God is teaching us by a Living Word how to walk on the new and distinctly different level that has been introduced to us recently.
Isaiah 58 is the famous chapter on the fast that the Lord has chosen for us to keep. We will read verses 13 and 14, which speak specifically of the Sabbath.
If because of the sabbath, you turn your foot, from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord honorable, and shall honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure, and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
The whole chapter emphasizes the fact that we are to turn away from what we would seek, even in fasting. We do not fast to make our voice heard on high. We are not fasting to create some battering ram to get through and persuade God to do something He never intended to do.
Rather, there is to be a submission to the will of the Lord and a delight in His will. If you turn your foot away from the course of life you would follow that day and begin to call the Sabbath a delight, to call it holy and honorable as God calls it, you will not despise it.
When you stop seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then God says, “You make Me your delight and this is what I will do for you—I will make you to ride the high places of the earth.”
I realize that if I am going to serve God or be related to His people, I do not pick the people I want to be related to, nor do I say, “I will be related to them if they meet certain conditions which I set up for my friends or my relationships.” We do not serve nor do we love on our own terms; we do it on God’s terms. Therefore the title of this message is a question: “On Whose Terms?”
We are going through a time of sifting. For the simple reason that God is laying down the terms: “You are going to walk with Me.” Things He may have excused on the other levels, He is not excusing now, because you would be tripped up by them. You may have been saying, “I will be related to the body, but on my terms. If I don’t like it, I will make it known. If I am not getting what I want out of this relationship in the body, then I’m not going to play church anymore; I’m not going to be involved.”
On whose terms are you going to serve God? On whose terms are you going to be set in the body? God is already cutting things off. The judgment seat of Christ was introduced at the Feast of Tabernacles. Things are being brought to the judgment and are being cut down. It is taking place now.
This is one of the most serious times the body has ever faced. It is the most serious time for any relationship existing within the body: the relationship between husbands and wives, between parents and children, and between brothers and sisters—whether on natural or spiritual lines.
We are not going to serve God on our terms nor relate to one another on our terms. This is being cut off. You may count it as disaster, but it is not. God wants you to get rid of the self-assertiveness that puts you in the driver’s seat. You are not to say, “When I like the word, I will walk in it, but if I don’t like it and it doesn’t agree with my ideas, I will not be a part of it.” That attitude is not going to prevail. We will find keys to this message in II Timothy 2:3–10. Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
We are coming into the place now where we will either be in the army of the Lord, or we will not. You may feel that you just like the idea of coming to worship and enjoy the beautiful part—the presence of the Lord. But you are going to measure up to what God wants you to be, or you are not. You yourself are the one who must make the dedication to walk with God, to be what He wants you to be.
I am facing that I cannot fulfill the ministry God has given me on my terms. I cannot relate myself to the brethren on my terms. I cannot deal with pastors on my terms or in my wisdom. I cannot deal with the churches in my own wisdom or in the way I would like to see them function. This is not mine to do; it is the Lord’s house and these are the Lord’s people.
I must find what God wants and then I must delight to do it. It must be absolutely that way. If it rubs against the grain and against the flesh—that does not make one bit of difference! It is God’s show, and we are going to do it His way.
This must also be understood where young people are concerned. A young man and a young woman fall in love and they begin to work things out. Usually there are certain characteristics or tendencies in one or the other and they begin making adjustments to each other. They spend about five years of their lives making these adjustments, only to find they have missed the will of God.
Those adjustments should have been to the will of God, not to themselves or to some selfish idea they had of what they wanted in a marriage. What God wanted in that marriage should have governed the whole situation, and then they would have had a very happy marriage, and He would have let them ride upon the high places of the earth.
In these adjustments a man conforms a little because he wants to please his wife and show her that he loves her. So he begins to automatically adapt himself to her ways of thinking, to her emotions and her feelings. She does the same thing because she wants to do everything she can to please her husband. They end up making a very poor job of pleasing each other and they have not pleased the Lord at all.
On whose terms do you serve God? If it is not on your terms, will you decide not to play anymore, and take your marbles and go home? Are you serving on God’s terms or on your terms?
Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.
He pleases the one who chose him to be a soldier. He may not please himself or live for his comforts. Some very difficult assignments may be given to him, but he has to be careful to please the one who chose him to be a soldier.
And also if any one competes as an athlete, he does not win the prize unless he competes according to the rules. We have a great liberty but we still have to face the fact that we are going to run the race, and fight the battle in the way God wants. The end does not justify the means.
In this Walk everything will be absolutely on God’s terms or it will not succeed. We will compete according to the rules He lays down. We cannot say that the end justifies whatever means we want to use. It does not. It will be done according to God’s direction and leading.
The hard-working farmer ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops. Consider what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descendent of David, according to my gospel; for which I suffer hardship even to imprisonment as a criminal, but the word of God is not imprisoned. For this reason I endure all things for the sake of those who are chosen, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus and with it eternal glory.
I don’t think Paul chose to be put in prison or to be beaten. But he endured all those things for the sake of the elect.
God raises up different types of people for us to minister to but we are not in it because the leaders necessarily like the personality of all the followers. We are in it because God put a love in our hearts for one another and said, “This is the way you serve one another. This is the way you become addicted to one another’s service and blessing. In honor you prefer one another. You seek not your own, but the other person’s welfare.” These principles are laid down. It is not what you like; it is what God ordains and what He said. And this is very humbling.
You may be set in the body and find that God has put you with someone who irritates you. You are going to learn to walk with them and be one with them. You will learn to do just the thing God sets before you, with all of your heart, your soul, your mind and your strength.
There is no place here for a personality clash. Your whims and disposition, your jealousies and ambitions are just not going to exist. Not only that, but some may even have a difficult time getting God to restore them to a relationship in the body because of the fact that person is not going to walk with God.
On whose terms do we go ahead on this new level? We will be led absolutely by the Spirit of the Lord and on God’s terms you will serve.
We turn now to the story about the ark being brought back to Jerusalem. But when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out toward the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen nearly upset it. And the anger of the Lord burned against Uzzah, and God struck him down there for his irreverence; and he died there by the ark of God. And David became angry (notice this) because of the Lord’s outburst against Uzzah, and that place is called Perez-uzzah (which means the breach, the break-through upon Uzzah; he was killed) to this day. So David was afraid of the Lord that day; and he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?”
And David was unwilling to move the ark of the Lord into the city of David with him; but David took it aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. Thus the ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months, and the Lord blessed Obed-edom and all his household. Now it was told King David, saying, “The Lord has blessed the house of Obed-edom and all that belongs to him on account of the ark of God.” And David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David with gladness. II Samuel 6:6–12.
God did not change; the situation did not change. David was the one who changed. It was to be done God’s way.
The Word of the Lord had directed that the ark was to be carried on the shoulders of the priests. It would never have upset David, if he had done it God’s way.
But he planned that the Ark of the Covenant should be carried on the cart, and when the oxen went over a rough place, the ark was about to fall off. Uzzah put forth his hand to steady it, which also was against the word. If we are going to do God’s work, we are going to do it God’s way. We will relate God’s way.
Relationships develop within the body which seem to make certain changes in our thinking. We start out with a pure idea of walking with God, but before we have gone very far, we begin to relate to one another on a personal, human level with our little ideas getting in the way. God will purify this Walk with Him. A pure word will come forth. It will not be contaminated by any of our opinions about what is to be. We will seek anew that the word be pure and unadulterated, without any ideas you and I might have.
I am also applying this to myself. I have pastored people a little to have certain set ideas. That may be fine except for one thing—they may have belonged to another level.
God is bringing us unto a new level, and we may find ourselves doing things in an entirely different way and thinking differently than we have before. I am laying the whole thing before the Lord.
There is nothing in my life I am not laying afresh before the Lord, for Him to have His will absolutely and exactly the way He wants it. This is probably one of the purest declarations of how we are moving into the new level that we have had for some time.
Jesus said, Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you…. John 15:16. The Lord is in the driver’s seat. And He has ordained that we go forth and bear much fruit. This is very important for us to remember.
There will be many things rubbing us the wrong way. Many things in this Walk with God that will trouble us because we are actually learning to think and to react to one another on a divine level instead of a human level.
This will shake marriages, it will shake the relationship between those who are engaged to be married, between boys and girls. It will shake the relationship that exists between pupils and teachers, between parents and children, between elders and people, and between the elders themselves.
God will shake everything. You are not going to respond to each other on the human level. That may have happened and it may be happening, but God is cutting it off. You will have to find a whole new spiritual basis for your relationships instead of a relationship on the human level.
You may say, “But I have had promises from God.” Yes, those promises from God had to do with His perfect will, not your perfect will. They had to do with your relationship to God. And all of those things will come to pass if God’s will is being done.
God’s will is not just mechanically doing the right thing. Sometimes young people say, “We had a word over us and we know it is in the will of God that we get married.” This can be the greatest deception in the world. People can be chosen by God, foreordained to walk together, but if they do not find the will of God, if they still relate on a human level, the will of God will never be done in their lives, even if it was the right choice that God willed.
You can say, I know God has set me in this body of believers. I know I am in the will of God. God set me here.” But if you live and react on that human plane instead of coming into the perfect will of God, you are still out of the will of God even if you are in the will of God by being set in a body of believers. Do you understand that paradox?
You may say, “Well, I know God set me here.” Fine—but He did not set you here to minister to one another on a human level or to be defeated. He is calling us up to a higher level and it is upon this level that the will of God is perfectly fulfilled. I don’t want to be displeased with the Lord as David was.
I will give you another warning. Do not react to this word on a human level. Do not be displeased with the teachings, for that can eliminate you so fast. Just because we may not understand it all, we cannot flip over it. God is the one who wrote the Book. It was not written to please us; it was God working out His plan. He never did say, “This is My word which I am going to make so palatable and agreeable to you that you will jump up and down over all the teaching you see there.”
The things that God speaks are not palatable on the human level. If you stop and think about it, you will realize that the Communion is not palatable. “Unless you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).
When Jesus said that, the Jews left Him; they did not want anything more to do with Him. Jesus said to the rest, “Will you also go?” He had said something that was utterly abhorrent to them because of their upbringing and their traditions. “Eat My flesh and drink My blood.” They would never touch blood.
What about our worship? You may say, “I don’t like it; I would rather be Old Order in my worship.” We are going to love it because God is in it. If six months from now God turns it around, and we all worship some other way, we are all going to like that.
Whether we worship the way we do today or not, we will follow the will of God and we will like it. We are going to think the way God wants us to think and feel the way God wants us to feel, because we are chosen to be the servants and handmaidens of the Lord, the instruments in the hand of God at an hour of destiny in the world.
Relinquish this idea that something of your own arrogance has a right to come up in your emotions—in jealousy, in likes and dislikes, in prejudice—and stand in the way of God.
You may object to divine order and submission or to a relationship that God has ordered for you. You may argue, “I am fulfilling the relationship exactly the way I see it.” It is not the way God sees it and that is a little bit different! What will happen if we don’t do it God’s way? We are at the judgment seat right now. I wish this could be written on the tablets of men’s hearts so they would remember it. It is so very, very important.
What does it mean for us to walk with God today? The answer is in two Scriptures: Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If any one wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it. For what will a man be profited, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? Matthew 16:24–26.
If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and take counsel whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks terms of peace. So therefore, no one of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions. Luke 14:26–33.
We cannot simply sing it and talk it. We are brought now to the level where we live it in every way. We live it, not on our terms, but on His terms.
Lord, our hearts have heard a word and this word is true. We are not going to obtain all the promises, their fulfillment, the deliverance, and the salvation that God will minister when we are asking by our own rules, in our own way.
We are going to obtain it by giving ourselves wholly over to the will of the Lord. This is not so difficult. It just requires, Lord, that we face what we are, that we are the sons of God and we are going to think like sons of God. We’re going to believe and react like sons of God.
You have been speaking to us for some time now. Lord, you will help us to turn away from our bondage, to be loosed from our bondage to the human level of reaction and thinking and come into what You want us to be, completely.
We can do this because this is what You are leading for. You have set a Word before us and we shall not say, “Oh, this is a hard saying. Who can hear it?” We are going to say, “It is a hard saying, but God can work it in our hearts. It will be a real thing.”
Search us, Lord. We lay our hearts before You; we wish to desire Your will above everything else. Forgive us where we have been rebellious. Forgive us where we have followed our own way. Lord, You deal with us.
I ask You, Lord, that the human level of thinking never enter in and muddy the stream of apostolic teaching and revelation. It cannot be—of all men it would be judged more quickly than anything else, if I would fail You, Lord. Oh God, let my words and meditations be acceptable in Your sight. Let it be what You think, what You feel, what You want in me, Lord; let me be a perfect channel in all my reactions, in everything for the glory of God. Not only work it there, make me a first partaker of it.
Oh God, we could become so opinionated. We can become so prejudiced without even feeling that we are prejudiced. We can become smug and complacent because we have been changed so much by the word we have been hearing that we forget there is still a great work to be done.
Loose us, oh Lord, from anything in our thinking that still clings to the old level, because we are going to walk with You. We want to be Your servants and Your handmaidens. Amen.”