Hosea 6:3 says, “So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth.”
The charge that God brought against Ephraim and Judah is in Hosea 5:15: … until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction they will earnestly seek Me. That, of course, has been the story of many people. They seek the Lord when the pressure is on them. At no other time do they seek the Lord’s face.
The Lord said in II Chronicles 7:14: “If My people, who are called by My name, humble themselves and pray, and seek My face…” This walk is not based upon that kind of relationship to the Lord at this point. To some extent it is. But Hosea said, “Then shall we know if we follow on,” or, “if we press on to know the Lord.” We ought to get the motivation straight that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the end time is not to be upon a people who follow on to know miracles, signs, and wonders, and to do greater works. That is not the goal. They that do KNOW their God will be strong and do exploits is the prophecy of Daniel (11:32). It is the result of coming into the presence of the Lord and coming to know Him. This is also the theme of the epistles of John. John kept writing, especially in the first epistle, about those who would KNOW the Lord. He was talking to a generation that had never seen the physical body of the Lord Jesus Christ on this earth. He Himself had lived beyond that century. This was an entire generation of people that had come into Christ. And he was talking to them about knowing the Lord.
When Paul wrote to the Philippian church, that was uppermost in his mind. He spoke about the things which were gain to him, and he counted those but loss. All those things—position, background, training—meant nothing to him. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee, and he was of the tribe of Benjamin, etc. All those things he could point to, but he said, “None of these things make any difference to me.” Then what was his goal? “That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and be made conformable to His death” (Philippians 3:3–10). Didn’t Paul know the Lord? Understand that he had seen Him on the way to Damascus, he had a revelation of Him in Arabia, he had many many experiences which showed that he did know the Lord, but the knowledge he wanted of the Lord was far deeper than that.
And this should be the pursuit of every one of us. We should not come to the place of just saying, “I love the Lord, and I know He’s here.” How do you know He’s here? “Because He blessed me”; or, “He healed me”; or, “I know He’s here in the service because prophecies came by His Spirit”; or, “I know He’s here because we were all blessed while we were singing.” The breakthrough will have to be on a higher level than that.
Jesus said to Nicodemus, The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. John 3:8. You do not see the Spirit but you feel it, like a breath of heaven that blows. Yet there is something more than that. A time will come of the awareness of your heart, the awareness for which Paul prayed—“that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18). You will come to know Him.
There is an old song that we no longer sing: “I shall know Him by the prints of the nails in his hands.” You are going to be hard up if you have to go around looking for His nail prints before you know the Lord. That is not the way you are going to know Him. The truth is, that after the resurrection, people did not know the Lord until there was a spiritual opening to it. The two on the way to Emmaus—their eyes were withheld, that they did not even know Him when they saw Him in a resurrected body. Yet He had the nail prints there (Luke 24:13–16). He used the doubting of Thomas to say, “Look, see the wound in My side? Don’t be doubtful, but believing. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:27–29). The real miracle of revelation is a thing of Spirit.
We must learn how to enter into the presence of the Lord, and we must understand Him. We must listen to His voice. We must worship Him. We must adore Him. There will be a communion, and then shall we know: “So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth.” Hosea 6:3.
As you look up, like the spring rain beginning to fall—beautiful … warm … moisture from heaven … coming down like beautiful little diamonds splattering your face … refreshing—pressing on to know Him, He will come to you as the rain. You will be looking up to Him, and there it will be.
As we stand before the Lord as a body of people worshiping Him with all our heart, at times we will literally feel and see like little silver raindrops splattering on our faces. God anoints us as it is coming down. Basically, you don’t walk with God unless you learn to wait on God, until you have an awareness of Him and a sense of His presence, until you have taken down the walls, and until you have been able to dominate your sensual focus that is upon everything around you—what you see, what you hear, the circumstances—responding to all of the sensual evidence of things about you which have distracted you until the Lord moves your way and you don’t even sense Him, you don’t even know.
The Lord is going to move that all away from His people. This Walk is going to take another turn. It is not taking a turn toward the multitudes, it is turning toward God. We are drawing closer and closer unto the Lord. As we draw closer to the Lord, what about all the other people? They will be drawn. If He is lifted up, if He is exalted, He will draw all men unto Himself (John 12:32). In His victory, in His love, in His holy presence, this is all going to happen.
Throughout the Old Testament we find the phrase, “Seek My face.” He rebuked them that they did not seek His face. Some of those old phrases we have read a thousand times, and I wonder if we really get them yet. What does it mean to seek the face of the Lord? What does it mean to seek His face? To come before Him that you can look upon Him? Oh, not with literal sight, but to come before Him until you are aware that there is an encounter; you have met your God; you are prostrate before Him; you are bending down upon your knees worshiping the Lord. It is an obeisance unto Him. Everything within you is aware that you have met the Lord.
We should continue to seek this most earnestly. We get along fine until the Lord suddenly says, “Come on. Take a look a little higher. This is what it’s really all about.” When you lose that awareness of the Lord, everything else goes flat, and in your own heart, the whole thing is worthless.
Prophesying goes a little flat. What are prophecies unless you are aware of the Lord speaking? What is a psalm unless you are aware that you are singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord? If the focus isn’t on the Lord in this, just to love Him and adore Him, we’ve missed it all.
This is a revelation directly from God showing us the future course of this walk with God—where we are going. We need more songs that enable us to focus on the Lord. We have had all kinds of songs about the Kingdom; now we need some adoration for the King.
Our services are changed, they are going to change. We are heading into being the people who will be worshipers. Set your will, when you come to the house of God, to no idle talk. Talk outside. Take care of your children’s need before service. Get them inside, but allow no running around. Get down to business. We come together to worship the Lord. We come seriously before the Lord, prepared to magnify Him.
We have been coming closer to this, and we may not break through completely every service, but I would like to see the entire focus on the Lord so real, that to be in the house of the Lord is to have a revelation of His holy presence. God intends that something of worship, praise to the Lord, and His holy presence be manifested continually, by day and by night. We ought to have many songs of straight, pure worship. Everything should be geared to this: “O my soul, all that is within me, bless His holy name” (Psalm 103:1). “Remove from me, O Lord, the distractions of my mind. Bring every thought and imagination into captivity and let them be subject to Thee, O Christ” (II Corinthians 10:5).
All of us have needs. We cast all of our cares upon You, Lord. We are not serving You to have them answered, but we are casting them upon You because we would be undistracted even with our needs. We do not want what we need to be the motivation of our coming into Your presence.
Let everything that is within us bow unto the Lord. Remove from us, Lord, the tormenting distractions that would pull us away and continually change our focus from the Lord until it is upon many things. Forgive our selfcenteredness, O Lord, that we have been occupied with so much attention upon such minor details of our lives. O Lord, we lay ourselves upon the altar again. We come by Thy mercies to present our bodies a living sacrifice, that by day and by night, everything that we are, everything that we have, all of our thoughts shall be focused on Thee, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
The presence of the Lord is with us, but it is as you worship Him and wait upon Him that your awareness of Him takes place. The Lord started talking to me about awareness within relationships. You get married, and after awhile you may become aware of your relationship, that you really do possess each other, and that you are being possessed by the other person. The awareness of it comes.
We have more than we are aware of. The Lord is marvelous in this Walk. The awareness has not hit us yet of what God is doing for us. We need to get into a period of just waiting before Him until His presence is real. When I say practicing it—the word practice, I think, is an abused word—you are more than practicing it. You are taking down the walls of unawareness so the presence of the Lord that is with you becomes real to you. You come to the place that His presence is more real to you than anything else, because you are His. You belong to Him. Your relationship to Him was there all the time, but the awareness of it comes. That is what is wrong with some of you. You are always looking for a word instead of coming into the realization that you really are His people, that you really are His worshipers, and that He is the Lord God Almighty who dwells in our midst.
We are still drawing back from the greatness of God. We are unaware of it, but the Lord is going to make it real to us. The awareness will hit us, and when it hits us we will say, “I had a meeting with God!” That is what a meeting with God really means, anyway. “Well, I waited on the Lord, and the Lord finally gave me a word. I had a meeting with the Lord.” A meeting with the Lord may not mean a word. A meeting with the Lord simply means that you wait before Him until a new awareness of the Lord reaches your life, and it changes everything within you.
To wait on the Lord is the most intense prayer you will ever make. It is a silent unspoken prayer. It is a prayer of listening. It is a prayer of perception. It is a prayer of the unveiling of your spiritual sensitiveness to the Lord.
We come to the Lord and we thirst, and He intends for us to drink. But that’s just one step of it. He intends before we are through that we are going to become fountains. Out of our bellies will flow rivers of living water.
No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better. Luke 5:39.
The Lord shall set before you the new wine of the Kingdom. But beware, for when these things come they shall not appeal to you. For your heart and your tastes are like Israel of old: on the melons, the garlic, and the leeks of Egypt, the fleshpots which you have cultivated a taste for. Beware that thou shalt not loathe the light bread that tasteth like wafers and honey that the Lord shall rain upon you. Be prepared to change your tastes. Reeducate everything within your heart, because you have lived in the day in which, more than you know, you have served self.
But the day before you shall be the day in which you shall delight in nothing more than to come and exalt the Lord, to serve Him and to worship Him. Yet have you come before the Lord with many petitions. You have come before the Lord with many needs. And you have said, “Come, let us go up to the house of the Lord.” But many times it has been to seek for what the Lord could give to you. It has not been to worship the Lord “that He might teach His ways” (Micah 4:2).
The day that comes unto you shall be a day of the Kingdom, in which thou shalt exalt the Lord and the Lord alone. As Isaiah spoke, “Many lords have had dominion over us, but Thou, O Lord, alone, shall be exalted in that day” (Isaiah 26:13). Be prepared that everything that thou hast served shall be put under. And thou shalt find thyself yearning to come to the house of the Lord. Thy assembly shall not be to please the visitor or the stranger. It shall not be to comfort the saints. It shall not be merely to edify one another. But thy coming together shall be for the purpose of the Kingdom: to exalt the Lord, to magnify Him, that ye shall lift your voices together in pure worship of the Lord.
Thou shalt find, more and more, these other things shall be brought low, and thou shalt glorify the Lord. Thou shalt praise Him continually. Yea, thou shalt not say in thy heart, “I am not prepared for the new wine. I am not prepared for even an eternity of standing about His throne and worshiping Him, with no other preoccupation, nothing at all.” But, behold, there are creatures that so adore Him, that continually day and night they praise Him and they magnify Him, and they ask for no other thing, no other existence than to live and to exist in his sight, to praise Him and to worship Him. And the Lord shall bring that pure hunger and that pure desire to us until we shall continually exalt the Lord.
Behold, shall not the worship and the praise that we have known be counted as a shallow thing compared to the depth and the glorious dedication to worship the Lord? Thou shalt find that few shall be moments in petition, but hours shall be the time of waiting before Him, glorifying him, and praising the name of the Lord. Yea, I prophesy it.
Let it be a prediction in Zion, that the day comes when you shall not wait upon the Lord merely for a word that shall direct you. But you shall wait before Him as His servants and handmaidens that shall continually adore Him, continually magnify Him, continually glorify Him, continually praise Him. And thou shalt count a service wasted where little time is spent magnifying the Lord. Yea, the words that come shall not be words that shall direct man alone. For these things can befall thee, even as thou art worshiping the Lord. But the day shall come, and God grant that it shall come upon us speedily, when our hearts shall continually magnify His name. Yea, from the raising of the sun, to the going down of the same, My name shall be great among the Gentiles. And once again, a pure offering of worship will be offered unto the Lord as in the days of old (Malachi 1:11).
Lord, bring the prophecy of Malachi to fulfillment speedily upon us. Set our hearts upon Thy Kingdom, O Lord. Turn our hearts away from their preoccupations and the struggle that we are in this age. Turn us to be worshipers of the Lord, to magnify His name, that everything shall give glory and praise unto the lamb that was slain for us. Amen.