We are becoming a prophetic community. Above that, we are becoming the Father’s family, who have learned to relate together without any religious spirit. No longer must we follow a certain set pattern or responses; we simply love God and open our hearts to Him.
We have been shaken by the truth of these simple phrases: “We do not love enough; we do not believe enough.” We are beginning to realize that we had better appropriate a lot more than we have. God is speaking a Word to us which we need very much. What God has for us is attainable. By faith we can reach into it; we can possess it in the name of the Lord.
It takes a great deal of faith to walk with God. Hebrews 11:5 states, “By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death.” He was translated close to six thousand years ago. Genesis 5:24 states briefly, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him.” But the New Testament tells us that it was the initiative of Enoch’s faith which opened the door to it. Hebrews 11:5–6 says that before his translation, he had received the witness that he pleased God; and without faith it is impossible to please God. Do you appreciate the fact that God will not do anything for you until the initiative of your faith comes forth? In James 4:8 the Lord says to you, “Draw near to Me, and I will draw near to you.” In Deuteronomy 4:29 He promises, “In the day that you seek Me with your whole heart, you will find Me.” Do you keep waiting for God to meet you? Open the door and walk in! It is your prerogative.
You do not need to go someplace or do something special in order for God to meet you. In the early days of this walk with God, before I knew the ways of the Lord more perfectly, I would spend hours waiting and waiting until God would meet me. It almost built a conditioning in my mind that I had to spend hours in prayer before God could meet me. It took me a little while before I learned the truth: He is not afar off. It is our own unawareness that stands in the way. All we have to do is pull back the curtains.
The Scripture that made this real to me was II Corinthians 3:7, which refers to Exodus 34:29–35. There we read how Moses went into the tent of meeting and lifted his veil off and talked with God face to face. The people could not stand to see the glory of God on Moses, so he kept a veil over his face. But when Moses went before God, that veil was enough to keep him from God. It was his initiative to remove that veil. He had to part the curtains.
If God is going to meet you, it is up to you. It makes no difference who you are or how long you have walked with God. It comes right back to one basis: You pull the curtain from your spiritual sight if you want to see God. You draw near if you want to sense Him. Do you want a meeting with God? Draw nigh to Him, and He will draw nigh to you (James 4:8). Seek Him first with all of your heart. Something in your own spirit must reach out to God. The Lord is saying to each one of us, “Open your heart.”
Because of our unawareness, we act as if we do not see the spirit realm at all. Pull it down. Walk with God. In a service, you come into the presence of God; then do not walk away from Him when the service is over. Set your heart to walk with God continually. Do not take off your openness to God when you leave the service, as you would take off a coat and hang it in the foyer. Take His presence with you. Walk with God—you can do it. This could be the greatest reality in your life, but you have to do it.
Jesus could do everything for you. He could teach you, appear before you, and give you a thousand Sermons on the Mount. He could even wash your feet. But when it was all finished, He would say, “Now you have seen what I did. Blessed are you if you do it” (John 13:17). It comes right back to what you do. Any truth you have becomes effective when you put it into action. Walk in that truth. Wash your brother’s feet, and watch the blessing come back to you. This does not mean that you must first reach a certain level of humility or have special towels before you can start washing feet. You are not receiving this message until you understand what foot-washing really means. God does not care one bit about the dirt on your brother’s feet. He is concerned about the way your compassion relates to Him and to your brother. Your brother’s feet may stink, but God does not care about that. He is concerned about your attitude toward Him, your attitude toward your brother, and the way you relate to him.
You relate. You pull down the wall. You rip back the curtains. You expose yourself to God and to your brother and say, “I’m going to do what God has set before me.”
There is a difficulty which we always seem to have. Very simply defined, it is identified as the feeling that we have grown up. We look back at what we were yesterday and think, “Oh, how immature I was.” But we never relate that immaturity to ourselves in the present. Instead, we always think that we are grown up, that we have learned as much as we can learn, that we have attained great heights. We rejoice, saying, “Here we are, Lord. Isn’t it wonderful?” We seem to forget, or maybe we never were aware of the fact, that we have so much yet to learn. We say, like Paul, When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. I Corinthians 13:11–12a. And that is where it leaves us. We tend to look back and say, “The days of being a child are over with.” But Paul says, “We are only seeing dimly yet, but we shall see face to face. We only know in part now, but then we shall know fully just as we also have been fully known” (verse 12).
Probably the most brutally devastating realization that can come to us is the fact that we do not have enough of God yet. Every denomination and movement chalks up what they have of God. Somehow they feel as if this is all there is to attain, and so they put a wall around their doctrines and their experiences. They say, “There it is—all of it. We are the people, and wisdom will die with us. If we do not have it, it does not exist.” Forget that thinking!
I do not criticize denominations. Merely because I walked away from many of their organizations does not insure that any of us could not be in the same position. We could feel that because we have a Living Word from God, we have all that can be received from Him. If we believe that, we are falling right back into the trap that every other movement has fallen into—the trap of believing that they have it all.
Not one of us loves enough. We do not know enough yet. Not one of us believes enough. Do you think that you believe all you are supposed to believe? Do you think that you love all you are supposed to love? Do you think that you know all the truths you are supposed to know? We do not appropriate enough of God in anything. We do not yet believe enough.
Do you believe that you are as hungry for God as you should be? Read a few verses from a psalm of David, a man after God’s own heart. As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” These things I remember, and I pour out my soul within me. Psalm 42:1–4a. This was the cry of a man whom God loved. David loved God too—so much that he could not get enough of God.
It is difficult to preach to people, trying to persuade them that they ought to have a little more of God. I would love to find more young prophets who are yearning and pleading, “Tell me more. Give me more. Give me more!” God loose us from the Laodicean lukewarmness and the futile business of urging the smug Christian, “Don’t you think that you need a little bit more of God”; then trying to explain to the skeptic what God is doing in the earth, in the Kingdom of God. We do not hunger enough. We do not strive enough. That drive to go on with God must be there. When will it be in our hearts? I have asked this question many times: What could happen in one service if we were all in one accord, striving to break through to God?
In my heart, I must believe that I can drop every openness to the fear of man, as well as to any type of flattery. It does not matter if people criticize me, or the way I speak, or anything else about me. I must believe that I can break through so that others can have something more of God. We do not care what anyone thinks, as long as we can break through and the rain of the Spirit can fall upon the dry and thirsty land. Criticize that if you want to. And if you do, I will tell you once more: You do not hunger enough. Anyone who was really hungering after God would be pulling at the coattails of those with a Living Word, begging, “Give me more!”
Let none of us be smug with what we have. God curses smugness, for it is the spirit of Laodicea. Leaving Laodicea is not easy. Lukewarmness infects us deep down in our spirit, making us neither hot nor cold (Revelation 3:16). The only thing that has not been restored is the vitality and the vigorous hunger of the early Church. We have most of the experiences of the New Testament; but take a group of Charismatics, a group of Pentecostals, or a group of Fundamentalists into one of our intercession services, and watch them walk out, because very few have the hunger of spirit to seek God with all their hearts.
I feel sometimes that we do not hate enough either. We ought to hate iniquity. We ought to hate lukewarmness, to hate these things with all of our heart. We do not press through enough in intercession. We are not into the Word of God enough. If we are to live by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), then we must be into His Word much more than we are now. We do not wait on God enough to receive His Word.
Above all, we do not stand before His presence enough to love Him and to worship Him. That is what this move of God is all about. We are not here for what we can get from God on the human level. Why were these churches raised up? God was on the lookout for worshipers. Very humbly we ought to say, “God, here we are, the people for whom You have been looking for generations, a people to worship You in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). We love You, Lord, with all of our heart. We are here to worship You.”
Forget about what you need. Forget about your problems. Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and the other things will be added to you (Matthew 6:33). You do not need to worry so much about yourself. Become a little more concerned about giving to God what He wants, because He is determined to have a people who worship His name and love Him.
If we can receive this as a Word from God, it will tell us what we do not have enough of. We can walk with Him. Humbly we present ourselves to God as worshipers loving Him and worshiping Him. He has been looking for worshipers for centuries. When He gets one, do you think He will let anything destructive happen to him? He will surely protect him, for that is what He has been searching for all this time.
The Kingdom is coming, and from now on we can expect the Holy Spirit to speak a great deal about discipleship and what it means to walk with God in the Kingdom. If that is what has come, then that is exactly what we must walk in. Are you thinking, “I like the old-fashioned way of praising God; I like the old church”? Maybe you belong to the fading age. You have to decide that. But something miraculous happens to people who, like Caleb or Joshua, suddenly become timeless creatures who walk with God!
Do you want services like the meetings of forty years ago? How much futility and frustration was mingled with the blessing! This is a different age! We are going to walk with God! We may think that we are spiritual enough with all that God has revealed, but we must run if we want to walk with God. He is doing a quick work in the earth! There is no term more obsolete than “the walk.” It is a dead run! What was enough yesterday is not enough today.