This is a passage in Isaiah 52. First 12 verses. Not going to go into detail, just a little summary as it applies to the church today.
52 Awake, awake! Put on your strength, O Zion; Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city! For the uncircumcised and the unclean Shall no longer come to you. 2 Shake yourself from the dust, arise; Sit down, O Jerusalem! Loose yourself from the bonds of your neck,
O captive daughter of Zion! 3 For thus says the Lord: “You have sold yourselves for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money.” 4 For thus says the Lord God: “My people went down at first Into Egypt to dwell there; Then the Assyrian oppressed them without cause. 5 Now therefore, what have I here,” says the Lord, “That My people are taken away for nothing? Those who rule over them Make them wail,” says the Lord,
“And My name is blasphemed continually every day. 6 Therefore My people shall know My name; Therefore they shall know in that day That I am He who speaks: ‘Behold, it is I.’ ” 7 How beautiful upon the mountains Are the feet of him who brings good news, Who proclaims peace, Who brings glad tidings of good things, Who proclaims salvation, Who says to Zion, “Your God reigns!” 8 Your watchmen shall lift up their voices, With their voices they shall sing together; For they shall see eye to eye When the Lord brings back Zion. 9 Break forth into joy, sing together, you waste places of Jerusalem! For the Lord has comforted His people, He has redeemed Jerusalem. 10 The Lord has made bare His holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; And all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. 11 Depart! Depart! Go out from there, touch no unclean thing; Go out from the midst of her, be clean, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. 12 For you shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight.
For the Lord will go before you, And the God of Israel will be your rear guard.
This passage of scripture has sort of a symbolism. It has almost a mental image and attitude and it requires something of you, listen closely what the Lord is saying to you.
Awake ʿûr a verb meaning to stir, to arouse, to awaken. It is used of raising someone to action, of motivating him or her.
We have now come to mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem-Heb 12:22.
Awake put on thy strength oh Zion. This is being clothed with power from on high. A garment we put on.
Put on your strength, come on it’s time to put on strength, open your heart you’re not going to be weak anymore.
The day has come for you to put on the strength of the Lord by simple faith that appropriates. You can literally feel it clothing you. If you can’t I will make some audios to teach you, no sense teaching something you cannot experience.
Put on thy beautiful garments oh Jerusalem, this is just like a new spring outfit, you know what that does for a woman right, it totally lifts her spirit putting on a brand-new set of clothes, feeling beautiful. And this will do something for you spiritually to.
This is something that lifts you, that lifts you in your spirit. And I believe that’s exactly what the Lord is saying. Come on, put on your beautiful garments. It’s time to dress up until you have in your own mind an image of yourself that is true.
When we come into a walk with God we go through so much in the testing’s and preparations of the Lord and we tend to get that beat down feeling about ourselves.
You see when you come into a walk with the Lord, you are following on to know him, and he reveals himself to you, and when you see him there is a corresponding revelation of yourselves in your present condition and if you do not repent, which simply is letting that image of him fill your thoughts, you don’t even want to look in the mirror because you’re thinking, hmm, I’m supposed to be in the army of the Lord, and I feel defeated.
And so, we don’t want to see ourselves as we really are at the moment, but change our focus, because YHWH doesn’t see us that way, it is just a natural reaction to see the Lord in the way he truly is.
So, we must see ourselves in Christ who we really are until we begin to see that God has a place for us, God has called us, see what he’s done for us, and we begin to adorn ourselves with our beautiful garments.
We began to build in our own mind and spirit by the appropriations of the Lord, by the appropriations of His glory, the appropriations of the wonderful things that are just to clothe our lives.
We appropriate to ourselves, literally, a new image of ourselves too. That we began to see that we’re putting on a new life completely in the Lord.
Now notice that the next verse just follows along exactly. It says, Shake thyself from the dust. Arise, sit on thy throne.
How many felt like that you’ve just been around in the dust? All right, get up out of the dust, shake it off, dust yourself. Climb up on that throne that God has for you.
You were called to be a king and a priest of God. I doubt if there’s any of us today that really dreams or imagines the great authority that Jesus Christ has bestowed upon his people in this time. We have no idea of it. We need to stir ourselves up and shake off the dust and sit on that throne. Because it’s a place of rule. It’s a place of authority that God has ordained the remnant to walk in.
Isaiah 52
Above all things, the emphasis has been upon submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s why we see on in that seventh verse that they’re going to cry to Zion, Thy God reigns. Submit your lives totally to the Lord and you’re going to reign with Him too.
The things that are going to do are fantastic. It seems like there’s an urgency on it as we’ve never seen before. A real urgency. It’s been dawning on my heart how we are bogged down and distracted by the cares of life until we’re missing the significant action and living that we should be occupied with in this hour.
Get up out of the dust. Sit on your throne. God has more for you than you realize. He’s done things for you, that has not even entered your heart yet. Have faith to believe for great things that you’ve not walked in heretofore.
And then we move on into the next verse. It said, Oh, loose thyself from the bonds of thy neck, oh captive daughter of Zion.
Well, that’s simple. Just throw them off. How many chains do people have? How many things of bonds? Yet the new day has come, so cast them off.
I think sometimes when we struggle with them we are not standing on the promise of the Lord that says, throw off these bonds. Throw off these things of bondage.
And yet, people hold back, I will do it tomorrow, tomorrow never comes.
Do you realize things that have hung people up all their lives are being met by just simple prayer and the laying on of hands?
I don’t know whether you grasp what God is really doing in this hour. And for you to accept any bondage, any chain and think that it’s a binding thing that you can’t get rid of is a mistake.
You can throw off those restrictive, damaging, devastating traits of heredity. God will reach right into our very nature and uproot things.
We’re going to see people walk as saints of God that you could never dream of the things that they’d once walked in because God changes everything so completely.
I am talking total transformation even in the processes of the thinking all the way through. Why? Because we believe for it. Throw off the bondage, just throw it off, shake off that viper. Get rid of that chain around your neck.
Walk with God. It’s a day of victory. Get up out of that dust and climb up on your throne and take your set and speak with authority.
Get ready for the thing that God has for your life. Do not further accept the very, very great limitation that people are accepting in their lives.
Even as Christian believers, they’re accepting limitation. I’m not in favor of it. Do not accept the limitation. If you’re struggling with it, it is only because you’re desiring to throw it off, so just throw it off and believe you are free.
I see that God is doing many things for us. And I would say some of them sovereignly. But most of the things that are happening to you is that God is just saying to you, all right, here, you have a problem, I got the provision here for you.
God expects you to use the promises, and gives you the authority, to use it. You’ll learn how to do it.
Isaiah 52
If you are caught in a problem, God make you an escape artist.
Just like in the old days, they used to take Houdini, who was an escape artist, and they’d chain him up.
Sometimes they’d put him in the chest and throw him in a river, and he just had so much time to get himself out of those chains and unlock that trunk, or he would drown. Very dangerous work, you know. You’d get killed that way.
But you know what God has done for us today? He’s allowed us to almost have the same thing. Here we are chained, and many of us are finding that the restrictions are because God just leads us into certain dealings in our life.
And here we are, restrained. Now, does that mean he wants us to die? No. But there’s a time limit on it, just like there was with Houdini. How long can you hold your breath? And it’s just the same thing.
And then the Lord tosses us the key to all the locks, and he says, here, here it is. Here’s my promise. Here’s the ministry I prophesied over you.
And you say, what good is that going to do? Well, you get to work on it and work fast, brother, sister, because you don’t have much time. You get out of those chains, and you throw them off. Throw off your bonds, old captive daughter of Zion. Get rid of them fast. Get yourself free.
When God started this whole thing that He’s doing of making sons that are going to reign with Jesus Christ throughout eternity, worlds, and ages without end, do you know that He knew what He was doing?
He made a world. He made everything with just one word, He created the physical world. They’re still trying to measure its depth and its length. They can’t find the end of it. That was just one word.
Then He turned around and created situations on that world that would limit you.
He made a man, gave him a free will so that he could experience what happens when you chose to do your own will, instead of his will for you. Instead of experiencing life, you experience death.
Then he subjected the world to futility for man’s sake, so that he might learn not to trust in himself, but in God. Now he is going to have to learn everything the hard way by toil and the sweat of his face.
Every time the man leans to his own understanding, he will once again make the wrong choice, so shake yourself from the dust, arise; Sit down on your throne, because the Lord subjected creation to futility with the hope that man would awake, and lose creation from futility, fulfilling the destiny of who God created him to be.
ISAIAH 52
The fall of man caused man to have a lot of limitations. He can’t jump very high, because he’s bound by the law of gravity. He can’t run very fast, because he’s in the limitations of a physical body. He can’t see very far, and so his horizons are definitely limited. He gave him imagination. He gave him a few things that don’t seem to do him too awfully much good in many cases at getting rid of his bondages.
Here man sits with all the restrictions and all the limitations. Here he is with all of his bondages. Here he is.
And if he becomes a Christian, then God adds a few more mountains and things in the way, rivers that are uncrossable. And then he says, Now, because you believe on me, I’m going to give you one thing. I’ll give you my word. I’ll give him my promise. And if you want to break through these limitations, you just start believing his word. You can do it.
Or you can sit there and doubt and waver and be a slave of your restrictions and limitations the rest of your life.
But if you decide, I’m going to believe, you’re going to get up out of that dust and you’re going to climb on the throne, you’re going to start binding and loosing and it’s going to be bound and loosing heaven.
You just never start believing God for things that’s going to happen. But God’s put you in this fix.
You can blame the devils that are barking like nipping dogs around you all the time.
You can blame the circumstances. You can blame the restrictions.
You can blame your ancestors. You can blame your descendants, you know? You can blame everything. Sometimes your descendants, the children, cause you a lot of problems. That’s what they say now. They say insanity is really hereditary. You catch it from your children. That’s the way it happens.
But with all of the things that happen, you can blame everybody, you can blame everything.
But in the final analysis, you’re going to open your heart to the Lord and say, Here, I believe a promise from God, and I’m going to cast off my bonds. Hallelujah. Cast off your bondage. Get rid of that chain around your neck, oh captive daughter of Zion. Climb up on your throne. Shake the dust off. Let’s go.
It’s time to move into all that God commands us and says that we shall have. And publish the glad tidings to Zion thy God reigneth.
He’s on the throne. He’s ready to help you. Oh, praise the Lord.
Now, one more verse that we’ll expound. The verses are all good, but one I’m going to call your attention to, verse 11.
Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence. Has anybody ever been to thence? All right. Depart from thence, touch no unclean thing. Go ye out from the midst of earth, cleanse yourselves, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord. And you’ll not go out in haste, neither shall you go out by flight. For the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your re-award.
All right, what does it mean? Depart from thence. Well, this, of course, is talking to the captive daughter of Zion in Babylon. Come out of Babylon, my people. Be not a partaker of your sins. Are you in Babylon? Where is Babylon? And what is Babylon?
Babylon is wherever there’s a believer who still has a chain around his neck. Babylon is wherever there’s a believer that’s sitting down and weeping because he does not have his inheritance in God.
Babylon is wherever people open to worship and there’s no worship in the Spirit. Babylon’s everywhere. And there’s always a little bit of Babylon in all of us.
But it’s saying so beautifully, depart ye. Come on, time to leave. Depart ye from thence. Touch no unclean thing. Get out of the midst her. Go ye out of the midst of her. Cleanse yourselves, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord.
What a time to cry to God for righteousness and holiness. but not in haste or in flight. You’re not being pursued out of Babylon; you’re leaving it voluntarily.
There’s nothing driving you out, but Zion is enticing you, and the Lord is leading you before and behind, and you’re going forth to do His will. Lord, help us.
The cry will go out even stronger than ever before, as it says in Revelation. Come out of Babylon, my people. Be not a partaker of her sins. Don’t be a partaker of her judgments. God’s calling his people.
You know something? We’re going to rise and begin the march out of Babylon to Zion. God is restoring and bringing forth a real liberation and victory to the people of God.
Are you bound? Are you in Babylon? Is there the restrictions and bondages on you? You’re like one of God’s children in exile. Maybe you’re tired of all those years that you’ve been wandering and you wish you could get back. Wish you could get back to freedom and liberty and victory.
Babylon is wherever there’s a bound believer. Let’s get out of it. Let’s move out of it fast. It’s time to move into all that God commands us and says that we shall have. Thy God reigneth.