It is very important to learn how to walk with God in these days, because there are so many aspects of life today through which you become fearful. Many of you have a certain panic level at which you start worrying: taking matters into your own hands and reverting to animalistic principles and instincts for the way you are going to live. It is most important in this day that you understand how to live and how to walk with God.
There was a publication worth reading, called, Israel Today. It has pictures of what Israel is like now, and it tells about people who listen to the radio all day long, surrounded by enemies, maybe the children of people who escaped out of Germany whose loved ones were destroyed in the furnaces, people who have lived through the six-day war in 1967. These are people who have come from all over the world under persecutions. It is a strange, strange country. They live, listening to the news all the time, wondering where the raids strike next, having to retaliate with a vicious blow of defense, if they are to exist at all, to put fear in even the guerrillas who are constantly attacking them.
That is the way it will be all over the world. There will be that nagging thing: the assault upon our economies; the assault against our resources; the thing that constantly comes against us of enemies within and enemies without. America is facing the most devastating period in its history, and it is a good time for us to learn how to walk. How are we going to walk through this? How are we going to think? We must become conditioned to the way we’re going to think.
I have often felt that God gives a ministry a great responsibility. But I think that the Apostolic word is more critically responsible than any other word, because I must bring you the word from the Lord and say, “This is the way you must walk, and this is the way you are going to think. This is the way you will respond and react to persecution. This is the way you will react and respond to everything you see.” You are going to be in the world but not of it. You are going to walk down through the end of many things, yet carrying in your heart and voicing from your mouth the beginnings of many more things. This is a tremendous responsibility that we have: to think as sons of light when we are walking through the last great darkness. What a tremendous responsibility!
There isn’t anything as devastating to us right now as to read the Sermon on the Mount and realize day by day we are going to come into these principles of the Kingdom until we believe them. When I began my ministry, I wondered if the principles voiced in the Sermon on the Mount were practical and how closely one should practice them. If someone asked you for your cloak and you gave him your coat also, then you could be arrested for nudism. And no one would care. People would think you were crazy. Something seemed a little extreme in all the things God set before us, yet I would like to share one section of Scripture concerning our attitude toward all the pressures.
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth …” Matthew 6:19–34.
“What? Isn’t this the time that we ought to have more treasures? This is no time to be left without a cache of secret food here and there; is it? This is a time to have an extra suit in almost every place you stop for the next week: with underwear, shoes, and everything else to go with it. This does not seem to be the time to not lay up treasures!” “… where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal …”
The newly poor of this world who are rich in faith—join the club—and you’ll find that the air is very heady up at that high altitude of those who have lost everything. Lay your treasures up in heaven where nothing can get at them—“for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”—even if you were never to face a crisis here at all; if nothing would come to pass in our generation and we would be like King Josiah or King Hezekiah, men to whom God gave a promise: “At least disaster won’t happen in your days, and you will live out your time.”
“Thank God, He’s not going to hit me; He’s going to hit my kids” (you would have to hate your children to have that attitude). “… for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” I can’t live as though saying: “Well, maybe it won’t even happen to this generation.” I have to reason, that even if it were not to happen for a thousand years, as true disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ it is our responsibility to convert everything we have that God lays in our hand, every treasure that we can take hold of, and to transfer it into heaven. Lay the treasure up where it should be. This is our responsibility.
You only have to be in a place where you have a sense of divine security that God is taking care of you, and suddenly money does not seem to matter, whether you have it or you don’t. If you have it, you use it for the Lord. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t make any difference. I am gloriously pleased with what is happening in this walk. We are constantly being motivated to put that which God lays in our hand into the Kingdom of God: strong investments in the name of the Lord.
“The lamp of the body is the eye; and if therefore your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters” (He is talking about the clear vision; you can’t serve two masters); “for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.
“For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life, as to what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor for your body, as to what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit” (approximately a foot and a half) “to his life’s span?” Verses 22–27.
How can a man add inches to his stature? He can’t do it. He can concentrate all he wants but it cannot help him. It is not going to do any good. I did see a man who could raise himself up six or eight inches because he could distend the vertebrae in his body. All he had to do was heave a sigh of relief and he was right back where he was. But giving all that effort, he still could not obtain permanent growth.
Of what effect is concentration and dedication to earthly principles? Is there anything you can get of this world’s goods that cannot be taken away from you? Is there anything you can actually attain to that you cannot lose? There is nothing. A man could spend millions of dollars trying to obtain a certain prestige, and it could be swept away instantly.
There is one thing we can thank God for: we who are in this walk have nothing to lose. Wherever we go we will be ill thought of, because the Lord spoke at the very beginning of this walk that it would be many years before there would be appreciation by God’s people of what He was speaking through us and restoring to the Church. We are far ahead of the word that has gone out which people have not yet accepted. Even less do they accept the channel of it. But that is in God’s hands. We are content to go ahead.
God says you do not have a double life. You do not walk with a double motivation. You are not torn between two different life-styles. You find out what God wants for you, and that is what you follow. You give it all to the Lord. You do not clutch to serve Mammon on one hand and also serve God. Few people have ever been able to understand the sin of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1–11. Why would God suddenly smite an old man down who wanted to hang on to a little bit of money when he sold his property, who wanted a little bit of security in his old age? This was the purity of the Church at that time. It was pure. This was the first introduction to lying to the Holy Spirit: lifting up hands, rejoicing, worshiping God, and saying, “I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord; not my will but thine be done,” but at the same time pursuing something that was self-preservation instinct all the way—saving their lives. It was inevitable they had to lose their lives.
This has to be the thinking behind each one of us: And why are you anxious about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these (that is true). But if God so arrays the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more do so for you, O men of little faith? Do not be anxious then saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or, ‘What shall we drink?’ or, ‘With what shall we clothe ourselves?’ For all these things the Gentiles eagerly seek; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you.” Matthew 6:28–33. Everything will be added to you.
“It is not an issue of what I have or what I don’t have, then?”
No. It is an issue of what you are serving and what your motivation is. If God finds a man whose heart is perfect toward Him, He often gives him other things that are incidentals. Abraham was a very wealthy man yet he would not take one thing from the King of Sodom lest he would say he made Abraham rich. David was a very wealthy man. But everything he received he stockpiled to build the Temple—the most fabulous treasures in all the world. Yet he did not take them unto himself. His son did not have that same dedication. I have seen some very wealthy men with great fortunes which were started in the will of God. It did not matter to Job when everything was swept away. He worshiped God. He was brought down to death’s door and still he worshiped God. Then God restored to him over and abundantly what he had before.
It does not matter how much money you have; what matters is, did God give it to you? Did it come to you because you were following the Lord wholly? Did it come to you because your motivation was right to serve God? I think that is the important thing. “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore, do not be anxious for tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself …” Matthew 6:33–34. Each day has enough trouble of its own. There must come that complete attitude in our mind by which we approach all the days to come and say, “Do not be anxious.”
“That means I am to go home and throw out all my extra clothing?”
I wouldn’t advise that.
“Well, I thought you were just saying we had to be careful about all of these things.”
I would be alert to the fact that clothes are going to be hard to find. I would have them taken care of, cleaned, and stored away someplace.
“But I’m too fat to get into that dress.” Don’t worry, comes the judgments, you’ll shrink down. It will be better than a gym, a beauty salon, or anything you can think of. We all have had the abundance. But the days before us are going to see something else. So save the things, not only for your own use, but for the people you can help. Be prepared for the days that are ahead, yet have one motivation. The prophets cried to the Lord, “In the midst of wrath remember mercy.”
Joel tells us that in the day when judgments are in the earth, whoever cries to the Lord will be saved. In Mount Zion will be deliverance in the remnant whom the Lord shall call. We are going to have the deliverance. We, in this remnant, are going to voice the word of God for the millions who will be saved during the judgments of God in the earth. In the midst of wrath He remembers mercy. God delights in mercy over judgment, as the Word tells us. And that is why both you and I are looking forward to the trouble. Some of these pigs need to be caught in a fence and start squealing. Then God will deliver them.
Have you ever been on a farm and heard the squeal of a little pig caught in a fence? They really squeal! Two sounds on this earth are most disturbing, haunting, and wracking: one is a baby’s cry; another is a pig caught in a fence. These sounds go right through to your soul. Have you ever tried to ignore a baby’s cry? “It’s good for him to cry; let him cry; he’s going to go to sleep.” But that baby gets through to you; you go to the baby. You can’t ignore him and neither can you ignore a squealing pig.
You are going to hear cries—the cries God is going to hear—not pigs caught in a fence, not little babies that have no other way of getting attention, but people who have forgotten their God and find themselves in the midst of judgments. Then there will be the deliverance. You will hear those cries all over the earth, and this glorious Living Word will be there. God has given us a promise for all of these people that will cry. Whoever cries in the name of the Lord will be saved. That is the way it is going to come.