Good morning, brothers and sisters.
You do not have to sit so far away. You know that I have that voice that goes into nothingness, and so…
Let us read a few Scriptures, beginning in the New Testament: 2 Timothy 4, verse 7. This is Paul speaking to Timothy in his final letter—these are among the last things he says.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.
Then I would like to go to the Old Testament, to Joshua 15, beginning with verse 13. This is after the initial conquest had pretty much been completed, before further territory was left for them to conquer.
Now he, Joshua, gave to Caleb the son of Jephunneh a portion among the sons of Judah, according to the command of the Lord to Joshua, namely Kiriath-arba, Arba being the father of Anak—that is, Hebron.
And Caleb drove out from there the three sons of Anak: Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai, the children of Anak.
Then he went from there against the inhabitants of Debir. Now the name of Debir was formerly Kiriath-sepher.
And Caleb said, “The one who attacks Kiriath-sepher and captures it, I will give him Achsah my daughter as a wife.”
Then Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, captured it; so he gave him Achsah his daughter as a wife.
And it came about that when she came to him, she persuaded him to ask her father for a field. So she alighted from the donkey, and Caleb said to her, “What do you want?”
Then she said, “Give me a blessing. Since you have given me the land of the Negeb, give me also springs of water.”
So he gave her the upper springs and the lower springs.
Then I would like to go to two places in the New Testament. First Corinthians 15, verse 10:
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain.
And then, one more place: Ephesians 2, beginning with verse 4.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
not as a result of works, that no one should boast.
Let us pray.
Our Father, we have turned our eyes this morning to Your Son and have seen, and reveled in, Who He is for us: that He is the One who came down and took away our sins. Now we just want to turn our eyes again to Him.
We want to turn our eyes to You, Lord, and ask that You would, by Your Holy Spirit, open Your Word to us and speak to us in a way that will encourage us to walk with You.
Lord, we pray for You to do this for us. Just like Achsah, Lord, we come before You and say, “Give me springs; give me water.” Lord, so we come to You this morning saying, “Give to us a blessing.” We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Now, the last time I spoke, I spoke on this verse from 2 Timothy because Jerry had brought a word about finishing the race: “I have finished the course.”
I do not want to look at it as a race, but as the course of our life: “I have finished the course.” What the Lord has given me, I have finished. It is like what is said about David: that he served the purpose of the Lord in his generation.
Jerry was talking about us being all in, and I remember saying, “You know, for me that is a hard thing.” Because when I look at being all in, it is like New Year’s resolutions. Okay, I can resolve all I want, but my resolve does not last very long. It vanishes. I think I made it four months once with one resolution, and that is pretty good, do you not think?
So when I was looking at it, I said, “Lord, where is my hope? Where is my hope, then? I do not have the resolve to do these things.”
The last time I brought a message on finishing the course, it had to do with this: maybe I cannot be all in. Maybe I want to be all in, and I am trying to be all in, but I fail at it. But God is all in.
God is all in, because we know, from what we celebrated here this morning at the table, that He sent His Son to die for us. He did not send His Son just so that we could be forgiven. He has a purpose that He wants completed in us, and He is working that purpose out.
I used Jacob as an example, if you remember. The idea was that we may stray, go off the road, and fall by the wayside. But God intervened in Jacob’s life, took him back up, brought him back to Bethel, and said, “No, no, no, Jacob, remember: you are Mine.”
He brought him back and said, “You are no longer Jacob. I called you Israel.” The rest of that message was about God’s intervention, using the circumstances of Jacob’s life. Not just bringing him into circumstances—you know, sometimes we think, “Oh, God’s doing this.” No, God lets the circumstances of life happen, but He uses them. That is providence. That is God moving in our circumstances.
Today, I want to look at a different facet. It is not just that God intervenes in our lives, but that God provides what is needed for us to come to the place where we finish the course—not the race, but the course of our life.
That course has an end. That is a wonderful thing: it has an end, an end to be achieved.
Now, when you look at this in Joshua, my New American Standard says that He gave her land in the Negeb. Does anybody know what the Negeb is? The desert.
This is the inheritance of God, but it is in the Negeb. Really, the provision—and our real inheritance—is that we find these springs, or that we are given these springs.
I look at my life, and we often look for sustenance as Christians in the wrong places. If I were Achsah, she did the right thing: she went beyond herself. She went to another to find this. That is not what I do.
I am in a desert. What do I do? Well, I had better start digging for water. So I just dig deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
When we are trying to find within ourselves the thing that will complete what God has begun, we are in trouble. Like I said, we go deeper and deeper, and we are in deep trouble, because we are never going to find it. We might find a little trickle of water here and there and say, “Oh, here it is,” but it dries up quickly.
So where do I go? Achsah did the right thing: she went to another. It is like Psalm 121, one of the Songs of Ascent, which speaks of going up to Jerusalem:
I lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
How many times have I looked at myself and said, “Where is the help?”
How wonderful it is when we come to the place—and it is always in desperation, is it not?—where we say:
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
I have to go outside of myself. I have to go to Another to find everything I need to be completed, everything I need for the purpose God made me for to be completed. That is not a bad thing. It does not make us failures. It is going to make us overcomers, because that is how we overcome ourselves: by looking to Another.
So you can see that these springs have to do with grace. We are going to be looking at grace, and that is always safe. I remember the first time I spoke here, back in 1998. I shared with Roger Augburn; we were both given a half hour. He spoke first, and I spoke second.
I spoke on grace. Afterwards, people came up and said, “Oh, that was a good word,” and so on. One sister—I will not mention her name; she is not here right now—came up to me and said, “Well, of course it was good. You spoke on grace. What is not good about grace?” That burst my balloon.
But I want to talk about this grace. When we talk about grace, I do not just want to give a definition and say, “This is grace.” There will be things that define grace.
I want to take this picture of the upper and lower springs to illustrate the wonderful provision God has made for us. Then I will seek to apply these two springs more fully at the end.
The verse in 1 Corinthians is in a chapter centered on the resurrection of the Lord Jesus—the classic treatise on the resurrection of Christ. The other verses are from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and Paul begins Ephesians with us in the heavenly places.
This is really important because both of these things—the resurrection and the heavenly places—are about how grace is given to us. It is all from the heavenly places.
So many of us have an earthly Christianity because we are looking to ourselves to do what God has promised to do. The Lord is saying, “You will not find the answer on earth. The answer is in the heavens.”
Let us consider the resurrection of the Lord Jesus for just a moment, because it is the risen Lord we are to look to as Christians. We look at the crucified Lord when we look back and find what He has done for us. But we look to the Lord Who has risen. We pray to a risen Lord.
We do not pray to One Who is dead. We pray to a living God. “I serve a risen Savior; He’s in the world today.”
There is no grace without the resurrection. You might say, “Well, Jim, Scripture says Jesus was full of grace.” But if He never rose from the dead, the graciousness of our Lord would be in the grave with Him. It would have stopped right there. All you would have had is a man who was gracious to others.
So without the resurrection, there is no grace. In 1 Corinthians 15:17, Paul says:
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.
There is no saving grace apart from the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It was gracious that He went to the cross for you, but if He never rose, what good is that to you? The grace stops there.
But thank God, on the third day He raised the Lord Jesus from the grave according to the Scriptures. That is important: according to the Scriptures. This was foretold. God had been planning this all the way through, and now it has come to fruition.
But that is just one part of the story. It is not enough that He just rose from the dead. If He rose from the dead and never ascended to heaven, what would that be like?
We took my father-in-law to Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. Good money trap. Fabulous to look at, okay, but that is all it is—something you can look at. If Jesus never ascended into heaven, what are you going to do? Set up a theme park in Nazareth, and everybody can visit Jesus?
There is nothing to it, because the power of the resurrection does not merely raise Him from the dead. It has Him ascend into heaven.
His ascension into heaven is what brings power to grace, because it gives Him a place in the heavenly realm. Having risen from the dead, He ascended to heaven. There He has the ministry of a High Priest and Mediator of the New Covenant.
As High Priest, He brings to God the blood of His atoning sacrifice. As Mediator, He brings the good of the New Covenant into our lives. So it is important that we realize that not only is Christ risen from the dead; He has ascended into heaven.
To show the importance of this priestly ministry, remember that when Jesus was crucified and cried out, “It is finished,” the veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom.
Hebrews 7:25 tells us that heaven is now open to all who draw near to God through Jesus Christ. Not only can they be saved from their sins, but they can be saved to the uttermost.
As High Priest, our Lord Jesus secures for us all the effectiveness of His atoning blood. He secures for God His right to open heaven to sinners. His sacrifice gave God the right to do that.
That is why it is so important. When you look at allegories, C. S. Lewis did something good in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When Aslan went to the Stone Table, there was a deeper magic.
There was something greater that went beyond. Not a releasing of God from His righteousness, but a fulfilling of His righteousness, because sin demanded death. Once death was obtained, the gates of death could be opened, because propitiation was made and atonement was made.
Therefore, this holy and righteous God now has the right to receive us. Everything that would be against us entering that holy place has been taken away. There is nothing to stop us from entering in. The enemy has been taken away.
Ephesians begins in the heavenly places, and this is where the High Priest is. Paul speaks in Ephesians 1 of all the blessings with which we have been blessed in the heavenly places.
Our High Priest acts as Mediator to convey—to bring to us, like a conveyor belt—all these heavenly blessings while we are still living on earth. It is like Jacob’s ladder: angels ascending and descending, bringing all these blessings into our lives.
When we look at grace, we must see that it involves heavenly action. Heaven has been opened.
Grace has heavenly origins and heavenly supply. Not one ounce of grace is deserved. Nothing secured for us in the heavenly places and given to us is deserved or earned by something we have done, or by something we seek to do in order to earn it.
Everything in the heavenly places is out of our reach. All these things secured by the resurrection of Jesus Christ are unattainable by us. Therefore, grace is unmerited. It is totally the kindness of God that gives us these things.
But there is also a conveying from heaven to us on earth of gifts and blessings through the mediation of Jesus Christ, our High Priest. That enables us to live the Christian life—the Christ-life in us.
Victory has been won for us by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Every time I say “death and resurrection,” I am including the ascension, okay? If I do not say ascension, do not think I am leaving it out.
There is victory over sin and Satan by Christ’s death. Christ was tempted to come off the cross, but He stayed on the cross, and He died. By that, He gained victory over Satan in His death, and victory over death by His resurrection, because He dies no more.
His victory was sealed when He sat down in heaven. He sat down because everything is done.
What the Lord has done for us is truly marvelous. I want to liken it to something. What was the key point in World War II? In Europe, it was the invasion of Normandy.
The invasion of Normandy had such an impact that, within eleven months—almost to the day—the war in Europe was over. It is an incredible thing.
The first thing established in the invasion of Normandy was a beachhead. After a beachhead was established, there was a lodgment. I want to talk about what those two things are.
A beachhead is when you make an assault on your enemy, are victorious, and undercut the foundation of his defenses so that he cannot defend himself anymore. He has to back off that ground.
When you see movies such as Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, you see the assault that happened. It was a great battle—not “great” as in far out, but great in intensity.
This is what Christ has done in His death and resurrection: He has made a beachhead. That beachhead has been made in the heavenly places.
Once the beachhead was established, the next thing was a lodgment. A lodgment is this: once the beaches have been cleared and the enemy has been cleared from in front of you, you can start bringing in supply trucks, tanks, artillery, and everything else needed for the battles ahead.
After the beach had been taken, the supplies could be unloaded from the ships and brought in. I think that happened at either Gold or Sword Beach, where there was not as much fighting, but the lodgment came in there.
We can look at this lodgment as the supply that comes from heaven to us—the supply that comes from heaven so that we can walk on this earth as Christians. There is supply for us, but we have to start first with a beachhead.
There are two songs of grace in the hymnbook that I thought of. One is number 805:
Marvelous grace of our loving Lord,
Grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt!
Yonder on Calvary’s mount outpoured,
There where the blood of the Lamb was spilled.
Then it says, “Grace, grace, God’s grace”—grace that is greater. This grace is great. The song speaks about the grace that takes away our sin, the grace that deals with our sin. We are saved by grace.
This is the beachhead we have been given. This is the place from which we move out in our lives. It has already been established.
What do we have at the beachhead? In Ephesians 1:7, it says:
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.
The first strike in this beachhead is over our sins. Christ shed His blood, and the High Priest takes the blood that He shed and applies that blood to the mercy seat in heaven.
If you read Leviticus—and I know that is probably your favorite book to read—in Leviticus 16 it talks about the atoning blood. It is not just that you kill the lamb. You kill the lamb, take some of its blood, and bring it into the presence of God, applying it before Him on the mercy seat.
Is that not great? It is on the mercy seat, because that is what the blood has purchased for you: forgiveness of sin by the mercy of God. God took pity on us because we were in such a condition, and that pity moved Him.
Charles Wesley wrote in one of his hymns:
Five bleeding wounds He bears,
Received on Calvary;
They pour effectual prayers,
They strongly plead for me.
“Forgive him, O forgive,” they cry,
“Nor let that ransomed sinner die.”
You see, we have an Advocate now with the Father. But I want to change our idea of an advocate. Generally, we look at an advocate as a lawyer. A lawyer is either using the law to acquit you or, as W. C. Fields said when he was caught reading the Bible, “I’m looking for loopholes.”
We do not have a lawyer. We have a Priest. There is a big difference between a priest and a lawyer.
When you look at the High Priest, what does he carry on his heart? He carries the twelve tribes. It is not just that he had the stones; their names were written on each stone. He knows the name.
On his shoulders, which supported the vestments, he had two stones. On each stone were six names of the tribes of Israel. He bears us.
Our Savior bears us before God, and He bears us on His heart because He cares for us. That is what I mean when I say He bears us.
When you are a mother or father and you bear with your children, why do you bear with them? Because you love them. You bear through the things they are going through. Those of us who are parents know how we have borne through things and gone before the Lord for our own children, because we love them.
A priest loves. Here we have this Priest presenting Himself on our behalf: “Forgive them.” He shows His Father His five bleeding wounds, and His Father cannot turn that away.
My brothers and sisters, there is more to grace than just the forgiveness of sins. In Ephesians 2:13, it says:
You who were far off were made near through the blood of Christ.
In other words, we are reconciled. When I have offended somebody, I know there is a wall between us. You can forgive and not remove the wall: “Yeah, I forgive you.” But this forgiveness removes the wall.
It is like the prodigal son. The father did not say, “Okay, become a servant.” No, he reconciled him to himself.
But there is more to this grace than being reconciled and forgiven:
As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God.
Now it is not merely that we are reconciled as friends; we have been brought into relationship. Not just any relationship, not merely the relationship of a friend, but a familial relationship.
When I enter into this relationship with God, what does God become to me? He is not merely God anymore. He is not some generic old man. He is now my Father.
Into our hearts comes the Spirit Who cries out, “Abba, Father.” What does that mean? It means that He cares for you. He will provide for you all that you need to help you grow up.
He will not put you off to the side. He will discipline you when He needs to, instruct you, and encourage you. He will do all the things that fathers do to raise their children. Above all, He loves you as His child.
There is nothing stronger than the love we have for a child. I love my wife, but I am finding out that I have strong ties to my kids, and those ties are so strong that I will not let them be broken. That is the love of a father.
But that is not all. There is more to this grace. In Revelation 1:5-6, it says:
To Him Who loves us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father.
Now we have been brought into a purpose. We have been brought into a purpose as priests. In other words, there is a purpose for us to fulfill in the kingdom of God.
It is not playing harps, or any other musical instrument. It is a purpose; it is a vocation. In my Catholic upbringing, a priest was the one who brought God to you. Our vocation is to bring God to the earth.
Our lives are to bring Him to the place where we live—to the desert in which I live. That is what I am. I am light. I am salt. This is the vocation.
You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.
This is grace: forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, becoming children of God, and having a vocation in the kingdom of God. All of this is the favor of God to us, and none of it is deserved.
But He has given it to us. He has conferred it on us in Christ. This is the beachhead; this is the place from which we live.
Now, one of my daughters would say, “Okay, Dad, now how do you apply this?” I will tell you how you apply it: this is where you start every day.
You start with this: “Here I am, Your child, forgiven. I am in this place.” Paul said, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
Apply that here: I am forgiven by the grace of God. Do you believe that? Stand on it. This has been established for us. This is a heavenly reality, as Watchman Nee would say. You bank on it. You reckon it. This is the truth—not my truth, but God’s truth.
I am reconciled by the grace of God. I am His child by the grace of God. I have been brought into a vocation, into a purpose, by the grace of God.
This is where we start. This is our starting point for each day, to live our lives from this base. I want to start my day knowing that I am forgiven, knowing that I am His child, and knowing that He has a purpose for me.
This is where I go out from every day. This is meant for me. This is where I start. This is a relationship cemented in the heavenly places, and I start in the heavenly places every day.
Now that the beachhead has been established, we have to understand that the lodgment also has been established. The lodgment is established so that grace, which enables us to live in newness of life in this world as sons of the living God, comes down to us.
We often think of grace merely as unmerited favor, but it is much more than that. We say, “Well, all those riches are up in the heavenly places.” Okay, but where do supplies come from when you are on the beaches of France in World War II?
They came from the arsenal of democracy, which was the United States at that time. Here you had the United States, untouched on its mainland, with all this economic and industrial power. All of that was funneled down to the men on the beach.
All this magnificent power came to them, not all at once, but in time of need. That is what Hebrews 4:16 says: we go to the Lord to receive grace in time of need.
We say, “Grace in time of need—I need unmerited favor in time of need.” No, I already have unmerited favor because I am forgiven, reconciled, and His child. So what does this mean?
It means that the infinite resources of God come to me.
That is the other hymn I chose, written by Annie Johnson Flint:
He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater.
The second verse says something like this, and this is the key: “When we have exhausted our store of endurance, when our strength has failed ere the day is half done…” We have to come to the end of our hoarded resources. We have to come to the end of thinking that we can do things.
We have to come to that end and say, “I just cannot do it, Lord. I cannot do this.” Why can I not do this? He says, “Because you are not supposed to. I can do it.”
When we come to the place where we can say, “Lord, I cannot do it anymore,” that is when His grace is restored to us.
In Galatians 5, I think it is, Paul says, “Why do you want to go back to being justified by the law? What are you doing? You have fallen from grace.”
Many times we think falling from grace means falling into some hideous sin. In God’s eyes, falling from grace is saying, “I am trusting myself.”
If you are going to trust yourself, the spigot of grace turns off as far as supplying what you need. The grace for forgiveness of sins is always there; it has never turned off, brothers and sisters. I hope you realize that.
The grace for the forgiveness of our sins and reconciliation never turns off. But the grace that supplies our need in time of trial can be turned off, and God will do it. But thank the Lord, He waits. He waits for us to come to the place where we say, “I cannot do it.”
Remember Jacob? “I cannot fool this guy anymore. I will have to give up Benjamin.” When he came to the end and said, “I cannot finagle this one. I will give Benjamin,” Joseph was restored to him. Whole new grace.
This is the grace that is sufficient in my weakness. “I cannot do this. I have no ability to do this. Why are You asking me to do this, Lord?” “Because My grace is sufficient for you.”
My grace is sufficient to help you suffer. I am reading an autobiography of Madame Guyon. My grace is sufficient for you to suffer.
My grace is sufficient for you to give hospitality to your neighbor, so that they might see the light of Christ in you. My grace is sufficient for that—even if your cooking does not match up. My grace is sufficient for that, too.
What is this grace? Let us nail it down. John 14:16-18 records the Lord Jesus speaking to His disciples:
I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever;
that is the Spirit of truth, Whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.
He abode with them because Christ was with them. But once Christ left and went to the Father, the Helper was sent down. “I will ask the Father.”
G. Campbell Morgan wrote, “The greatest resource of God’s grace to us is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”
I think Tozer once said that the indwelling of the Spirit is the most unknown thing God has done for us. So many of us have no idea that the Spirit dwells in us in such a way that He has enabled the life of Christ to live in us.
This is the mediation of the High Priest: He mediates the New Covenant to us. Ezekiel 36 says, “I will put My Spirit in you.” Jeremiah 31:31-34 says, “They will know Me.”
Let us deal with that for a moment: “They will know Me.” What does that mean?
First of all, we have a starting place. The Holy Spirit opens the Word of God to us and reveals Who God is. He reveals it in a way that is understandable.
How do you explain to a blind man what a mountain is? How do you explain what the color blue is? But if you have a seeing man who does not know the language, and he has never seen a mountain because he lives on a plain, you bring him a picture and say, “This is a mountain.” Then he has some understanding.
The Lord does this for us. He gives us the Holy Spirit to open the Word to us and reveal, through the Word, what God is like.
We think of the law as a bunch of rules, but all these rules explain the nature of God. We are studying Ruth. You want to see the nature of God? Look at Ruth.
Here you have Boaz doing exactly what the law of God says: do not pick up after yourself; let the poor people glean. But Boaz saw more in God than merely a rule. He saw a way of providing for other people.
In Ruth 2, you see him not only refraining from picking up after himself, but leaving bits and pieces behind on purpose, because he found out that God’s heart is not merely, “Do not leave this.” God’s heart is to care about these people.
That gives you a whole other aspect of Who God is, does it not? He is not merely a Guy in the sky who has written rules for us to obey. He is saying, “This is what I am like.”
I let My rain fall on the just and the unjust.
We see Him in the Word, and what we see of Him in the Word makes us worship.
Then, through the Word, He prompts us into works of faith, where we come to know God not merely by letter but by experience. Every time we take a step of faith, God meets that step of faith, and we see, “Oh, God is faithful,” or, “God is able.”
All of a sudden, our knowledge of God is not merely book knowledge; it is experiential knowledge. This is grace. This is grace to us.
He writes God’s Word—God’s law—on our hearts. For my daughter, here is more application.
Moses brought down ten commandments. The Holy Spirit writes two commandments in our hearts—not on our hearts, but in our hearts.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
As we read the Word, go out, and are prompted into works of faith, we begin to find out Who God is. It evokes a response.
When we see the Lord as He begins to show us Who He is through the Word, and as we step out in faith and find that what He asks us to do is good, right, and perfect, our whole outlook on Him changes.
We see that He is worthy to be worshiped. He is worthy for us to give ourselves to Him.
Then there is a second commandment like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
How is this applied? He writes these things in us as He leads us out to minister to other people. By ministering to other people, I do not mean merely preaching to them. There are all sorts of ways we minister to people.
We drive them somewhere. We cook them a meal. We go with them to dinner. We help them in their yard work. We babysit for them. There are all sorts of things that we do.
The practical thing is our stepping out when we hear the Lord speaking to us. We have to come into agreement with His leading; otherwise, we will not do anything.
When the Lord says, “This person needs a visit,” I can say, “Jerry can go visit. He is better than me. He is more bon vivant.” That is pretty good, huh? But the Lord says, “No, I want you.”
“But Lord, I do not have any…” “Just go.” When I come into that agreement, all of a sudden I find the Lord writing that kindness into my heart. He is writing these things in my heart.
As I obey that voice of His in my spirit, I find that He is leading me to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.
The Holy Spirit is taking Christ and disclosing Him to me so that I can disclose Him to others. This is grace. This is the grace of God to us.
There is one more facet of this grace. He has put us in His body. He has made us members one of another—not so that we are in some little religious club, but so that we become joints of supply.
That is what Ephesians 4:16 says, I think. We become joints of supply of the life of Christ to each other. That is the importance of grace. All of this is grace. This is the supply God has given to us.
There is something about dwelling together in harmony. There is something about being together. I like army movies and war movies, and Band of Brothers is a great title for this: a band of brothers.
There is not only a familial connection. I will do things for my brother that I will not do for friends. But there is also camaraderie. There is a sense of saying, “I have your back. I will go out with you into battle. I will go with you and be with you through it.”
If you ever played team sports, it is the same thing. You get in a team situation, and everybody has their role. Sometimes, when somebody cannot play their role, someone steps up and becomes that joint of supply.
I remember when my dad died. On the day of the funeral, we had our Tuesday-night Bible study, and it was my turn to teach. People said, “We will teach it for you.” “Oh, no, no, no, I can do it.” I should have never said that. It was a disaster.
Until one brother stepped in and took the ball. It was Norm Jewfer, and he rescued the Bible study. He rescued it because he stepped in as a joint of supply. He knew my supply was clogged, and he stepped in. The Bible study was a lot better because of that.
Joints of supply—the body of Christ—is an important thing. If you want to see a better picture, look in Nehemiah 3 and Nehemiah 4. They are working together, building the wall. They have each other’s backs. They are fighting for each other. This is the wonderful thing of the body of Christ.
Now let us apply this, because I am over time. How then is our life like these two springs?
The upper spring has been provided in the heavenly places. It is all the blood of Christ—everything the atoning sacrifice of Christ has given us. That is the upper spring.
This upper spring is never going to dry out. It is an eternal spring. It is never going to dry.
This is the place where we are supplied with the strength simply to be in the world. This is where we find God’s rest. We find the rest of God for us in this place.
The lower spring is when all those things that are in the heavens come down to us who are on earth: the conveying of those blessings, the riches of Christ secured for us and brought down to us as we walk with Him through the course of life.
He has given us the source of life in the Holy Spirit, our Helper. This is His ministry: to lead us to the end God has for us, to that place and purpose—not merely being a child, but growing up finally to a son.
In closing, I want to end with Psalm 16:5-6:
The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and my cup;
Thou dost maintain my lot.
The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places;
Indeed, my heritage is beautiful to me.
Everything in the upper spring and everything in the lower spring is maintained by God. He maintains my lot.
This is strange when I think of it, because we think of Achsah and Othniel in the desert. Yet the psalmist says, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.”
What he is saying is that it does not matter that I am in a desert. Why does it not matter that I am in a desert? Why can I consider this a pleasant place? Because I have been given two springs.
My source of life is not in the desert. It is in the springs, and this has been given to me.
There is that devotional, Streams in the Desert, which comes from Isaiah 35:6, I think. We have been given streams in the desert. He has given me upper and lower springs.
This leads me to the end. This is God’s supply for me so that I, with Paul, can say, “I have finished the course,” when the time comes.
I am not there yet. I have not finished the course. I do not see myself as dying soon, but who knows? I do see myself in a desert.
Hopefully, my eyes are beginning to see the two springs that have been given to me, so that in this desert I can say, “My lot is a good thing. The lines are pleasant.”
Let us pray.
Lord, I want to thank You that, even though I may not have said these things well, they are all true.
Lord, I pray for myself, that I would be entering more and more into the good of my inheritance. I pray for my brothers and sisters that they would stand in the place You have given them.
I pray that each one, as they start this new year, will not look back and say, “I have really blown it,” or, “I cannot make it. There is too much in front of me. I do not see how I am going to make the next year.”
I pray that they would see that it is not the earthly part that their eyes should be on, but the heavenly. We should seek the heavenly things.
Oh, Lord, we are the redeemed ones. We are the reconciled ones. We are Your children, and You have made us priests for Your kingdom. Lord, we want to live in the good of that.
We also want to know the indwelling of the Spirit You have given to us, to live in us and through us, that we might know Your supply.
Lord, I pray we would quickly come to know when we are trying to get something or do something in ourselves, and find that You have the supply we need and long for. Because You have that supply, the life is there and the glory is there.
Lord, I thank You for my brothers and sisters. I want to be a better vessel to convey Your life to them. I pray for them, that they too would be better vessels to convey Your life to me and to one another.
Lord, all of this we lay on You. We take our hands off, and we pray that these things would become not merely things in our notes or on paper, but things inscribed in our lives by the Holy Spirit, by the Lover of our souls, the Lord Jesus.
Glory to You, our heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name. Amen.