When God speaks to us about love, telling us how to enter into it, Satan hates it because it is one of the great keys to worship. We’ve heard about love, but learning how to open up to it has been difficult, and when the teaching comes, Satan begins to move in.
One thing that enables us to move in love is the fact that we stand on His perfect love and His perfect provision for us. Nothing else works. If you were the devil, what would you do to stop people who were on the verge of moving into a great flow of love? If you want to know what the devil would do, just think like the devil for a minute. In the first place, he has been working at damning men’s souls for a long time and he’s become quite proficient at it. He knows what gets to people. So the first thing he does is to bring enough conflicts to get you confused, so you will start warring and battling him. It’s the strategy of distraction. You forget all about entering into love when you’re busy warring against the enemy.
Satan isn’t going to keep you from your walk with the Lord for a single minute, but he’s going to render your walk as ineffective as he can. So he uses the distraction of conflict to bring you into confusion; and that confusion leads you to battle him. What have you done then? You have allowed yourself to be moved off the premise of faith, to think, “The whole thing is lost”; to ask, “Where did the victory of Jesus go?” to say, “I’ve got to battle the devil and to take a stance, “Come on devils, we’ll fight it out!” When this happens, the devil is very pleased because he has drawn you from a position of victory in Christ to one of warring against him.
Satan is the defeated foe. That is a fact you must never forget! If we want to loose a service, we proclaim the Lord’s victory, the completeness of the victory He has given to us. A service under satanic attack can change in just a few minutes by our quoting Scripture and prophesying, but not by thinking, “Now get in there and fight.” We’re not going to move out of the victory of Christ to fight the battle all over again. The war was won over 1900 years ago and it doesn’t have to be fought again. If Satan can get you to fight it again, it would be useless, and besides, you wouldn’t win. the world needs only one Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ. It needs to stand in His perfect victory, to just stand there. We’re not struggling up to victory, but that’s what the confusion and conflict would indicate if you were to listen to the devil. We are seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. We are more than conquerors. He’s made a perfect provision for us.
Now all we have to do to dispel the confusion which hits our spirit in satanic assault is to rise up and proclaim that victory. Speak it positively. We are blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Speak it. Not a long sermon about it; just speak it. Quote a Scripture, give a word, give a prophecy, sing a psalm—anything—as long as you position yourself firmly, “I stand on the victory of Jesus Christ! I won’t be moved. I won’t be discouraged. I won’t be distracted. Nothing will get to my spirit—no heaviness, no emotional assault—because I am a conqueror in Jesus Christ. He made me that.”
When a man is born in Jesus Christ, remember this is his heritage: For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. I John 5:4. So, we stand in that victory. We were born with that heritage—born to be free, born to be conquerors, born to come forth into His own image, to be led from glory to glory, to be one of the many sons He brings to glory. This is our heritage. This is the thing that is wrought in our spirit now—right now! It doth not yet appear what we shall be. So it doesn’t yet appear, but still we are now the children of God. And we have received the Holy Spirit which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession. We’ve been sealed by the long-promised Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13–14).
It’s done. You’re sealed. You’re marked. You’re branded, little maverick. You belong in the heavenly roundup. You’re His and you proclaim your victory. When you were born into Him, you inherited everything that he wrought for you. You inherit it—it’s your divine heritage. Proclaim it! Sing it! It’s your victory in the Lord. He is our victory!
In this walk in the Spirit we do not have too many things to battle. We have entered into such a joyfulness in the Lord that the world no longer pulls us. We feel freer. We have felt that marvelous anointing of the Lord. The only thing that we have to fear now is that in our coming together there would not be the measure of ministry to you that you need.
It is very easy to leave a service and not have what we should have. That can happen when the gifts and the ministries operate on an old-order level, until we have performers and an audience of spectators. When I see that happening, I use any means to get everyone to participate, so the service becomes body ministry instead of an audience watching different people perform. Even though the gifts of the Spirit are manifested with good prophecies one by one, or good psalms one by one, when it begins to smack of a performance, we all tend to do our little thing. We must not be content with that. We must have that which can take the babes who are newly saved and bring them into services where they can begin to participate and immediately gravitate to the spiritual level of that church. I’m concerned that they come up into it almost instantly and bypass the long and painful old-order way of growing, with ups and downs and ins and outs and round and rounds. We can assimilate and lift people up quickly if we get them to come to the body and participate. They can prophesy to one another, exhort, edify (really build up), comfort (overcoming anything wrong in their spirits), and sing before the Lord. Filled with the Spirit of the Lord, we sing and make melody in our hearts to Him.
This is why we sometimes use antiphonal responses. It may seem ridiculous to some, and we may not always have to use it to any great extent, but it is a good tool when we need it; and we need it while we are learning to flow together. After a while, we’ll have trained ourselves to participate with every individual, because that is body ministry. Body ministry is the body making increase of itself in love. The great flow through all of its members makes body ministry the most important thing we do.
Some services are an experience. I speak and the people Amen the word. They almost grab onto a truth before the sentence is ended. They receive the Word as it comes by openly responding to it. It doesn’t fall to the ground; it doesn’t even get a chance to bounce once because they are seizing and devouring it.
This is body ministry: an anointing to hear, an anointing to participate, an anointing to take a brother and pull him right into a new spiritual level, so that even the babes coming in can prophesy by virtue of the high level of anointing that is upon the whole body, rather than by what they have to work up to as an individual. The day of individuality is giving way to that distinctive way the body receives and bolsters each individual.
How do we put this into action? Slow and easy. Choose someone who is unaccustomed to singing psalms (because he will do so with a kind of fear and trembling) to get up and sing a nice little psalm concerning the things that have just happened in the service, reiterating them to whatever melody the Lord gives him. Then begin antiphonal singing. The congregation should recognize that although this psalmist may have a good voice, he doesn’t habitually do this; and he has been chosen so the people will bless him as he sings, drawing forth the psalm from him. They will begin to feel it hitting them, almost like waves, as they bless him and draw out the song. Don’t let the song end too soon.
Anyone, even in the most fearful state, would soon overcome his fears if he knew the body was going to support him in a conscious effort toward body ministry, by listening uncritically, not analyzing, but desiring only to woo forth the gifts from their brother.
The yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing (Isaiah 10:27). As we speak of our victory in Christ, the anointing in the service will mount higher and higher, and soon you will realize that much time has passed since you even gave a thought to spiritual conflict. You refused to accept that diversionary action, knowing you had been loosed and made free in the Lord.
Sometimes you sing out at maximum volume, but sometimes intensity is best expressed in a whisper, as you worship Him softly, as His family, concentrating on His very presence. Sense His moving on you like a sweet, gentle breeze blowing over your place of worship. Then let the volume become a little stronger and yet a little stronger.
It is not only important to teach the ministries who lead the worship; it is important also that the congregation be taught. The spirit of a service is sweet when the worshipers are easily led. They must be trained until their spirits are easily entreated, and it is easy for them to sing and do what God says in the Scriptures: let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly; in all wisdom, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord (Ephesians 5:19).
We have to learn flexibility; it isn’t always natural to us. By nature we are children of habit and of conformity to those habits. But in the Spirit we learn flexibility and the infinite variety of manifestations within the creativity of God. As an illustration of this, think of all the different kinds of apples God made and the hundreds of varieties of roses in His creation. Now He tells us that there is also diversity in the manifestations of ministries, but it is the same Spirit.
God is a God of variety. Why should we come to church and be bored because we are in a rut, when the Spirit constantly draws us into His variety? You probably receive something more than usual when there is an unusual presentation. You can get to the place where you hear the same words over and over again, and they don’t register. But when God brings a little variety in the moving of the Spirit, those same words suddenly come alive to you.
Your mind can even get in a rut through memorized Scripture. It’s difficult for me to read the King James version of the Bible, because it has become so familiar to me from a lifetime of reading and memorizing it. I can close my eyes and almost see the next verses. I begin to read and in two or three minutes it suddenly dawns on me that not a bit of it is registering. When I realized that the King James version was not feeding me because I was too accustomed to it, I began buying different translations. I would read a passage first in one translation, then in another, and then in still another. I find that the wording of the different presentations causes the truth to come through clearly.
We must be eternally vigilant to fight the ruts and the trickiness of our own minds. When traveling to a new place for the first time or two, you are unaccustomed to the road and your mind registers almost everything you see. But as the trip becomes a familiar habit, your mind registers less and less and soon the trip becomes a boring rut that you travel mechanically.
God deliver us from the ruts. Help us every day to come into worship as fresh as though we had never traveled that route before, as if we had never before worshiped the Lord, but had wanted to all of our lives. God help us, so that every time we say, “Praise the Lord,” it isn’t just some old phrase that we repeat over and over again until we almost trip over it.
Sometimes I hear people get in little prayer ruts by repeatedly using certain phrases and approaches. Let’s get out of those ruts. I think that love requires that we keep a freshness. Every time a man looks at his sweetheart, it should be as though it were for the first time. He should be thinking, “I’ve never really seen you before, Honey. I didn’t remember that you looked so beautiful.” If we have that freshness, we will keep our love alive, but if we get in a ho-hum rut, soon our love will be that way too.
God is saying to us, “Come before Me and love Me with all your heart and soul, all your mind and strength.” Each time we come before the Lord, to adore and love Him, we should visualize or fantisize a different aspect of His nature. We could imagine how He appeared to Abraham or how He appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and approach Him in that way. You may say, “That seems wrong to me.” Then what does He look like? How are you going to picture Him? God is a spirit, and it is very difficult to get an image in your mind of a spirit. But we can picture the ways He manifests Himself to men, because in each of those times He tries to show us what He really is like as a spirit.
Come before Him afresh each time. Surprise yourself. Say, “Today the Lord will be to me like the burning bush; tomorrow I’ll come to Him as though He were the angel of the Lord who wrestled with Jacob.” Approach Him each time with a freshness in your spirit that says, “I love the Lord, and I’ll never let our relationship get shabby. It will never become commonplace.”
Always pick up your Bible reverently, not to make a fetish out of it, but never let it become commonplace. Treat it as though you were opening and reading a love letter, thinking, “I’m going to find the face of my beloved in these pages today.” Approach the Lord with that freshness of spirit. Train yourself to do it. I do. I don’t think you ever have heard or read a sermon in which you felt that my attitude to the Lord was commonplace, that He wasn’t the most exciting person in the world to me. He is that way to me. I see to it that I set the Lord always before me.
Let us magnify the Lord. Let us adore Him. Let us come before Him, making Him real to our hearts every time. It’s up to us. When you come to worship the Lord, stay out of the ruts. Stay out of the normal way of doing things. I know you are creatures of habit and when the first leader jumps over the fence, like dutiful sheep, you all take a run at it and jump over the fence too. If the leader jumps in a ditch, you jump in a ditch. That quality of being a good sheep, who is easily led, is fine, but in the leader and in the people there must always be a freshness of approach to the Lord. Never lose sight of it for a single minute. Never come to the place where anything leads your heart to say, “Oh, I don’t know whether I want to go to church tonight or not.” Always come with an eager anticipation that would say, “Oh, we’re going to a family reunion tonight,” in the sense that you eagerly await the gathering of the family of God.
From a time of religious persecution in French history, when to be caught with a Bible could mean execution, comes a story about a little girl who was going to a meeting. She had her Bible hidden under some clothes she was carrying, hoping that no one would find it. Some soldiers stopped her and asked where she was going. She answered, “Oh, I must make haste. The family is gathering, and they are going to read my Father’s will.” So the soldiers let her go and soon she was at a gathering of God’s people. Let us have that same attitude: The family will be gathering and they are going to read the Father’s will. We’re going to hear what He wants and we’re going to hear it all afresh.