Let’s try to open our hearts afresh to what it means to walk in the Spirit, to walk with the Lord. In John 4:23, Jesus told the woman at the well that the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship Him.
To worship in spirit and in truth is difficult for us today because we stand at the close of two millenniums of Christian traditions, which affect the Protestants as well as the Catholics. Both have built up empty traditions. Consequently, anyone who has been involved in Christianity often has a more difficult time coming into a real walk with God than someone who has never even been a Christian at all. It is more difficult for Christians because everything they have been conditioned with in their thinking has to be broken down.
Unbelief has been taught to us from the pulpit. We have been taught that the day of miracles is over. Even the fundamentalists have a dispensational teaching that excuses us for not believing God for anything today; it puts all the potential miracles into the future or the past. Because of this, people have become so conditioned to unbelief that the minute they face this walk they start backing away from it. They don’t know if they can believe. The early Church had almost the same problem. The Gentiles, the harlots, and the publicans came into the Kingdom ahead of those who had been skilled in the Old Testament Scriptures.
You might think that the more a person knew about the Scriptures the quicker he would come into a walk with God. But this knowledge is often a deceitful handling of the Scriptures, using them to build the fabric of one’s own doctrinal system until the Word of God is read through eyes that are already conditioned to what it is going to mean.
For me to describe what it would mean to worship God in spirit and in truth would be very difficult, but we find a key in the fourth chapter of John. The Samaritan woman who came to draw water from the well was able to open up to Christ better than most of the Jews of Jerusalem, even though prejudice between the Samaritans and the Jews worked against it. Why? Because she was a sinner and she knew it. She came up against revelation and she was able to grasp it.
It isn’t how much you know about the Word of the Lord; it is how dedicated you are to do the will of the Lord. Surprisingly, there are people who are not in church and yet have in their heart more willingness to do the will of the Lord than some of those in the church. Jesus said in John 7:17: If any man willeth to do His will (the Father’s will), he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself.
Your capacity to understand the truth in this walk is not based upon your intelligence or how many Scriptures you have memorized or how long you have been taught in the Word. Remember, the greatest scribes, were so trained in the Word, that even to this day, some of the Polish Rabbis are from memory able to copy the whole Torah perfectly, and yet those scribes and pharisees in Jesus’ day met to connive to crucify Jesus Christ.
It isn’t how much you know about the Scriptures, it is how willing you are to walk in the will of God as it is revealed to you from the Scriptures. Your capacity for knowing the real truth depends upon your willingness to walk in the will of the Lord. If any man will do His will he shall know the teaching. This is what we really need to know about walking in the Spirit. It is based not only on what God tells you, but your dedication to walk in it, your dedication to do God’s will as it is revealed to you.
I would like to paint a little picture that would help you. Why did the Jews have such a difficult time, especially when it came to seeing Jesus as the Son of God? Well, I think you would too. To look upon Jesus Christ, as the prophet Isaiah said, he hath no form nor comeliness; that when we shall see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him. Isaiah 53:2. Do you picture Jesus as a very handsome man? He wasn’t. There was no comeliness, no winsomeness, that we should desire Him. What about the Apostle Paul? In appearance he would have been less handsome than any of our brothers. What did they say? His bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible. II Corinthians 10:10. That was a criticism. And with that, in his own heart there was a determination not to be with them in any enticing words of man’s wisdom. How did the Church ever get started with a man like that?
If you think you have a hard time with this walk, how easy do you think they had it in the early Church when all the learned ones, everybody who was anybody in their world, had rejected this? They were ignorant and unlearned men—fishermen, Galileans—and imagine, they were the ones who spoke this Word that turned the world upside down.
Now you still have a problem. God begins to restore prophets to the earth: “Boy, prophets, I don’t know whether I want to believe in a prophet today.” That is just the way many fundamentalists think who believe anything God has done, as long as it happened a hundred years ago: “As long as it happened a hundred years ago we’ll accept it, but if it is something God is doing right now we’ll reject it.” Why? Because that treasure has to be seen in an earthen vessel.
We know that in our flesh dwelleth no good thing (Romans 7:18), and that we are not sufficient in ourselves to think anything of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God who also makes us able ministers of the new covenant (II Corinthians 3:5, 6). There they are, mere men. You look at them and you have a problem believing. Why? Because you have to have a revelation from God.
Christ didn’t come saying, “You have to accept me. I’m Jesus, the Son of God.” He came to the disciples and said, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?”
“That’s an easy question: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”
But whom say ye that I am?
Peter spoke up, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee… Matthew 16:13–17.
It must be the same way today. If you are going to see Jesus Christ as Lord over the Church—what He is doing and how He is restoring—it won’t be flesh and blood that reveals it to you. It will be the Father who is in heaven.
Notice that there are two different words here: thou art Peter (which means a stone), and upon this rock will I build my church (Peter was a stone, and the rock was the revelation of the Father, the Father’s revelation to men’s hearts); and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Verse 18. If a man can talk you into something, then a man or a devil can talk you out of it. When God reveals something to you, all the powers of hell, the gates of hell, cannot prevail against it. When something is revealed to your heart, and you want to walk in it, it can’t be taken away from you.
The difference between this walk and other walks is that this is based upon a divine revelation rather than a catechism, a doctrine, a set of teachings, or experiences to which you have been exposed. Experiences can come and go; the structure of doctrines can fail, but a revelation of the Lord to your heart holds you steady, day after day and month after month. That is the basic difference. In New Testament times and now, the difference between the religious world and a real walk with God is that the real walk with God is based upon a spiritual revelation to your own heart.
That is the way you come into this walk; God makes it a revelation to your heart. It has to become real from God to your heart. You may sit in the church thinking, “Oh, I’d like to join this church.” I am reluctant when people say they want to join the church. It shows me they haven’t really grasped the picture yet. You can’t join the church, you are set in the body. Just like a couple of bolts and a couple of little flanges, you are bolted right in. You are tempered together. You may sit in the church six months before you have the sense of the Holy Spirit planting you. Things don’t move as rapidly as they did in the old order, because it is based upon spiritual reality. You know when you have become a member of a local body because God fuses you into the very life flow. It is there; that’s the difference.
In old order you would sign into the church. Church rolls have hundreds and thousands of names upon them. We have no church rolls. We have no formal membership as such. We have a glorious fellowship, yet we would walk up to anyone whom God sets in this body and say, “Because there’s something in your life that you haven’t repented of we’re bringing you under discipline. Repent or be submissive to it.”
It is not a matter of setting people in and out of membership. We have a spiritual order because God is creating it. God sets it in order. Everyone knows he is a part. We need no letters, no church duns, no financial machinery, and yet, we come very close to hundred-percent tithers in all the churches as they come forth. What makes this happen? They haven’t joined anything; they have been set in the body, and they are giving in the name of the Lord. Over and above tithing, they give and give and give. Members of the body come and go. Wherever they go there is another church that God raises up. There is a flow in the spirit. This is a walk in the spirit.
We open our hearts to do His will, and when we set our hearts to do His will we know the teaching whether it is of God. Some of the things that you open your hearts to believe out of the Scriptures are pretty far out. We have resigned ourselves to be absolutely free and clear from any politics, but if God tells us to prophesy concerning a matter, it is confirmed by the mouths of prophets, we do it. God has taught us one safeguard: Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the others judge. If any thing be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the first hold his peace. I Corinthians 14:29–30.
What were they doing? Just the same things that would happen here; it is an exchange of prophets speaking. If one prophet speaks don’t worry too much about it. When two of them say the same thing worry a little bit; if three of them say it, you are in trouble because you have a Word from the Lord. In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established. II Corinthians 13:1. It is the law of confirmation from different unrelated sources.
I learned this principle when hands were first laid on me and prophecies were made. God brought me into a marvelous walk with the Lord. Shortly after this, a group of us met for a holiday and prophecies started coming. People who didn’t know of my earlier experience were speaking the same prophecies. Not long after that the same prophecies came again. Everywhere I went the same prophecies came. I had confirmed to my heart so unmistakably what I was to walk in, what I was to do, that I knew I had a word. Then I started worrying. God had given me a Word. I couldn’t pass it off as some crackpot thing.
God is speaking again today. People are getting words that are confirmed to them. Prophets will be in the earth again. There will be more apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (in the New Testament sense), in this generation than there has been recorded in all of the Scriptures put together. Count up all the prophets you can find, and there will be more prophets who will be manifested and established before God in this next decade, among this people, than occurred in the entire Scriptures. As Jesus said, “Greater works than these shall ye do” (John 14:12).
We are just at the brink of the greatest witness the world has ever had. This gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached to all the world for a witness. Whatever kind of curtains try to hold it back—purple curtains, iron curtains, bamboo curtains—nothing is going to stop it. God is going to have His word and His witness and the voice of His prophets speaking to the ends of the earth. That is what this walk is all about.