Many of the brothers come to me and say, “I don’t want to be occupied with a lot of things; just one thing. I don’t want any distractions.” I think that attitude will help you as much as anything possibly could. A Scripture which is a thought for us all is in Isaiah 30. It is speaking about the restoration in prophetic terms, and then verse 21 says, And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it; when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.
“Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee saying, ‘This is the way, walk ye in it,’ when ye turn to the right hand, and when you turn to the left.” It is important to understand this. So many things can come to distract, but the mark of really walking with God is the ability to weigh all the good things that are set before you and evaluate them. Find out what the Lord’s will is for your life, and then sacrifice everything else for it.
I suppose Paul could have had a career as a lawyer or as many things. But he said he put everything by the wayside. In Philippians 3:13–14, he wrote, Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold: but one thing I do—one thing I do—forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. I don’t think most of us have learned that yet. In youth you don’t either; the will of God is a rather vague thing in your mind. But what about other things that you want or desire? this strange feeling you have that your life isn’t fulfilled unless certain things happen to you? You are almost driven by a blind instinct that is not a safe guide at all, not for Christians nor for the new creation. Consequently, we’re always trying to put the brakes on some of the young people so that they will not follow after something that is just an instinctive grasp.
They go through periods of this; I’ve seen it happen again and again. First the girls go through it. They want to get married, and oh, they feel that they are nothing if they’re not married. Then they get married, and next they want children. Couples ask me, “Is it the will of the Lord or not for us to have a child?” They want the will of the Lord, but it is always mingled with an instinctive drive for fulfillment. Recently a couple who are in school wanted to know whether it would be the will of the Lord for them to have a child. To wait a year was something they didn’t want; they wanted to have the child now. That’s not good thinking. God set a thing before them and they should follow through with it.
Many times women get the idea, “If I can only get these kids old enough to get rid of them, to send them to school. At least I’ll be free certain hours of the day.” After awhile they look forward to their graduating, and then they worry for fear they are not going to have a good marriage. Suddenly they wake up to the fact that they have followed the course of all generations before them.
The Lord set something before us that you should consider seriously. You can have marriage in the will of God and you can have children in the will of God, but there has to be one guiding thought in your life, and that is, “I want the perfect will of the Lord.” This is what lifts you up out of an existence and give some meaning to your life. The Lord will add the children and all the rest.
I have a fear of things becoming primary that should be secondary. Something within me repels at the perversion of life in a believer who lives for his home, who lives for a new car, for his job, his marriage, or for his children. These were not meant to be primary. Many troubles we have in life come because we take something that was meant to be secondary and make it primary. Then God is secondary, and that makes the primary thing idolatry. The first commandment is violated: You shall have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:3.
People can make gods of everything that is right and legitimate. No matter how right it is, a thing becomes something wrong the minute it is eulogized and placed above God’s perfect will for your life—you have to remember that. In the wilderness God used a means to an end when the children of Israel were smitten by the serpents. Many of them were dying, and they cried out in repentance and so Moses made a serpent out of brass. If we were wandering in the wilderness, we would be fortunate to have any brass, let alone a smelter. In quick order they could make such an object as a serpent—imagine that. They made a mold and cast a serpent out of brass. Don’t think that they were without skill and ingenuity; they knew exactly what they were doing.
When Moses made that serpent out of brass, he put it on a standard pole and held it up, and anyone who looked at it lived, even if he had been bitten by the deadly serpents (Numbers 21:4–9). Jesus said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, and whoever believeth on Him need not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:14–15).
How beautiful this is; it was such a type, and yet we read on about the days of the kings and see how the decline had already set in. God wasn’t so real to them anymore. Loving their traditions, those things, they got out that serpent of brass and began to worship it. What had been something beautiful that God had provided for their deliverance became an occasion of judgment. It had to be destroyed completely because it came to usurp God’s place; it had become an idol (II Kings 18:4).
You can do the same thing. In Romans it was said they loved and worshiped the creature above the Creator (Romans 1:25). An Englishman named Alexander Pope said that the proper study of man is man. That’s not true; I believe that the study of man is the Lord. “Well,” you say, “we want to know all about ourselves.” Yes, I know. The famous Greek Socrates said, “Know thyself,” but he didn’t do so well. He was finally given a cup of hemlock poison because he perverted young boys. Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato were said to have been homosexuals—and they proceeded to talk about man! I don’t believe they had that much to say.
Did you like studying Shakespeare when you went to school? He is put down as one of the greatest writer of plays of all time, but he was a typical Taurus, you know, a bull. Once a Taurus gets started that’s generally what you hear. Some of his plays are a little better than others, but most of them are occasions for a man to make a big speech. There are many disjointed speeches, so far from conversation. Such is the wisdom of man.
I still do not understand why the schools won’t teach the Bible. They will teach Shakespeare, and so we get a lot of the Taurus. They teach everything else, and honestly, but where is someone who will rise up and cast down the idols we’ve set up in literature? They debunk everything that is of God; why don’t they debunk the writings that are definitely second-rate, without inspiration? The world will be full of writers in this generation, in this walk, who will write better, more profoundly, and in a more inspired way than all of the writers in the history of literature. We must learn how to live our lives without distraction, to be dedicated to one objective and to let the other things disappear.
Whatever is in the will of God for you, pursue that with all your heart. This one thing I do. Everything else has to be forgotten. “One thing I do. I’m going to forget everything that is behind and I’m going to press toward that one mark: the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:13, 14). Notice the way Paul words it in that chapter: “I want to apprehend that for which I was also apprehended.” In other words, “I want to lay hold of the thing that God had in mind when He laid hold on me.” That makes it blunt and right to the point.
God got hold of your life with a purpose in mind, and the one cry of every heart should be, “Lord, what did You have in mind for me? What is in Your heart, Father, for me? You knew me before the foundation of the world, and I am not going to be like a fish fighting the line; I want to become, in the language of Ephesians the second chapter, Your workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto the good works which He hath foreordained we should walk in. Lord, what are the works that You ordain for me to walk in? What did You plan for me to do? You had something in mind when You first tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Follow Me.’ And it wasn’t that I should use God or that I should use the provisions of Christ for my own ends or to satisfy myself, or to run back to all the instincts of the Adamic nature and say they have to be fulfilled.”
There is something profound in it that says, “Seek first, seek first the Kingdom of God. The other things will be added” (Matthew 6:33). We come to grips with something: Oh, many delights we’ve had, many things entice us, but blessed is the man who delights himself in the Lord. He will give you the desires of your heart (Psalms 37:4). How do we see that? Oh, we have to find some answer in this; otherwise we are tormented. The longer I live in this walk and the deeper the battle goes, the more I am concerned about one thing. I have to do the will of the Lord. I have to do my best toward it. I think I am losing even the instinct of self-preservation.
I would like to preach a series of messages on the resurrected body, to debunk in your mind the preciousness of this present existence. I would show you that if we want to save our lives, we’re liable to lose them totally, but that if we lose them for Christ, we can save them blessed indeed. I want to go on to see what will happen in that first resurrection, when the dead in Christ rise first. What will it be like? What manner of body will we have? I think we would stop trying to hang on to an existence that has so many obvious limitations to it.
So much is going to transpire soon. If we only knew what could take place in the next five years, the tremendous change of an age, I wonder if we would be living our lives so conservatively. I wonder if our being conservative, trying to save our lives, isn’t based on a fearful lack of dedication to one thing: living for God, living for Him with all our hearts. Of course, there are many who won’t listen to this word, but we listen because something in our minds really wants it.
The attitude you take makes the difference. The best way to get turned on sexually is to think about it, and the best way to get turned on spiritually is to think about it. The best way to be fearful is to think of all the hazards. If you stopped to think how many fears could rest upon you and of the awful accidents on the freeway, it could scare you to death. What dangers could befall you! Approximately every sixteen seconds, a major robbery takes place somewhere. Sixteen seconds—you count them off—“Maybe it’s my turn.” And if you figure in all the assaults too, you could really build a frightening picture.
You are living a precarious existence to begin with. Read history and you realize, “Life was cheap.” So today it’s become dear? The world has better weapons now with which to destroy. What we did in Viet Nam in those bombing raids was almost unparalleled in history. It is hard to believe that that much death and destruction could be rained down. No one was saying anything about all of the civilians who would be destroyed; if it was orders from headquarters, then it seemed to be all right.
We don’t find any reasonableness in our lives. Does this bother you? Would you like to spend the rest of your life getting justice in the world? You never will. Do you want a better mankind? “Come on,” you say, “don’t be bitter or cynical.” But I watch these men who want a better mankind, men with a selfish drive. Many a millionaire will really give money, provided that his name is spelled properly and displayed in all the appropriate places. No, there is only one thing worth living for, and you know it.
This walk really has something to live for. Give yourself to it; go all out for it, because there isn’t another thing in the world better than to live your life effectively knowing that you’re speaking God’s word and working at what God is doing in the earth. You are a part of a destiny God is laying upon His people.
Do you ever feel like you are wandering around, and all of a sudden stepped on the conveyor belt and started moving? From then on it’s a destiny. It is as if everything is ordered: your steps are ordered; the battles are ordered. But with it, there has to be a time when you say, “All right, Lord. I don’t want any of that; You can have it. I’ll just shoot for the thing that You want.” Every once in a while it seems God has to jerk us out of our immaturity, and I marvel that He is so patient with us. We get our eyes on the little baubles and want them, so the Lord has to unveil again the futility of everything except Himself, the futility of everything except living for God with all our hearts.
I will finish up with a little story. A little girl wanted a string of pearls. She and her daddy were very close, so he took the child down to the dime store and they bought some little paste pearls. She loved them; she thought they were so marvelous. But the time came around to her birthday and her daddy came to her and said, “Darling, do you love your daddy?”
“Oh, Daddy, I love you more than anything in the world.”
He asked, “Would you give me your pearls?”
She started to cry. “What does a daddy want with pearls?” Again he asked if she would give him the pearls. Finally, she brought them to him. She sobbed as he took them and tossed them into the fireplace. Her little heart was broken. But it was her birthday, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a beautiful string of genuine matched pearls. And then he put them about her neck.
I think God does that with us sometimes. He says, “Come on, give Me the baubles, give Me the thing that’s not important,” and God doesn’t even seem to care that it breaks your heart. He doesn’t even worry about your crying, but He is saying just one thing, “Come on, give it all to Me. Give it all to Me.” He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. Matthew 10:39. Do you believe that’s true? And that is what the Lord is saying to us. All the ambitions and striving, the discipline of your school or trade or profession, all the difficulty of getting established—when it comes right down to it, none of it means anything, except one thing: Lord, to do Your will. If I’m going to school, I want to be in the perfect will of the Lord. If I’m not going to school, I want that to be in the perfect will of the Lord and not my own laziness—I don’t want that to be an issue. Whatever I put my hand to, if it’s in the mind of the Lord, I want to do it with all my heart, as unto the Lord. Whatever I do in word or deed, I want to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 3:17). Let there be just one way of living, living with Him Who is preeminent, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let us not be disillusioned. Every so often, someone gets disillusioned. “Boy, I’m tired of this sacrifice; I’m tired of everything.” I know—that carnal nature doesn’t turn handsprings over this path. It is a death to you, a living word of the cross. That’s all right. Don’t be disillusioned. I can remember when Grace Chapel was just an old barn stripped down, and we were trying to put it together to keep the building department off our necks. It was to be moved off and made into a factory when we bought it. We had to put up some sheet rock, take out the windows on one side, put in a fire wall and so on. It was had work, and I remember there was no one around; no one showed up to help. One night we had a guest preacher, and he said, “One thing about it when you’re working for the Lord, you can’t be driving these nails and saying, ‘Lord, where is everybody else?’ It’s just between you and the Lord that you’re there.” I smiled, because that was the way I felt about it. It makes no difference if anyone is helping or not.
“Well, I’m bitter.”
Why are you bitter?
“It seems like I do all the sacrificing. I do all the work.”
Tough! You don’t say, “Lord, I’ll follow Thee, if John and Henry and Sammy all follow You too. I’ll sacrifice and put in $5.00 when I see them put in $5.00.” No. Sammy may drive off in a fine Cadillac and give nothing, and you may give your all and ride off on a bicycle. That’s all right. There is something else you get hold of in your heart, a personal matter between you and the Lord. The whole world can do their thing the way they want, but there comes a time when the spirit of Joshua rests upon you. You know what he said in modern English? “You can do whatever you please, but as for me and my household, we’re serving the Lord. You can serve your other gods, you can do anything, but we’re going to serve the Lord (Joshua 24:15).
That was the foregone conclusion. What do you think about it? Will you serve the Lord? Suppose we hit a time or two when someone says something about you or criticizes you. Will that bother you? No one understands you—will that bother you? Let it, but it doesn’t mean you will be distracted. You hear a voice behind you saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it, when you turn to the right hand, when you turn to the left.”
In the Old Testament when we read that the people had stiff necks, it meant they were stubborn. We don’t need stiff necks, but we do need some good blinders on us. Lord, we don’t want to look to the right hand or the left, we want to move right on in one path, the perfect will of the Lord You want for us.