Thank you.
I don't think there's that much difference in
the accent.
If there is, it's his fault, not mine.
He speaks bad.
Okay, I'd like to read a verse in
Isaiah chapter 45.
Isaiah 45 verse 18.
I was asked this morning if I'd share
from the word and also share a little
bit about what we're doing in South America.
And I don't know about anybody else, but
it's hard for me to combine two things.
But I think we can with this text
this morning.
Because we're talking about a situation.
We're talking about a promise.
We're talking about a world condition.
We're talking about a purpose.
Purpose of God.
Verse 18 in Isaiah 45 says, Thus saith
the Lord that created the heavens, got himself
that formed the earth, and made it.
He hath established it.
He created it, not in vain.
He formed it to be inhabited.
I am the Lord, and there is none
else.
I have not spoken in secret in a
dark place of the earth.
I said not unto the seed of Jacob,
seek ye me in vain.
I, the Lord, speak righteousness.
I declare things that are right.
This little phrase, not in vain, sticks in
my mind.
We live in a world destroyed.
Literally, this verse means, or the word vain
here, in vain, means to lay waste.
May it be more clear if we said
to be a desert place.
It says God, and the purpose of God,
the world was created not to lay waste,
not to be a desert.
The thing that impacted me, the God of
creation is coherence in all his works.
That which is true of the whole is
true of every single part.
There is no life created in vain.
There's no day in any life created in
vain.
There's no event in vain, or put it
in New Testament language, all things work together.
There's nothing which flies off at a tangent.
There's nothing which works against other things.
As we come into God, as faith takes
hold of life, somehow everything is polarized.
You know what it is to look through
a polarized glass, and there are certain things
you can't see.
If you ever take two polarized glasses and
put them together and twist them, that which
you can't see here and that which you
can't see here combine, and you've got a
black spot in front of your eyes.
And I believe somehow God brings his own,
if they're obedient, if they're following him, to
a place where they see that all things
are somehow polarized.
They're going the same direction.
There's nothing, once again, flying off at a
tangent.
There's nothing which is not working.
There's nothing which is neutral.
And we could speak a long time about
this.
You know, we call some things good and
other things bad.
And the good is to be desired, and
the bad if we can get out of
it, or cop out of it sometimes.
If we can avoid it, so much the
better.
And yet in God there is no good
and bad.
I know in one sense there is, in
moral things, but in life itself, health and
sickness, for God they're both alike.
Riches and poverty.
The apostle talks about, I've learned how to
abound, I've learned how not to abound, I've
learned how to have, I've learned how not
to have.
I've got beyond all of those things.
All things work together.
He says they work together for one purpose,
and what is that purpose?
They work together for good.
For good.
Read about the wise men coming, giving their
gifts to Jesus.
You know, they gave gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Gold speaks about the nature of God, that
which God has given us of himself.
Frankincense about the communion, the fellowship with God,
and myrrh.
Myrrh is a sweet smelling spice, but it's
a very bitter, very bitter spice to the
taste.
All those negative things, all those hurts, if
I can only bring them to God, it's
not only legitimate, but it's a pleasing offering.
It's right up there with the gold and
the frankincense.
You know, it's not that that third person,
well, what can I do?
I don't have any more.
I got this little bit of myrrh.
Maybe he'll accept it.
No.
It's a threefold thing.
We could maybe go into that and talk
about body, soul, and spirit, but we won't.
Let's get back to our text.
So God created the earth, once again, with
one purpose that includes everything and every part.
He created it not in vain, once again,
not to be a desert.
What is a desert?
It's a place where life will not grow.
And physically, around this world there are many
desert places.
It wasn't that way in the beginning.
It's this way now since the curse of
this creation.
There are places like the Sahara, deserts down
there in South America, deserts here in the
United States, where nothing will grow, where life
cannot be sustained, where the seeds which are
planted die, where the person who enters must
leave or else they'll die.
And spiritually, there are deserts.
Maybe I can bring in Paraguay here.
There are lands, there are countries, and it's
hard for me to communicate.
You've got to live there.
You've got to be there.
You've got to absorb that atmosphere day after
day and week after week until it becomes
real, until you can sense and know and
participate of the death that there is in
those countries.
But what I want to say is that
even today, almost 2,000 years after Jesus
came, there are countries, and many countries, around
the face of the earth, which are deserts.
There are places where the gospel is bloomed,
and there are other countries where missionaries labor
for years and they count their converts on
their fingers, after 20, 30, 40 years of
faithful service.
Why?
Because these places are desert places.
I remember years ago when we first went
to Paraguay.
We'd been in Argentina.
We'd been in a church where there was
a tremendous moving of the Spirit of God,
tremendous renovation, beautiful atmosphere.
The church was full practically all the time.
We moved over to Paraguay.
We came right out of this atmosphere, this
heat of almost revival.
We'd sing the choruses that we'd learned back
in Argentina.
We'd pray with the same fervor.
We'd preach with the same urgency.
It was like stepping out of a heated
room into the Antarctic.
We'd sing, and the songs would just kind
of float out there and drop to the
floor.
We'd pray, and the prayers would seem to
die.
One day I was in a meeting.
And in that meeting, it wasn't a vision,
but it came with an impact of reality.
We were singing, and as we were singing,
all of a sudden it dawned on me.
I saw it, the situation of a country.
It was as though I could see the
enemy standing on top of a tremendous fortress,
like those old medieval castles, reaching up into
the skies.
And he was way up there on the
top, and as it were, I could see
it from the top looking down.
There was the enemy on top, and he
was saying to the church, you shall not
enter in.
And at that moment, it seemed that there
was a fortress made up out of every
evil thing that had happened in that country
ever.
As though in the invisible world, every immaterial
thing, every hurt, every tear, every broken home,
every destroyed life, every act of violence.
Paraguay is a tremendously violent country.
Tremendously violent country.
All the hurt, all the wrong, all the
children who didn't have parents, all the drunkenness,
all the immorality, all the twisted things, somehow
in the invisible world, they became material.
And over the generations, the enemy took those
things, the things which each life supplied of
wrong, took them and built, as the building
blocks on his fortress, built up with them
walls, built up towers, built up bulwarks to
heaven.
You remember the verse where Jesus said, the
enemy cometh and he hath nothing in me?
Let me just stick this in parenthesis, and
then we get back to the fortress.
You know, this is the other side of
the coin.
I think many times when the enemy comes,
we go into despondency, we go into defeat,
we go into despair, we go into unbelief,
because he has something in us.
You know, we can rebuke him, and we
can do everything, but there's something in us
that belongs to him.
And you say, you've always kept, for instance,
you've always kept for yourself a little place
to feel sorry for yourself.
You know, and I can see that he's
coming, and, excuse me, I'll use this brother
here, he's coming walking over to me, and
I'm saying, no, no, no, and I'm saying,
in Jesus' name, no, and he's saying, this
is mine, this is mine, this is mine.
He takes me, gets hold of me, and
I can't get out of it.
You know, we talk about, quote, deliverance.
We talk a lot, we bat around a
lot of phrases.
There's a lot more to it than what
we really realize, I believe.
The enemy builds, and I believe not only
over a country, but over a life, heritages
of wrong, fortresses in families.
And I don't want to get into this,
because we all get kind of psyched out.
There's no need to, but it is true.
There are families where certain sins run down
through the generations.
There are places where there are certain fears
that rule and destroy.
There are families which can never, what can
I say, get off the ground, either in
life, or in business, or in their own
personal relationships.
Think of one missionary down there in Paraguay,
Argentina, down in the southern part of Argentina.
As he got married, there's a tremendous fear
in his heart.
My family has fallen apart in their marriages,
and God, are you going to hold me
as I step into marriage?
There's a real fear there, and it's a
real battle to get out, and know that
God has said, child, you're free.
And I'm not talking about a mental thing,
because that's not good enough.
Mental conviction can't take away ground that belongs
to the enemy.
I can't argue the enemy out.
You know, I can't go to the negotiating
table and say, well, listen, enemy, you know,
let's talk this over.
He's saying, this is mine, and that's the
way it is in the spiritual world.
There are only two worlds, either God or
the enemy.
We're in one, or we're in the other.
Here it says, once again, not in vain.
We got countries which, as I said, are
desert places.
They're in vain.
In vain.
I believe the challenge to the church, the
challenge to whoever has got ears to hear,
has yet to see with all those countries
around the world, God's calling people to those
countries.
He's calling people that will rise up and
say, God, you've said this earth, and it
doesn't matter what country.
It doesn't matter whether it's Paraguay or Iran
or even the European countries like Germany and
France, which are so far away, it doesn't
matter who they are, but that somebody hear
the voice of God, somebody hear the word
of God and go there and say, God,
it's not going to be in vain in
this country, and it's going to take my
life.
I've got to lay down my life, and
it's not just words, and it's not just
a feeling.
It's not just something we hear in a
meeting.
It's reality, day after day, week after week,
year after year, and an insisting.
You know, it's not just a matter of
seeing something and possessing it.
We hear a lot about, you know, confess
and possess.
I believe there's a way of prayer.
God gives us a vision.
We want to possess this thing out here,
and we're back here, and this is the
measure of our lives, and this is the
measure of the thing that God wants us
to possess, and we have to agonize.
We have to strive.
We have to be purified, and our faith
has to be tried, and our lives have
to come under the pressure.
We have to keep through it all that
same cry, God, give me to possess that
which you've put before me, and as we
go, little by little, our lives are enlarged,
and as we keep on going, they're enlarged,
and we're not yet possessing until the day
comes when we reach that place, and at
that time, as we reach the place, then
our life is able to take the measure
of that which God would desire to give
us.
Once again, I repeat, it's very different than
confessing a thing, confessing and possessing.
It's true.
We confess, and we possess, but how many
times do we have to confess?
How many times did Abram have to confess?
And how many times did Abram fall down
on the way?
You know, we think, if I got to
keep that, as though faith were something mine.
The just, it says, shall fall how many
times?
Seven times.
Means any number of times.
It's not necessarily seven, a perfect number of
times.
He'll fall till he knows he can't walk.
You with me?
He'll fall till he knows he can't walk,
till he knows, as Paul says, there's nothing
in me.
But then somehow, through it all, through the
falling and the rising again, his eyes get
filled with a vision of who God is.
This is the thing I want to try
to transmit today.
This phrase, not in vain, God's bringing us
back to see who He is.
The God who fills eternities, the God whose
purposes do rule among the sons of men
and over the face of the earth.
Not in vain.
You remember there, let me look at it
a second here.
The end of Proverbs, talking about knowing God.
Chapter 30, it says, the words of Agur,
the son of Jacob.
Jacob.
Even the prophecy, the man spake unto Ithiel,
and to Ithiel and Ucho, says, Surely I
am more brutish than any man, and have
not the understanding of a man.
I neither learned wisdom, nor have knowledge of
the holy.
Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended?
Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?
Who hath bound the waters in a garment?
Who hath established all the ends of the
earth?
What is his name?
What is his son's name, if thou canst
tell?
He's saying, I don't know a thing.
I don't understand how it works.
I don't understand how things operate.
I don't understand who puts them together.
But God, show me who it is.
Because if I know who it is, then
I know and I'll find my way out.
If I can see Him, if I can
only see Him, and it's, once again, it's
not a mental knowledge.
It's not going to a seminar about the
purposes of God, and it's not reading a
book about it.
It's a life process, and there's got to
be that cry.
You know, God likes to put His finger
right on the spot.
Right on the spot.
Remember when Paul fell down there on the
Damascus road?
What did the Lord say to him?
Saul?
Why?
All his life, all his purposes, that persecution,
the Lord puts a why there.
Why?
I think many times, if we only had
ears to hear, there's a why that's echoing
from heaven over our lives.
The Lord's saying to me, Paul, why?
Why do you do what you do?
Why are your priorities what they are?
Why do you live the way you live?
Why is your life ordered the way it's
ordered?
Why?
There's a tremendous sense of urgency.
God wants us to see things.
We tend to be so negatively oriented.
We tend to be negatively oriented in the
sense that we're always trying to escape the
negative.
And I think maybe part of it's due
to a wrong emphasis, a wrong slant that
the teaching's taken in the church.
We think of Jesus' first message.
He came and He said, Repent.
You know, we can preach repentance all we
want, but we've got to keep it in
balance.
Repent.
We say, you know, the word repent means
to think again.
We go back and we say, this is
the word that the Roman officials there in
the army used of the soldiers.
They said, Repent, and it meant about face
and go back the other way.
They said, that's what we got to do.
We got to leave our sin.
We got to repent because we're sinners.
That's true.
But I believe the positive has always got
to be greater than negative.
And Jesus did not say, Repent because you're
sinners.
They were sinners.
They needed to repent of their sin.
But He says, Repent.
Why?
Because there's a kingdom that's come to this
earth.
Because the old things have passed away, all
the history, all the promises, from the time
that Adam fell and his heart was broken
by his sin when he saw everything he'd
lost, on down through the generations, the prophetic
word and the prophetic messengers, looking out into
the future and seeing the glory of God,
and one after another, prophesying it until we
come to the end and we see Simeon
there.
He received Jesus in his hand.
I don't know how many times that man
had had to rebuke death, say, Death, go
away.
Not yet.
I've not yet seen it.
Death, you can't touch me yet.
But there came a time, He said, Now,
Lord, let your servant, the word means your
slave, Lord, let your slave depart in peace
for my eyes have seen.
Mine eyes have seen the glory.
Mine eyes have seen your salvation.
And Jesus came.
What's His message?
This is His message, Repent.
Why?
Because there's a kingdom that you've not even
imagined.
There's a kingdom where your life is not
in vain.
You know, I believe this curse of emptiness
hangs over the nations, hangs over the individuals.
It's a tremendous thing to re-emplace emptiness
with fullness.
I was supposed to be talking about Paraguay
and we forgot it back there, but that's
our task in Paraguay.
A life where there's been generations of disobedience,
generations of immorality, generations of violence.
You know what?
It's relatively easy there and here to get
people to respond on a superficial level.
I said last night, we can respond through
negative things to get out of hell and
judgment.
We can respond for a positive reward that
God would give me something.
But to respond to the mercy of God,
to come into the full purposes of God,
to see it and to turn from everything
else, repent, because there's a kingdom.
Once again, a kingdom we haven't even imagined.
I think the trouble with Christianity is that
it's turned stale.
It's turned stale.
We're trying to pass things on.
I talked to a missionary earlier this year,
I guess it was.
He'd been down in Argentina for many years.
The Lord had used him in revival down
there.
He's up now in the States and he
was talking about the children of God.
I mean, those that are born again.
I'm not talking about the children of God
in the sense it used to be used.
He's talking about those that know God and
he said, you know, the real people, the
real children of God, those that are God's
own, he says, they're very few.
He said there's three here and there's five
there and there's maybe 15 here.
You know, we have big churches, but we
don't have very many people that live through
the communion, through the flow, through the intercourse
with the life of God.
Something we listen in church and we think,
wow, that's great, that's neat.
You know, how do I put that to
use?
And it all becomes me trying to take
it and me trying to work it out
and me trying to do it.
Whereas God wants us to get beyond that,
to transcend those things, that our spirits be
freed, that our life come into a different
basis.
We need the basis of faith, a real
faith.
Who is he?
Ager Christ.
Who is he?
Because if I knew, if I knew, then
faith would spring forth.
If I knew, there is a God that
loves, there is a God that's powerful, there's
a God that has a perfect purpose in
my life.
We always think of how much we've got
to give up.
Maybe God will want my money, maybe God
will want my life, maybe God will want
to send me to the mission field, maybe
God, you know, that's so poor.
That's, that's tremendously small, all our reasoning when
we're thinking that way.
I had a friend, came up from the
mission field after many years, met up with
some people he'd known years before.
And they was getting on in years and
this person said, you know, you've had a
very full life.
And apparently it made an impact on him
because he, they started looking back, they saw
all the times they'd had nothing.
One time they came up from, all the
way from Argentina to the States.
I was going to say on foot, not
really on foot, but they started overland because
they didn't have any money.
Ended up on a tiny little boat, just
a tiny little boat.
They said they went to the pier, they
heard there was a boat leaving.
They were up in Ecuador, I think.
There was a boat leaving for Panama.
And they said they went to the pier
and there was no boat, but there was
a little mast sticking over the top of
the pier.
And they went and they looked down and
there was their boat.
And another missionary was going to send his
daughter with them and he saw the boat
and he said, no, she's not going.
But they had to go.
They had no alternative.
If they were going on, they had to
go on that boat.
Anyway, a very full life.
He'd seen revival.
He'd paid a price.
He'd fought the enemy tooth and nail for
years.
He'd suffered.
He'd been hurt.
A very full life it was.
Because life is not the external.
We can have it all if it's empty
inside.
If it's empty inside, it's lying waste.
If it's empty inside, it hurts.
And we can pile more and more and
more on the outside and it'll hurt worse.
There's, you know, emptiness is not a vacuum.
It's a throbbing pain.
The state of this world is frustration.
Not a passive frustration, an active frustration.
I'm frustrated.
You know, many times if we were realistic,
we'd have to say, God, why am I
here?
What am I doing?
God, is this all there is?
Is this all there is?
You know, even if we have a good
church, even if we're in the best place
in the world, if it's not inside, God,
I go and it's beautiful in church and
I see the pastor and I hear the
music and oh, it's great.
And then I come out and God, it's
empty.
You know, there's only one way into this.
Since He created it not in vain, He
formed it to be inhabited.
He formed it to be possessed.
I said yesterday, one of the most beautiful
things in life to me is to see
the older servants of God that have gone
on with God throughout the years, come nearing
the end of their life and they're free
and they're above it all.
They're transformed.
They're living in a measure, the eternal kingdom
down here on earth.
Their earth is inhabited.
There are no empty places.
There are no places that are crying out
frustration.
There are no places where they cannot bring
life and they know they cannot bring life
and they know it's empty and they know
there's nothing they can do about it.
Somehow, through the years, they've gone beyond it
all.
They've come into God.
They've come into a possession.
He formed it not in vain.
He formed it to be inhabited.
He formed it to be filled.
He formed it to be possessed.
He formed it to be taken, every part
of it.
Taken in Him, taken for Him, taken by
Him, by His Spirit, in our lives.
He says here, I said not unto the
seed of Jacob, seeking me in vain.
Remember the words of the apostle there in
the New Testament?
Brethren, know that your labor is not in
vain.
This is that which is written over the
things of God and over the things of
the enemy is written in vain.
In vain, no matter what it is, no
matter how beautiful it is, no matter how
permanent it seems, time is going to come
when it's all going to be permanent.
There's not going to be nothing left.
It's going to be ashes.
Said yesterday, I believe somehow the history of
the world, the history of the universe, is
repeated in each generation.
Just as Jesus said that His crucifixion, His
rejection, and the sins of the generations would
all come upon this generation, so the cursings
and so the blessings of history apply to
each generation.
The purposes of God.
Watchman Nee in one of his books talks
about the corn of wheat falling into the
ground and dying, and we use it to
mean surrender and leave our own life and
step into God.
But he talks about it in a different
way, and he said that every work of
God only endures a lifetime.
The next generation has to once again find
the seed and find it for itself, come
into a fresh and real experience.
Because otherwise we're trying to sure up.
I remember in Paraguay some years ago, we
never had storm sewers in the streets, and
when it would rain, we'd have rivers.
They decided to put in storm sewers.
One place they did it, and they got
too close to the houses, and you know
they had to prop those houses up because
they were falling over.
I think that happens with our house sometimes,
our spiritual house.
We have to prop it up because the
foundation isn't sure.
It's being taken away.
The substance isn't there.
The reality isn't there.
Yet God says, I said, seek me not
in vain.
You know, we don't know how to seek
the Lord.
The Bible really doesn't tell us how to
seek the Lord except in a very general
way.
It says, seek him in praises.
Seek him, but it never says, you know,
do this and do that and do that.
The five steps to seeking God, it talks
about sincerity, it talks about fasting, it talks
about prayer, it talks about intensity, but it
never actually lays down one, two, three, the
way to seek God.
I believe it doesn't matter.
Seeking comes from the heart.
Seeking is more desire than anything else.
It's not the words that I say.
There's a verse that says, while you're seeking
me, I will be found.
It's like a little child crying out for
its mother.
The child will never find the mother because
she's upstairs.
The little child's all over and bumping into
things and banging on the table and crying
and bawling and getting confused.
But while he's seeking, the mother hears and
she comes to him.
You know, and if God would say, do
this and do that, we'd think we'd done
it.
We tell people how to do it, and
you can't do that.
It doesn't work.
That's one of the reasons there's so much
frustration around.
We try to get our act together.
We try to form a spiritual life.
You can't form a spiritual life.
The only thing is desire.
The only thing is crying without words and
crying without a cry and praying without a
prayer.
But when that's there, even though, once again,
the simplest things, we read a little verse
like this, not in vain, you say, oh
God, God, let my life be not in
vain.
Oh God, I don't understand it.
I don't understand the purposes that you would
bring into my life.
I don't understand how you're going to work
it out.
But God, don't let it be in vain.
It must be an awful thing to step
over the threshold into eternity.
After having lived a life in vain, all
of a sudden get your eyes opened.
It must be a tremendous anguish, intensified by,
in the transformation that eternity brings, tremendous anguish.
God, I was back there and I never
knew what it was all about.
But it was all in vain.
I was so proud of myself and my
strength and trying to keep things under and
trying to keep things organized and doing things
and being something and myself as a person
and the value that I have as a
person and all of this stuff.
I was so involved with that that I
never saw that there's something far beyond anything
that I could ever hope to be.
And on the other hand, I believe it
must be something tremendous.
I said yesterday, step into eternity and find
that it's not new.
Say, God, now I can possess it, but
I've seen it for a long time.
And Lord, I see those things, they're so
much greater and so much clearer and so
much more beautiful here, but I had a
little bit of that on earth.
Lord, the freedom here, there's no devil, there's
no sin, but on earth there was no
condemnation.
Lord, I'm here in your presence, but on
earth there was no separation.
You look at that list there in Romans
8, if we had time we'd go into
that.
Nothing shall separate it.
A list of 17 things, 7 things first,
10 things later, the whole thing has a
significance if you go into the numbers.
External things, internal things, spiritual things, natural things,
the anguish, the persecution, that which destroys from
within, that which destroys from without, all, it
goes into all the spheres, all the facets
of human personality, and beyond it all, the
love of God.
Yeah, but in the middle of it all,
you remember that little verse in the middle
of it all that I didn't used to
like, and I used to say, Lord, what's
this doing in here?
As it is written, for thy sakes we're
free and victorious and shouting and dancing all
the day long.
You remember that little verse?
No.
As it is written, for thy sakes we
are killed.
We're what?
Don't say that, that's a negative confession.
We're what?
We're killed all the day long, we're slain
all the day long.
It's as though the Christian has to step
into death to find it's not there.
I lay it all down, and then I
see there's no separation.
There can be no separation, nothing can be
taken away.
He formed it.
You know, it's not the enemy.
If I might just say one little thing
here, I think a lot of us are
frustrated about ourselves as people, our personalities.
You know, if I just had more capacity,
if I was just like pastor, if I
was just like our brother here, if I
could just sing like the other, if I
could just play the piano, if I just
wasn't so, you know, of so few words,
if I could just explain things, if I
just had this, if I just had the
other, if I just had the money that
somebody else has, if I just had the
opportunity that somebody else has, if God would
just treat me like He treats that one.
What did Jesus say when He came to
earth?
Father, a body hast thou given me.
All things work together for good.
God has made each one of us exactly,
exactly the way He wants us to be.
And if there are areas where there are
lack, and if there are areas that are
hard for me, it's because God somehow has
got a measure of grace, He's got a
measure of revelation, He's got a measure of
His own power, a measure of His own
life to glorify that thing.
I remember one time, some years ago, going
from Argentina to the north, from Paraguay down
to the north of Argentina, and as we
were driving down, the sun was setting out
there in the west, and there were storm
clouds out there, dark, black clouds.
And we were going to a meeting, we
were driving along, and I was thinking and
meditating, about to arrive in an hour, two
hours at the place of the meeting.
And I looked out at that sunset, and
all those clouds, as the sun was dying,
caught the glory of the sun.
And all that darkness was transformed, beautiful shapes,
beautiful forms, and it was all glowing.
It was all different colors of red and
rose.
It spoke to me.
You know, we say, Lord, take the clouds
away.
Lord, take the problems away.
Lord, if my life was just free and
open, there was nothing, none of those things.
You know, there's something beyond.
Lord, let the sun shine through my clouds.
There's a beauty in those sunsets.
There's not much beauty when the sun just
falls down, you know.
And even if there is, yesterday we were
coming, and it was kind of a nice
sunset.
You know why it is?
Because there's a lot of dust in the
air.
And where the sky gets red, it gets
redder in the areas where there's a lot
of dust in the air.
You get some place, probably in the way
up north, where there's a lot of green
grass, and you don't get, as the sun
goes down, it doesn't light up the sky
the same way.
So it's either the clouds or the dust,
and we say, Lord, take the dust away.
Lord, take the clouds away.
Lord, these are so black, and they're all
over my head, and they're covering my horizon
from one end to the other.
And the Lord says, child, I got something
else.
I got something better.
Why does God have us on this earth
anyway?
If he'd take all those negative influences away,
it'd be just like heaven.
You know, if he'd take me all away,
I'd be here alone.
It'd be great.
You know what I mean.
Hmm?
It'd be just like heaven if he'd take
all those negative things.
But he doesn't.
He says, child, if you see me in
these, you're going to see a glory that
you'd never see if they weren't here.
You'd never see it if they weren't here.
He's got a purpose.
He's got a beautiful purpose.
You know, I think, go back to repentance
and all those things, we're afraid of paying
a price in so many areas because we
never have really seen the tremendous dimension of
the positive.
Somebody talked about revival, and they said, you
know, you talk about revival, but it's terrible.
And that's true.
You know, in the little movings of God
we've been in South America, it's terrible when
God comes and moves and takes your life,
you know, and he saws it apart, and
that's you.
And yet, beyond it all, it's glorious.
Because even if this is dying, there's something
else that's coming to birth.
It's beautiful.
And there's a whole new vision.
There's a whole new world.
It's a world where the capacities are far
beyond this, where the peace has no measure,
where the love is infinite, where the grace
and the faith and the confidence and the
security mean that everything else is not needed.
He formed it.
God formed it.
He's forming a people.
He's forming a world.
I believe he's reaching out, reaching out to
the nations.
He's going to have a world inhabited.
I like that word.
A world possessed.
A world filled.