How many things hath the Lord set before thee in these days? He hath not allowed thee to walk in yesterday’s blessings, but He hath brought all of the wonders of tomorrow and made them available unto thee that you should walk in them.
He hath said unto thee, “Behold, separate thyself from the chains of yesterday, and be not encumbered with the chains and circumstances of today. Be ye free, O ye people of the Lord.” Cry unto the Lord that He shall let thee walk in the freedom of the Spirit, that your spirit may appropriate those things that are freely given to thee by the Lord.
It is not an hour for the people of the Lord to think of themselves as poverty-stricken. Behold, the house of God is not a poverty-stricken area, and it shall not so be decreed by the Lord of heaven that this is a poverty area.
Behold, this is an area of sufficiency and great blessing. Thou shalt reckon thyself blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places. This shall be thy thinking.
Thou shalt turn away from everything that limits thy thought. Thou shalt reach unto the Lord that there may be great expectancy in the house of the Lord.
How rich thou art, O thou who are the poor of this world—He hath made thee rich in faith and heirs of His Kingdom. Rejoice together in it in the name of the Lord.
“A new prayer shall the Lord bring forth in the remnant that He has raised up. No longer shall they cry unto the Lord in agony of spirit that God might bring release; they shall draw upon the release that has already been laid upon them.
A new ministry shall arise in the house of the living God: it shall be a ministry of appropriation. It shall come forth in those who are strong in faith. Behold, their eyes are open. They have seen the dawn of a new day. They have seen the light of God break forth in the earth. They have heard His voice, and behold, it is a day that the Lord hath spoken a word, and their faith reaches up, and in a ministry that God imparts to them, they draw the provision of the Lord to fall upon the people of God. Yea, thou shalt see the enemy come against thee, but if thou art strong in faith, if thou art rich in vision, the Lord shall cause thee to walk in fullness.”
In 1 Kings, chapter 19, after the story of the Mount Carmel executions of the prophets of Baal, it said that Elijah fled at the threats of Jezebel. He was afraid and ran for his life and came to Beersheba which belongs to Judah, left his servant there and he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and sat down under a juniper tree. There he requested for himself that he might die. He said, “It is enough now, Lord; take my life; for I am not better than my fathers.”
There comes a time when a man wonders in the progressive nature of things, “Will we be better than our fathers?” We are not as good as our fathers were if we are not better than they were. We walk in a great deal more available light than they had; we have more available blessings than they had. It is easy to downgrade a former generation and say, “They didn’t have so much? But neither did they have as much made available to them.
The day is past that we can say like Elijah, “Let me die; I am no better than my fathers,” because there is a generation coming forth that is going to excel. They will do exploits; they will shine as the firmament because more is available to them in the Lord. All things have been made ready; it is all prepared; all we have to do is come to the feast (Matthew 22:4). Let’s believe God to get into it.
Peter says, “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). We should excel, not with that which is born of our flesh, but with what God is making available to us in the Spirit. We must press in with all of our hearts. Don’t be discouraged. A righteous man can fall seven times—it doesn’t mean he isn’t righteous because he falls—and the Lord will uphold him with His hand (Proverbs 24:16).
Righteousness is a state that God imparts to you of His own attributes. You may be stumbling along without good judgment, but that does not mean you are unrighteous. The worst thing you can ever do is to fail to press in, fail to reach for it, fail even to make that initiative of faith the operating principle of your life.
Say, “I am a believer, Lord. I believe in all that has been revealed and in all that is about to be revealed. I am a believer, Lord.”
The tried and proven word of the Lord confirmed by many witnesses, tried and proven as gold is tried in the fire; this is the true riches that belong to the remnant in the last day. This is what God gives them when He says, “I have made you rich in faith, heirs of the kingdom” (James 2:5).
Lord, loose us from every reluctance to believe this and move into it. We must accept it. We will declare it again and again until the utmost reaches of our subconscious and the depths of our being respond and echo back and say, “The Lord is true. The Lord is true. His word is true. His word is true. We believe it with all of our hearts.”
“Has it not been said that the kingdom of God is within thee? Shall it not also be said that limitation is within thee? But thou shalt not on thine own accord blast down those dams, for the kingdom of God is a flood tide that swells against the banks. The kingdom of God is fully within thee and it swells against those dams. Thou hast opened the faucet here and there and allowed a small portion of it to flood through, but this is the hour when thou shalt blast down wholly every dam, every limitation within thee, every bit of unbelief which would hold back that Kingdom which would come forth in this hour. For this is the hour when the flood tides of the Lord shall pour forth upon the earth, and thou shalt be the ones who shall blast that dam.”
“Yea, this shall be an hour when you shall come before the Lord and repent in thy spirit of the limitations which you have accepted.
There shall not be a Laodicean lukewarmness settle upon the people of the Lord. There shall not be a trust in their own strength until they shall say, ‘I am rich and have gotten riches and have need of nothing.’
Nay, thou shalt bring down thy barriers and bring down thy walls, O house of the Lord, and allow the blessing to flow and to penetrate within thy heart the full measure of that which God has spoken.
There shall not be in thy heart that which shall cease to contend day unto day and night unto night, crying before the Lord, ‘Avenge me of mine adversary,’ for yea, as thou dost stand in faith and contend, the Lord shall bring down the walls.
He shall even bring down the deep subconscious conditionings of defeat that have been within thy life. You shall see how the inhabitants of the land promised unto thee shall be bread for thee.
You shall be strengthened as you come against the principalities and powers. Draw not back from the spiritual conflict; draw not back from the warfare which the Lord hath ordered of His own accord for thee to walk in.
But yea, as ye come against these things, let there be that rebel cry of ‘Victory! Victory! Victory!’ in the house of the Lord. You shall not be a people limited, poverty-stricken and withdrawn in thy heart, but ye shall be more than conquerors through Him that loveth thee in this hour.”
Doth not the Word say that thou shalt contend earnestly for the faith that was once delivered to the saints. And yet, behold, when ye shall so manifest thyself in the service or in thy daily walk, men shall look upon thee as heretics. They shall look upon thee as a strange thing.
Thou shalt be as a rebuke unto this generation, the generation of those that are lukewarm, whose love has waxed cold because of abounding iniquity.
Thou shalt be a continuous rebuke, yet thou shalt not mark thyselves as heretics merely because thou art contending earnestly for the faith that was once delivered to the saints. If anything, let thy soul contend even the more earnestly. But let it not be a superficial thing or superficial emotions. Let it reach to the depth of thy being, that thou shalt agonize before the Lord.
And thou shalt contend not as beggars, whining before an august presence of a potentate, but thou shalt come as dear children, crying, “Abba! Father!” claiming thine inheritance, claiming the thing that is thine, determined that thou shalt walk in it. God hath removed the limitations upon this generation, and you shall walk in that liberation.
A man could spend a lifetime studying the book of Hebrews and never exhaust it. It was one of the greatest books to be released in New Testament times, about 69 A.D., a year before the destruction of Jerusalem.
The hearts of the saints were being prepared that the Lord had a better sanctuary; there was a better Jerusalem, a better temple.
Jewish Christians all over the world mourned at the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, but not as much as you might think.
They may have had a deeply ingrained patriotic love for Jerusalem, but when God removed it, they had already shifted to the realm of the Spirit and had seen the better thing that God had prepared. And so the Jewish Christians continued on worshiping the Lord.
The book of Hebrews deals with the better sanctuary: When He said, “ ‘A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. Hebrews 8:13. In the tenth chapter, the same idea is repeated: then He said, “Behold, I have come to do Thy will.” He takes away the first in order to establish the second. Verse 9.
There must be a realization in our minds that though we cling to certain things, when God has something better, we must be ready to let go of the lesser.
Be ready for the Lord to expand and deepen your understanding of everything. Don’t stick to a simple little rut at the Communion table of something that was real to you at one time; God may suddenly open up a deeper meaning of that Communion than you have comprehended.
You may be running down a little rut to get blessed and find out that the blessing is not there. This is a principle of God that is in operation. For instance, when you have read a certain chapter in the Word of God and it has been real to you, you mark it, thinking, “I must remember that chapter because it blessed me so much.”
Six months later, you go back to read that chapter, and you don’t get the same thing out of it—the same blessing is not in it that you found before. What has happened?
You have moved onto a different plane, and although you are wanting to go back and eat the pablum of six months ago, God wants you to cut your teeth on a steak. He wants to show you something deeper in the Word, and your mind is running back to old ruts and old levels of revelation.
Other people coming up will have the same thing that you did, but God wants to make it obsolete for you because He intends that you get into a higher plane.
Remember the great cry of Paul to the Hebrews. He was very upset because though by that time they ought to have been teachers, they needed someone to teach them again the first principles (Hebrews 5:12).
Paul saw that some of them still had need of the milk; they were not able to bear the meat. Chronologically, their age was such that they should have been into the meat, but they were still babes. You can be in the Lord for forty years and still be a babe, or you can be in the Lord for six months and move into being a prophet. It depends on you and how fast you want to move.
God has a way of showing us that we have to take what He gives us. But then the time comes that He opens up a new level, and all the former things become obsolete—or should we say less effective in meeting our needs—and we have to move on to something more.
I have had people say, “I’m so unhappy. I was reading the Word and praying every morning, and then suddenly I found that I was dead; I was reading and not getting anything out of it. What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with my spirit?”
You were being blessed in a comfortable little rut, and you were saying, like the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, “Let’s build three tabernacles and stay around here forever. One for you, Moses, one for you, Elijah, and one for you, Jesus, and we’ll all stay right here.” (It was probably close to the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, and they thought it was a good thing to do.)
The Lord said, “No, let’s go down the hill.” They came down the hill and found a boy possessed by an epileptic demon. The disciples had tried to cast it out, but they couldn’t (Mark 9:2–18).
That is the pattern: you come down off the mountain and go right back to problems that are too big for you, to things beyond your ability to handle. What will you do? Run back up on the mountain where the blessing was? No, you were blessed so that you would be put into a place where you have to stretch yourself in God and appropriate more of God; you have to meet the impossible and learn how to cope with it and do it in the name of the Lord. This is what God is teaching us.
We must have a severance experience, that experience of God severing the old. Much of our routine, our habitual way of living, our ways of thinking, our ways of feeling, our ways of reacting must be circumcised and cut away, because God has something new for us.
If we have gone sour on one level, we must open up to what God wants for us on a new level, and in order to do that, sometimes a circumcision of heart is necessary.
Joshua, chapters four and five, tells about the children of Israel coming over the Jordan. They had come to Gilgal (Gilgal means “rolling” because there God rolled away the reproach of Egypt from them), and there they circumcised all the males who had not been circumcised in the wilderness.
Then God said, “Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.” The Scripture says that they kept the Passover, and the manna ceased and they were eating of the corn of the land. What was God doing? He was getting ready to bring a new level, so He dried up the manna. Now it was going to be only a memory.
This was a new bunch coming up and God was saying that they had to do something else besides eat manna: they would have to fight for food. They would no longer be led, with an occasional encounter with Amalekites; they were getting ready to go in and subdue thirty-two nations, each one of them greater and mightier than themselves.
They were moving into one of the greatest concentrations of population in the world at that time and they were going to take all of it. In order to do it, they had to go through certain changes: the circumcision, and the release from the manna of old.
They were getting ready to be conquerors. They were about to put the soles of their feet on all the land; they were going to dispossess giants, take vineyards! The land was flowing with milk and honey and they were to have it in the name of the Lord.
They set about to do this and God was with them in it. Canaan must have been very beautiful at that time, for in those days there were a great many forests (after the days of Christ, the Turks destroyed them) and wild animals, so many that God said, “I’ve left the Canaanites and other nations in the land, lest the wild beasts grow too numerous for you” (Deuteronomy 7:22).
If you go to Palestine today, you would never suspect that could ever have been, but in those days, there were even hippopotami and lions. Remember how a young lion roared against Samson on his way to Timnath (Judges 14:5)?
The world was different then. The animal world had multiplied greatly, but man had not multiplied as he has in recent centuries. So here was a beautiful land, flowing with milk and honey, full of game, vineyards—everything that they wanted.
The Lord said, “It is to be yours. First, you must be circumcised; next, we’re going to get rid of the manna, the light bread that your soul loathes and you must begin to fight for a new diet. Go out in the morning, whip a couple of giants and take some grain out of their granary. Wash it down with some of the wine from their vineyard.”
The Lord was teaching them something. I wonder if He could teach us the same thing. Can we open up to a new level of diet, a new level of existence, a new way of thinking?
We are not discarding any truth we have believed. We believe in the progressiveness of revelation, and we believe in the progressiveness in this walk with God. We are going on from glory to glory, and we cannot linger on one plane when God wants to bring us into a greater glory in our lives.
We must search our hearts to see if there are any barriers or walls. The knives of circumcision must cut away from our hearts anything that hinders us—cut away the old ways of thinking and bring us into something new in the name of the Lord.
Elisha had this in mind when Elijah walked by him and threw his mantle on him. He said, “Wait, let me say goodbye to the family,” and Elijah said, “What have I done to you?” He knew what he had done, and so did Elisha. So Elisha went and killed the oxen, broke up the good hardwood plow, built a fire, and they had a barbecue. He wasn’t going to use those oxen or that plow anymore; he was going to be a prophet, and he didn’t worry about anything else (1 Kings 19:19–21).
It was a severing experience. The old level had to be cut off: “I will not live and strive and labor on that level anymore.”
That is what it means to labor to enter into His rest. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works as God did from his. Hebrews 4:10.
That is hard to understand. Here we are, striving and laboring to enter into His rest and yet it says that we have ceased from our labors.
It means that we have ceased from our labors on a human level and have reached up to a spiritual level. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do in the name of the Lord. Oh, God bring us into this experience!
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. Hebrews 4:12, 13.
When he speaks of the Word of God in this passage, we must remember that this is what is happening to us: we have been hearing a living word; we have been constantly exposed to the word of God, and it has constantly been an instrument of severing us from things which need to be cut away, severing us from old planes of living.
Look at the young men in the church. When they came in, they weren’t at all like they are now. They are being welded into a beautiful company of prophets in the Lord. It thrills my heart to see what happens to them month by month. We haven’t given them special individual attention; we have spoken a word from the Lord to them, and it has been like a sharp two-edged sword. It has pierced even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints and marrow; it has been a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart.
This is a living word. God says, “Open your heart to the word and I will keep cutting away on you.” We need drastic experiences because there are still many things that have to be severed in our lives—ways of thinking, deep attitudes.
You are not yet perfected, but you must understand that you are the recipients of a process that God has set in motion by the Word. It is taking place. Go on in it. Keep your hearts open to it; don’t close them.
Sometimes it seems that God has mutilated you, that He has torn you to pieces. He cuts so deep, right down to the joints and marrow, right down between soul and spirit, and He is constantly doing this.
Every time we have a great liberty, the Holy Spirit will bring something that cuts a little deeper and we realize that some of that soul life is still left in our worship. God is constantly cutting away, constantly dealing with us.
Let’s examine this process a little more. When people have the anointing of the Lord upon them and the call comes from God, I’m mindful of what happened in the New Testament.
A word used frequently in relation to discipleship is “forsake.” “If you want to be My disciple, you must forsake all that you have (Luke 14:27). Take up your cross and follow Me.”
There must be an instrument of death, some channel or means by which God gets you to sever from the old life and move into the new.
How did He do it in the New Testament times? The disciples forsook all, their nets and everything, to follow the Lord.
Later on, after the Lord’s resurrection, the greatest help to the New Testament church to really cut them clean for God was persecution. That did it.
The persecution, sharp and intensive against them, weeded them out and thrust them into a new level. It was like a knife; it was a severing experience; it cut off the casual living. They couldn’t be persecuted like that and still be casual.
It has not pleased God yet to open up that level of persecution to do it for us. I don’t think it will be necessary because that level of persecution would slow down the publication of the word a great deal right now.
Instead, God has substituted something else for it which is just as effective: practically from the outset of this walk in the spirit, He has allowed spiritual warfare to come against the people.
They come up against demon power and witchcraft; they are frequently in a state of battle. This is accomplishing the same purpose that the persecutions accomplished in the early Church. In those days, it was persecution that separated the men from the boys. In these days, it is the spiritual warfare.
The theory of this walk with God is so beautiful that if it were the whole picture, thousands of people would be involved who are not involved now.
The greater percentage of the people who draw back from the word do so because of the spiritual assault, the pressure, the warfare involved. We should bless God for this warfare.
Anything that we have, we have because God gave us a word and He put us under the pressure that severs us from the old ways of thinking, the old ways of life.
Sometimes we are ready to give up: “I can’t bear it”; but it is the pressure that makes us what we are. We won’t escape it; we must cling to the Word of God and it will bring us through. Even though our very lives and sanity may be in jeopardy because of the pressure on us, it will make us into the men and women of God that we want to be. I glorify God, I praise the Lord for the things that happen in our lives.
Sometimes we think, “Oh, if I only could have the anointing and be prophesied over. I want to go out and preach.” Don’t lose those objectives; keep them in your mind, but neither despise thou the chastening of the Lord. For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. Hebrews 12:6.
This chastening separates people from the things within them that would be the hidden cause of their future defeat. Seeds of defeat are in their hearts, ready to spring up somewhere along the line and utterly destroy them, but God has a way of cutting those things out Oh, how God knows how to sever you from the things that would rise up to defeat you. Bless the Lord for His dealings!
If I had sat up nights for a hundred years, I couldn’t think of anything as intelligent as what God is bringing forth by His spirit. Every morning when I get up, the first thing I say is, “Oh, Father, I take my hat off to You. I’m so impressed with You.” Do you think that’s sacreligious? No, I am impressed with God. I’m impressed with the wisdom in the way He moves. I’m impressed with the way He knows how, in this generation, to reach down into a world so filled with sin and iniquity and bring forth a dedicated company of believers.
He is bringing forth young prophets; people who were staggering around with their minds destroyed by drugs are now prophets of God. The miracle of it, the wonder of it! That couldn’t have been done no matter what kind of a program we had.
It was God who gave them a word, and that word was in their hearts. He started the experiences. He put them through the testings, and when He finished, He put the knife to them; He severed the old ways of thinking, the old ways of feeling. He is making us entirely new. “Behold, I make all things new,” saith the Lord (Revelation 21:5). Oh Lord, do this for us. This is the key of the making of almost every man and woman of God.
But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Philippians 3:7. I don’t believe Paul always thought that way. I’m sure there was a time when he thought, “It’s pretty good to be a Hebrew of the Hebrews, of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised the eighth day. If anybody has something to boast about, I have a little more.
Who else at my age has what I have—a member of the Sanhedrin, educated at the feet of Gamaliel—yet all that I have, those things I counted gain; I count them now but dung.” Paul said, “That’s the way I’m looking at everything the world ever counted right, everything the world ever counted of any value. I’ve got a new way of thinking.”
“Paul, you’re crazy.”
“No, I’m not.”
He just had a wisdom that belonged on a higher level. He wandered through the world, turning it upside down. You don’t turn the world upside down if you have a respect for it. It has to be something that you don’t want. You are not looking for anything from it. Then you have leverage over it.
Have you ever heard of Doc Holliday? He wasn’t a saint; he was a dentist that developed tuberculosis and came out to Tombstone, Arizona. Doc Holliday was a tubercular, and he was the fastest gun in the west. Why could he shoot, down any man in a gunfight? Because he knew he was as good as dead, and he didn’t have a reflex of fear for his life that holds a man back. He could shoot down any man because he didn’t care whether he lived or died.
Do you want to be quick on the draw? Come to the place where you say, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Men shall live because they are not loving this world; they are not clinging to an existence on a lower level; they have not joined the cult of the comfortable. They are not Laodiceans, but they are disciples of Jesus Christ, ready to endure hardness. They are those who want to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth (Revelation 14:4), and they love not their lives unto death (Revelation 12:11). God cut away from us everything that must go. Cut away our thinking about life itself, until You deliver us as sons, who all our lives have been subject to the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15).