What is the Living Word that God is speaking to us today, and what has He always been trying to do for us in both His written and spoken Word? The books of John and Revelation contain a number of passages about the Word. The first chapter of John tells us, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us … John 1:1, 14. Revelation chapter 19 tells us that He comes as a mighty conqueror, and He has a name written: “The Word of God” (verses 12–13).
What is this Living Word that we are concerned about? Jesus said, “My Words are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). The following passage from the fifth chapter of John will help us to learn something about the Word and understand more about our walk with God.
“And you do not have His word abiding in you, for you do not believe Him whom He sent. You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me, that you may have life.”
“For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote of Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” John 5:38–40, 46–47.
How were the writings of Moses related to what Christ was saying? Christ was talking about the fact that He had spoken to these Jews—many were persecuting Him, but some of them were believers. They heard His Words; they searched the Scriptures because in the Scriptures they thought that they had eternal life. He told them, “These Scriptures testify of Me. But you do not come to Me, that you might have life.” Does this show us something about the Living Word that God has been speaking to us?
There are people who say, “Yes, I believe the Living Word.”
You could counter that with one question: “Did the messages reveal Christ to you in a very real way?”
“Well, they revealed a lot of truths. Now I understand end-time truths and other scriptural teachings.”
Then they have missed the truth, because the Living Word is Christ’s Spirit being manifested in the earth. If they argue about it and say, “That is not true,” they will have limited their faith to the level of the Fundamentalists. Some say that we are exalting the Living Word to a place equal to the Scriptures. In reality we have never done that. But the Living Word does the very same thing that the Scriptures do. Because of the anointing, it reveals Christ. If you have listened to tapes of the Living Word without having a revelation of the Lord in them, you have not really heard. If you have read the Scriptures without receiving a revelation of Christ in them, you have missed their whole purpose. Their purpose is not to teach you doctrines and ideas, but to reveal Christ.
Christ said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; but these Scriptures testify of Me. They are opening up the door to Me; but you do not come to Me, that you might have the life.” You cannot divorce the Word from the Lord. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). You say, “Well, I can accept that.” Then can you also accept the fact that Christ is coming forth within you? A recent This Week message, “The Library Of Eternity,”* tells about this. Can you believe that God intended for you to be a living epistle, so that anyone who sees you will not have a revelation of you, but rather a revelation of the Lord? They will see Him! Don’t say, “Well, I can’t believe that.” You had better believe it! You are to be a living epistle, “known and read of all men” (II Corinthians 3:2). Christ is writing this on your heart.
In the Old Testament, we see that God wrote upon the heart. Jeremiah prophesied, The sin of Judah is written down with an iron stylus; with a diamond point it is engraved upon the tablet of their heart … Jeremiah 17:1. But both Jeremiah and Ezekiel prophesied what God later said: “I am going to write My Word upon your heart. I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ’Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” Jeremiah 31:33–34.
“And I shall give them one heart, and shall put a new spirit within them. And I shall take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.” Ezekiel 11:19.
“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” Ezekiel 36:26.
In the New Testament, we see that Paul came along with the same idea. He told the Corinthians, Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart. II Corinthians 3:3, KJV.
Wasn’t Paul saying, “We wrote by the Spirit of the living God, so that you become to every man on the earth ‘the Word of God’ ”?
“We become the Word of God? Oh, that’s blasphemy!”
Is Jesus the Word of God?
“Yes, I accept that.”
Then the Christ in you must become the Living Word of God to the world, too. We need to realize that our thinking has minimized this. We don’t know why. Perhaps it may be because this is the way the world views it. People want to believe truths and doctrines, but they do not want to see Christ in the Word. They only want to put the jigsaw puzzle of the Scriptures together until they are able to understand how every truth, every doctrine, and every event in all the Scriptures fits together.
When I was about fourteen years old, a Presbyterian minister, who was a wonderful force and influence, occasionally came and taught in the Washington, Iowa, church where we were at that time. He introduced us to one of the first editions of Halley’s Bible Handbook, then only a few pages. My encounters with him were priceless, because he loved the Word and would teach me about it. In one of his illustrations of the Scriptures, he talked about a jigsaw puzzle that had a picture on each side of it. On one side was an intricate scene which was very difficult to put together. The easiest way to complete that picture was to spread the puzzle out on a board and turn every piece over to the other side. The other side of the puzzle was a picture of a man, which was easy to put together. When finished, it could be flipped over on another board and everything was all together on the difficult side too. This most intricate puzzle was easily put together because there was a man on the other side who was easy to discern.
This illustrates how you can search the Scriptures to try to find out many facts about them, points on which people differ such as doctrines, creeds, and rituals. But to put them all together, you should turn them over. You must look beyond the obvious, and see Christ. “You search the Scriptures,” Christ said, “but they are they which testify of Me” (John 5:39). If you do not see Christ in the Word, you have not seen the complete picture at all.
You can never put the puzzle of the Scriptures together until you see the full focus on Christ. You can never put this end-time move of the Living Word together until you see Christ coming forth as a Living Word within you. Until you see yourself as a living epistle of Christ, you have not seen what the Living Word is all about. Until you see Christ in the Living Word, you have not seen the Word either. It becomes a very simple thing of believing in God’s Word. It is not enough to say, “I believe the Bible. I believe it is God’s Word.” Do you believe that it is to reveal Christ to you? Do you search for it until you see something of the Lord revealed to your heart? Unless you have met the Lord in every Word you have heard all these years, both in the Scriptures and in the Living Word, you have not heard the Word as you should have.
Now let us look at some verses of Scripture in Hosea chapter 6, which seem to be totally unrelated to what we have already read, but they are not.
“Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before Him. So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth.”
What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? For your loyalty is like a morning cloud, and like the dew which goes away early. Therefore I have hewn them in pieces (how?) by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of My mouth; and the judgments on you are like the light that goes forth. For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. Hosea 6:1–6.
Now let’s go back to verse 1 and see exactly what was said: “He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.” How does He do all of this? By the Word, by the prophets.
But what is God after? He is not giving us the Word and putting us through devastation just to say, “Now is the time of healing.” What is His one purpose? He wants us to know the Lord. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord … Hosea 6:3, KJV. He wants more than all our offerings; He wants the knowledge of the Lord in our hearts.
All of God’s dealings come to pass because of the Word. In Hebrews 12:26–27, we read that the Word comes and shakes everything. As the Word comes, it deals deeply. And you will find that the shaking, the devastation, and everything you go through is designed for one purpose. God is wounding you by His prophets. He is slaying you by His Word. He is coming at you, saying, “I will wound you; but I will heal you. After two days, I will raise you up; and on the third day you will live in My sight.” Do you understand what this means? Are you grasping what the Word does to you?
The Word slices. The sword of the Spirit—the sharp, two-edged sword—cuts to lay you open before God.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the dividing 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.
It comes to remove from you everything that resists the knowing of the Lord, everything that withdraws from Him, everything that stands to keep you from this relationship of knowing the Lord and the Word of God which comes to your heart. You must get this way of thinking in your mind, so that when God gives you a Word, you will know, “Oh, this Word is going to cut me up!” But at the same time, you must always see what it accomplishes.
Hosea says, “He hath torn us, but He will heal us. He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days. He will raise us on the third day, that we may live before Him” (Hosea 6:1–2).
The whole purpose is to live in His presence, to be aware of Him! The Word does not come just to correct you where you are wrong; it is designed to remove from you that which keeps you from standing in the Parousia, the presence of the Lord.
Then shall we know … Oh, let us know! Let us know! Let us press on to know the Lord!
“Well,” you say, “I know the Lord.” Be careful not to boast. Philippians chapter 3 speaks about the goals of the Apostle Paul. He was on one of the highest levels of spiritual attainment that has ever been in the entire history and course of the Church. And yet he said, “I count all these things but loss—everything—that I may know Him! I want to know Him! Something in my heart is yearning to know Him. I will suffer everything (Philippians 3:7–10). I will go through anything that He puts me through.”
We, too, are saying, “He can wound us, but He will bandage us up, and with our splints and our bandages we will stand in His presence. We will follow on to know the Lord, and He will come to us as the rain, the former and the latter rain” (Hosea 6:1–3, KJV). This is very comforting—the healing, the rain, the blessing are all wonderful. But do you understand that the whole purpose of the Word, the sword of the Spirit, the Living Word, is to deal with you to get rid of the things that prevent your knowledge of the Lord? He doesn’t want you to hear the Word, to listen to tapes of the Living Word, only to say, “Now I understand something about the Parousia. Oh, finally I see the endtime events. Now I see the restoration. Now I see the Lordship of Jesus Christ.” Those things can still be vague doctrines. They become real when you meet Him. You have to meet Him in the Word.
Someone has said that one of our problems has been the fact that people can listen to a Living Word tape without understanding that it is divinely devised for one purpose—to bring them into a revelation of the Lord. If He is not revealed in that tape, they have missed the whole purpose of listening.
Do you say, “Well, the messages cut me all to pieces”? Good. But the purpose of wounding you, of tearing you, of devastating you is that He will heal you and revive you in His presence. You will stand in His presence. You will know Him. You will follow on to know Him.
There are still too many among us who are missing what God is trying to do. From the very beginning of this move of God, the emphasis has been on waiting on the Lord, knowing Him. But through the years, people bypassed this waiting on the Lord. Many brothers said, “Well, I will study the Living Word manuals to learn the basic principles, so I can go out and teach Bible classes and start churches. I can minister to the people.” How could they really shepherd anyone without knowing the Shepherd themselves? A great deal of emphasis among the brothers has been, “Let’s teach the brothers how to shepherd. Let’s get the principles of shepherding in their mind, in their heart.” That is very good. However, you could learn all of these principles and then walk in the midst of the people and begin to shepherd them and leave them aghast because they have missed the Great Shepherd in it. The principles of shepherding cannot be taught apart from God dealing with you and your coming into His shepherding. It is a love relationship (John 21:15–17). It is the Christ coming forth in you.
You cannot teach the principles of the Word unless there is an anointing in your heart to reveal Christ. The book of Acts keeps speaking about this. The disciples went everywhere and preached the Word. The Word increased, but it says that they magnified the Lord. They preached Christ, they preached the resurrection, they preached Jesus as Lord (Acts 2:22–36; 4:1–2, 33; 5:42; 8:35). And then it turns around and says that the Word kept increasing; the Word was multiplied (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20). The Word was glorified (Acts 13:48–49).
You cannot divorce the Word from the Lord. If the Word is revealed, it has to be a revelation of the Lord too. He is the Living Word.
“Do you mean that what you are saying is a Living Word?”
No, it is not a Living Word if you don’t see Him. If you see Him, it is a Living Word. If it reveals Him to your heart, it is a Living Word.
“Brother Stevens, I really want to know! Give me a definition. Do you preach a Living Word, or do you not preach a Living Word?”
I can’t answer that. Is there sound without an ear to hear it? Or is there beauty if no one sees it? The flower that blooms out in the desert unseen, does it have color? Is color in the eye of the person who sees it? Is hearing in the ear of the person who hears it? Is there any Word if there are no ears to hear it? Is there any Living Word unless it is revealing Christ to you?
“Brother Stevens, I expect an answer. Do you preach a Living Word, or don’t you preach a Living Word?”
That is for your ears to determine. Did what you hear reveal Christ to you? Did it make Him Lord over your life?
Did you open your heart and find that the Lord was revealed to you?
In that sixth chapter of John, the twelve disciples could have said, “Jesus, You were telling the people things they couldn’t receive, and they left.” Jesus asked them, “Are you going to go too? Are you going to leave Me?” Peter answered, “No, we can’t go. You have the words of life” (John 6:66–68). But they could have said, “You are the words of life. Where shall we go?”
“Well, I’m getting out of the Living Word.”
Be sure that you analyze it carefully. Was Christ ever revealed to you in that Word? If He was, how heinous the crime before God of forsaking a Living Word that was the Lord’s revelation (Hebrews 6:4–9).
“I never found the Lord in it.”
If you leave it, you are better off to know that the judgment will be far less on you because you didn’t know. To whom much is given, much will be required (Luke 12:47–48). The goal is to know the Lord, and know what He is doing. He is revealing Himself. Unless the Living Word and all the dealings that come to our lives because of that Living Word result in our knowing the Lord, we have missed the whole purpose of God. Tell me, what is the whole purpose of the events of this hour?
“Oh, we are going to see antichrist destroyed.”
We don’t worry too much about that.
“We are going to see the Gospel of the Kingdom preached.”
Yes, that is true.
“We are going to understand the truth as knowledge is increased.”
Yes, but what is the real goal? What is God doing?
“Well, He is going to bring judgments on the earth.”
I think that will be incidental and secondary. And I am convinced that a great deal of the book of Revelation has already been fulfilled. If you were shown certain events in history, as well as in the book of Revelation, you would see what had already happened and what was believed before a more modern teaching came forth. You might be interested to know the traditional view that was held for centuries, from the time of the ante-Nicene fathers (the early Church fathers), as to what really was the truth. What was the truth? How did they interpret end-time events? No great apostle of the reformers ever believed the rapture theory—the Babylonian deception. They knew that Rome was the antichrist. They lived for a thousand years under that oppression; they knew where the falling away was (II Thessalonians 2:3). It was history to them. We are not in the falling away; we are in the days of restoration of the truth (Acts 3:21). More has been restored in the last five or six hundred years than we can possibly know.
What is God doing? What is He trying to bring forth? End-time events? I think there is a big question about them. He is trying to bring forth the Parousia, the presence of Christ, Christ coming forth in a many-membered Body (I Corinthians 12), living epistles who speak the Gospel of the Kingdom to the ends of the earth to bring an end to one age and the beginning of another (Matthew 24:14). When we talk about the presence of the Lord, we are talking about the one principal thing that God is doing. When we talk about the Living Word, we are talking about Christ’s presence being real to us.
Look again, and see what Hosea was prophesying: “Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before Him.” Hosea 6:1–2.
If you think of a day as a thousand years (II Peter 3:8), that means the whole cycle of almost two thousand years has been completed since Christ was resurrected, and now is the time that we are to live in His presence. The purpose of the Living Word is that it comes to reveal His presence to you, to make Him real to you, so that you can walk with Him, so that you can live with Him. You become a living epistle who carries that presence to others.
Do you like the Bible? Do you believe it?
“I have to read more chapters every day. I am neglecting them.”
Don’t worry about it. If that is the way you are approaching the Scriptures, you are not getting much out of them anyway. Instead, remember that you have to see the Lord! Never read the Scriptures unless you intend to see the Lord. Never listen to a tape unless you are listening to hear the Lord speak to you through it.
Has this Word reached through to you, and are you saying, “I want to correct a few things in my heart with the focus of my faith; I will see the Lord in the Word and follow on to know Him”? Don’t be a follower of me or my teachings or doctrines, and don’t be a follower of the walk or the walk’s teaching. You must be able to say, “I heard a Living Word, and the Lord became so real to me!” Otherwise, you have missed it. You have failed—we all have failed and all is in vain unless there is a revelation of the Lord.
The first message I preached after having a revelation of the Lord and this walk was out of the book of Acts where Paul stood before King Agrippa and said, “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision” (Acts 26:19). That message was real to me because I had had a revelation of the Lord, and I was aware how sustaining that was. I knew that no longer would I be an expositor of doctrines. The Lord had been promising me, for two or three years, “I will give you another ministry, and that ministry will exalt Me.” At the time I thought, “Well, what am I doing? I am preaching the Scriptures.” I couldn’t understand what He meant. But after I came into that ministry of the Living Word, I was aware that no matter what I preached there was such an anointing that it unveiled Christ to the people who were hungry to hear Him and would listen to it.
The first message triggered off much persecution because, believe it or not, even the Fundamental and Pentecostal world does not comprehend that the Word is to bring a revelation of Christ. They still preach doctrines to get results: to get money, to get converts, to get people to agree with them, to build an organization, to build a business enterprise, to build a kingdom, but all that is not His Kingdom. But God is saying, “Listen! There is only one basic reason and motivation to preach the Word—that you exalt Christ in such a way that He draws men to Himself; He becomes real to them” (John 12:32).
This present message started as I was meditating on the Twenty-third Psalm. As I went through this psalm, I saw how the Word was to reveal the Lord. In the beginning phrase, The Lord is my shepherd …, I saw that all He was to do, the benefits that He was to bring to us, were to bring the exaltation of the Shepherd to our hearts. Yet we can be so concerned about the benefits to the sheep, and about being sheep, that we forget that the Lord as the Shepherd is the great revelation of this psalm. The more I thought about it, the more I became aware that this is the purpose behind every Word that God speaks.
“You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; but they are they which testify, witness, manifest, reveal Me. But you do not come to Me, that you might have life.”
Remember, it is the letter that kills (II Corinthians 3:6). Nothing is deader or more destructive than religion that uses the letter of the Word which does not bring a revelation of Christ. The letter kills. Many claim that they “preach the Word.” But do they actually preach the Word unless there is a revelation of Christ? Is there any such thing possible? There must be a greater focus on the Lord. In every spoken Word and tape that we hear, we must hear the Lord. We must see the centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ in every Word that He has spoken in the Scriptures. In every commitment, in everything we go through, He brings us forth that we might stand in His presence. Oh, let us follow on to know the Lord and stand in His presence!
It is inevitable that you should try to define the Living Word. What is the Living Word?
1.It is Christ (John 1:1).
2.It is a revelation of Christ (John 5:39).
3.It is Christ speaking His Word in the earth (Revelation 19:10).
4.It is not an exclusive thing that only one or two can speak; and yet it is not a very common thing in its expression.
5.It is Christ as a Person.
6.It is Christ as the Word (Revelation 19:13).
7.It is the Word that is also Spirit, and living (John 6:63).
We must see the objective that God has, and receive it in every Word. Otherwise we can get hung up on issues such as having no position, but rather a commission. We have yet to see the full meaning of a commission. Ninety percent of the commissions over us may be projects. It may be unusual if even ten percent of your commission ever defines your office or position to the church. When a commission is given by the Spirit of the Lord, He moves upon people, and Christ speaks through the Spirit to say, “You go and do this, and you go to reveal Christ.” And when that project is finished, your commission is over; and you move on to the next commission that the Lord has for you.
In Acts chapter 8, for instance, Philip went down to Samaria where he preached Christ and brought miracles, healings, and deliverances (verses 5–8). He did not focus on authority; he did not focus on any position. He did not say, “I am one of those who serve soup to the widows at Jerusalem” (Acts 6:1–5). He did not claim an office or a position; he claimed nothing. He preached Christ! Then when the Spirit moved him, he went someplace else. That same chapter tells how he opened up the Epthiopian and the Coptic branch of Christianity, which was the purest form of it for centuries to come, when he won the Ethiopian to the Lord (Acts 8:26–39). Philip did all of these things because he was commissioned. The commission consisted mainly of God saying, “Go do this, and go do that.”
In Acts 13, we read how Barnabas and Paul were commissioned. As certain prophets and teachers fasted and prayed, the Spirit of the Lord spoke, “Separate Barnabas and Saul to this work” (Acts 13:1–2). Then hands were laid on them, and they were sent out by the Holy Spirit to work on projects. They were not given some special title or office; they were just those who were sent to do a work. Later, they were called apostles (Acts 14:4, 14). The office was never important; it came as a result of doing projects. Do you want to be an apostle? Do the work of an apostle. Show the fruit of it (I Corinthians 9:1–2).
You are an emissary of a Word. Actually you are a bearer of Christ in the earth (II Corinthians 5:18–20). There is no such thing as a position of any importance. There is only a heart that listens to what God says and does it, that takes the Word, which becomes like a burning fire shut up in your bones.
Did God ever speak to an Old Testament prophet and say, “I have raised you up to be something important”? No, He said, “I have put My Word in your heart and in your mouth” (Ezekiel 3:1, 10; Jeremiah 1:9; 15:16). Even when Jeremiah said, “I can’t speak anymore,” the Word was like a burning fire shut up in his bones (Jeremiah 20:9). The prophets had to speak—it was a Word.
They were speaking God into the earth. That was what God wanted. They were not coming to speak forth a certain political or religious order, or a kingdom of positions, or ministries; they were coming to speak forth God into the earth (I Peter 4:11). What God had to say had to be conveyed with His presence.
Jesus said to the early disciples, “They won’t accept you as disciples. If they accepted My Word, they will accept your Word. If they rejected My Word, they will reject your Word” (John 15:20).
The issue is the Word. If they do not listen to the Word, they do not listen to Christ. If they hear the Word, they will hear Christ and see Him revealed.
This leads us to never glorify flesh again. Instead, we magnify the Word of God that comes forth and glorifies Christ. And when we hear a man speak, though it may be with faltering words of man’s speech, no enticing words at all, we will listen because it is revealing Christ (I Corinthians 2:1–5).
We listen and we keep listening, to hear Christ speak, rather than weighing the Word for doctrine. We see Christ in the Word; we hear Him! We will see Christ in one another, but we do not magnify any man as the oracle of the Lord. The one objective in this hour is to speak His Word with integrity, with purity, with anointing, so that people come to know Christ.
The issue is the Word. The war is over the Word. If you have heard a Living Word, it has revealed Christ. If you have not heard it, then you could make an issue over the ones who speak it. But the ones who mouth the Word are not the issue. Did you have an ear to hear it? Did Christ come forth in that Word?
If you did not see the Lord when He spoke, you did not hear Him.
If the Lord ministered His Word to you, it was engraved upon your heart.
To hear Him is to see Him, and then to reveal Him.
All of the Lord’s dealings are designed so that we will know Him.
It sometimes takes the sharp, two-edged sword of the Word to cut out all that keeps us unaware of Him. His Word will bring His revelation of Himself to you.