In these days that are so busy we should do everything we can to help and to hold up one another with all faith. Sometimes people misunderstand each other, they misunderstand God and they misunderstand themselves and what is happening to them. If it were not for the revelation and prophecy that come in this walk with God, most of us long since would have determined that this was not of God, but He has borne witness to our hearts of every word that He has brought.
No matter how happy and blessed you are today, tomorrow you can be wiped out, because it is so easy to go from one extreme to another. When people are lifted up they become cocksure and start strutting. There is nothing worse than strutting on top of a mountain. When you are down in the valley you can strut, if you have the courage to do it—you can never fall off the valley. But if you are strutting on top of a mountain you are likely to break your neck, or worse.
A Scripture that shows how this has happened before is in Matthew, chapter fourteen; in which they had gathered up the twelve baskets full after feeding the five thousand men. plus the women and children. That must have been a mountain top experience, but oh, how quickly they came down into a tailspin.
And straightway He constrained the disciples to enter into the boat, and to go before him unto the other side, till he should send the multitudes away. And after he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when the even was come, he was there alone. But the boat was now in the midst of the sea, distressed by the waves; for the wind was contrary. Matthew 14:22–24.
Now, this was in the wake of a big blessing. Have you found that the day after some of your biggest blessings, the winds are contrary and they blow you in the direction you don’t want to go? Have you been in a wind so stiff and strong that it seemed to blow you in spite of yourself? The wind was so contrary.
Whenever God does something great for you then you know something contrary can happen. A few years ago, it always seemed that after having been at a good prayer meeting and receiving a tremendous blessing on the way home you would wonder what would happen to you tomorrow. After the blessing come the contrary winds.
And in the fourth watch of the night he came unto them, walking upon the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a ghost; and they cried out for fear. Matthew 14:25–26.
The disciples, like most people, were conditioned to respond with fear instead of faith. In the great storm with the winds so contrary, instead of them being thankful for the one person that could control it, they didn’t believe; didn’t accept Him as He was. Their fears put in their minds another image of what was taking place: this was a ghost, they were afraid and didn’t recognize the Lord in it.
When people are harassed and troubled by contrary winds, they don’t know how to sit when the winds are blowing and say, “Yesterday I was popping into my mouth those little fish and pieces of bread continuously; fish, after fish, after fish, oh, it was marvelous!” They could have talked about all the people that ate so much; imagine all the jokes they could have told. No doubt they had a sense of humor and could have had so many stories of the people who stuffed themselves in that desert place—don’t forget they were really hungry and had been three days with nothing to eat and then when they ate, well, you know they weren’t being polite. They were seated in rows of fifty and something was really happening to that bread and those fishes. Twelve baskets of untouched fragments were left, and there, staggering down the desert trail back home were ten or probably twelve thousand people including all of the children.
Now with that kind of a victory, and if you had seen something like that, wouldn’t you think it would last you a little while? But it was not even the next day, only the fourth watch in the night; they were down in the boat, the wind was contrary and here came Jesus, ready to solve everything, “It’s a ghost!” They outshrieked the winds in their fear, a picture of abject terror, but it was just Jesus.
That’s the way people are with their circumstances and problems. I have determined, that whatever I see coming on the horizon, because of the promises of God that have assured me it is coming, of what God is going to be doing; I am going to rest in the Lord. However contrary something appears, or how many contrary winds and forces are working against us to keep us from arriving at the destination God has for us; we have to believe that Christ will make the move to come to us in that situation and we must not be afraid of Him when He comes. We must not misinterpret Him.
Are we saying, “God has met us so wonderfully; He has fed us so miraculously; and now, we are afraid?” The circumstances can happen so suddenly to upset everything: “The boat can capsize. Look at the huge waves. The winds are contrary. Not only are we not getting to our destination, but we are getting further and further away from it all the time.” The harder they row the further their destined shore is away and the last they see of it, it is clear out of sight. This is the way the disciples were thinking, but it is not the way they should have thought. There was a fear that cried out, “It’s a ghost,” against the very thing that was bringing deliverance and Jesus said, Be of good cheer; It is I; be not afraid. Matthew 14:27.
What happened after that? Well, Peter became bold and said, “Bid me walk on the water;” Peter was overcompensating. You can’t be in the prow of the boat, hollering for fear that there is a ghost coming to you on the water one minute, and be filled with faith the next. You can’t change that fast. When people try to do that they are only fooling themselves. Like the children of Israel, ready to stone Joshua and Caleb, refusing to go in to the land of Caanan; the next day God told them, “Too bad for you, forty years in the wilderness.” “Oh, we should have obeyed, we should have believed, we’ll go up.” It was too late; they were a day too late. One day cost them forty years in the wilderness.
If God says, “Jump”, you want to be up in the air when you say, “How high, Lord?” You want to obey Him so fast that you immediately move in response to faith—instant reaction to faith. The disciples didn’t have it when they were afraid that Jesus was a ghost; some other response was washing them out.
I hope that you will not act like some fearful son of Babylon the first time something happens, that you’ll not run away from the fact that things are going to be a little bit different in this walk. Are you prepared for God to do wonders? When you hear things said about you and this church will you run for cover? Will the fear of man be on you? Are you afraid of being different? Are you afraid of leaving the beaten path? Would you rather be in your coffin lined tip in a nice orderly row like the rest of the dead or do you dare to be alive and different? The dead rise up and are furious because the living don’t have the same smell of death they have. That is what’s happening in the conformity of the religious world, with so much death in it that people are dying in the pews. They are looking in vain for something of life. Wherever there is a place with a menu that is just sustaining—a starvation diet—people go to it. They don’t come for the living bread because they can’t interpret God. They are afraid of the persecution. The fear of man is on them; the price to be paid; so they continue to spend their money for that which is not bread, and when God begins to move they cry out for fear.
Don’t be afraid of this walk. Don’t be afraid of what God will do. Don’t be afraid of what He wants to be to you. Believe the Lord for much and refuse to let yourself panic, because, whatever comes along you can make a mountain out of a molehill; this is the season for it. What circumstance is ready to wipe you out? You are not puffed up at this moment by the appearance of things. You never have been. You are sustained by a sure word from God.
What if things today don’t look just right? That doesn’t matter does it? Believe the Lord and trust Him. If you don’t feel today like you did yesterday, that doesn’t mean that you’re abandoned. God has started something and you have to believe there is going to be a fantastic finish and it’s going to end up right. You will have your ups and downs, but you know where you are going to come out.
You saw that when you bought your ticket; you’re on the rollicoaster, way up, and you think sometimes you haven’t anything supporting you underneath, you will just fly away into space, but soon those ups and downs will level off and you will come back again to the spot that you saw first when you bought your ticket. You bought your ticket and God is leading you. He has already shown you how it will come out, but some of the things you didn’t see are those ups and downs. That doesn’t matter. Don’t be afraid; it will come out all right. Hold steady. The Lord was real to you while you were worshiping Sunday: God was in His heaven and you were right next to Him and all was well. Probably the letter that wiped you out Monday morning was already in the mail, to be delivered four or five days late, and if it had been on time you would have had it before Sunday.
You don’t know what will befall you tomorrow, but you do know that your hand is in the hand of the Lord. Nothing is changed by your circumstances or events or appearances. The reality is in the relationship that God brings within the body, between the individual members specifically. The reality is in the relationship that you have with the Lord. It is possible on one day for the church to look like fugitive pirates off the ship, ready to cut one another’s throats and make each other walk the gangplank; and then the next day you think, “Praise God, the Kingdom’s come, such oneness, such unity, the body is flowing together.”
The Lord will start visiting you and if you’re not careful, you won’t recognize Him. He will come walking through that storm that has you panicked and He will meet you. The Lord lowers the walls that the enemy can rush in, as He did to the Children of Israel when they walked through the Red Sea. At the last minute Pharoah and his army were coming right after them and the Lord kept lifting that cloud enough, I imagine, that the rear guard of the Israelites were spitless and weren’t lingering long, seeing those Egyptians coming. Those Egyptians were mean boys, and you could just feel those whips again on your back, right now! It’s easy to cry out in fear, “O Lord, what’s going to happen to me? It looks terrible.” But don’t you know he is visiting you in it? It’s about time that we stopped panicking. A lot of us have stopped our blessing halfway before it reached us because we wavered in unbelief. Peter did that after he said “Lord, let me walk on the water.” “Come.” He started and then he sank because he wasn’t conditioned to really trust the Lord.
We want to trust Him. We want to go into this coming season with our faith strong. We don’t want circumstances to wipe us out—no feelings to come up with great force to leave us trembling. We have to believe that our times are in His hands. He is here to direct our steps and we can’t afford to be paralyzed by terror, misapprehension or misunderstanding. We have to be ready to move at that moment He directs. David had that quality. He said, “Lord, shall we go up against the Phillistines?” The Lord said, “Go up, but first a little word. Go down in this ravine and stay there. Down there are a lot of mulberry trees; and when you hear something going in the top of those trees, don’t be frightened, that means that I’m moving with you.” If he had heard that going without being prepared, it might have frightened him, but you see he was conditioned to faith.
They waited and waited; the captain said, “Now, shall we go?” “No, not yet.” “But they’ll get away from us if we don’t go now.” “No, hold steady, everything will be all right.” Soon he could feel it and he could hear it, the going of the Spirit in the top of the mulberry trees. “All right boys, this is it, this is the time, let’s go!” Then they went in and took them.
What has God for us? What signal of the Spirit will come; what anointing will come; how will He come? Will He frighten some people because He’ll be like a ghost walking through the dark of the storm? Will He come as a going in the top of the mulberry trees? Will there be some strange way that He will make Himself known? The breakthrough will come soon and this walk will break into the greatest move of God’s Spirit ever known. You may be going through circumstances in which you know that with the least turn you could be really frightened and not even believe that the Lord is with you. We are all in that position together.
You young people could think, “Well, I wonder if I’m making any progress. I’m not getting anywhere.” Then something could happen to you—insult added to injury—you get bawled out, you lose your job, suddenly you are humiliated. It’s not enough to have a faith so that you are down today and back up tomorrow, you become discouraged and want to give up, but you don’t. If you are going to come back anyway, why go through that route, torturing yourself by hitting the bottom before you bounce back up? It is a kind of an India rubber ball experience. You know you will not come up until you take a whack on the bottom and bounce back up. Why not stay up? Why not have faith? Why accept wipeouts? Consciously or unconsciously you submit to every defeat that you’ve ever had in your spirit and mind.
Circumstances are impossible to defeat you. Defeat does not begin in circumstances, defeat begins in your spirit Circumstances can be an illusion. There are men that have walked through circumstances, in victory all of their lives, which would have been interpreted by every one of you in a discouraging manner.
From the time that the Apostle Paul became a Christian until he became a martyr, there wasn’t a time in his life that the circumstances were not so adverse and discouraging that many of you would have lost heart and thought it not worthwhile. But he never lost heart; he was raised up by God to go through it. No matter how the circumstances looked, he had victory in his spirit.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savour of his knowledge in every place. II Corinthians 2:14.
It is not necessarily in the circumstance but in your spirit. It is not what things happen, that count; it is what those things that happen, do to your spirit, that counts. You have that victory in your spirit, or you don’t. When you jab a man, the thing that is in him comes out. He’ll bleed royal blue blood or the blood of a commoner, but when you stick him in his spirit, what is in his spirit is what will come out. When you treat him rough, he will be full of self-pity or be filled with faith and trust God.
When they are getting you ready for something in the Army, they give you a briefing: “There is going to be a hill and you can expect this and that on the other side. Watch for this, where the mines are, etc.” If you go in you have to know what is happening or you will get something worse than you expect.
But if you know where the enemy is, and Paul says, … we are not ignorant of his devices. II Corinthians 2:11—then you can go in and say, “Lord, I will not let one deep fear in my heart be so great that I can be wiped out.” Every time God starts to move and work something out, although it may not look like it’s working out the way you want it to, don’t be discouraged. What if God is in those troubles and harassments? “I wish God would deal with this thing.” Maybe God is; God may have stirred it up. God does a lot of things like He did to Pharaoh. People argue and do everything they can to twist it around, saying “God shouldn’t do that. Oh, how vicious of God to keep hardening Pharaoh’s heart.” But that is exactly what the Bible says he did.
Moses could have become discouraged—he wasn’t too enthusiastic about the whole thing anyway. He didn’t even want to get in that position in the first place. One showing and he had the whole country in chaos; one thing after another and it was all working for him, and each time he succeeded. Remember all the lice that came? It is surprising what little things can get people down. They were ready to let the Israelites go. Imagine waking up to frogs everywhere; one thing after another, Moses had it made, except God kept tripping him. The race would be running right down for the tape and God would trip him, “We’ll run it again!” That can get tiresome, but he had to believe, he had to trust and he had to continue. We would probably be surprised to know how many times we have been close to victory, and God has had a hand in tripping us up. Why? God has something else in mind like He did when He hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Maybe Pharaoh was really through with the whole thing. One day was enough, he’d let them go, but that wasn’t enough for God. God had a few more tricks to play on Pharaoh and the result was, that after ten of those plagues Egypt was a broken power, never to come up again. But that was hard on Moses.
The wear and tear on His believers is rough, but what God is doing, one time after another, putting His believers through it, is for a purpose. God seems to be positioning things, like a final kill, for the judgments that are going to start in the earth.
God’s people are being drawn into unbelievable circumstances, at times in financial jeopardy, and they don’t know which way to go. You may feel that you are often on the verge of a breakdown and if you weren’t so busy working for the Lord, you’d take time to have it, but you can’t because of all the work we have to do. You’d love to be sick for a week but you can’t afford to do it, you need the money. What is the Lord doing? He is bringing you right down to the place where He will work quickly. You are going to be believers in the circumstances ahead. The greater percentage of you won’t even waver as you watch His plans unfold.
Let us not judge another brother or a sister. May we not be an occasion of Satan creating an illusion and lie to them. Let us not accept any illusion or lie of the enemy, for we know the oneness of the body is in its unity and the love they bear for one another. Let us not accept the circumstances that Satan creates as tokens of defeat in any way. If the Lord lures the Egyptians to follow us and pursue us rapidly, it is only because God intends to drown them anyway. It is not for our hurt, but it is for the just recompence to them. Illusions come to try to break the unity, get you not to believe, make you to waver and think no one cares. “Nobody loves me, nobody really cares about me, they don’t care whether I make it or not.”
Really they do, but God will not let you have sympathy on a human level. It is disastrous for you. You must have compassion and receive compassion from others on a divine level. You are loved and you ought to make every effort to show your brothers and sisters that they are loved too. In the middle of the day when you are in difficulty, you may think, “I wish I were in church tonight, things would look different; right now they look like the world is coming to an end.” But that is an illusion. You are seeing the Lord come to you, and without recognizing Him you are saying, “It’s a ghost,” and misinterpreting the circumstance.
If the Lord loves you and wants to make you a hero, what will He do first for you? Now you can’t be a hero unless you bleed a little, and without which you won’t get a Purple Heart or any medal for bravery. You will not receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for playing tiddlywinks in the back barracks. You will get it because you will be out in the midst of where the enemy is. So when the Lord comes and says, “Oh, my beautiful servant, I love you. You will serve me and be victorious.” Watch those words and listen carefully; “read the fine print,” when God gives you a prophecy. You will go out and God will make you more than a conqueror. You know something will come against you soon, because if you are going to be a conqueror there will be much to conquer. The bigger those prophecies that come to you, the more wonderful exploits you will do; like David and Goliath, or going through a fiery furnace or a lion’s den. That is what they will hang the heaven’s “Medal of Honor” on you for. Well done, good and faithgul servant: Matthew 25:23, and you can still smell the foul breath of those lions that you were sleeping by all night. The Lord said to Elijah. What doest thou here, Elijah.? I Kings 19:13. Well, he didn’t really know. He had just been through the whirlwind, and the earthquake, the fire, the thunder and listened to the still small voice. Then the Lord had something to tell him about the biggest job that was ahead of him.
Where is the right place to be? Your steps are ordered of the Lord and He will help you. Suddenly it will open up to you; that you are doing a great work for God and it is so important that you will not let anything distract you. Satan will create painful distractions and if you give him the time you’ll be foolish. Set your course. If you are discouraged over this and that, and if it isn’t essential, forget it! Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Read the Word, go on with prayer, and the things you want to do for the Lord. Isn’t that more important? Do you remember the Scripture that says, I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down, Nehemiah 6:3? That answered the request of Tobiah and Sanballot to come down for a conference concerning the troubles, and mischief designed to stop the work on the wall. No matter what you see, what you hear, what you feel, live in expectancy from one moment to the next believing for what God will do.
We know, Lord, this is an apostolic word for the army of the Lord that will enable them to rise up to the beauty of the battle, the greatness of the victory. O Lord, we will not set our sights on the rabbit when we have the lion. We will not be distracted. We will wait and walk in that which you have spoken. We claim nothing short of all the promises of God. All the promises of God, in Him have their yea, and verily; and we claim them all. There is not one thing that we will not claim of all the good things you have spoken, we will claim them all to come to pass that we be carried together into the fullness of it; so we will be drawn in together, Amen.