In the book of Hebrews is a passage that will teach you the attitude you are to have toward your experience and toward your walk with the Lord. It is very simple, but so practical.
Hence also He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. Hebrews 7:25. The King James reads, “to save them to the uttermost.” The margin in the New American Standard Bible reads, “to save them completely.”
“To save forever,”—you sense the duration of that salvation; “to save completely”—you grasp the extensiveness of that salvation; “to save to the uttermost”—you begin to realize all the aspects of the salvation that is total and complete. Paul is trying to convey here that our Lord Jesus Christ ever lives to make intercession; a continuous process of intercession goes on so that a continuing, perfecting process in your experience may be effected.
Your salvation that began perhaps as a tremendous thing was not limited, because it was of God. That experience can grow and increase. The walk is really an expanding walk. Whatever you have received from God does not have limitations upon it. It will continue to grow. “For He ever lives to make intercession for us,” to bring to a completeness, to bring to the uttermost, to bring forever, all that He died to win for us.
Let’s read another Scripture from the book of Hebrews. He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time (“one sacrifice for sins for all time”—it is complete), sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time onward until His enemies be made a footstool for His feet. For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified (the literal translation is, “being sanctified”) Hebrews 10:12–14. By one offering He has forever perfected us. Now do you understand the completeness of what He has done for you? That is to be manifested in the completeness of your own experience. Very few people have this idea. This walk has approached it better, but we are missing it, too. We must understand that when the Lord embraces us in this walk, He is bringing many sons to glory. It is the perfect manifestation of sonship that is really involved, not just a deliverance from a few little problems.
You say, “Well, I fell in a hole, and I’m muddy, and I pray the Lord will dry-clean me.”
It is more than that!
“Well, I want to be able to pray and feel close to the Lord.” It is more than that! It is to become a son of God in full manifestation, to be used of the Lord. But you do not embrace it yet. May God open your heart to understand that this is an expanding walk. Even your understanding will increase and abound. You are to grow in grace, and in knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ (II Peter 3:18). This is to be a continually expanding awareness of the Lord, of one another, of your experience, of everything. This is the difference between the walk and the old order of things. They were so limited, and their experiences became dead:
“Well, praise the Lord, I was saved forty years ago, and I’ve been in the way ever since.”
“How about lately, brother?”
“Well, I just pray I’ll be able to hold out until the end.”
They say, “I sought, and I tarried, and finally I prayed through and received the Holy Spirit.” There is such a finality, such an end of anything that could grow, because the vision of an expanding walk, and expanding experience is not there—“to be saved to the uttermost.” How many times have I heard them say, “Well, I believe we all have to sin a little bit every day.” How unscriptural, when the Word talks about perfection! We do not have to sin a little every day; we can enter into the righteousness of God so deeply that we can walk in that righteousness.
We have to face the fact that no matter how much we have seen in the way of experiences over these last few decades, they still seem to be a little short of what we read in the Scriptures. That is our own fault. We do not get saved like Saul of Tarsus; we do not get filled with the Holy Spirit like they did on the day of Pentecost, with fire leaping on them and landing on their heads. We do not have the same intensity; we do not have the same aftermath of power and miracles and thousands of people saved, as they had. What is wrong with the experience? We have limited it. We have not had faith to believe for anything greater. We have not accepted the fullness of what God has provided. We receive a little experience and say, “Hallelujah, I have it, I spoke with tongues and I prayed through.” That word “through” is so significant—through, all through. Nothing more happened. But the walk is not like that. The walk is an expanding walk, and whatever you have received from the Lord can increase and grow. I am saved, every day I am being saved a little more, and I am going to be saved a little more tomorrow. But more than that, I am going to be saved to the uttermost, because He is ever living to make intercession for me. I am going to have more. I have received the Holy Spirit, and He is going to fill me with all fullness.
If the Bible says that our experience should be more than we can handle, we will not accept that we have it all when we have something a little short of what we really need. Our whole attitude toward the walk must be different than old-order thinking, because they are too content to accept a limited experience with finality, and never move on. This experience has to flow. I am glad that the Word says, in Psalms 23:5, “My cup runneth over.” Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.… my cup runneth over. Imagine the Lord continually pouring out more than the capacity of the cup to hold. You have seen statues spouting water in the middle of fountains. The same water pumps through them day after day, until slime finally develops. Many people’s experiences are like that. It looks as if they really have something going, but it is the same old thing, and the pump keeps pumping it up. There is nothing that says, “My cup is running over.” It is very limited, a lot of activity, but there is nothing fresh in it. God help us, if we still need a motor to pump and circulate our experience around, if we have to be on something artificially created to keep us generating.
In this walk you should have something flowing and overflowing. If you are not having it, you had better seek the Lord, because that experience God gave you can expand. Take your salvation back to the Lord and say, “Lord, come on, touch it, let it grow a little. You are ever living to make intercession; bless it until I am saved to the uttermost.” Begin to seek the Lord. This is different than the old order. I can remember being a pastor and evangelist in the old order. The secret of the continual revivals was to get people saved over again. Over the course of five years, maybe several thousand people were saved. However, those churches might not have more than two hundred people in them. But, if two hundred were saved in the spring, and two hundred saved in the fall—the same two hundred of course—that makes four hundred a year that were saved. After five years, two thousand people were saved. Do you see how ironic it is? That is what they do. They make unbelievers out of the people, convince them they are sinners, and get them saved over again. Most of those people haven’t been saved over six months at a time all the years of their life.
That is not the way God brings about a walk. We do not make an unbeliever out of a person, but we say to him in the hour of his need, “Bring your experience out and look at it again, and let God touch it once more; let it expand, and let it grow.” If there are difficulties in your life, your salvation has not been all that it should be. Bring it back to the Lord, and let Him expand it a little bit. It is good to look into the Word and say, “The Lord gave me a beautiful little house.” You look at your little house with its four little walls, and one room, and you can barely live in it, and you say, “Lord, is this all you have for me?”
And He says, “No, look at the blueprints of all I have. In My Father’s house are many mansions. There is plenty of room here.”
“Well, the blueprint says that I am supposed to have quite a mansion here, Lord.”
“Then take the blueprints and start working on it.” So we add another room. Enlarge the place of thy tent (thy dwelling).… Lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes Isaiah 54:2. The Lord wants to bring great things to us. Reach out! Expand your experience with the Lord! The walk will be everything you dare to believe it can be. If you are disappointed in the walk, look in the mirror—there is your problem. Or look in the Word and see why you have made the mistake, because everything is there. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice; by one sacrifice, He forever perfected (forever!) them that are being sanctified. It is all finished, all complete. The blueprints are there, approved by heaven. You are going to stand in His glory in the same image. That is what He intended for you to be, and you have settled for something less. You struggle with problems on the level where you are living, instead of making changes. I know a person could live in a little cracker box, but as the school of the prophets said to the prophet Elisha, “The place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us” (II Kings 6:1). They went out with axes, chopped down trees, and they built a new place so there could be room for the school of the prophets.
Your experience should accommodate all that you really need. You say, “I don’t know, I have all this ministry and all this work to do; I’m so harassed by it. I don’t seem to have time to sleep. I don’t know what to do.” It isn’t the expanding ministry that is bothering you; it is that your walk and your experience with the Lord is not expanding rapidly enough, so go and get a bigger walk with the Lord. It will happen. It is up to you to believe that. Isn’t this one of the most important messages you ever read? This is an entirely different concept than in old order. This very concept is the difference between old order and new order. We believe, “I am going to have a great walk with God, a great experience with the Lord.” What makes the difference? The faith factor. You have to believe for more, beyond your experience. You have to say of every experience: “This is an open door.”
“I talked in tongues. I saw ten angels dancing around the throne on the sea of glass. I spoke in tongues for hours. Everybody around me marked how many languages I spoke. It was a marvelous experience.”
“What did you do with it?” Do you see? It either has a finality to it, or you consider it an open door. In this walk we make the Holy Spirit what He should be. We say, “We received the Holy Spirit and the door is open; now we go on to the gifts and the ministries, and we go on to everything else.” Take another step.
“Now I’m prophesying.” That is an open door. Go on into the next step. Become a prophet. Do something else; get with it. One thing leads to another. I doubt if for many millenniums God has done everything that was to be an end in itself, or blessed anyone who was to be an end in himself. God is doing something in these churches that is not an end in itself. We are not blessing these churches so they will be filled. That is not the end that God intends. As soon as we have a few people, they go off and start more churches. When it is all over it will be written, “They did the will of the Lord.”
“Then all these other churches, are they an end?”
No, they have an end to fulfill too; they are just a means to an end.
“ ‘The gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in all the world for a witness to all the nations, then the end shall come’ ” (Matthew 24:14)—“is that the end?”
No, that is really the beginning of the Kingdom.
“When the Kingdom comes, is that end of it?”
No, no, no! He will reign until He finally turns everything over to the Father (I Corinthians 15:24). You see, on and on and on, everything is a means. It started in God, and He created something, and that created something which creates something that creates something, and that creates something. On and on and on and on, until it all winds up back in Him. We are far from seeing the end created; we are just seeing means created, and when I bless you, that is not an end in itself, but it has created in you another means which God will use to accomplish something more. Do you understand that? There is no experience you receive that is an end in itself. I hope you grasp this deeply in your mind. This is the difference in the gospel of the Kingdom—that we sense finally that there is no finality.
The Holy Spirit and the laying on of hands are not ends in themselves—they are means. Personal ministry—“If I could just get delivered”—is a means to an end. Intercession—we are to pray through until we see one thing accomplished, and then we will pray through until there are more things, because each thing will give way to something more. Remember, it is faith. God will be as much to you as you believe Him to be, or as little. Your experience and walk with Him will be as much as you believe it to be, or as little. You will be used by the Lord as much as you believe to be or as little.
If you accept this, you can also accept an answer to something that has been a great problem. How many times have we come to a devil we could not cast out? How many times have we come to a problem we had not the wisdom for? Years ago, the idea of this expanding walk came to me, and I saw something that I’ve held onto quite faithfully. There were people we could not minister deliverances to at one time, but if we would pray and seek the Lord, then later in our walk with God we would come back to it and it would be done. How many times people have been sick, and we have prayed for them and they have been healed, but there is always that one problem that nags at you and says, “See, that one was not healed.” Maybe not, but I do not accept that with finality.
If I do not accept limitation upon my experience, but believe it will grow, if I believe my faith is going to expand and grow: whatever I cannot handle today, by the grace of God I will handle tomorrow. And if I do not handle it tomorrow, be patient, the next day we will see it happen. I think this is probably one of the most important applications of this message: that you are going to refuse a lot of unbelief over what seem to be defeats. One brother said, “How many times I have prayed for my wife to be healed, but now I have new faith to believe. I am going to keep on praying, and she is going to be healed.” You do not accept defeat just because it did not happen. You only realize, “I have not grown into the place of faith where it can happen. But because this is an expanding walk with God, I am a growing being in God’s sight. I am becoming a son. There is no basis for me to accept defeat because I am victorious!” He hath delivered; He doth deliver and we know that He shall yet deliver us, and He will always cause us to triumph in Christ Jesus. Maybe not today, but it will be tomorrow, or the next day.
The reason old order can not cope with the changing scene is because their experience and their faith is not expanding. What they had was wonderful a century ago, or a half-century ago, but they do not have enough today. They do not have oil in their vessel and oil in the lamp; they do not have a double portion. This is the day to realize that anything static or limited is not going to work. No one who is standing still is going to make it. It has to be a growing experience, because the need is growing. The area of battle and conflict is growing. We will have more if we keep growing, in order that we can face more, overcome more, accomplish more, and be more, in the name of the Lord.
The faith we appropriate from God for today is all right for today, but it is not enough for tomorrow. If we are faithful with that, He will give us more.