Come, and hear, all ye that fear God, And I will declare what he hath done for my soul. I cried unto him with my mouth, And he was extolled with my tongue. If I regard (or if I had looked with favor, if I had approved), iniquity in my heart, The Lord will not hear: But verily God hath heard; He hath attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, Who hath not turned away my prayer, Nor his lovingkindness from me. Psalms 66:16–20.
When you are in a period of intercession, or seeking the face of God in worship, or any exercise in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, there is an attitude that brings quick results—you must think like God thinks.
Many people have the attitude that the Word of God is not really essential to them, but you must read the Word.
A prophet is one who has God’s word; but he has more than just a word from God that he might receive and prophesy in the church. The sum total of all his thinking, attitudes, and responses is identified with God’s thinking and His responses.
He has thought God’s thoughts after Him; he has been moved with what moves God; he seeks what God seeks, and is concerned about the Kingdom of God more than his own interests. He has that same attitude that is in the heart of God.
Christ said, “Be ye perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), so he finds himself, day after day, echoing God in the earth. Then God has a prophet indeed.
Our attitude toward everything within our lives has to be according to that. If we look upon iniquity with favor in our hearts then God Himself condemns that iniquity and does not hear us.
That which opens the door to Him is when our response is the same as God’s. In the great passages on prayer, the Lord teaches us how to pray and to seek His face, and then He says, “When ye stand praying, forgive, even as God forgave you” (Mark 11:25). In our seeking and praying, we can seek to pray in the will of God, and want the will of God with all of our hearts, and yet that which can break the contact is if we think differently than God does toward iniquity in our hearts.
When we come to the Communion, we must abhor evil. We must not only abhor it in a brother or sister or in the world, but we must look in our own hearts and say, “This I hate.”
It is a human tendency to see what is in our neighbor and condemn it, and look at that which is within ourselves and have many good reasons and sympathetic thoughts about why we permit it to exist. There can be no pet sins that you hang onto, “This is just a little one.”
When we flee Sodom and Gomorrah, let us get clear out of the country, because the fire will fall. When Lot was fleeing he said, “But Lord, just behold, this is a little city, is it not a little one? It is not too big a problem—let me stop with my daughters here.” “No, that whole plain is going to be destroyed” (Genesis 19).
When we come out from iniquity that has been condemned, we should flee from it. If we look back upon it with favor as Lot’s wife did, we shall turn into a pillar of salt. If we do not go too far, but just a little way, we are still in trouble. We cannot stop at the suburbs of Babylon. We dare not linger in the vicinity of Sodom and Gomorrah, but we must come to the place where we look upon the iniquity, the thing of the flesh, and hate it. We hate it with everything that is within us, and as we come to think as God thinks concerning it, we hate it almost violently.
Have you prayed that way yourself? Have you come to the Communion and seen that trait in yourself that has come out again and again, and you cry out to God in an agony?
When you feel as God feels toward the problems that you see within your heart, God will hear you, because the doors are open in mercy, He will hear you. We have learned to ask, to seek, and to knock persistently; and we find, we receive, and it is opened.
Do not come into the house of the Lord and suddenly blank out the problems that exist in your own life. Come to the Communion altar and say, “By Your mercy, Lord, I rejoice in all that You are bringing forth in me, but I hate the remnants of the flesh that remain; this I abhor, this I want done; I want an end to it in the name of the Lord.” God will hear you. “But if I look with favor upon iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”
The great principle behind this message is how oneness with God and His purposes, His attitudes, His Word, is still the greatest key of prayer we can ever know.
Prayer: Draw me and I will run after Thee, O Lord; pull my soul toward Thee, and let there not be within me that which forgets Lot’s wife. Let me not look back: no desiring after that which is condemned by God, or about to be judged by Him.
All sin is such a filthy and evil thing. There shall be no glamour of the world in our minds or hearts. We shall not find something drawing us, (even though we walk in the way of the Lord), that in our hearts makes us want to look back and think that there is still something good in it.
All that is in the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lusts thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.
Father, search our hearts for this is an hour that we must have that honesty within our hearts. Let there be no fond memories of Egypt in us; let there be no longing after the leeks and the garlic and the melon of Egypt with the fleshpots.
Let not our soul abhor this light bread of manna that comes to feed us, but O God, let us delight continually that we are redeemed out of the hand of the enemy.
All that pertained to the life under bondage we abhor, and we turn away from with all of our heart, with all of our soul.
Oh, let there be that within us that rises up and says, “Bless Thy name, O Lord of Hosts. Thou has wrought righteousness within us, and all of our desire and expectancy shall be in You.”
We shall delight ourselves in the Lord; He shall continually be the joy of our hearts, and His Words the occasion of our rejoicing. We shall rejoice in Thy judgments, O Lord. Whatsoever that Thou hast said, that our soul shall cleave to, in the name of the Lord.
Forgive us, O Lord, if the world yet has a pull, if the glitter and the empty tinsel of the old flesh life still seems to catch our eye. Remove it far from us; uproot it completely from us.
O Lord, the vanity of the world, and its emptiness must be a thing that our hearts hate. O God, we would hate it with a perfect hatred; we would see that it is the course of death and destruction, but our hearts shall cleave unto life that floweth from Thee.
We repent of sin, and we repent of any attitude toward sin that is not right in Thy sight; let us hate it. Let us come to Thee, O Lord, not regarding any iniquity in our hearts with any favor or approval, but saying, “O Lord, fill us with Thy righteousness, for we do hunger and thirst after it.”
A Right Spirit Renewed Through Humility
This shall be a day that the people of the Lord shall approach the altars of the Lord eagerly: for it shall be as a fire that burneth upon the altars, a sacrifice; and there shall we present unto the Lord our bodies a living sacrifice.
There shall we see a right spirit renewed in us; there shall the Lord bring forth the brokenness and the contriteness of heart that is pleasing and acceptable in His sight.
This day shall we not humble ourselves in the face of the Lord; shall we not open our hearts unto the Lord? And yea, the Lord shall be entreated.
We shall come before Him because He hath taught us His ways. We shall come before Him because He hath made known unto us His word; He hath revealed unto us His plan, and His working in all the earth, and our soul shall delight in it.
We shall turn away from the pursuits that hath filled the hearts of men—their ambitions shall not be our ambitions, their goals shall not be our goals.
Behold, their energies are spent for that which wasteth and satisfieth not, but our energies shall be spent even as the Lord of Hosts directs us in all of His grace.
Yea, this shall be a day when he that hath cried for a right spirit shall find it renewed within his heart as he humbles himself before the face of the Lord. Amen.