The Word the Lord is giving now is oriented to launching us into His Kingdom and into the greater living works that are to come. Basic to this Word is the need to repent from dead works. It is not enough to have the cell door open; we must walk out of the restricted conditioning of our thinking. As much as we try, we do not know how to break out of it; but God will show us. He has already led us out of formal religious services. More and more our church services have become times of active participation for all, instead of being a passive audience listening to a few participants.
How far we are moving from the old age! How much change we have had in our services—in liturgy, in procedure, in pattern—even within the last two years! We no longer preach according to traditional patterns. I preached my first sermon when I was fourteen years old, over forty-five years ago. God has brought us during the past twenty-five years step by step into a Kingdom-focused walk with Him. He is saying, “Be flexible. Take another step!” Much of what the church services embraced was participation only by a few. We still had the audience structure in our services. People came, and they sat. They listened, but they did not participate. Everything now is moving toward the Body of Christ coming together. If some seem to do nothing, still they have active faith that will loose and minister to one another.
Our services are reaching a level which is so miraculous in scope that we will be amazed to see what can take place in just one service. Our hearts have been preparing for this through a deep repentance from dead works.
Everything in this world is relative. Some people may not appear to be good, even though God has made them righteous. Romans 4:3 says that God made Abraham righteous by his faith, and yet some of his actions did not seem very righteous. But on the other hand, other people do not seem to be entirely bad. The world is filled with people who seem to be either good or bad, or else a mixture of both.
It is hard to evaluate people by their positions and experiences. Some who have received the Holy Spirit think they are really righteous. Yet they appear to be a mixed multitude. They have a bit of Babylon in them along with a little bit of the Holy Spirit. While we live in a day of such imperfect appropriation, we would do well to repent of conditionings that remain of an old order.
We stand before the Lord with a holy anointing, but Satan also is standing there accusing us because we are wearing filthy garments. The filthy garments must be taken off, so that we can be clothed with a new righteousness (Zechariah 3:1–4). We must be endued with a new conditioning of mind—having our minds renewed by the Holy Spirit so that we know how to press into the greater works. I know we are in a transition, but I entreat you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, pursue after the big breakthrough.
A woman dies in the midst of a travail pain if she gives up. Do not be discouraged. Do not die now. Press on to the birth of what God has for us. We know the Kingdom is coming! There must be a liberation in our spirit that says, “Yes! Here we are! Thank God for how far we have come, but we need the filthy garments off!” We need to possess the righteousness that God has been speaking about, the purity of the vision. We still do not know how much of the old conditioning we have to dump yet. We must strive to get Babylon and Egypt out of us to become the pure people whom the Lord wants.
In Hebrews 5:12 Paul said, For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for some one to teach you the elementary principles (“first principles,” KJV: this is where we received the title for our manual, The First Principles) of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. But Paul said we are to leave those first principles about Christ and press on to maturity: Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity. Hebrews 6:1a.
Children do not have to do this. They are constantly goaded and exposed to pressures which may produce or inspire maturity. In the Spirit, maturity is a choice. If you are babes, “by this time you ought to be teachers.” You have the privilege of pressing in faster. Do it! Find the way to break into what God has, with all your heart. Paul continues, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God. Verse 1b. Understand the meaning of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God.
Do you realize that the religious instinct is part of the Adamic nature? To explain this further, note how many religions are in the world; and note that perhaps less than one percent of them have any life or merit. Satan has his false prophet and his satanic trinity. The beasts and the false prophet and all the satanic hosts we see in the Scriptures reveal that Satan is God’s ape. He imitates God in every way he can, but he brings people into a bondage to dead religious works. This is why some of the most ungodly people in the world give to religious charities most generously. They do not have a change of heart; they build up their old Adamic nature by dead works. This does not bring life to the old nature. It is still dead. Therefore their works are dead works.
The Scripture that speaks of “dead works” speaks also of “faith toward God.” This too was a foundational truth that had to be there. It does not say “faith in any aspect of God,” but “faith toward God.” The basic thing that brings spiritual maturity is not merely one factor. The basis of your growth is not dependent only upon the Living Word and the marvelous teachings and principles of the Kingdom. In your actual circumstances, you may not be able to attribute your growth to any one of those things you have been taught. Maturity comes also because of your faith toward God. It is not even a specific defined faith.
You may think you have a faith that nails down a promise of God which He will work out. But sometimes you have to say like the three Hebrew children, “We do not know whether God will deliver us or not. All we know is that we will not bow down to that idol. This we will not do! We are not budging” (Daniel 3:16–18). They would not bend to the idol, they would not budge, and they could not burn. God make us like them, so that we will not bend, budge, or burn.
Sometimes we do not know how a situation will turn out. We think we have a good witness that it will be all right, but we do not have any sure word to know what will happen. Every one of us is in that position. At the time when we have made our petition and expressed our faith toward God, He in His uniqueness may have strange plans for us which we could not begin to comprehend. This still requires a faith toward God.
God could even give a Word and the circumstances seem to belie it. Look at Joseph at the time when he was in the dungeon and everyone had forgotten him (Genesis 40:23). Yet he had a Word and a vision that God gave him as a boy. It was a specific promise. But even at that point, whether he was believing it specifically or not was not the issue. “Until the time that his word came to pass, the Word of the Lord tried him” (Psalm 105:19). God threw him into circumstances which demanded a faith toward God. Even when it was not a specific thing he could nail down, he had to say, “I just believe.”
When David was harassed on the right hand and on the left by the Philistines, by King Saul, and by others who were seeking to kill him, he did not have a homeland. He was a fugitive living in caves, but he rose up and sang this little song to himself: I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Psalm 27:13. He had to believe that God was good in all his trials. He did not have any specific hope he could point to, but he said he would have fainted if he did not have a faith toward God.
At some time or other, you will be in a place where you do not know which way to turn. You will feel neglected; no one will pay any attention to you. You will suffer, thinking you might as well drop out of the scene because no one would even miss you—and if you stay with it, what is there but a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice. Everything could suddenly look so bad and so sour, until you reach into this one reserve: your faith toward God.
Hebrews 11:6 says, But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is (that He is the God He represents Himself to be—this does not do you much good if you believe that He is all of this, and yet He will still bypass you; but the rest of this verse says), and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Some people started out without anything, but they had this faith toward God: “God, I believe that You are; I have faith toward You. I believe You are what You say You are. You have said nothing to me yet. But if You are God, as You say You are, this is what You are supposed to say to me.” They obtained promises (Hebrews 11:33). They did not have any chapter and verse. Instead they said, “Write another Book, Lord, a codicil to this wonderful Testament. Tell me what You really feel.” This is the faith in which we stand!
Many times you may feel like the little boy left in the corner, whom everyone forgot on Christmas day. Oh, the loneliness of the spirit that God tests. In Luke 9:18 we read that Jesus had His disciples all around Him, and yet He was alone praying. You can work closely to people and still be so alone! There is a loneliness that you can experience in a crowd, a loneliness that seems to rise out of what everyone else is doing. You can be in the midst of group intercession, where everyone is having a great time, and yet you think, “God, help me. I do not know what I am even standing here for. I do not know who I am or where I am.”
Oh, what loneliness comes when you are going through a testing and a time of deep intercession. Even when God draws you into your Gethsemane, there are always a few nearby, a chosen two or three. But when you sweat blood, you are all alone. God positions you in a unique place where everything that everyone has ever prayed for and ministered to you will suddenly have its realization at that moment.
When a woman brings forth her child, there can be the doctor and many nurses around, but still it is a lonely experience. She does the labor. She has to do it. Death, too, is a lonely time. People can stand with you and say, “Soon you will be with the Lord.” But it is a lonely experience that you have never passed through before, and you know not how to do it.
You absolutely must have faith toward God. You may seem to stand all alone, yet God is reaching out to you. Reach into what He has for you! Satan will tell you that the prophecies over you were not confirmed, that the people who spoke those prophecies over you have drawn back; so how can you believe that they ever spoke a Word from God?
Almost everyone who first prophesied over me, when God met me, withdrew. Within a year most of them were no longer prophesying over anyone. Yet they had spoken a Word from God over me. Actually, they had ceased from prophesying several months before. When I came to their church, the Lord anointed them and revived gifts in them; and they laid hands on me and prophesied over me. Afterward they seemed to lapse back into their regression, and soon they were no longer ministering. It does not matter how God works a victory. He could still use the jawbone of a dead jackass if He had to (Judges 15:15–16). The end result must be a meeting with God.
Do you wonder how you will ever work everything out? You must have a faith toward God. Then you will not waver, or be rebellious, or be bitter. Instead, you will believe in “the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” It requires a little faith to change your tune from “pie in the sky” and instead believe to see the goodness of the Lord and have faith toward Him here.
The ninth chapter of Hebrews is one of the most unique chapters in the Scriptures. The first eight verses give some details about the Tabernacle that was first pitched in the wilderness, a symbol of the sanctuary in heaven. As you read further about the Old Testament Tabernacle, try to understand its full meaning. If you do, this message on repentance from dead works will become alive to you. Here Paul was talking about the old outer Tabernacle that was still standing: which is a symbol for the time then present, according to which both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make the worshiper perfect in conscience, since they relate only to food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until a time of reformation (or until the time of restoration that we are speaking about).
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.
For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled, sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
And for this reason He is the mediator of a new covenant, in order that since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. Hebrews 9:9–15.
The book of Hebrews is evolved around the word “better”—a better sanctuary, better covenants, better promises, better everything. This Epistle was written to the Hebrews; but it was speaking to believers, Hebrew Christians who were still clinging somewhat to the old covenants. A conscience from generations past had been built into them from birth; they had observed certain rituals and sacrifices. Theirs had been an effort to be religious, knowing they could never attain the ultimate goal they sought within themselves by continuously repeating the sacrifices. They had continually practiced rituals which were but symbols of something to come. This chapter tells how Christ came once for all; by one sacrifice He opened the door to the new covenant.
Verse 14 said that Christ offered Himself without blemish to God to cleanse our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. At the time that this book of Hebrews was issued, the people were told that the blood of Jesus, the Holy Lamb of God, cleansed them so that their conscience would not go back to the dead works. All that they had done was dead. It was twice dead—first, because it could not permanently absolve the sin problem; it had to be repeated time and time again. And second, it had already been abrogated by Christ’s perfect sacrifice that had come. It was twice dead because it never worked in the first place, and God does not want it to work now at all. If this is the case then we had better get rid of our dead works!
Now you may be thinking, “How does this apply to me? What will God do to me?” He will bring you into living works, but first He must open your eyes to see the dead, foolish things that you do which do not help at all—the motions you go through which are nonproductive, noncreative, which do not produce the righteousness and the witness of Christ, which are not sending the Living Word to the ends of the earth, and which are not bringing forth the Kingdom. Examine yourself, and you will realize how much that old religious flesh still gets into your walk with God.
I want to be rid of that old religious spirit. I have caused some to be offended. I have a rather salty type of speech. I hate the pompous religious put-on, and I have refused to be religious in appearance. In every way I know how, I have tried to turn away from the Pharisaism that our Lord hated.
God wants to do something through us that is living. He is saying, “I want the living works. I want you to walk with Me. I want you to practice My presence.” As the Parousia comes to us, you will be amazed at the small percentage of people who will become aware of His presence. The rest of them will be thinking that God really met them; but they will run around busily doing all the things they feel they must do.
I know there is a tremendous amount of work to be done, even to see that everything involved with the Living Word is taken care of—even tedious work such as filing. I am not saying that those are dead works, but they could be. Do not think, “Oh, this is my duty, my religious duty.” Instead say, “God has created me in Christ unto good works” (Ephesians 2:10). Reach into the creative life of God.
If more people would only touch God, they would volunteer to do this work. If people really loved to see this Word published, more of them would study to become good editors of the Word. If the burden were there, volumes of this Word could be published. First, there must be a great dedication, almost like the scribes in the Old Testament had, as to how you reverently work with the Word. Your labor could either be a dead work of duty and ability, or it could become a living work. If it is a living work, it will amazingly reproduce His life in you also.
Elisha was a man who had a double portion of the Spirit. After he died, a corpse that was thrown into his grave came alive as soon as it touched Elisha’s bones. There still was miracle life in his bones. He was the prophet of the double portion of which there was no end. Because he had given forth so much, much came back to him. It is impossible to deplete the reservoir of the Spirit.
God is not impoverished by what He gives you. He could give you everything that He has, and He would be even greater Himself. By the law of the Spirit, you are not diminished by what you give. If you give of yourself until you are worn out and almost break down, then you are working in a dead sense. You must be anointed. It is in the anointing that you give that will bring life back to you again. This is why I love to preach the Word. When I speak a living Word, it charges my being with new life. “Give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over…” Luke 6:38.
May God open the door for us to see what the living works are that He is trying to reproduce in all of us. In Hebrews chapter 9, Paul was saying that all the Old Testament observances were good in their time, but they were limited. Now, a better day has come, a day to move into the greater living works. You cannot do this until you actually have your conscience purged from dead works.
What is a conscience? A conscience is not always the creative attitude of God that is pure. There are people of various cultures who have a dedicated conscience for certain ideas which seem right to them. The early Polynesian people had one conscience. Japanese and Chinese people had another conscience. In fact, suicide was an honorable act in the Japanese culture; if someone had been humiliated, he could commit hara-kiri and die honorably.
There are customs and beliefs in people’s background that differ. Your conscience can develop according to your associations and your own experiences. Paul spoke about people who had their conscience seared with a hot iron (I Timothy 4:2). You can come to the place where your conscience is not functioning and the sensitivity is gone. It is seared; it is calloused with scar tissue because it has been violated so many times.
We are seeing much spiritual success in some of the young men who were never preconditioned in a Sunday school. Since they have come into a walk with God, they have become completely transformed from their former life in the world. They have a new sense of righteousness and morality. This does not mean that we should send our children out to be conditioned in the world first. The point is that the Pharisees had difficulty because they had such a conscience to dead works, and they were so busy with their dead works that Christ walked in their midst and they did not even recognize Him. If a man has a conscience to dead works, he has little awareness of what is really taking place in the realm of the spirit. He is locked into the soulish, religious realm.
Deeply religious people have difficulty hearing an anointed message that is really of the Lord. They may sit there tolerating it, but they will not understand because they have no heart to hear it. When the soulish, religious flesh is locked in with a conscience to dead works, it is difficult to break it. A sinner on the street knows he is a sinner, and he is not conditioned by a religious pattern. It is easier to lead him into the realm of spirit. If you do not believe this, then you do not believe what the Lord said to the Pharisees: “The harlots and the publicans will go into the Kingdom ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31). Christ compared the dead works of the Pharisees and scribes to whited sepulchres: whited and beautifully polished on the outside, but inside full of dead men’s bones (Matthew 23:27).
The Lord is delivering us from that conscience to dead works. Whether we are cleaning the floors of the church, or whatever we are doing, let us do it with an expectation that the Spirit of the Lord will fill that place. Let us believe that the glory of God will be present. Our expectation in the Lord is living and vital!
Every time we work in the Word, we should be aware that it is like radioactivity. We can be thoroughly saturated with the quality of spirit we want to be exposed to. “Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (II Corinthians 3:18). We constantly seek to pull back the veil and push away the clouds. We do not want to be merely religious; we want the living works to flow. As He transforms us and changes us, He will make us vessels of honor in His house (II Timothy 2:20–21). He will bring us forth to do His will, as we seek His face with all of our heart, but not out of our fleshly religious striving and dead conscience.
After you go through a number of changes in your life, Satan has less access to throw worries and pressures and harassments upon you. Then an awareness of freedom grows. The day that you start thinking free is the day that the mind of Christ has come to you. Freedom starts with your heart, and then it goes to your head. From the time when your head begins to grasp this freedom, the mind of Christ prevails.
As long as your conscience is bound to dead works, you do not come into the clear mind of Christ: revelation does not come to you clearly; you are always striving to please the Lord; you are always a little bit guilty. God help us overcome the feeling that we are always a little bit guilty. Do you find yourself crying before God, wondering what is wrong? You may not know; but you just feel guilty. You know the flesh is wrong, but you do not know how to pinpoint what is wrong.
God made us with a deep capacity to worship. The religious spirit that prevails in the flesh is actually the depravity of an original capacity to worship, though you may think it is of God. Sex is of God, too; but this does not mean you can go to a house of prostitution thinking, “God put this in me, so this is right.” That is a degraded, depraved evidence of something that God originally created to be pure and wonderful.
The religious spirit is as bad as lust. It is an evidence of the depravity of the flesh. We can become so religious that we actually become self-destructive, in that we deceive ourselves by thinking we have a relationship with God in religious dead works, when we do not.
If you give your body to be burned, it will profit you nothing (I Corinthians 13:3). Being very religious is of no avail. All that counts is being a new creature: For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. Galatians 6:15. According to their religions, some believe they must not be circumcised, and others believe they must be circumcised. All will fail with their religions, circumcised and uncircumcised alike! Only a new creation will prevail, a whole new creation!
Believe to get rid of the old dead ways. We have had enough of religious observances as dead as killing bulls and killing lambs. Now we can move in as one creation in Christ Jesus by His holy precious blood, which forever looses us from everything and enables us to enter in. We are loosed from those dead works. They do not count. “What will we do then to work the works of God? We have to do something!” Believe on Him! Believe on Him! Believe on Him! (John 6:28–29.) Turn away from everything that will bind you in any way.
This could be a liberating message, or it could be very much misunderstood. Some still want that old-time religion. How quickly people build up a conscience for it. They say they believe in Sunday school; an institution only a hundred and fifty years old or so has suddenly become the tradition to govern all churches. How did churches get along for those thousands of years, even in New Testament times, without Sunday school? How did they get along without the famous presses that print all the little Sunday school cards for the children? How did they get along without a printed “golden text” for every Sunday, and the contests between the “blues” and the “reds,” for the free bicycles, etc.?
People want to be religious, and so they want to believe in Sunday school. They want to keep Christmas: “Oh, God bless Christmas trees!” The Scriptures speak about cutting the tree down from the forest and decking it with silver and with gold (Jeremiah 10:3–4). This was an abomination of heathen idolatry; the Feast of Saturnalia was kept for centuries before the birth of Christ. Today they keep it in their office parties.
You might be thinking that this is radical teaching. It is not. This religious spirit is a result of the old nature. This is what happened after Adam fell. Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord. Genesis 4:26b. After the fall, they finally got around to become religious. In the Garden, they walked and talked with God. Afterwards, they had to build a religion about it.
In Hebrews 9, Paul was saying that in the Old Testament God gave the people a ritual that was a promise and a hope of the reality that was to come. Every time a little lamb died, it was speaking of the blood of the Lamb of God who would come and open the door “once for all.” People could believe for a relationship to walk and talk with God and not be religious, not placate a dead conscience anymore. If you understand this message, you will get your Bible back and it will begin to mean to you what it should.
What does the New Testament mean? It means what Hebrews 9 is talking about, a whole new covenant. What is that new covenant? Jesus said to His disciples, “This is the new covenant in My blood which was shed for you” (Luke 22:20). What do you have to do in this covenant? Believe on Him! What will happen if you believe on Him? You will change! You will be re-created with His very nature. Then you will go to work with Him to do His will on this planet.
Do not work while you are dead; work after you are alive. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works… Ephesians 2:8–9. We work because we are the workmanship of God. God works us over, and then we go to work. But we do not work to get worked over. We believe by the grace of God through faith. Believe on Christ! Believe in the blood of Jesus Christ! Believe in His sacrifice, and be made new! Then your works will be new and living. This may sound like the good old salvation message you heard from the beginning. But we still need to apply it along the way. There are still some of the vestiges of the old rut of religion.
Let us keep our walk with God fresh. The only way that we will be perpetuated with God’s favor upon us is that we continue to walk in the light and be a living oracle, a member of His living Body in the earth, His living testimony speaking forth His Living Word.