This was the day that the Lord gave us a Word, early this morning before dawn, that we were going to be in control; and it seems like everything has gone the other direction from that. But I’ve seen that happen before, haven’t you? You get a Word and you’re tried in it before it comes to pass. “Until the day that it came to pass, the Word of the Lord tried him,” was the way the Psalms talked about Joseph (Psalm 105:19). We’re breaking through to something that is timeless; it belongs to the time that we’re in right now.
Can I talk to you just a little bit about what’s happening to you? One of the fine things in my life was the writings of Ruth Paxton, a woman who spent her life ministering in the China Inland Mission. Her writings were in publication before I was even a teenager, so I don’t know just when she started. She wrote Life On The Highest Plane, and she was one of the outstanding spiritual teachers. We also had Jessica Penn-Lewis, who wrote War On The Saints. These stand out, I think, as outstanding ministries of revelation who saw something that we’re so into right now: spirit, soul, and body. I don’t know whether Paxton’s book is in publication now—Moody Press did have it—but I wish we could have it available so that those of you who want to study this could just browse through it. So I’m talking about the time when I was in my very early teens. I was into that book. I think it affected my life, because the Lord was directing me to understand some of the things in it.
Life On The Highest Plane dealt with the fact that man is a threefold being. There are little charts in it that illustrate the three aspects of our nature by using triangles: “Here is the body; here is the soul; here is the spirit.” And it shows the way that it sometimes tips so that people become creatures of one or the other. For instance, there are people in whom the physical is very, very prominent. Athletes are like that, I think, and they struggle to have some kind of a mental or soulish identity. So they focus and they concentrate and they discipline—marathon runners and people that turn to the physical. I’m not saying that the physical isn’t important, because Paul says that bodily exercise profiteth a little, but godliness is profitable for all things (I Timothy 4:8), pointing out that the human spirit actually could come to the place where it could control the physical. Do you believe that’s true? I’m of the opinion that if we reach this level of spirit that we’re on, you could command your body and it would rejuvenate and reproduce and respond—every organ within it, every cell within it. Scientific study has shown that every cell of the human body contains within itself everything necessary to reproduce that human body.
If the physical nature in the triangle is on top, that means that somewhere below it, maybe it’s a little off balance, is the soul, and the spirit. Now that can explain people’s relationships out in the world. There are people who enjoy a relationship as long as it doesn’t involve their spirit, as long as it doesn’t involve their soul too much, as long as it’s just kind of a physical arrangement. They like that—no commitments. There are a lot of people who like that. And there are those who go out in the world for lust and for sex, and they are only concerned about a one-night stand—something which becomes an interesting physical experience, but nothing that they want to relate to or communicate with later.
There are other people who are very much on the soul level. And when we talk about the soul, we’re talking about the mind, the emotions; the will, of course, is involved with all three. Sometimes there is a strong will in those who are physical, a strong will in those who are soulish, a strong will in those who are spiritual. The spirit, soul, and body have one common denominator. If your spirit is really set on something in God, it will command and direct your soul, everything of the psychic level, everything of the mental level, everything of the intellectual level, and drive it to a certain thing.
I think it’s necessary to get ahold of this, because we are entering into a phase, an age, of spirit. And that means that your spirit is going to have to predominate over your soul and your physical.
You’re weighing that, aren’t you? All right, what do we do? You say, “That means that if I go to college, I don’t study?” No, you set your heart to study, but your spirit determines what you’re studying for, and what you’re going to retain, and how much you’re going to be influenced by it. Your spirit becomes almost a self-appointed filter, that the things that happen to you on a mental, emotional, or a physical level are filtered through your spirit for it to determine exactly the meaning of it. Of course, that’s in the pure analysis. Most of you can’t resist blowing up once in awhile, getting a little emotional, because the soul is like a wild, untamed beast until the work of the cross is done in it. And once that’s done in it, then everything is brought into subordination to it.
It’s very difficult for some people to know the difference between the soul and the spirit. But what we’re doing here now is placing the basic thing that’s going to help you more than anything else.
First of all, you are believing for a complete dedication to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over your life. That dedication has to be a thing of spirit, and it has to involve the work of the cross in the soul-flesh.
And once that takes place, your spirit begins to take more and more control. I don’t know whether you know what I mean by control or not. It not only dominates you, but it controls everything around you. God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Now that’s not talking about the Holy Spirit; it’s talking about in your spirit. There has to be a reality of your spirit.
Almost all of the religious activity of the world is soulishly generated. But God has been reaching for people who would break through to this realm and this age of spirit. And when they break through to it, it’s strange that the religious world out there says that you’re freaks, that you’re nowhere, because you don’t have your liturgies, you don’t have your signs, you don’t have your candles, you don’t have this or that. It says that you’re not following the religious rules; and you aren’t. You break out of the soul limitations that were bound upon it.
Sometimes your objection to being limited causes you to adopt another soulish limitation. For instance, we could find some of those who came over from Europe and were, I think, products of Menno Simons. They began to preach against fashion; and in their teaching against the fashions of this world, they created their own fashion. That’s an interesting thing, because sometimes you say, “I refuse to be religious this way.” You say, “I object to the habits that a nun wears; I object to the collars that the priests wear; I object to all of that.” And you wind up with some little rig of your own. So the pendulum swings from one end to another. And the answer is not in some new form of soulish, religious reform or rejection; the answer really is to be found: get out of the soul level totally. Don’t go and establish something more that is repulsive to you, that you know is not of the Lord.
You’re getting an education about spirit, soul, and body, aren’t you? You’re beginning to understand what we are going to do in appropriating this freedom in our spirits. We’re emphasizing above everything else that this has to be something more than a mental thing. It has to be a reality. Do you see the wisdom of saying in your heart, “I am not going to make this a mental discipline. I will not make this an emotional discipline. I’m going to make this something where my total, absolute dedication to the Lord Jesus Christ is going to lift me out of the realm where my flesh, my soul, is going to dominate and control and try to whip up some reasonable facsimile of what God says.” You could take somebody that is really soulish, and he can look very spiritual. Are you following? But in that dedication you say, “I break out of that; I’m going to find a renewal of my spirit.”
Are you following this in your mind and heart, and do you realize that we’ve come a long way, little by little, to pull people out of mechanics? We have kicked down a dozen liturgies, ways of worship, song books, and so forth. And even the song books we’re getting now, one of these days we’ll probably burn them, because there will be something better that will be more the expression of our spirit reaching to God. You say, “But they’re wonderful.” Of course they are—everything we’ve done has been a step in the right direction and a step away from the wrong direction. We’ve consistently moved away from the soulish, religious, and we’ve reached to come into that which is spirit and truth, and to really experience it.
Now you say, “But I’m afraid I’m just a religious spirit, and I don’t know what I can do.” Well, self-pity is one thing that has to go to the cross too. Self-justification, the whole “self” family. How many “self” things can you name? Self-condemnation, self-pity, self-justification, being self-conscious. You say, “Well, I’m not going to move.” That’s self too. To move without faith is to be self-conscious. God is setting you free—not to be self-conscious and say, “Well, I don’t want to move in self, so I won’t move at all.” That’s self. Take a step in God, a step of faith, because true faith is a belief in what God has provided for you. And that faith in what God has provided for you has to be based totally and completely upon a spirit acceptance of it, or you never do totally accept it.
If you emotionally accept what I’m saying, you’ll have to accept it again a dozen times. To get people out of the soul level sometimes was so difficult; every time they came to church you had to convince them all over again. But you take a person who breaks through to the realm of spirit and he’s got it—once and for all time, it’s there. And there is a resurgence of faith that comes forth in every situation, no matter what the verdict of the senses, no matter what the response of the emotions, the appearance of the circumstances, or even that which is inflicted upon you physically. You come right back, you spring right up, “But God said this, and this is what I believe.” Your spirit receives a gift: Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God. I Corinthians 2:12. Do you like that? You’re going to find a lot of Scriptures coming alive to you all over again, because this realm of spirit, as your spirit is free, can loose you from a lot of the emotional trauma, the agony of the soul and the mind.
Now why are we emphasizing dedication to the Lordship of Jesus Christ? We’re setting your spirit free. But we’re doing more than setting it free; we’re setting it on the throne. Your spirit is going to dominate everything that you think, feel, everything that happens to you. And that’s why in “the Unwrapping” we did not have a lot of tedious theology, but we said that this is going to be a persistent authority. It’s a persistent authority that you are going to walk in. I tell you, I have opened the door to the Kingdom of God on this level to you; and the more you go back and get the gleanings and get everything and begin to open it up, you’ll say, “I read it; I thought I had it. But I read it again and I began to see new things in it that I had never seen before.” And of course, that’s the whole idea of the spirit.
Every one of you is probably wondering, “What’s my triangle like? Is it flesh? Is it spirit? Is it some soulish domination? Where am I?” I’ll tell you where you are. You have been consistently and carefully led through that work of the cross for the soul-flesh (Matthew 16:24–25). If you followed it, it was an agony to you. It’s a thing that your mind would not even accept as being reasonable. In fact, some even said, “I’ve been through this before. I’m not going to repent because I don’t want it.” The rebellion of the soul-flesh against the cross means that your spirit can be a lamb that’s submissive, but your soul is a goat that’s hard to catch and hard to kill.
Let’s go on a little bit further. You say, “Well, how do I know whether I’m a soulish person?” If you persist in individuality instead of oneness, you still need the work of the cross in your soul, because you’re not going to make it while you persist in being an individual, retaining the rights to yourself.
The basic thing of a spirit is that when it is dedicated to the Lord and God has met it, that spirit is so submissive to the Lord. You see, God isn’t a soul, He’s a Spirit (John 4:24). And He never intended for you to be just soul. He intended for you to be a spiritual being—actually, a triune being like Himself (Genesis 1:26–27; I Thessalonians 5:23). And that’s the reason why we find the difficulty in relating to God. Just watch the “electronic church,” the different churches on the media. Last year twenty-four billion dollars rolled into their coffers; and that was just to the religious corporations and the broadcasts. What do they do? “Well, we’ll give you a little prayer cloth. We’ll send you a candle. We’ll do this and that.” They have all of the gimmicks, because they thrive and they exist solely upon religious soul-flesh.
Don’t get the idea that your soul is a rebel against God; it’s just a rebel against what God wants to do to it. Your soul can be more religious then you know, and you can say, “I don’t need any of this thing. I’m a religious person.” The Pharisee prayed, “O God, I give tithes of all that I possess. I fast twice a week—not like that publican over there” (Luke 18:9–14). See, that soul-flesh always comes forth, no matter what form it goes through. It says, “Jesus is my Savior,” but it winds up with a religious arrogance that is a part of the soul.
I’m giving you a lesson that you’ve never heard in thirty years. You’ve heard parts of it, but I’m trying to get something through to you, that you’re going to become spiritual beings. Paul said, “The rulers of this world didn’t know, or they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. We’re not teaching you wisdom of this world. We’re teaching something else. In the spirit, we’re teaching spiritual things to them that are spiritual” (I Corinthians 2:6–13). And those of you who are breaking through to this realm of spirit will find that this is the realm of spirit in which you speak it and it is imparted.
The realm of soul labors with things; it has to feel them emotionally; it has to come to an altar and sing songs—all of those things that you go through emotionally, and then try to build it up. Can you picture what I’m trying to say about this whole process? They labor to attain; they struggle to get there.
Back in the Midwest, we used to have at least two revivals each year, one in the spring and one in the fall; and each time everybody got saved all over again. When the churches in the old Pentecostal denominations sent in their reports to headquarters, they had to write the information down on the form. When it asked, “How many members do you have?” they would write, “We have 150 members.” “How many conversions did you have?” “We had 300 conversions.” Everybody got saved at least twice a year, because, you see, they never could get ahold of it in a reality in their spirits.
When we lived in the soul level of the Church, that was the best thing we had. That’s all we had. But God always gave the promise that there was going to be the perfect triangle in which the Holy Spirit was going to dominate us.
And where the Spirit is Lord, there is liberty (II Corinthians 3:17). The more that you understand this in your heart, the more that you’re going to see it appropriated. You could just say to one another, “We’re free! We’re free from the greatest trap that we ever knew, where Satan coming as an angel of light tried to make us religious (II Corinthians 11:14), instead of us becoming transformed sons of God in spirit and in truth” (Romans 8:12–30; John 4:24).
How do we go about becoming spiritual? That’s the question. In the Shakespearean play, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth slaughters the king; and she’s so overridden with what she’s done that in almost a suicidal frenzy she says, “Out, damned spot!” It’s the thing that Pilate said when he said, “I wash my hands of this” (Matthew 27:24). There’s always a residue of self-condemnation on the soul level. It’s always trying to be spiritual. There’s always that striving. There’s always the battle that goes on between self-condemnation, and withdrawal, and periods of aggressiveness in which you are reaching forth into the Lord. And then back and forth the pendulum swings, always striving, but never really convinced of the fullness of the blessing of the Lord. Then there comes that breakthrough in the spirit, and you’re no longer striving to be righteous, but you realize that it is imparted to your spirit (Philippians 3:9). And it filters down like the rain of heaven, and it saturates your soul and your flesh, and you realize that this is the hour of I Thessalonians chapter 5: … I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. Verses 23–24, KJV. But don’t try to start at the wrong end and work up.
Let’s get with the spirit first. Let’s get into that dedication of spirit. Let’s get our spirits free, because when our spirits are free it’s not just that there’s a channel of ministry opened in the earth—which in itself is probably the greatest thing God has ever done since the creation of the world to bring to pass that tremendous fulfillment for which Christ died in the fullness of time (Romans 5:6). The greatest thing that’s happening is for you to come to the day where your spirit can appropriate; your spirit can impart.
Your spirit will not know limitations that are like leg irons that shackle you, so that you say, “I know in my heart what I want to be but I can’t be that.” Yes, you can. “Well, I’ll try harder.” Oh, no. You just trust Him more. It will come by faith.
This is one of the mysteries of mysteries. This takes it out of the realm of struggle and puts it into the realm of victory. Do you believe that in your own heart? Have you felt, “I’ve been on a merry-go-round and I never caught the brass ring. I kept trying; I kept reaching. I knew that there was a Word from the Lord. I was like a perennial—I kept sprouting up, I would get frosted, and yet a little bit of spring rain and I’d start blooming again.” After awhile that gets a little bit discouraging. But we’re entering into the realm of the spirit where a man’s years shall be as the years of an oak tree (Isaiah 65:22). That can be a long time! What about limitations? They’re overcome by the realm of spirit. Is there anything impossible to a true believer? (Mark 9:23.)
We have a word in the Scriptures that is translated “saint”; it really means “true believer.” And I see that there are translations that have come out that call it “true believer.” A true believer—that means someone who really has in his spirit faith. We think, “Now, if we are real pious, and we say all of our prayers, and we listen to all the tapes …” We could even make a ritual of that! I’m going to tell you—you could listen to all of the tapes and still miss God a thousand ways, because you can make it a focus of concentration to try to learn something about God instead of your spirit soaking up and saturating God in His Living Word. That’s where change comes.
I’m going to say one thing to you: I loose you into this realm of spirit. I loose you. Army of the Lord, I loose you in the name of the Lord!
Church after church is going to go through this revolution. Struggle is going to give way to the actual appropriation and walking in the victory of the Lord. He won it. We should not ever consent to struggling to attain and win what He’s already attained and won for us.
I want you to realize that in the spirit we have total authority and control. Your ministry is not going to be the struggle of emotional intercession so much as it’s going to be the prophetic proclamation of your spirit in faith that brings down from the promises of God a visual, actual fulfillment before your eyes!
There’s a difference between the soul and the spirit. The soul comes into one thing: “Now we must walk by faith and not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7); and it always struggles to ignore what it sees, and it never sees what it’s trying to believe. But when you get into the realm of the spirit, you say, “I believe to see the goodness of the Lord (Psalm 27:13). I believe to see it. It’s going to happen. I’m going to see it. Because I see it in the spirit, I know I’m going to see it with my eyes.” You say, “Well, that isn’t walking by faith.” You bet it is. Faith is the substance of the thing hoped for, the evidence of the thing not seen; and it’s by faith, by a Word from God, that the very ages and worlds were determined (Hebrews 11:1–3). Everything that has happened has happened because men of faith proclaimed it, and it happened.
There’s something generated in your spirit that says, “Everything God ever said to me makes a lot of sense now, and I believe I can walk in it. I believe that more than walk in it, I can be it.” I minister to you in just one simple prayer: I loose you from whatever domination the soul-flesh has had over you. I loose you from that, in the name of the Lord, and I loose you for your spirit to sit on the throne with the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:6; Colossians 3:1). I loose you to be spiritual people. We set your spirits free, because it’s the free spirit that seems to reach in and inherit and appropriate. You’re going to be free. This is not a mystical jargon; we’re just talking about becoming sons of God. They’re spiritual entities, basically, still manifested in the flesh.
But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Romans 8:11, KJV.
We don’t want to ignore the flesh. Paul said that we don’t want to just cast off this tabernacle, but we yearn to be clothed upon with that which is from above (II Corinthians 5:2, 4, KJV). And he was talking about one thing there. He said that the outward man can be perishing day by day, but the inner man is being renewed (II Corinthians 4:16). In other words, he was seeing that the spirit was being renewed by the Lord. You’ve got to believe that. You can’t make your decision about where you are and how much victory or how much defeat you have in your life by what you see, by what you feel, by what somebody tells you. It has to be based totally upon what your spirit appropriates and says: “This is the Word from the Lord.”
All reality is found when the Father has found a people He has been searching for from ages past who worship Him in spirit and in that reality (John 4:23–24).
You’re loosed; you’re totally free. Will you believe it? Are you saying, “I’m really struggling to believe it”? Or are you saying, “I’m believing it. I’m not struggling. I know it’s mine—to be sanctified wholly before the Lord.” Are you really tired of trying to struggle with the weaknesses of the flesh? Are you really sick of struggling with these emotional things of your soul? Are you tired of the input of your senses that is always trying to deny the truth of God’s Word? Are you tired of being moved by what you hear, what you feel, what you see? Just dump it; just shake it off. It’s the instrument by which the viper puts his poison into your system. It’s a killer.
Come back to the faith. Believe it. It once was real; it once was quickened to your heart. You say, “But I’m dead.” Hooray and hallelujah! God had it coming to you. You say, “I’m just dead. I just don’t feel like I can go on.” It’s good sometimes to feel like you can’t go on, and then you draw something that’s like a second wind. You draw His strength. Isaiah sure talked about that.
In the book of Isaiah, God spoke in the first person and told about all the strength He had, how He created everything and what He did; and then He said, Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. Isaiah 30–31a, KJV. It’s those who wait on the Lord—in their spirit the strength comes.
This is the thing that has been battled from the very beginning. In the early days, the Lord began to talk to me about waiting on Him. Some of the things that happened to me then opened the door for all of this that did happen. When we first came to California, we had a little house with a big fenced-off yard, a garden, and a chicken house. We cleaned the chicken manure out of the little chicken house, put a window in it, and made it a little place for me to just go out and wait on the Lord. I fasted and prayed there, sometimes taking nothing but water for days or weeks at a time, seeking the Lord and waiting on the Lord. It’s where this ministry was really born, in the old chicken house. I’ve never talked to you much about it, but that was important.
When I began to teach you in the early Fifties, I told you, “You’re going to have to learn to wait on the Lord, or else you’ll never really know the voice of the Lord.”
Look at the people who are still dominated by the soulflesh. They can receive wonderful things from the Lord. They can receive the Holy Spirit and shake and speak in tongues. I’m not blaspheming the Holy Spirit, but I’m telling you that I have seen people stand against what God was doing, shake their finger at you and talk in tongues. I remember one woman who did that, and she died within six months. It’s easy to blaspheme the Holy Spirit by trying to pervert what God is doing because you don’t even know what He’s doing; you don’t even know His voice; you’re not hearing Him.
So much that God has done has resulted in experiences that were at best a blessing, but the person never opened his spirit to hear His Word—never opened his heart. There never was one real Bible scholar to come out of the Pentecostal movement. There was not one consistent, deep Bible scholar who came out of the Holiness movement, because they were so engrossed with the wrong thing that they never reached the realm of spirit that opened up their ears to hear the Word from God.
What are you going to do with this Word? If I could, I wouldn’t move you. I don’t want to stir you up. I don’t want to commit you back to some soulish realm that you’ve left, or are trying to leave. I want to say, “It’s all going to be done now by a gift of faith.” The preaching and the teaching was important and it laid a foundation; but now you need the faith to believe it, and make it happen, and become it, and do it. It was all real. We’re not going to go around the mountain over and over again (Deuteronomy 2:3). But there are some people who really are dedicated to going around the mountain. And every time they go around, they wave their little flag at Jesus and say, “Just pray for me, Lord, that I’ll hold out to the end.” But the end isn’t in sight because they’re just going around the mountain.
Let’s move into the promises! Let’s move into what God has! Let’s be what He said. I rebuke that limitation that comes upon you in the soul level which says, “I’m always to be, but never am blessed.” I loose you to say, “Today, I’m blessed. My spirit is free. Today I’m going to move into this.” No more delay. No more acceptance of a long process that just excuses yourself to be soulishly religious without being a spiritual reality.
Can you say, “I take it all. With every bit of faith that I have, I appropriate more faith to be a person of spirit, a free spirit, an appropriating spirit, an imparting spirit, a functional spirit. I refuse to be an earthbound soul. I refuse to keep looking up with my soul-flesh, but instead I sit down on the throne with Him in my spirit.”
MARILYN STEVENS: I think you were able to speak this so clearly because we are there. Everybody heard it and understood it—maybe not in the depth that they can apply it right this minute, but they know that what they heard will become real, because their understanding is in process. We have ears to hear and the faith to move into it, and our understanding is going to catch up. It’s a matter of total impartation.
It’s really simple; but it’s been hidden because it had to be until the time the pure dedication would take this Word, or else it would have been misappropriated and misused.
What was it the man of God said? Consider what I say, and the Lord give thee understanding in all things. II Timothy 2:7, KJV. There has to be that hearing of faith, and then there follows the understanding. The understanding can expand if the spirit has received it as a revelation.
Are there any keys or suggestions for us to become a hearer of the Word? Are there ways that we can really correctly hear the Word of the Lord?
The greatest parable that was ever written was the parable about the sower who went out to sow the seed, and the various types of soil that received it (Matthew 13:3–8; 18–23). One of the things that you do is you become alert to the thorns that grow up and choke it. You become alert to the birds, representing the demon world, which come and take away the Word before it has a chance to bear fruit in your life. The other would be that you receive it on such a shallow basis that when it begins to spring up and a little persecution comes, the whole thing that God is doing aborts. It withers; it dies right there. But there are those who receive the Word of God and bring forth fruitfulness thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. Even that is in degree.
How do we go about hearing the Word so that we retain it? First we must be alert to these other things, so that we become the good soil that receives the Word of God, not in a shallow way or a way that can be distracted and the Word destroyed. Then the next thing that we do is we constantly look to apply the Word in our lives. The Scripture reads in I Peter 1:23, “You were born by that incorruptible seed, the Word of God, which lives and abides forever.” And then it says: “As newborn babes, desire the unadulterated milk of the Word that you may grow thereby” (I Peter 2:2).
A woman can become pregnant and nine months later have a baby, but the will of God does not come forth that way. The Word of God must be constantly fed. It’s the seed that’s going to produce and it has to be constantly fed. When Paul wanted to instruct Timothy how to see it come forth he said, “Give yourself wholly to these things, and then the profiting will appear to all. Remember the prophecies. Remember the Scriptures. Give attendance to that. Don’t fail” (I Timothy 4:13–16).
If I could give one thing that I would say would work, it would be that it isn’t a comprehension that fails, but it’s a comprehension that is constantly made vital and alive by the Holy Spirit by your continuous application to it. You will grow because you become that Word as you give yourself to it. That’s the key: the diligence with which you give yourself to that Word.
When you listen to the Word don’t say, “Oh, that was a wonderful tape; let’s get to the next one.” The people who profit from a Word are ones who hear it, it falls in their hearts, and after they’ve listened to it a dozen times something is done. We have thousands and thousands of tapes, but a handful of them could have changed the whole walk if people had just been diligent to hear them over and over again. Not just by repetition—the Word is not just a thing to be memorized. It’s a thing that you unwrap, and it becomes deeper and more spiritual to you. You read a Word the first time, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” Read it tomorrow. “Oh, I didn’t see that.” Read it the next day. “Isn’t that great? I didn’t see that either.” And after a while it begins to explode something within your heart.
When I was young, I set on a course about the Word. There were those who said, “You have to read so many chapters a day.” There are those who say, “You won’t backslide if you read the Bible fifteen minutes a day, pray fifteen minutes, testify to somebody for fifteen minutes.” That was a popular Fundamental doctrine. But I did find this: I never said, “I’m going to read so many chapters a day and read them as a discipline.” I read until some Word came alive. Thy words were found and I did eat them. Jeremiah 15:16a, KJV. You have to understand that that’s the way the things happen to you. It isn’t what you learn; it’s what you become. You’re created by that Word. You’re devastated; you’re killed by it. You’re destroyed by it. You’re inspired by it. One verse that comes alive to you—you could give yourself to it to find everything else would be added to you. It isn’t how much you read; it’s how much comes alive. And this is the key, because His Words are spirit and they are life, and you cannot be a person of spirit apart from that Word (John 6:63). I am not for the discipline of devotions. I’m for the search for that little Word that belongs to you today, and you hang onto it.
The biggest day yet is coming up. Let’s believe for it. This has been a lesson in the School of Prophets and Seers; this Word is producing the people of spirit who are going to walk with the Lord.