. That is God’s desire.
What should you do? Find that you have been sanctified. That is what you should do.
Open up to the idea that He has sanctified you. Look at that and say, “Lord, show me what that means,” and bring it to the place where you see, “Gee whiz, I belong there. There is nothing greater.”
Just one little thing: there is nothing greater than when you hear the Lord speaking to you in your heart of hearts and saying, “You are Mine.” There is nothing greater than that.
I can remember when that happened to me. I was on an airplane, flying from New Zealand to Australia. I had just had some experiences with the Lord, and I was writing a letter to my sister.
It was the end of January 1976. I was writing to my sister about things that were happening to me, just welling up in my heart.
The Lord was saying this because I was away. I was going on, doing my own thing, and the Lord had corralled me. I got sick of myself. I said, “I do not know what I am doing. I just do not know what I am doing.”
“I feel like I have blown it. I have gone beyond the pale of being recovered.”
Then the Lord showed me how that could never be.
I was writing my sister, telling her what was happening, just overwhelmed with the presence of the Lord. It seemed to speak right into my heart: “You are Mine.”
“You are Mine now. You understand that, don’t you? You can never be the same.”
That is what I think is my calling. My calling came when He just said, “You are Mine.”
All of a sudden, just done. You feel like, “Lord, yes, I surrender.”
This is what the Lord is looking for. He is not looking for you to be anything. He is looking for you just to say, “I understand. I see it. I am Yours. I surrender to You.”
Let us pray.
It is so hard to fathom, Lord, You being so great—like Abraham seeing God Almighty, the everlasting God—that all these things would stoop to us and redeem us and tell us that we are Yours.
Lord, thank You. Thank You for what that means to us. I have no idea what it means to You—what it means that You have redeemed back to Yourself a people. I have no idea.
But Lord, I do just pray this for us: that we could get out of the realm of thinking that we have to do this and that, and just find out—just let You speak into our lives—that You have redeemed us.
You have called us by name, by both names: Lord, Jacob and Israel. You know both sides. You know who we are in our reality, in our flesh.
Yet You know the one that You have called us to be also, and You call us by both names. You are not ashamed to say You are the God of Jacob. How I thank You that that is so.
But Lord, we want to be the people who are not ashamed to say, “You are my God.”
Lord, we ask that You will open our eyes to see what You have done in such a way that we just surrender our lives to You.
Lord, we want to give You back what You really desire, and that is our very life.
So help us, we pray, to have that light shine into us and help us to see it, so that, Lord, what You have generated in us can come to fruition—to Your glory, to Your glory, and to the salvation of many others.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.