Recently the Lord put me through a wilderness. Looking back on it, I know God had a great hand in ordering my steps by having me face the many pressures. I came out of it as the representative of the whole Walk, because I was the first partaker of a release that belongs to the whole Walk—a time of renewal, a time of refreshing, a time of entering into the next steps. This is important for us.
To me, it has been likened unto this. I believe the Messiah’s ministry was to embrace seven years. (In the prophecy of the seventy weeks, Daniel prophesies that in the midst of that one week, the Messiah was to be cut off.) After Christ was baptized in the Jordan River, He was driven into the wilderness by the Spirit, and for forty days He fasted. At the close of that time, He was tempted of the enemy and He won. I have such a witness in my heart that the first ministry had to be accomplished, not in a Body of believers, but in a fleshly body, because Christ was to be the Lamb that died. Our Lord had to be incarnate in the flesh of one individual, but the time is near when we face three and one-half more years of His ministry.
Even though it again comes forth from Christ, it is another kind of ministry. It is not the suffering ministry of a Lamb knowing He will die; it is the ministry of the Lion of the tribe of Judah coming to possess His Kingdom and the rewards of His suffering. It is to be inaugurated and accomplished, not in the flesh of one Man, but by our Lord incarnate in a many-membered Body.
I believe we must all go through a great wilderness experience just as the Lord went through one. As we come out of it, we enter into the time of the greater works, the time we walk in and fulfill that ministry. It is important that we recognize this and understand what God is doing for us. In these coming days, we must have more understanding of the wilderness, of what God is doing for us and accomplishing within us. There must be a complete dedication to enter into the things He has for us.
How real it has been to my own heart lately to walk into the services and say, “You are my family. You are not my kingdom; you are my family.” I have been aware of my father ministry, and of a number of other father ministries coming forth. When Paul wrote to Philemon, he pleaded in behalf of Onesimus: I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds. Philemon 1:10. It seems as if we keep producing, even though we are in chains, even though we are in bonds. No matter what anyone does to the father ministry or how it is assaulted, it keeps on producing.
I want to set before you a spiritual father’s viewpoint in this Walk. I see seven aspects of the great family of God, the various ways they progress and mature, and the way a father ministry must relate to what is brought forth. I know this to be true: God has spoken to me that we are responsible for all that our vision produces. We are responsible for all that our desires and actions bring forth. He demands that we be faithful to all the fruit of our former faithfulness. We never reach the place in God where we can say, “I’m not going to be a father ministry to you anymore.
Paul brought forth this truth so clearly in I Corinthians 4:14, 15. I do not write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For if you were to have countless tutors in Christ, yet you would not have many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. It is this attitude of the father ministry I want to convey to you.
1. A spiritual father feels the pleasure and inexpressible joy of becoming a co-creator with God to bring forth a son. It’s a great blessing to be a father. It is not a carnal joy or merely a sense of fulfillment. He has become a co-creator with God, and through His Word, he has begotten a son of God.
2. A spiritual father is also a spiritual mother—and he had better have the breasts for it too. He goes through the pain of delivery. I don’t think anything is brought forth in the family of God without someone fathering it with some pain. When that life comes forth in God, a bond is created that cannot be broken. With great respect, I have never broken nor have I had the leading of the Holy Spirit to break a bond that so exists between a spiritual father and his son. I have broken bonds between husbands and wives when a marriage was dissolved and nothing remained but a harassing bond and a source of oppression. I have broken oppressive bonds between parents and children, but a bond between a spiritual father and his son remains. You are responsible for what you bring forth; you suffer with it and you rejoice with it.
3. The process of growth—the preparation, training, and early teaching that a father participates in—is a joyful thing. Then too, what a dreadful responsibility it is to see the young children of God trying to walk in your footsteps, emulating characteristics you have. I find myself delighting to turn away from things that are not expedient. It is not that they are forbidden, but I do so in order to better help the little ones that they stumble not.
4. A spiritual father participates in development and growth. He has to produce the autonomy of his children by recognizing that the authority he wields in the spirit must constantly change. The authority is at very close range over the one who is beginning. A different kind of authority is exercised over those who are expanding in the creativity and in the originality of their own ministry as the Holy Spirit is bringing forth that which is unique to that particular member of the Body. A spiritual father does not try to make a son conform to his own ministry. He helps open up an expression of the will of God in the distinctiveness which belongs to each individual member. So there is a changing manifestation of authority between the father and his spiritual children.
5. The father ministers a protection and helps build immunity. It’s surprising that the children of God are not born with all the immunities they need. I think you know what I mean. When a little baby becomes a certain age, the parents take him to the doctor who begins giving him vaccinations. They are concerned that immunities be built up in that little child as soon as possible. They do not want him to be victimized by any kind of plague that could destroy him. They want to help him learn how to protect himself. That is what a good spiritual father does. What you father, you will have to see built up and protected. You don’t know what kind of a “wolf” will come, what kind of a wind of doctrine will blow. You prepare them.
6. Progressive weaning is part of a mature relationship between a spiritual father and his son. A spiritual father is always trying to eliminate dependencies when it is time for those dependencies to be removed. When you are raising a spiritual child, you treat him as you would a natural child. You must take him by the hand and lead him across the street. In his sheer exuberance of learning to walk, he could run right in front of a car. Anything could happen, so a dependency is necessary. You put razor blades on the top shelf. You put any medication that would be harmful to the child out of his reach. You don’t leave the scissors on the table where the child could get them. You are careful that a cup of hot coffee or tea is not placed too close to him. That child is dependent upon you for many things. But as time goes on, you keep your eye on him and proceed to wean him from every dependency you can. The father ministry of authority, and sometimes strong authority, is always necessary, but the dependencies change. The area in which a son needs to be submissive and completely dependent changes. He moves into areas of submission to become more perfectly mature in Christ.
7. A spiritual father views the relationship with his son as a partnership. There is a partaking together, a true yokefellow vision. This is where we all join in together and begin to move. Then somehow we lose sight of the spiritual father in a great measure, because we are all pulling together.
These last four stages will be given particular emphasis in the Walk this year, for many of the ministries are in turn producing spiritual sons and churches themselves. They will be concerned about participating in their development and growth, and in the changes of authority that must take place. They will be concerned about building spiritual protection and immunities in them. They’ll be concerned about the progressive weaning that must take place between themselves and those they have begotten in the faith. They will be concerned more and more about those who have come up under their hands, entering into a full partnership with them and partaking together as yokefellows in the burden and the load that is to come. They will rejoice as their sons are able to faithfully take that authority and walk in it. This is where the Walk is now.
This year is a turning point for me too. As I came out of my wilderness, I became incapacitated to be what people demanded I be. The heavy demands keep coming and I say, “Lord, I don’t have what the people need.” It has been clearly emphasized in my mind that God does not intend for me to be everything to the Walk. He intends that this year I devote the greater part of my efforts to the School of Prophets, to the training and teaching of ministries, to the teaching of fathers. In a sense, I will have a grandfather role now. The ministries will have to take an increased responsibility because the term “apostolic company” cannot be just a phrase; it must be a realistic way of life.
It is impossible for one man to initiate and inaugurate everything that will have to come forth. It will require an unorganized Body that is not a legislative body, that is not a synod, but a group of brothers who wait very much on the voice of the Lord, so that in every matter apostolic confirmation can come through a company. As brethren begin to move, things will start happening. In the mind of the Lord, one will be sent here, another there.
There comes the time when there must not be an arbitrary rule, but a position where God is speaking again through the great corporate structure of an apostolic company that He is creating in the spirit. I must give what is necessary now to help this become a reality. The relationship I have with the Body will change. If it does not, some of you will be spiritually retarded, and I will be destroyed. We must fit into what God wants. That doesn’t mean that I am suddenly no longer a spiritual father. It means the eliminating of dependencies when it is time to eliminate them, the bringing forth of authority among the brethren as it is time for it to come forth, and the moving forward of the other ministries. In many areas this is taking place. I trust that God will show you the wisdom of it.
One other thing the Lord made so real to my heart was a passage in Matthew 24. “Who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time?” (The King James version reads “meat in due season.”) “Blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you, that he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But if that evil slave says in his heart, ‘My master is not coming for a long time,’ and shall begin to beat his fellow-slaves and eat and drink with drunkards; the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour which he does not know, and shall cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites; weeping shall be there and the gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 24:45–51.
Of course, I don’t intend to beat you or fail to feed you. With this passage I want to emphasize that there is nothing greater for advancement in the Kingdom which is to be established, than that a man who is under the authority of His Lordship be faithful to give the servants meat in due season, to properly feed them and exercise them. That is what we are going to do in the Walk. I have such a witness that the Walk is prepared now for the next great wave of an exodus from Babylon. As our hearts are prepared, we will see literally thousands loosed to come out. Believe me, God is more concerned about getting them out of Babylon than you are. They are His people. The cry of His word is, “Come out of her, and be not a partaker of her sins” (Revelation 18:4).
I think basically a parent errs in only one of two directions: Either he gives a child too much supervision or he gives the child too much neglect. The wisest parent gives a child the proper amount of supervision and the proper amount of neglect. Every child thrives on some neglect. If a child is supervised too closely, he can become quite rebellious, quite spoiled and helpless, and his immaturity may be so protracted that he never will pull out of it. How many a wife has found that her husband never was given a chance to grow up! He starts throwing things around and littering up the place. Who picked up for him before? His mother did! He married a wife to wait on him hand and foot, because what he wanted was a mother.
If a child is given too much, he becomes spoiled. If his mother serves too large a meal and he has two or three kinds of meats, several vegetables, and two or three desserts set before him, he rarely has an appetite. But if his mother gives him only one vegetable and one piece of meat, he will eat it. If you receive too much attention and have too much handed to you, it spoils you.
The three Southern California churches have already been spoiled because they have so much set before them. Sometimes they have had as many as ten excellent messages of real apostolic teaching in one week’s time. When these tapes are sent to other places, the people really feed on them because they are so hungry. They seem to appreciate the Word more. We are now going to solve that by my not being in these three churches so much anymore. As I get out into the other churches, the California churches will really begin to grow, because they will have the proper amount of neglect and the proper amount of attention. Some of the other churches have had a little too much neglect. That’s why we are looking forward to the ministers’ convocations all over the country. It’s going to be a good year, as we realize the family is learning how to expand, how to grow, how to care for one another, how to hang a little loose as far as any anxiety is concerned, but to hang very tight in our unity with one another.
I am finding too that I used to expect a great deal from myself, and yet I tended not to expect as much from my spiritual sons. That is not good. So as I am expecting a great deal from myself, to walk with God in an ever-expanding ministry of authority and wisdom, I will also be expecting more and more from my sons. I am going to lay demands on you that you may think are unreasonable. I’m going to demand the fruitfulness from you. I may be like the father who is always embarrassing his son or daughter by asking, “When are you going to give me a grandchild?” That is probably what I will be doing too. I’ll say, “Come on, produce. Let’s enter into the fruitfulness.”
There is another picture you must see too. You must expect a great deal from those who are over you. Don’t be afraid to put them on the spot. When you have a real deep problem or a very critical decision that needs to be made in your personal life and you come to the elders, tell them, “I’d like to have you help me with a problem.”
“Well, you tell us what the problem is.”
“No, it’s your responsibility to have the revelation.”
“Do what Nebuchadnezzar did as he demanded that the wise men tell him both the dream and the interpretation. You should make demands of those who are over you. Won’t that put them on the spot? Sure, that’s the idea. Expect more out of those who are over you. Expect more out of those who are under you. Expect much more out of yourself. Expect to learn the voice of God for yourself, and then go to those over you for confirmation. Don’t lay the whole burden upon them. Expect to walk with God and know the voice of God for yourself. This kind of demand and expectation produces growth.
Lord, we want You to seal this Word to us. It is more than just a little message. It is the guideline of a growing move of the Spirit that will invade many other churches and continents this year. We want to embrace it. We want to anticipate it. O Lord, I know we are deeper into the days of the Parousia than we realize. For many years we have been taught the principles and laws of the Kingdom. We are learning to live by them. We are deeper into the full restoration of the faith that was once delivered to the saints than we realize. We have progressed farther into the establishment of the divine order of both the Church and the Kingdom than any of us know. How important it is now that we sense the days of destiny resting upon the Walk, upon all of its ministries, upon the apostolic company, upon every one of us.
O Lord, humbly I cry for Thy wisdom and anointing to rest upon all of the other spiritual fathers who are coming up, that they shall be like-minded, for this is what makes it Thy family, Lord, instead of our kingdom. We bless our hearts, in the name of the Lord, that we will have a new vision of what is expected of us, from the least to the greatest. We want to demand of ourselves that Walk in the Spirit which will be perfect, in the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.