The greatest vice in the Kingdom of God will not be lust; it will be laziness. A man who is given to lust sins against himself and sets into action those sins which can destroy him, but a man who is lazy sins against the Kingdom of God and holds back the Kingdom of God in the earth. A lazy man is generally not indolent; he may be very ambitious and very busy, but not for God. Where his own interests are concerned, he is really involved. But where the works of God are concerned, he does not care.
God is saying, “Seek first the Kingdom! Seek first the Kingdom! Then the other things will be added.” First seek the Kingdom. Be diligent to do the Master’s business, not your business. There are many kinds of business, including monkey business, but God wants us to be busy about the Kingdom business. Most people do not understand the difference between dead works and living works. To be driven and motivated by God is one thing, but to appropriate and involve God in everything you do is another.
Worship merges us into God, and then our works draw and channel the availability of God in our lives. That sounds like a simple statement, but it is so profound that volumes could be written on it; it would take a long time to understand. We can worship until we are merged into God. Then our works can issue forth, not that we are working for God; but through our faith we can tap, we can draw, and we can channel the availability of God through our own lives to the world. When we understand this, we can perform the exploits and the greater works.
Paul wrote in I Corinthians 12:4–6, Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations (the energizings, the workings, the release of divine energy), but it is the same God which worketh all in all. We do not yet know very much about working with God. The concept of dead works has been around for so long that it is difficult to understand how to enter into living works. The fourth chapter of Hebrews explains how we are to cease also from our works as God did from His, and we are to labor to enter into His rest. We enter into a rest from the frustrated strivings and output of human energy which accomplish nothing because they are not freighted or filled with divine anointing and power.
The theory of evolution teaches that everything happened by chance, that one way or another it just happened; however, we know that the law of chance had nothing to do with creation. Creativity is not a result of accident or chance. If the parts of a disassembled watch had been placed in a box and shaken from the beginning of the universe until today, neither by accident nor by chance could that result in a functioning watch. The wisdom of this world, which God says is foolishness, teaches that everything happened by accident or chance. Science even explains that the creation of the galaxies of the universe was caused by a series of explosions, as if there was a big mass in space which exploded. But what about the prime force which caused that explosion in the first place? That question is not even considered by most scientists. Somehow, they seem to be more enthralled and occupied with what is happening to the universe and the rapidity of its expansion.
A problem arises when believers see themselves as unrelated to a world of energy, to the great energizings in the works of God and of creations. This has happened in the church world until Christians are more concerned about working for God than with God. Too many people have spent years of their lives doing works which were pointless, worthless, and without any end in view, while trying to merit some favor with God by working for Him.
You can work for God, yet find that what you do for God is not worth anything. But if you submit to God and believe Him, then through your faith you are created as His workmanship. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:8–10. When you become an instrument in His hand, then you will walk in the works which God has before ordained.
God’s plan is not for you to do a great work for Him that is beyond His understanding or planning. He has foreordained that you should walk in those works which He has planned to loose in the world. You must understand that it is only because He has intended to do His works through a human channel that you will be able to work the works of God. To work the works of God is a great fulfillment.
Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God. Hebrews 6:1. One of the first things you must do is repent of the religious instinct which tends to motivate you to do a lot of dead works. The very foundation of your relationship with God is not the realization that you are a sinner; it is the knowledge that anything you do on your own is worthless. The pharisee has to be taught that he has no righteousness, and that what he has produced of his self-righteousness is not pleasing to God and has no value. It makes no difference how he presents himself; he is nothing. According to Isaiah, all of his righteousness and human efforts are like “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6).
You must repent of dead works that are lifeless. God is saying, “I want you to be filled with My life, filled with My creativity, filled with My power, filled with Me. When you speak, I want to be speaking. When you move, I want to be moving. I want to be manifested in everything you do. When you minister with your hands, I do not want them to be empty hands; I want them to be anointed. I want to move through your hands; I want to speak through your mouth; I want to move through your thinking and through your faith. I want My living works to come forth in the earth.”
We often slip back into the old rut of thinking that in ourselves we must perform certain works. Remember—whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 3:17). In doing so, you are actually pulling God into everything you say and do. Learn to do this unconsciously so that when you speak to someone, you believe for God to think and to speak through you. This can be very difficult to do, and if you are not careful, you can begin to think that you are something special and get a god-complex. It is easy for people in certain occupations of authority and prestige to develop a god-complex; they often tend to act and think as if they were God.
Repent of dead works so that you will not do anything as a ritual. There is no magic charm in what a human being alone can minister to you, but there are men of God with authority who have so repented of dead works that when they lay hands on you, God is laying hands on you. When you stand before them and ask them to minister to you, you know that they will not look to find the answer in their brains. They believe for God to speak and for His wisdom to come forth to meet you.
There cannot be any dead-works thinking within us. The whole foundation of working with God begins with repentance from dead works. First lay that foundation; then go on from there. How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Hebrews 9:14.
Have you ever found that God had to purge your conscience from the condemnation that leads to dead works? For example, if an alcoholic asks you for a quarter, you feel a pang in your conscience if you do not give him a quarter, even though you know that you would be helping to finance his trip to hell. The conscience to dead works has to be purged. There are people in ghettos whose conscience is so set against the police that they will not speak to a policeman, even when it would save a life. They will not be an informer. They have their own sense of right and wrong morality, of which their conscience ought to be cleared.
Never get the idea that your conscience is to be your guide. There are people in Africa whose conscience still dictates that they should eat their enemies. They believe that the spirit and strength and courage of the enemy is thereby transferred to them. Do not be too sure that this is only foolish superstition. It involves a true principle which was perverted by Satan in the fall of man. Jesus said, “Except you eat of My flesh and drink of My blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). Hebrews 9:14 states that the blood of Christ will cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. And we read in Matthew 5:16, Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (not how much you give to charity and salvage drives), and glorify your Father which is in heaven. If you have the faith and the dedication to pull God into what you are doing, when it is complete it will be so spectacular that instead of looking at you, men will say, “Look at what God did.”
You should not pray as though you are looking up to God and calling upon Him to intervene in a situation. Instead, take a drastic step forward and prophesy your prayers. Say, “God will speak through me. I will not be a beggar before God, but I will ask God to meet me and move through me. I will believe to speak for God; I will believe to speak in God. My words will bring the whole of God into the disposition of every problem. My words will be the answer of God to every question, the fulfillment of every one of His promises. I will speak God into it. I battle with God because I refuse to accept Him as a being apart from myself. Likewise, I refuse to see myself as a person who is apart from God. I reject myself as a person apart from God; I am one with Him. I am determined and dedicated to be one with Him. With His Word in my mouth I will say, as Jesus Christ our Lord said, ‘I judge no man, but My Word shall judge men in the last day’ ” (John 12:47–48).
The day of the fulfillment of the Word of God has come. Nothing is more powerful than a Word from God whose time of fulfillment has come. Do not rebel against God; strive to be totally submissive to Him. Do not rebel against God, but do rebel against being apart from Him in anything you do, in anything you say, or in anything you are. In doing so, you will speak His words, you will do His works, and you will become a member and an essential part of Christ by His Word and by His will and by His creative forming of Himself within you.
Awaken, and speak God’s words which destroy and create. Be a worker of works greater than He once did, because He now works them through you. Your contending and wrestling and fighting and interceding are not to be against God or Satan or Babylon or the establishment. In your own human struggle, either singly or with others, you cannot cope with any one of these powers, but you must continually strive to be found in Him.
The struggle, then, is to be a member of His functioning Body. It is not enough to want to be a hand of the Lord; seek to be a functioning hand of the Lord to whack the devil in the mouth. The problem is not in believing that you are a member of His Body. The problem lies in believing that you can function as a member of His Body, that you can be His fulness, with all of His creative utterance and all of His authority.
One of the greatest Scriptures in the New Testament says that we are the fulnesss of Him who fills all things (Ephesians 1:23). God is doing very little on His own. He has channeled all of His fulness into those who are truly dedicated. They are His fulness, and they alone. Nothing of the Kingdom will come until they see and learn this, and until they are dedicated to be God’s workers in the earth—releasing His energy, releasing His power, channeling God into their work. It cannot be done on a human level, for whatever a believer has as a human, the devil has a thousand times more. But whatever the least one has, as a channel of God, is more than all the combined powers of the devil put together.
Press uphill to the summit. Learn how to move in God, not how to work for God. Then you will know how to do the greater works, because He is going to do them through such believers. Shake off the frustrating efforts of the human nature and reach in to move in God—pray in God, think in God, speak in God. Loose the area that God has for you to move in.
“I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou hast given Me to do. And now, glorify Thou Me together with Thyself, Father, with the glory which I ever had with Thee before the world was.” John 17:4–5. God has created you as His tool to do His work and His will. Man alone can never do it. Some of the multitude asked Jesus, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” John 6:28–29. Your faith links you with Him.
Let this be your prayer: “I link myself with You, Lord. You are able to do exceeding abundantly above all that I ask or think, according to the power that is working in me. I turn You loose, Lord. With aggressive, violent faith, I turn You loose. You will not be imprisoned within me. You will not be helpless within me. My unbelief shall not limit Thee, O Holy One of God.”
Have circumstances been rather rough lately? That is what you are here for. Has the battle been great? That is what you are here for. Have problems been so great that you did not know which way to turn? That is what you are here for.
When the Lord faced the hour of His greatest testing He said, “… what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Thy name.” John 12:27–28a. We are not called by God for self-preservation; we are chosen to perform a divine destiny, to be channels through whom God moves. We are not here to say, “Father, save my hide,” but to say, “Lord, this is what I came for.”
For this purpose we came into the world: He who knew us before the foundation of the world has redeemed us to Himself, that we should be a people redeemed, a peculiar treasure upon all the earth to show forth His marvelous works (I Peter 2:9). Let us become dedicated to a living Word and a living work. Let all that God is, be within us and work through us.