Morning, brothers and sisters. It is good to be back with you. It is nice to be here—home. This is home. Praise the Lord.
First of all, I did this at prayer meeting, but again, thank you to those who prayed for me when I was in California. I cannot tell you the help and the rest it is to know that people are praying.
Even yesterday, I was washing some dishes. You know, when you are studying and trying to prepare, sometimes you just need to get away and get your mind on something else, because your mind is stuck in a rut on something and you cannot get past it. Here I am washing the dishes, and I am remembering, and I am just saying, “Lord, thank You. I know that people are praying right now.”
What a comfort that is for all of us—to know that people are praying, not just people who speak. It brings heaven into our midst and into the situation that we are in. So, thank you.
Let us read some Scriptures, okay? Let us go to Joshua 6, starting with the first verse.
Now Jericho was tightly shut because of the sons of Israel; no one went out and no one came in.
And the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and its valiant warriors.
You shall march around the city, all the men of war, circling the city once. And you shall do so for six days.
Also, seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. Then on the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets.
It shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat. Then the people will go up, every man straight ahead.”
So Joshua the son of Nun called the priests and said to them, “Take up the ark of the covenant, and let seven priests carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord.”
Then he said to the people, “Go forward and march around the city, and let the armed men go on before the ark of the Lord.”
And it was so, that when Joshua had spoken to the people, the seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the Lord went forward and blew the trumpets; and the ark of the covenant of the Lord followed them.
And the armed men went before the priests who blew the trumpets, and the rear guard came after the ark, while they continued to blow the trumpets.
But Joshua commanded the people, saying, “You shall not shout, nor let your voice be heard, nor let a word proceed from your mouth, until the day I tell you, ‘Shout!’ Then you shall shout.”
So he had the ark of the Lord taken around the city, circling it once. Then they came into the camp and spent the night in the camp.
Now Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the ark of the Lord. The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord went on continually and blew the trumpets; and the armed men went before them, and the rear guard came after the ark of the Lord, while they continued to blow the trumpets.
Thus on the second day they marched around the city once and returned to the camp. They did so for six days.
Then it came about on the seventh day that they rose early at the dawning of the day and marched around the city in the same manner seven times; only on that day they marched around the city seven times.
It came about at the seventh time, when the priests blew the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, “Shout, for the Lord has given you the city.”
And back to Joshua 6:20.
So the people shouted, and the priests blew the trumpets. It came about, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, that the people shouted with a great shout, and the wall fell down flat. So the people went up into the city, every man straight ahead, and they took the city.
They utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword.
Then I want to go to 2 Corinthians 10, starting with verse 4.
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.
Let us stop there.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You again that You have brought us into Your presence, at great cost to You and great joy for us. We thank You and we praise You.
This morning, as we come to You, we want to hear from You and what is on Your heart. We do not want a teaching or a lesson. We want a speaking of the living God to us in our being. Lord, nothing else will do.
So we come asking this because we know that You want to speak to us. You want to let us know what is in Your heart, what is on Your heart. You want to let us know what Your plan is, just like You let Joshua know what Your plan was. So we want to know what Your plan is.
We commit ourselves to You because we have an understanding that is not full, but You have all fullness in Christ. We thank You that Your Holy Spirit is able to reveal everything that is on Your heart to us in a way that we are able to understand and respond to.
Lord, that is the end we want. We do not just want to hear; we want to respond to what You are speaking to us. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, it has been quite a while, and I am not going to review, okay? But I will say this: I covered this last time, so you should remember, right? I mean, I covered these verses almost verbatim, except that I used Joshua 5:13-15 also.
We have been talking about the Lord having a generation walking into the will of God together through Joshua. Since it has been a little while, I want to take a little different tack and almost go over the same thing, but I want to do it in a different way, because the Lord is multifaceted in the things He is doing.
The Lord is after something. When we looked at these verses last time, we saw that there is a warfare and a battle in our coming into the will of God and having everything that He has won for us in Christ. We are following the Commander of the Lord’s host into Christ, into everything Christ has.
That is very spiritual. I mean, there is a real part to it, very spiritual. But there is more to our coming into Christ that the Lord is after in this little story of Jericho.
I know that we can look at it and say all the Canaanites are going to be destroyed, but I think this story has something for us today. The Lord is trying to speak something to us in this day.
I believe that one of the things the Lord wants more than anything in this world today is a witness and a testimony. We go in as Christians, and we look at finding everything that Christ has, everything that God has for us in Christ. We want to enter into all of that, but God has more than just us in mind in coming into this land.
Why did He even have Israel? So that He would have a people through whom He could show who He was. They were to be His witness, His testimony, to the whole world—this nation. Today, the church is to be that.
Every Christian, individually and together as the whole church, is to be that. This is what we are to be. What did Jesus say? The light of the world, the salt of the earth. This is a witness and a testimony to God.
I think sometimes we overlook that because we are so intent on our own spiritual progress. We are so intent on our going on with the Lord that we forget it is not all about us. God is doing something greater.
Even as great as all the things we think of—what Christ has done for us and what we have in Christ—there is something greater than that. It applies to what God wants to show of Himself, that the world might know that there is a God.
So I want to apply this little Scripture of Joshua going into Jericho in this way: this is a warfare, or a battle, over the world that we find ourselves living in at this time, in this generation.
Again, I am talking about generation as the time in which we live, and we are all part of this generation. I am not out of your generation; you are not out of my generation. We are all living at the same time together.
For some of us who are older, this is something we have never known. I was talking with some people that I was praying with this week, and for us, we have never known anything like the time we are living in.
Those of us who are boomers, okay? We came out of prosperity. We came out of peace. We came into wonderful times, and the world has changed. It is so different. The United States is not the same. It is just not the same.
You remember the old movie Back to the Future? You remember stepping back into that time, and it seemed like, “Oh, it was a simpler time. It was a more moral time.” We wax nostalgic. The whole thing is, we look at that world and it seemed like it was just so wonderful. There was no strife.
Then you come to today. The younger people living in this generation have never known anything different. They were born into this.
We were born into something like Solomon: the war was already done. No, they are born into warfare. The whole thing about this is that it is not about passing the torch.
It is almost like, “Well, our generation has done our job. Here you go. Good luck. I am going to Florida,” because that is what we do when we retire, right? We go to Florida. Unless you are in California, then you go to Texas.
But it is not like that. It is not passing the torch. I do not even like that term anymore. You know the book on church history by Kennedy, The Torch of the Testimony. It does not say, “Passing the torch of the testimony,” because this is the torch of the testimony.
The thing about it is, we are all carrying it. We all carry it. We do not pass it off to someone else. We carry it together until our time is done.
All up until that time, we are carrying it together. We are not leaving someone on their own.
It is not like we know everything: “Yeah, just do what I do and do these things,” because the time has changed. We have to learn the Lord in a new way as well.
Our younger brothers and sisters have to learn the Lord on their own and come into their own understanding, their own walk with Him. So we have to learn how to adjust our walk to the day that we are living in—not adjust it to the culture, but adjust it to what the Lord is doing in this time.
There has to be a whole new opening of our eyes to this. I am not talking about the things that are foundational, but the things that are foundational as they are applied into this time that we are living in. They all apply, okay?
So we are all taking this torch together.
Now, let us look at Jericho as the generation we live in today, all right? In Joshua 6:1, it says that it is shut up because of the sons of Israel. But I want to look at it this way: it is shut up. There is no one who comes in or comes out.
What is it? How is it shut up? I am going to use one verse, and I am going to use two different translations for it, okay? In Romans 1:28, the first part says this. It is talking about how all the world is shut up under sin.
If you look at this, it is amazing, because you can say, “Well, that is today,” but it was back then. Today is today.
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer.
Okay, that is the postmodern generation. That is the worldview. I am not saying it is every person, okay? I am saying the worldview of this generation: they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer.
And in the New King James, it says this:
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge.
In other words, God was somewhere there, but they say, “I want to wash it out. I just want to wash that part out, because it does not apply anymore.” Again, the postmodern worldview. This is the world that we live in.
I am not complaining. I am not judging. I am just making an observation. This is what we see. This is what that thing is, okay?
The whole point here is this: it is against the knowledge of God. It is against the knowledge of God.
It is not nihilism, but it is almost like, “If there is a God, He does not matter.” God does not matter. Go ahead, you can believe in God—whatever your truth is. You want to believe in God, that is fine, but God really does not matter. Okay, get that through your mind: God does not matter.
So the battle that is being fought is concerning the knowledge of God. The knowledge of God.
God being known; God making Himself known. It is about the knowledge of God. We are not talking about an intellectual argument over God. This is not Timothy Hitchens and Ravi Zacharias going at each other, okay, and whoever has the best argument.
We are not talking about that type of thing. This knowledge of God is not like that. We are talking about the knowledge of God as God as a reality—a reality that shapes a counter-worldview.
I am not going to get real philosophical or anything like that, but I am just saying this is where the battle is. It is a view that this world has, and the younger part of our generation is at the spear tip. It is going at them. That spear tip is really going at them.
They do not even think of us anymore, because we are past. Like that movie Logan’s Run—remember that? In the seventies, there was a kind of psychedelic world where once you reached thirty, you were out. You did not matter anymore.
Imagine, once we reach sixty, we are out. How many of you, when you were teenagers, thought about being sixty years old? It was not even on the radar, was it? Being twenty-one was coming up, but even thirty—who thought about being thirty when you were a teen? “Oh, I cannot wait until I am thirty. I can imagine my life when I am thirty.” That was not even in our minds.
So the spear point is really aimed right at our younger brothers and sisters. They are the ones who have been born into this, where we were not. We were born into something that was a little more tolerant of Christianity.
I think another message I gave a long time ago was this: remember, Jesus was an alternative. I think it was the Doobie Brothers who sang, “Jesus Is Just Alright with Me,” in the midst of the sixties and seventies. It was just an alternative. “Hey, check Him out.” But now He is not an alternative, because the knowledge of God is not here, okay?
So the battle is not ours. It is not ours to fight this battle; it is the Lord’s. The Lord is fighting, but He is using an instrument, okay? He is using an instrument: the witness.
He is using us. We are the witness for God. A witness who gives a testimony is saying, “This is true.”
It is not just an idea. You watch old Law & Order, and you get into the courtroom and they discredit a witness because, “Oh yeah, he is serving time, so his witness does not count.” They count that kind of stuff.
The whole thing is the witness of the testimony, and the witness must be true. A witness cannot be bought off: “I am getting a lesser sentence on this,” or whatever. “I am getting immunity for this.”
Here we are, and what we are to do is follow Him into this testimony. We are following God. Like last time I talked about, we are following this leader, this Captain of the Lord’s host, and we are following Him into everything Christ is.
One of the things that we are following Him into is not just what Christ is for us, but we are following into the testimony of Christ to this world. This is what we are doing. This is our calling. We are called into this testimony.
Now, I want to look at His battle plan. Watchman Nee had Sit, Walk, Stand. Joshua had march, camp, shout. Okay? You could probably get it on the bookstand over there.
The whole battle plan—the whole thing God wants, how His people are to be His witness and testimony—is these three things: there is going to be marching, there is going to be camping, and there is going to be shouting. I want to look at those three things.
The first thing is the idea of marching. Marching is really walking with a purpose. It is not meandering around, or like when you are courting your wife and you bring her out there and go for a walk. You are not really going anywhere; you are just walking, all right?
This is going somewhere with a purpose. You notice in this marching—and I am going to switch it over to walking—this march is to walk with a purpose.
When you look at Joshua 6:7-9, it talks about the ark being there, and in front of the ark are these priests blowing trumpets. Then, in front of the trumpet players and the ark, were the rank-and-file soldiers.
To me, it seems that this is backwards, because now you have the army in front of the ark instead of the army behind the ark. Why is this? What is going on? We have come into something whole; there is something new here.
The whole thing is this: it is like when Abraham, after Ishmael was born, and God was giving him the covenant—the sign of the covenant, which is circumcision. The Lord said to Abraham, “I am El Shaddai, I am God Almighty. Walk before Me, and be perfect.”
This is the same idea right here: “I want you to walk before Me.” Now, I want to break this down a little bit. Walk just means live. Anytime they say you need to walk in the light, or do not walk in darkness, they are talking about your manner of life—your life.
Your life should be lived in the light, right? Your life should be out there. So, your manner of life: “Walk before Me.” Let us live before Him, knowing that He is there.
Now, we can get all paranoid: “Oh, He is there. I know He is here somewhere.” We are not talking about something like that, right?
The other thing is, it does not say, “Walk before the people of Jericho so they see something.” He is not saying that. He even puts those people far out of the way. He says, “It is not about them. Just walk before Me.”
We walk before someone else and we are trying to show them something. We put on an air. We try to be something we are not, and then it just blows up in our face, does it not? Walk before Me.
Then it says, “Be perfect.” Be perfect means be mature. In other words, what He is saying is, “Grow up before Me.”
Let me put this in a more understandable way, so we really have an idea of who God is. He is saying, “The whole purpose of your walking before Me, first of all, is that you get to know Me.”
That is what I want most of all. This is what I want of My children: that My children know Me. My sheep know My voice. But it is not just My voice that I want you to know. I want you to know Me. I want you to know who I am. I want you to know My person.
It is like this. We just had a song, “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,” right? The second verse said, “How He watches o’er His loved ones.”
This is a real picture. Remember when you would take your kids, when they were little—three, four, maybe five years old—and you would take them to the playground where other kids were? This is the idea.
“I am taking you out to the playground, which is where you mingle with everyone else. But you are My kids, and I am going to be watching you.” Not as though I am scrutinizing you, saying, “Oh, do not do that,” but I have My eye on you.
Sometimes I see something happening and I might step in and say, “You know better than that.” Or there is something else I might see and say, “What you did was good.” Maybe you need help getting onto the jungle bars, so I might help you up. Maybe you are in an argument, or somebody is threatening you, and I step in to protect.
This is the whole idea of walking before God. We are walking before Him in a way that we know, first of all, He is my Father.
He cares for me. He more than cares for me—He loves me. He shows His love for me by the way He cares for me. He will not let me step out of bounds without letting me know.
He might not stop me from stepping out of bounds, but He will come and say, “You know what you did was not right.” He will help me when I need to be helped. I can converse with Him. He will talk to me, not condescendingly. He will talk straight to me.
So this is the idea. The Lord says, “This is what I want you to do: walk before Me.”
I am not going to give you a handbook of what you do to walk before God. When you are walking before God, it does not need a manual. It just does not need it.
You get up and you say, “Lord, I want to know how to know You.” He leads you into the things that you need. We are introduced to the Word. We are introduced to coming to a meeting. We are introduced to other Christian friends who go this way. We learn how to pray. All these things are part of our walk.
That is what we do: we walk before God, and He shows us how to walk before Him. I do not have to tell you. If I do tell you, I am robbing you of getting it from God Himself, of that personal relationship that He wants for you, that He died for you to have.
Then, after they went around one time that day, they went to camp. Not summer camp—army camp, all right?
At camp, what do soldiers do in camp? Some of them train—that is part of it. But this is where the commander talks to his soldiers. They have obeyed the orders, they have gone around the one day, and he talks to them.
Last time I said the Word is so important. The Word is important, but I want to bring it in a different sense. In Joshua 5:13, when Joshua meets the Commander of the Lord’s host, the Commander has a sword.
It is very descriptive about the sword in this way: it says His sword was drawn. That means it was out of its scabbard, and it was ready for action.
Brothers and sisters, this is what happens in camp. We go home. We go to the place where the Commander is so that we can have that speaking, and all of a sudden He unveils His Word to us. He takes it out of the scabbard.
The whole thing is, we begin to see that sword unveiled. The Word is opened up to us, and things are revealed to us—sometimes, and most of the time, for the first time. Our minds become engaged.
There was a cartoon of the perfect soldier that came out in World War I. He was a big, strong guy without a head. Why did he not have a head? Because if he thought about what he was doing, he would not be a soldier, okay?
But as Christians, we are not mindless. We are not mindless. We have to engage the mind with the Word and the One who is behind the Word.
Really, what is happening is that in the Word, we are looking for God. We find God looking for us. Sometimes, as we are looking for God, we find that He is looking at us.
We catch His eye, and then instead of looking at us, He is looking into us. We become uncovered before Him—not in a way that is bad, but in a way that we can see for ourselves who we are.
Then He can say, “But this is what I have made you. This is what I have called you to be. I know you are not noble. I know you, but this is what I have called you to be.”
We have that eye looking into us, and we find out for the first time, a lot of times, what mercy is. Mercy is not that we do not get what we deserve. That is a cheap way of looking at mercy.
Mercy is when we look at God and God is looking into us, and we find out who we are. He does not just say, “Okay, here is the coal. Burn your lips; now you are clean.” But He brings up in us that desire to serve Him, and we hear Him calling through His Word, “Who shall I send?”
Mercy enables us to come out of ourselves, even though we see how God sees us. It enables us to come out of ourselves and say, “Here I am. Send me.” That is what mercy does.
So you come into the camp, and the Lord reveals Himself—His plans, His purpose. He does not reveal laws and rules, but He reveals His personality as a Person.
It gives shape to who He is. We can now have some kind of definition of it. That is why it is so important that it says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
This gives definition. This is the logos of the Word, the concept. We see who God really is, and we see the parts of His personality. We see how He sees righteousness, what He considers righteous, what He considers sin, what gives Him joy, why He judges, and why He saves.
This is what He is able to do, and we see it all in a real history of real people in Israel. These things are given to us. That is what Corinthians says, right? They have been given to us as teaching examples.
This is saying, “This is how I am. This is what I am like.” That is why, as we are looking in 1 Kings, we are seeing God’s dealings with Israel. All of a sudden we say, “I am starting to see who God is.”
My focus is becoming off the kings and going to God. I am finding out what pleases Him, what does not please Him. I am finding out all these things about Him, and through all of that, my mind is renewed.
My mind is renewed. That Greek word for renew means this: my mind is adjusted. My mind is adjusted into how I perceive God, because I perceive God now as He really is.
As I see Him as He really is, then I say, “Okay, Lord, I see this in You, and I see this in me.” The Lord says, “Well, we have to do something about that, do we not?” He takes us that way.
That is part of our walking, and that is the in-camp part of our walking. That is that secret life that we have that no one else sees, but that we have. He begins to reveal Himself to us in a real way.
Another thing is, all these people are walking together. There is a place where you have your individual thing, but it is a walk together. It is not just the witness of one person; it is the witness of His people.
I want to give a couple things about walking together, okay? The walk is a pursuit. In 2 Timothy 2:22, Paul tells Timothy, “Flee youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.”
Let me put it in two ways. First of all, what binds you together as a generation in this generation is not our age. It is not that I like baseball and you like baseball. Of course, the younger part of the generation does not like baseball because it is too slow.
But it is not about that. The commonness is that we have the Lord. We are pursuing the Lord.
The best part of my life was when I understood this. I met my best friend Jerry at a hippie church in Covina Park. We met there—Jerry Leinberger, my brother Mike, my brother Bill, Ed Lee, and Lou Police. We were talking with each other, and we just came to this conclusion: “We want to serve God. How do we do it?”
From that, we began to seek the Lord together, to pray together. That is where we got into our Tuesday night Bible study, where Lou said, “I think my dad will teach a Bible study.” We said, “Yeah, let us go. We want to do this.”
I want to use this, okay, because this has something to do with it. We were all the same age. When we got this Tuesday night Bible study going, we were there for a few months, and then we wanted to go out and share the Lord with the neighborhood.
So he said, “Christmas is coming up. We want to go Christmas caroling and pass out tracts.” Floyd said, “Okay, well, I am going to bring you somebody here to help you sing.”
Now, you have to remember, this is 1974. I was twenty-one. My hair was about down here, nice whiskers, barefoot. That is how we came to the meeting, okay? That is the way we came.
So he brings over this couple, Mike and Jo Taylor. Some of you know Mike and Jo. They were so straight. I mean, he wore jeans, but they were not jeans, you know what I mean? You guys ever heard of mom jeans? They were pressed and everything like that. Well, to us, that would have been mom jeans.
He wore a collared shirt. He came in, smiley guy, nice. Then his wife was British. Oh, so proper. Jo Taylor, so proper.
He said, “Okay, we are going to have these guys help you sing.” We are thinking, “Now, Jo plays the piano.” So Mike brings his instrument. You know what it was? Trumpet.
We were the guitar generation. A trumpet? You are kidding me. You have got to be kidding me.
After we left that meeting, our first thing was, “Who are those people?” But we had about six weeks of training, okay?
But you know something? Today, the Taylors and this group of guys that were there—we are close. You know why? Because the Lord got us past the straightness to see that they loved the Lord. They wanted to serve the Lord, and all of a sudden, that made a big difference.
They were only about five years older than us. Then Floyd started bringing in the older dudes: Paul Harlan, Charles Barrett. But the whole thing was, they loved the Lord.
They loved the Lord, and that was the big deal. That is why I am talking about this walking together. It is not like you have to force yourself to do this. The Lord just brought these people in.
Maybe it was orchestrated a little bit by Floyd to help us out, but behind Floyd’s orchestrating was the Lord. It was wonderful. Like I said, the friendships we have from that time are still there because we have something in common: we love the Lord, and we want to serve Him.
Now then, you have day two, okay? All this means is, from day two to day six, you have a daily walk. It is a daily walk before the Lord. Daily. There is no binge walking.
Most people think I am talking about binge watching. I am talking about binge walking, all right? Let us see. Uh-oh, he has got the phone out.
How many of you have got a pacer? You have got a pacer? We are supposed to be healthy now. I remember at school they would say, “You got your pacer? You can get ten thousand steps a day, and you can show it to us and get a prize.”
Today, that is the whole thing: ten thousand steps a day, okay? Which is how many in a week? Seventy thousand, right? Seven times ten thousand. Okay, and I taught history. Is that not amazing?
But if you get to Friday and you have only got twenty-five thousand, you binge walk, okay? But really, what good is that?
It really does not do any good. It just gets you out of breath and makes you feel like, “Oh man, I have got to do better next time.” It gets you on a whole different level.
The Lord says, “Daily.” Once you get up, I want you to walk—walk around, walk before Me, walk before Me, walk before Me.
Walk before Me, have light. As we begin to walk before Him, all of a sudden we begin to walk in light. We just begin to walk in light. We then become children of light, because we have that light, because that sword is unsheathed to us.
That is a wonderful thing: the sword is unsheathed. Then there is a manifestation of the children of light.
As they are marching around, think about this. You have six hundred thousand soldiers, maybe a million. They are all marching in front, and they all look the same, right? If I am in Jericho, what is going to catch my eye?
I am going to catch sight of those seven guys with the trumpets and those guys carrying the ark, because they are different. Attention is drawn to what is different.
Where is the difference? How are they different from me? That is what Jericho is looking out at: “How are they different? I see something that I want to understand. Why are they different?”
Those who carry the ark dress in linen. F. B. Meyer says it was white linen, and he talks about it being the priestly garment of purity.
As we walk before God, we become men of the cloth. Now, what are men of the cloth? To us, it used to mean a minister, right? Somebody who wore that backward collar, or dressed up in a suit and tie and preached to you—which they do not do anymore. Now you go someplace and it is a T-shirt and jeans. I am not saying that is bad, okay? Just different.
The whole thing is, they are wearing these linen ephods, these linen robes, actually. The idea is that we are all to be those who carry that testimony, who carry that ark. We are all to be wearing these white garments.
He said, “The purity.” You know where purity comes from? You say, “Oh, it comes from the Lord.” Okay. But the root of purity is a clean conscience before God and before man. That is the root. You have a clean conscience.
Luther, when he made his famous statement at the Diet of Worms, said, “Here I stand. It is neither right nor safe to go against conscience.”
This whole idea of us being before the Lord and being before His Word—what that has done for us is restore true north.
I do not know how many of you backpack, but there is a true north and a magnetic north, okay? If you are working out your route on a map and you are going by your compass at magnetic north, you are going to get lost on that map, because the map is true north.
The whole thing is, by our walk with God, He has restored to us true north. We know what is true.
We know the truth that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. He calls us out to faith. We start following, and there is a truth in our walk.
Our consciences become clean before Him because, as we are walking with Him, we come into agreement with how He looks at life. We come into agreement as to what He calls sin. We come into agreement in the places where He says, “This is not to go. This is not to touch. This is where you go. Walk this way.”
True north is restored to us. We have this purity, and conscience is so important. I am running out of time here, but there are a number of verses where it talks about conscience: 1 Timothy 1:5, 18-19; 1 Timothy 3:9; 2 Timothy 1:3; 1 Peter 3:16; Romans 2:14-16.
All of these are about conscience. Paul is saying, “Our gospel comes out of a pure conscience. Our life is out of a pure conscience. Out of a pure conscience, we fight the good fight of faith.” All these things apply to the way we live as we walk before God.
Because we are walking with Him, all of a sudden our consciences can be cleared. If they are not cleared, what happens? We come to make it right. We come to make it right.
He is faithful and just to put us back on the right path. That is where He is. That is the work of the Spirit. All of a sudden, our conscience has been given back to us. It is awake.
We understand who God is, and we are free from dead works. We are free from the works that think, “I have got to do this to please God. I have got to do this to get in His good graces.” That is not what it is about.
Instead, we find ourselves doing things because we are about our Father’s business. Big, big difference. Now I am living out of a relationship instead of under law.
Most people will look at Christianity as being nothing more than doctrines and laws. That is what the postmodern worldview looks at. It is just doctrines and laws. It has no reality other than that.
But by the Spirit, through the Word, we have found that true north. By the Spirit, we have come into a living relationship with the holy, righteous God, and He has become alive to us.
That is the thing. It is not that we are alive to Him. The whole thing is that God has now become alive to us. That is the difference maker.
People look at us and they go, “God is alive to them. He is real.” There is a reality in the way we live because we are living before Him.
All of a sudden, we find that because our minds have been renewed, we are now being transformed.
Then we have the rams’ horns, okay? A lot of people talk about the rams’ horns being the gospel, the gospel of Christ. But I am going to put it a little differently: the gospel is Christ.
All of a sudden, what happens is the Word becomes flesh, and the Word becomes flesh in us. All of a sudden, Emmanuel is present—God with us. God with us.
It is not just with me, the believer, but where I am, God is here. God is with us. Even people who are not believers can sense there is something different.
“God is in this place. God is where this guy goes. This guy is different. There is something around him. He has got an aura.” No, he has got the presence of God with him—or her.
Emmanuel. We are not emulating Jesus, but the Word becomes flesh.
The life of Jesus stands in bold relief from any other life in a fallen world. It just stands out. The life of Jesus is different.
Everything in this fallen world that could touch the Lord Jesus did touch Him. “Well, my dad died.” Joseph, His foster father, died. Did He come into contact with sickness? Did He come into contact with sin? Did He come into contact with tragedies? All the time.
But look at His life in the midst of all those things. Look at His life. Even to the point where He is in the boat in the storm of the century, where do you find Him? Completely at rest.
What a witness. God is with Him. That was the thing to the disciples: “O you of little faith, God is with us.”
This life is displayed. The displaying of this life in individual believers and in the believers in the church before God becomes God’s siege mound. It becomes God’s grappling hook. It becomes God’s battering rams.
This is the life that pulls down everything that is against the knowledge of God, because it shows that God is real. There is a God, and He lives. These people know that He lives.
Then there comes a time to shout. We are not all called to be evangelists, but we are called to be witnesses.
What we are witnessing to is that God is alive. There is a God, and God is alive. People ask, “Why is there this hope in you?” That is what 1 Peter 3:15 says, right? Why do you have this hope?
They have this touch upon you. Then what happens is the walls come down.
I have this little book here. We read a lot of very spiritual men, okay? I read Watchman Nee, I read Sparks, I read F. B. Meyer, McLaren. I have been reading McLaren lately—interesting. But there are prophets for this day too.
This is Timothy Keller. I know you guys know of him. He is an interesting guy. What I am saying is, he is saying that our lives are more than just spiritual things that eat up spiritual knowledge.
Our lives are to bring that back out. Spiritual knowledge is supposed to come in; it is supposed to go out.
When I talk about hope, this is what people see. He has two chapters in this book. Let me read this, because this is what people see:
A meaning that suffering cannot take away from you.
A meaning for life that suffering cannot take away from you.
A hope that can face anything.
People who know God have that. They have that. People who do not, do not. It is a big difference.
This is our witness: that we have a God who is our hope. No matter what happens.
What did Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego say when he said, “We are going to throw you into the fiery furnace”? They said, “You know something? Our God can deliver us. But even if He does not, it is okay. We are not going to bow down to the idol.”
As Christians, we are not immune to everything that happens in a fallen world. We are not immune to that. We are not immune to getting cancer. We are not spared from that.
We are not spared from losing a loved one. We are not spared from having our children go off and do things that are hard, things that other kids do. We are not spared from those things.
But the thing is, it does not shake who God is. As a matter of fact, because we have this God who shapes us, that is the witness and that is the testimony.
Because of that, the walls come down, because there is a seeing of reality.
Then the fruit of all of this is that there is a Rahab. Rahab comes out of this saved, does she not? It is an amazing thing. It is a work of God. All these things are.
The whole thing I want to bring to you—and I do not know if I have done it very well—is this: we do not want to just cloister ourselves into a religious community and say, “We have the spiritual things, and it is the spiritual life that matters.”
The spiritual life does matter, but the spiritual life goes out from us into a postmodern world. We are supposed to be walking around Jericho. We all walk around Richmond. All of us walk around Richmond.
But the question is, do we walk before God as we walk around Richmond? This is what God is calling us to.
Some of us say, “Oh no, what am I going to say? I am going to say it wrong.” I say, “You just be obedient.”
“Why are you so hopeful? What has happened to you? Why are you going through this thing and you are not tearing your hair out? I can see you are sad, you are anxious, but there is something different about you. There is something that has stayed about you, and I do not understand it. What is this?”
We have a testimony to the world. That is what the Lord wants. He wants a testimony.
That is why He called the people together: to be His testimony to the whole earth, to the heavenlies, and to the things under the earth. All these things are meant to be testimony of Him—that He is alive in our life, that we know Him, and because we know Him, we are different.
We are trusting Him. We are going about His business. Our lives are different, and this is what people take note of.
They do not take much note of the things we say unless they do not go with the way we walk. But they will look at the way we walk even if we do not say anything. They will look at the way you walk.
Then they will say, “I notice you are different. Why is that?” Our testimony is that we know God.
Not that we know God in some abstract way; we know the God who is alive. We know the One who not only died but was raised from the dead. Not only was He raised from the dead, but He is exalted on high.
Our knee is bowed to Him. Sooner or later every knee is going to bow to Him, but right now my knee is bowed to Him. That is my testimony. That is what shows up.
That is what shows up to the world: our knee has bowed to Him. They take notice of that. Hopefully, there are those like Rahab and her family who say, “I want to bow the knee too.”
This is what God calls us to. Let us pray.
For God so loved the world that He gave a testimony. He gave a testimony of Himself.
We celebrated You this morning—Your love—because we have seen the testimony. Lord, not everybody sees that testimony.
I think that last song we sang said, “The nations need to see.” Lord, the nations need to see. You have a chosen vessel.
Lord, we want to understand in our own hearts that we are that chosen vessel. We want to walk before You so that Your light can so shine before men that they know there is a God and they glorify Him.
Lord, this is to Your honor and to Your glory, because You love the world. Oh Lord, shine, we pray, through us. In Jesus’ name, amen.