Now, about love. I Corinthians 14:1 tells us, “Pursue love.” Doesn’t everyone? Yes, but this verse is the result of I Corinthians 13, which speaks about the love that you have in your waiting on God. Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy. I Corinthians 14:1. This verse gives a goal and an emphasis that we must consider very carefully. We pursue love. That’s the goal—we never lose sight of that.
Why is love so important? It is important because we “desire earnestly spiritual gifts.” And spiritual gifts can lead you into a meaningless mysticism if you don’t have the love. “Meaningless mysticism” is a good term. It means: If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (a meaningless thing). And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing (meaningless existence, isn’t it?). And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. I Corinthians 13:1–3. Without the love, you have a meaningless mysticism. The love is what gives a gift or ministry the complete divine character. The gifts give us the divine abilities, but the love gives us the divine character with the gifts. There is a difference—what you do is one thing, but what you are may be distinct from what you do. But we want what we do and what we are to be synchronized in a holy expression of our life in God.
Look back to I Corinthians 12: Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers … I Corinthians 12:27–28a. I wish we had known as much about the basic ministries in 1951, at the beginning of this walk, as we know now. We would have gone a great deal further in our recognition that the apostle, the prophet, and the teacher are really the basic gift ministries as far as the Church is concerned. Verse 28 continues with the word “then” as though the outcome of these ministries is immediate: … then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, various kinds of tongues. All are not apostles, are they? All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they? All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? But earnestly desire the greater gifts. I Corinthians 12:28–31a.
Apostles, prophets and teachers are included in the whole picture. This whole ministry of the gifts of the Spirit is not just the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith and the working of miracles, etc. It is not just the nine gifts named earlier in the chapter (verses 8–10). It includes also the people whose very ministry becomes a gift—you can’t separate them in the context of what these verses are saying.
I Corinthians 12 ends with: And I show you a still more excellent way. I Corinthians 12:31b. Then, after the chapter on love, Paul boils it down: Pursue love (I Corinthians 14:1). You cannot get around it; the pursuit of love has to be in every phase and at every stage of God’s moving in us and God’s moving through us. We must pursue love. You say, “Well, I thank God, I know He loves me.” Yes, He does love you; but that love cannot be dead-ended and your performance become a thing that has only the mechanics of the gifts in it. That performance must be constantly an expression of His love for you and of that love reaching out to another.
I John brings that out quite strongly. “He that loves God, loves also him that is begotten of God” (I John 5:1). If I love God and I am begotten of God, I will love also a brother who is begotten of God. But this is the problem. We can love God because we do not have to eat at the table with Him or sleep in the same house. We do not have to cooperate and work out a schedule with Him in our day. Because He is invisible, our awareness of Him tends to diminish, and we just call Him in whenever we need help. But He is with us all the time. The difficulty is that because His presence is a little vague, we can say, “I love You, Jesus,” and fool ourselves.
But we are constantly aware of those we live around. We feel, “I am having a problem with these ones that You have begotten in the Kingdom, my brothers and sisters.” It all sounds wonderful in theory when we say, “We all love the Lord. We are coming together in the Spirit. We are all going to be one and we are starting a communal home.” Then, you will soon see how much you really do love each other, how much oneness with the Lord and with one another you have. Jesus prayed, “That they all may be one, that the world may believe” (John 17:21). But if you put all the Christians in one pile today, the devil would not have any more problems; the Christians would have incapacitated each other by midnight. Their unity is a very carefully defined thing; they are not any more one than they can possibly manage and still create the illusion of unity. You may not believe it really works like that. But do you recognize the fact that God has been teaching us to be one, teaching us to relate, teaching us to love one another?
Have you had that problem of relating to your brother lately? Are you beginning to feel the friction and the strain? Why? It is because you have won victories. You have walked on with God and you have come to the place where you realize, “Yes, we had faith. We had love. We won.” Now it takes more faith to live with your victory than it did to win it. It takes more love to live with your victory than it did to win it. It is like the man who says, “You have never seen anybody court a woman like I did. I brought her flowers and candy; I was so attentive. I opened the car door for her. I was the perfect gentleman.” Now what does he do? She comes out of the house practically a wreck, with a couple of kids tagging along after her. He is already sitting in the car and as she gets in, he complains, “You know we are always late for church! Can’t you move it along a little bit?” She opens the car door for herself, gets the kids in, sits down, and collapses.
It is one thing to court a woman and another thing to be married to her. It is one thing to battle to win a victory; it is another thing to live with the victory. The United States has had the courage to win most of the wars that they have fought—we have to say “most” now. We used to say that they won them all. But anymore, it is a calculated thing not to win a war. The United States won the wars, but did they really know how to live with the victory they had won? Did they really know what to do with it?
It takes a lot more faith and a lot more dedication to stay with a victory once it is won. Everyone wants to say, “Wait a minute. This is more than I can handle; I am going to back off now.” Withdrawal does not always occur only with people who do not want to face the initial stages of walking with God. It can occur also with those who have walked with God, and quite successfully, but unconsciously they do not want to cope with the next step. They do not have the faith and they do not have the love for it.
“What is wrong with the walk?”
Nothing.
“But what about all the battles we have been through?”
We won them.
“What about all the things that were prophesied?”
They have been coming to pass. The deeper worship is coming forth, the things that God wanted us to have. We are coming to a simplicity of the Kingdom. It is all happening.
“Then why is it that I am having so many problems?”
Because you do not have enough faith and love for the victory you have won.
The walk has been beautiful. But we have sometimes had this problem: We have been like a dog that is chasing a car. He is barking at it and snarling at it, but you wonder if he would know what to do with the car if he caught it. It is one thing for us to chase the enemy and say, “We are going to have victory!” But it is another when we say, “Okay, we have it. Now what do we do with it?”
Many of you prayed for me. Someday I will tell you what your prayers brought me into. Through the years, certain restraints and restrictions had made it very difficult for me. The amazing thing is how many races I won—in shackles. But the freedom began to come as you prayed. Do you know what happened then? I had built defenses. Finally, the need for them was gone, and I could not continue to live with walls. As the walls disappeared, I found I could relate more than I had before to a whole vast world out there. I am grateful for what your prayers did, but I don’t think you understand yet what you really accomplished. If God’s grace continues to rest upon us and we press on into it, the next few years are going to show such great reward for our perseverance—a hundredfold for every effort we have ever put forth (Hebrews 10:35–36).
Even though I know that every step of freedom that came tested me to the utmost, I want to test you with this same question. Do you realize that you are going through many things because you are winners? You are being set free from old ideas, old associations, old bonds, and old conditionings. Through the years, you can easily become entangled in these. It is easy to establish a certain way of responding so that you can live with a detente situation—you maneuver, you put up walls, you withdraw. You become tolerant of that situation or relationship. Many of those responses are not good. But when the victory comes, then there is an openness, a transparency. You face things more as they are and you do not always like that either. Knowledge comes with an awareness, and then you have to adapt yourself to that awareness.
One more illustration is the devastation I experienced recently. I went through it. Why? It is easy to live with prophecies; that’s not so hard. For years I could say, “I’ve got faith. I’ve got faith. I believe.” What do you believe in? “Kingdom music. In a vision that the Lord gave, I heard it.” Now, we have a recording studio. We have some good musicians and we watch them begin to come together in unity. We watch the fulfillment begin to happen. We work until two-thirty in the morning with it, grab some sleep, and then go back to work again. What are we doing? We are living with the beginning of fulfillment. Did we like it better when there were only prophecies and we did not have to do all this work? No, we are glad to see the first stages. But I could look at this time and say, “God, why couldn’t You have done this years ago? I was a young man then and I had pretty good ears.” Now I have a hearing loss, and I sit in that booth believing God for the revelation to bring forth the sound. Why couldn’t God have brought it forth when I could hear it better? Nevertheless, God helps me.
I wonder if the prophecies are not easier to live with than the days of fulfillment. You can walk through the wilderness and murmur and complain as the Israelites did (Numbers 11:4–6). But the time finally comes when you must go up and look through the land. The spies come back and you hear the report, “We saw the nephilim there and they were like giants. We were like grasshoppers in their sight.” And here is the effect of a nephilim: “And we were grasshoppers in our sight too” (Numbers 13:26–33). God brings forth a humility in you, but that humility cannot be with despair and unbelief until you believe that God is not able to bring everything out of nothing (Romans 4:17; Hebrews 11:3); your humility is pointless because it is not coupled with faith.
That is where we are. So many have gone through devastation. We have gone through this devastating thing, the work of the cross, and we have come out of it feeling that in the flesh we are not adequate. Yes, but it is exactly what God wants. As long as anything in us remains in the way, we will not be what God wants. It takes people who are wholly trusting in the Lord; they will come forth with a humble faith.
We have won victories. How do we know that we have won victories? We are still standing, as it says in Ephesians 6:13. One could feel, “Yes, but I failed.” Someone else might say, “No, I didn’t fail.” It doesn’t matter which way you feel. There is only one rule: What was, was (Philippians 3:13–14). We do not condemn, and we do not condone (Matthew 7:1–2; Romans 14:13). Nobody has to excuse you; nobody has to condemn you. Neither do you condemn anyone else, nor do you condone what they did. It is past. Your faith has seen one thing happen: that perpetual, cleansing efficacy of the blood of Jesus Christ that buries the past limitations and mistakes and lets us walk before Him justified by faith (Hebrews 10:17–23). That is the way we move in. Are you getting ahold of this? You can say, “This is beginning to make sense to me now. Can I be encouraged then?”
Yes, you can be encouraged.
“Don’t I have to go back and evaluate all the past mistakes?”
One moment of faith before God could correct anything that happened in the past.
“Well, I had my chance and I lost it.”
Maybe God wanted you to have just that much information out of it. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is: faith, believing God.
Does this Word encourage your heart? Do you feel that you have gone through enough that you can say, “That is exactly where I am; I need this. I thought I was beaten, only to find out that this problem that I have with faith and love came about because I came into a victory and that victory demanded more faith and love than it took for me to get this far.” You have not lost; you have won when you are projected into a new level where you have to appropriate more faith and more love from God. You have not failed; you have not lost. You are just in the place to really begin to love a little more, believe a little more, and see more things happen.
We have been fighting division, deception, every demonic thing, as well as nephilim spirits. I don’t think we know how to evaluate the victory we have really won or how far we have come. You say, “Well, I do know. I really feel loyal to the Word.” What you are really feeling boils down to the fact that you realize you are building your life on a solid rock (Matthew 7:24–25). No matter what is happening above, you have that rock underneath as your foundation. There really is a better way to put it. It is like our roots are in the Lord Jesus Christ. We live in Him, we are abiding in Him, His Words are abiding in us (John 15:4–7), and we hang down humbly and fruitfully to the whole world (John 15:2, 5, 8; Isaiah 27:6; 37:31). Anyone can come along with an ax and say, “I want to cut you down.” But all they can do is trim off a few branches and you will grow even better. They cannot reach the roots. They cannot reach the anchor that is beyond the veil (Hebrews 6:18–20). They cannot reach the heart of Christ, and that is where we are rooted and where we live.
In Him, we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). I don’t care what has happened to us, we have discovered our identity and our life by a Living Word. It is found in God, and we are living in Christ. We are discovering this more and more. That is my experience. And I am persuaded of the Lord that it is your experience too. The day that anyone can prove to me that God died is the day we are in trouble. But His Words live (John 6:63; Hebrews 4:12). He is alive (John 6:57). Because He lives, we shall live also (John 14:19).
The Living Word comes so much out of God’s dealings with the vessels who bring it forth. This makes the Word so alive in their hearts and it encourages us then because it means that we can live it and walk in it ourselves. It is a real thing. We reach in for the Father, to teach us how to live and move in the level of victory and anointing that He is bringing. It is not a time of defeat. It is not a time of unbelief. It is a time that our hearts are set on the Word. We claim a greater faith to walk in and possess the promises and the victories that are ours in this hour.