Dear Ones,
Several days ago, we celebrated Valentine’s Day! However wonderful it is to celebrate our love towards one another, there is a greater love we are celebrating! We are rejoicing in God’s incredible love towards us as He is opening His heart through His Word concerning His “World of Done”! Romans 16:25-26a says, “Now to him that is of power to establish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest…” God is sharing with us what has been hidden deep in His heart from before time. First Corinthians 2:7 says, “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.” In this verse we find that, before the world, God had ordained this hidden wisdom unto our glory. God is moving right now, opening our ears and eyes to hear and see “that which has been hidden but is now being unveiled.” It is a Sabbath year for our Jesus Tribe Fellowship, and as we hear what the Spirit is sharing with us, we are also entering into His rest… a rest given to us even from before the foundation of the world. In that sense, this year of rest is greatly blessed of God as He so preciously shares with us. Let us together feast on the Word flowing from His heart. It is our time to enter in together with great joy.
As for me, I am personally immersing myself in the Word for your sake. I believe the Lord is sharing so richly with us right now because of His great love and care for each of you. I know that this “World of Done” sharing brings with it a greater freedom and covering than we have ever known. Because I love you, His sheep, I cannot but give myself to this for your care and through His love. Please pray for me as I labor in the word with the Spirit, and also for all of us as we enter into this Good Land of God’s Pure Son together.
Yours from His Heart, Randy
download“And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.” (Hebrews 11:15)
“In that day, he that shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back. Remember Lot’s wife." (Luke 17:31, 32)
“And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. And Jesus said unto him, no man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9: 61, 62)
“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13, 14)
All of the Scriptures speak of a possibility of turning back. While in the wilderness, Israel continually threatened to go back to Egypt. The possibility of turning back to our old life is ever before us though deliverance is a past, completed fact: “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins: wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience. Among whom also we all had our conversation (manner of life) in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Ephesians 2:1-3).
If we become mindful of the life we had before, we might possibly return to it. It all depends on what our mind is full of. If we continually feed on the Word of God and the fellowship of the saints, we will press toward the mark of ever learning Christ, our life. But if our mind begins to be taken up with the cares of this life, then we walk on thin ice. We are to “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
But there are more ways of turning back than just turning to sin. You can look back to religious things also. You can turn back to old experiences, trying to recapture them. Just as we leave sin, so we blame these things. We must lay aside our old conceptions and experiences. We must find that “old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God” (11 Corinthians 5:17, 18).
Our old, experienced, religious self is just as harmful as a sinful self. Both have limited God from doing a “new thing” (Isaiah 43:19). It is like pulling teeth to get us to forget those things which are behind. We have charted, diagrammed, and categorized our Lord and left the providence of God and the freshness of walking in the light anew and afresh every day. I love the song, Give Me That Old Time Religion, but all it speaks of is going back.
I have heard people say, “Things sure are not like they used to be. God really did great things back then.” In reality, it is not the experiences they want to recapture but the Christ who was so real at the time. But the fresh Christ is not found in turning back but by pressing toward the mark.
You should not measure yourself and your spiritual state based on past experiences. Nor should you measure the church you are in now to one you may have previously been in to find out how far you are or how short you have fallen. Do not be as those who measure themselves by themselves or by others. Christ is the measure, not the Christ of our past but He who now is. We can find a jawbone of an ass and say, “Bless God, it worked for Samson, and it will work today.” It is not the instrument or the method we use that is important. If we pick up a jawbone against the enemy because we have seen it work before but the Spirit of the Lord does not come upon us, then it would be better if we threw it down and ran instead of standing our ground and being destroyed.
God told Moses to make a brass serpent and put it on a pole when in the wilderness. The people were being bitten by snakes so the Lord said that whoever would look on the brass serpent would recover. This foreshadowed the cross. It meant nothing in itself. God honored it because it represented what Christ would do at Calvary (John 3:14, 15). Speaking of King Hezekiah, many hundreds of years after Moses made the brass serpent, we read: “He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan” (11 Kings 18:4-6).
The brass serpent worked once; it was given of God; and the greatest man of Israel’s history made it with his own hands. Why not continue to use it? The people were looking back. Because of this, the things that had been life for those in Numbers 21 had become idolatry for the next generations. Hezekiah was not looking at what had been but what was not. He took his place among the greatest of kings because he found the very real and present God who used very different things to accomplish his purpose. Hezekiah was not trying to conform Israel to the Israel of Moses’ day no matter what great things God had done for them. He broke up the idol of looking back and called it Nehushtan. He called it what it was. Nehushtan means “a piece of brass.”
Just because God used something before does not mean that He will use it now. Do not lay the old things before Him expecting Him to bless them now. They may have been good then and may well be good now, but He may have an altogether new direction for now. The old things that we keep shoving before Him may be the very things that stand in the way of progress and new direction for today. We cannot see what is before us, for we are too busy looking back trying to bring the old things forward.
Jesus himself told us plainly, “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17). The old wineskins of past knowledge, past experiences or past ministries cannot contain the freshness of the new wine. God is not pouring old wine right now. If we are not able to expand, then we are old wineskins. He will not fit into the wineskins of what once was. We must be prepared to be enlarged. If the old ministries we are trying to retain are not expanding, then we must discard them and pray that new vessels and vehicles of the new wine will be given. But to stubbornly hold with the old will result in the loss of the old wineskins and the new wine, and God will seek elsewhere.
There is a difference between living in the confidence of what God has shown us and done through us and living by the faith of the Son of God. We can be very confident in our own abilities and achievements, but it is like putting money in a bag that has a hole in it. It is the reason for our lack of fruitfulness.
It is not good to have a preconceived mold in the form of facilities, goals, etc. that we try to pour Christ into. He formed Bible schools from hungry hearts. He forms homes and halfway houses from growth and people who are already laying down their lives in that way. They must be a natural outgrowth of the growth of the Word in the heart of people who are constrained by life to do it, not constrained by past truth or constrained by leadership.
Growth comes when we look not at the things that are seen, but at things that are not seen with the natural eye (II Corinthians 4:18). We must not look at what has been done before and try to simulate it. Our faith is not in what we have seen or in what has been, but in Jesus now. The road is not always marked beforehand. The barriers and narrowness are usually of our own making. We usually walk by sight and not by faith. He is able to reach far beyond our capacities into the magnitude of His own expanse and greatness, but only to the degree that we allow that to work in us. Do you believe that? Read that statement again. Now read Ephesians 3:20 – “Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.” *** Stay tuned next month for part two!
