I remember many years ago there was a
friend, a pastor that my father knew, and
in the forefront of the charismatic move in
the north of Argentina, in the north of
the States, he used to put out a
magazine, from what I remember, and he used
to say that the Church is stagnated because
every Christmas time we go back to Christmas,
and every Easter time we go back to
Easter and we form a little vicious circle
and we never get out of it.
And I'm sure in a sense in many
churches that's true because we go back to
Christmas and we say what's already been said
last year, and the year before, and the
year before, and the year before, and the
same thing at Easter.
And yet, I'm sure there's a totally different
aspect that we need to go back, we
need to see more.
There's no measure to God, there's no measure
to the Word of God.
I just want to share a few thoughts
this evening.
First verse of Matthew 1, the book of
the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of
David, the Son of Abraham.
Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son
of Abraham.
I've read this verse I don't know how
many times before.
It caught my attention, the way that the
genealogy is introduced here.
I started thinking about it.
Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son
of Abraham.
Jesus was firstly, most importantly, the Son of
God.
The expression of God, he was God.
He expressed everything that the Father was, the
nature of God, the thoughts of God, the
works of God, the ways of God, expressed
through a man.
And yet, there was also a human side
to his nature.
I want to just look at this a
little bit tonight, symbolically.
Son of David, Son of Abraham.
What does David represent?
What does Abraham represent?
It says the generation of Jesus Christ.
In other words, Jesus was generated, just the
same as a generator in a car produces
electricity, so Abram produced Jesus Christ, so David
produced Jesus Christ.
In other words, he was Son of Man,
all mankind, and yet there were certain characteristics
which brought Jesus forth.
Am I losing you?
My wife is going to talk to me
afterward about talking in the abstract.
Say you understand, please.
I'm not supposed to talk in the abstract.
Some of us think in the abstract, and
other people are very concrete.
Let's try and bring it down to the
concrete, then.
Out of its chronological order, chronologically it would
be Jesus Christ, the Son of Abraham, the
Son of David.
Here it says Jesus Christ, the Son of
David, the Son of Abraham.
I believe it's in the order of its
importance.
What is David, then?
There are two things that come to my
mind.
David, firstly and most importantly in his relationship
to God, was a man beloved.
His relationship with God was a love relationship.
If we go back historically, you look at
the life of David, you look at the
ministry of David, you look at David's effect
on Israel.
He brought about a revolution, he brought about
a revival in all that man's response to
God in Israel.
You've heard about the tabernacle, I'm sure, the
tabernacle of Moses.
Yet when you come to the New Testament,
God talks about restoring the tabernacle of David.
The tabernacle of Moses had the outer courts,
had the altar, had the...
I forget the name of it in English.
Yeah, right, I know that.
What do you call it where they washed
the priests?
The laver.
Okay.
You have the laver, you have the brazen
altar, you have the outer court, you have
the inner court, you have the holy place,
the holy of holies.
Each part is representative of the work of
God, the appropriation of that work, the altar
speaking of the cross, our washing there in
the laver speaking of our purification to draw
nigh, the altar of incense speaking of worship,
adoration, and so on until we come to
the holy place, the presence of God.
And yet by the time David came along,
all of this symbolism, which in its first
impact on Israel I'm sure was tremendous, as
a coming out of Egypt, coming out of
a religious experience where they knew the promise
of God to Abraham, they knew a little
bit about faith, were suddenly brought into a
revelation of all that God was and all
that God meant, and all that it meant
in the personal realm of appropriation as they
desired to draw near to God, the necessity
of the sacrifice, the necessity of purification, the
necessity of separation, the necessity of the incense,
the necessity of worship.
And yet by the time David came along,
Israel had been through a long history of
victories and defeats, mostly defeats, finishing with the
total destruction of the first king of Israel,
Saul.
And when David came there was a fear
of the
altar of the Lord at Shiloh.
So David takes the ark of the Lord
and brings it to the tabernacle of David
there in Jerusalem, there in Zion.
And around this ark, typifying the presence of
God, around the presence of God, around the
person of God, he forms a whole new
order of worship in the praise, in the
adoration, the way of coming, the way of
expression, the response to the people, of the
people toward God.
Although the other still exists, yet the central
thing was no longer the external, but the
internal, man's response, the heart response, the spontaneous
response.
It wasn't a structured thing as Moses' tabernacle
was.
And yet at the same time it was
something which demanded everything.
You look at the expression of David's own
heart cry there in the book of Psalms,
the depths of his soul-searching, the depths
of his repentance, the intensity of his longing,
the surety, the confidence of his faith, and
you find a person who has found deep
relationship with God.
And so David is, once again, the person
that more than anybody else in all the
Old Testament represents the love relationship with God.
David, the ancestor, David through whom Christ came,
Christ came through, if we apply it down
to the personal now, Christ came through a
love relationship.
There's a sense in which God wants to
reveal his Son to each of us, wants
to reveal his Son through each one of
us, wants there to be, as it were,
born of us the Christ.
Are you following me?
Or is this too, you're with me, two
people, three people, good.
Okay, that's enough.
He wants, God wants us to come into
that relationship, he wants there to be born,
once again, through our relationship to him, an
expression of Christ in us and through us,
just as through the generation of David, through
the generation of Abram, Christ was brought into
this world.
There was no Christ, as it were, apart
from David and apart from Abram.
Once again let me underline, this is the
first verse of the New Testament.
The first mention of things in the Bible
are always vitally important, they're always like a
signpost pointing the way, and whenever that fact,
that doctrine, that truth is mentioned later on
through scripture, it's always in agreement with the
first mention, no matter what that truth be,
whether it be the mercy of God, the
judgment of God, the grace of God, always
the first example, as it were, written in
capital letters.
Later on it might be written in small
letters, but the first mention is always in
capital letters and with a flashing light.
So we're introduced to the new pact.
God is bringing in his Son to take
away the curse.
I don't know, sometimes it doesn't mean too
much to us.
Sometimes when we see hurt, when we see
wrong, when we see lives, families, cities, nations
that have been destroyed, taken by the enemy,
as it were, just wrung in total destruction,
then we start to realize a little bit
what it means when the curse is taken
away.
God says the curse will be taken away
from off the face of the earth.
We won't see it finally in all its
manifestation until that last day when the old
earth and the old things are passed away
and the eternity commences, and yet spiritually speaking,
he's opened the door to all of this.
We read there of Jesus coming in Luke,
the prophecy of Zechariah, that he'll come that
we might be delivered from the hand of
all our enemies.
We might be delivered from the hand of
all our enemies.
Once again, God's deliverance, God's manifestation, God's life,
God's relationship starts right here.
It starts when there's something within us which
responds in love toward God, when there's something
within us which, even before faith, starts to
spring forth with longing, with yearning.
It doesn't have to be something we can
understand.
I think one of the greatest curses of
20th century Christianity, maybe of Christianity in all
ages, is that we've mechanized religion.
We've made it a series of truths which,
if you put in the right order, produce
a certain given result.
It isn't that way.
I think that's what this verse, among other
things, is trying to tell us.
Jesus is the son of David.
Jesus is the son of love.
It's an inarticulate thing.
It's an indefinable thing.
We can't define love.
Why do we love a certain person?
Why do I love my wife and not
somebody else's wife?
Why do I love that person and not
the other person?
That person's my friend, but this person, somehow
there's something within me that responds, and how
can I explain it to a third person?
Well, we can't, except to a certain point.
I like that person because I like the
way she is.
We run out of words pretty soon.
And yet, the Spirit of God, the Apostle
says those are the led by the Spirit
of God, they are the sons of God.
When the Spirit of God is within the
child of God, there's a longing.
It's one of the first characteristics.
There's something, once again, inarticulate.
It's like a compass.
It automatically points to the North.
It doesn't do anything else.
There's no words.
There's no having to plug it in or
anything else.
That little needle automatically points to the North.
There's something that draws it.
So it is with the child of God,
so it is with everyone that would really
come in to that which God desires us
to come into.
Faith can bring us up to a certain
point.
Discipline can bring us up to a certain
point.
Our mind can bring us up to a
certain point, not very far along the way.
But there comes a point where our mind's
not enough.
There are things we cannot understand.
I think there are things we cannot believe.
Our faith is growing, but I think in
a sense of all children of God, there's
always that sense of so much more out
beyond.
If I could believe as I've seen, as
I've read, as I've heard, as I've participated
in different places at different times, if I
could have all that I know ready to
put into instant action in any given moment,
that would be glorious.
Those meetings when the Spirit of God has
just come down, if I could just kind
of raise my hand tonight, like a friend
of David's who was in the South Seas,
and all of a sudden he said, I
don't know why I did it.
He said he raised his hand, and he
was in a girls' boarding school.
He had about 200, 400 girls there, and
he raised his hand.
These were Methodists, Methodist boarding school.
Raised his hand, and he said, Receive ye
the Holy Ghost.
And he said the Spirit of God just
swept in.
The people started falling off the chairs and
crying out to God.
And afterward, even he didn't know what he'd
done.
And yet God came and God met him.
And if we could have that that we've
seen and that that we've touched at our
disposition all the time, wouldn't it be wonderful?
But we can't.
And yet, and I don't know how to
express this, I don't know how to explain
it, there is a faith, the Apostle says
there in Galatians, the faith which worketh through
love.
It says it's not in circumcision, it's not
in that mechanical thing, it's not in the
law, it's not in works that we can
do.
He said it's not in uncircumcision.
It's not going the other route and having
something totally unstructured.
He said it's neither in the structure nor
in the lack of the structure.
Rather it's in an inner essence that God
does his work.
And it's the faith that works through love.
As I said, not only are we not
able to put into everyday use at any
given moment all that we've seen and touched
at different times, but I think there are
many times we can't even see the way.
Think of Jesus there on the cross saying,
My God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Maybe that is a historical moment, maybe it's
kind of hard to apply it to us,
but those words were first spoken by this
man, David.
There came a time when David said, My
God, why have you forsaken me?
And yet even in that expression, there's a
yearning.
It mattered to him, it mattered more than
anything else on this earth.
My God, why?
He wasn't turning back, he wasn't saying, Okay,
God, I quit.
He wasn't saying, God, I'm through.
He's saying, Lord, why?
I want to know the why.
I want to know the way.
I want to be able to reach that
which I cannot yet reach.
On and on through the life of David,
and we can look it up there in
the Old Testament, there was a longing.
There was a love that captivated him.
He was different than his brethren.
He was different than all the people around
about Saul.
He was different even than all the people
around about Samuel.
He was different when he went into exile.
He was different when he was fleeing.
All through his life, he was different.
He'd been captivated, he'd been separated.
There was one thing that mattered to him,
only one thing, the presence of God, the
glory of God, the yearning, the longing for
God, day after day, year after year.
He was captivated, he was inspired by love.
Tremendous heights of faith that he reached, tremendous
expressions of his own inner surety, knowing that
there would come a time when he would
be satisfied, when all the old things would
be passed away and all things would be
made new, when the veil would be taken
away, when the darkness would be passed.
So Matthew starts his gospel saying, this is
the book of the generation of Jesus Christ,
the Son of David.
I think if we can learn the secret,
and it's not learned in a day, and
it's not learned in a year, and it's
not learned in ten years, I think it's
a little bit like the poem about St.
Paul that says, in one part, Go with
thine earliest dawn, thou shouldst begin it, scarce
were it finished at thy setting sun.
If we start with the dawning, we'll not
be finished before the end of the day.
And yet it's the lesson of life.
I think we're only as big as our
love.
Our faith is only as real as our
love.
I've seen people doing this with prayer, which
in a sense is the expression of faith,
the most common expression of faith.
It's kind of like, well, I know how
to do it.
It's kind of like, I found a button
which if you hit that button, you get
the candy.
There's a mechanization.
I remember certain people, very spiritual.
Apparently from what I gathered, their technique when
they met a new brother, they'd come and
say, if I can get him to pray,
then I'll be able to sense his spirit.
It's kind of like, if he says the
right words, and if he has the right
intensity, and if he yells, and he says,
Oh!
Then, oh, great!
There's ten points.
And if a guy says, Dear Lord, why
have you left me?
He's no good.
But we can't do that.
We can't do that.
The Son of David, inspired by that.
Maybe there's one other aspect.
That's David in the Old Testament, David in
the New Testament.
Call my attention, reading there, let's take Bartimaeus
and others also.
Remember the story of Bartimaeus the blind man
sitting by the roadside outside of Jericho.
Jesus starts coming by, and Bartimaeus starts yelling.
The people tell him to be quiet.
What's he crying out about once his sight
is back?
What's he saying?
Saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy
on me.
I used to think, why is that in
there?
Such a long title.
Could have said any one of a hundred
other different things.
Could have just said, Jesus, have mercy.
Could have just said, Master, have mercy.
The disciples when they're out there on the
sea, Master.
Carest thou not?
A lot of things.
Yet he's there, Jesus, Son of David, and
they tell him to be quiet.
And he goes through the whole long address
once again before giving his supplication.
Jesus, thou Son of David.
I thought about that.
I believe it's because in the Old Testament
there's the pact of David.
The pact of mercy.
God saying, my mercy will not be taken
from David.
Here's Jesus, the Son of David.
He's the expression of the mercy of God.
Jesus, the Son of David.
The Son of love, the Son of mercy.
You know, I've said many times, I hope
someday before I get through with this earthly
pilgrimage, I'll learn to pray some of the
prayers of the Bible as they should be
prayed.
I'll learn to say some of the words
of the Bible as they should be said.
We say the Lord's Prayer, and to really
pray it, I don't know if we ever
do.
I don't know how many people ever really
learn to say it in spirit and in
truth.
This concept of the mercy of God, I
remember some years ago, I forget the exact
circumstances surrounding the situation, but anyway, I was
praying.
All of a sudden, I was reading the
Bible, and all of a sudden it was
all the Lord said to me.
He said, can you respond to mercy?
Lord, what's this?
What do you mean, can I respond to
mercy?
I started to see, we as human beings
respond to fear, fear of judgment, fear of
hell, fear of the consequences of sin.
We can respond to that.
We can respond to the hope of reward,
the hope of attainment, and yet to respond
in truth to mercy is a totally different
sphere, way out beyond these two, where the
mercy of God melts us.
When I was a student in the last
century, there used to be a lot of
the kids there among all the kids of
the Bible school who would come back from
a Sunday morning or Sunday evening service, and
they'd say, well, you notice in the service
that the pastor was preaching how this moved
and that moved, and all of a sudden
that was prophetical and this was this and
this was that.
They'd talk about meetings, and the presence of
the Lord came and I felt like shouting.
I thought, wow, that's strange.
Every time the presence of the Lord comes,
I don't feel like shouting.
Whenever the presence of the Lord draws nigh
to me, I don't feel like any of
that.
I must be wrong.
And yet as the years go by, I
realize they're talking about something out on the
periphery of the working of God, the blessing
of God.
When the blessing of the Lord comes, when
the joy of the Lord comes, I feel
like shouting.
But when God himself comes, there is no
real response, apart from the total surrender of
all I have and all I am.
There is no real emotion except that emotion
of just saying, God, I am nothing, I
have nothing, I can do nothing.
The response there in the Bible of all
the men of God, the great prophets, the
great apostles, is flat on their face, all
of them, all of them.
Daniel's saying there's no strength in me.
Ezekiel, all the rest, and the hand of
the Lord having to raise him up, saying,
stand on your feet, I've strengthened you.
The Lord, that day was as though it
was in, just came to my mind, can
you respond to mercy?
Do you know what it is?
Do you understand what it is?
Does it touch you?
Does it melt you?
Does it motivate you?
Or are you on the other wavelength of
being motivated by your concepts, your fears, your
desires, escaping one thing, trying to reach another
thing?
Something that starts with mine is born of
mine and finishes up with mine?
Or can you respond to mercy?
When God comes and he doesn't demand anything,
he gives everything.
And yet because he gives everything, then something
within me, and once again we come back
to love again.
The mercy brings me to love.
I respond that way.
Remember David at the end of his life
saying, Lord, you've given me an everlasting covenant.
And he said, my house, I forget exactly
how it goes, but he liked saying, my
house is not worthy before you.
My life was not worthy before you, and
yet you've given an everlasting covenant.
He was understanding what it was all about.
I think there are things that God wants
to teach us in our life down here
below which go far beyond all our, quote,
ministry, all that we do for him, all
our reading, all our understanding, all our head
knowledge, that we understand the person of God
and the nature of God.
Once again, I repeat, for us, Jesus was
born of David, and if Jesus is going
to be born of us, if we're going
to come into the full realization, if it's
going to be real, tangible for us, then
it means that these same things must be
in us that will be the generation, will
generate Jesus Christ once again for us and
the whole level and through us as far
as what our ministry is able to produce.
I've noticed an interesting thing.
There can be the same ministry, the same
identical ministry as far as its outward manifestation,
totally different results in the hearts of people.
Right now there's a tremendous move of God
in Argentina, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
people being touched in a healing wave
and a preaching of salvation, a very clear
preaching of salvation, a very careful handling of
these tremendous crowds, a very precise making sure
that they know exactly what they're doing and
why they're doing and not coming forward twice,
for instance, for the same thing and so
on and so forth.
Avoiding anything that would lead to a lack
of control or a kind of a mass
hysteria.
And yet, although God's doing tremendous miracles, there's
not a tremendous depth of conviction of sin.
Again, I notice reading back and from a
little bit that I've seen of other ministry,
there are other people can have that same
identical ministry.
In fact, I was reading somebody today, just
a book I happened to pick up, that
one of the first healing evangelists, way back,
grew up in an old car in front
of this person's house.
Her father was a preacher, was a girl.
From what I remember looking out the window,
she saw the car come up.
She said, I saw this little tired man
get out of the car.
And she said, I don't know why I
started to weep.
He hadn't said a word, he hadn't done
a thing.
There's something that God transmits.
Is this too mystical for you?
There can be a healing move where many
are healed.
And there's a joy and there's an awareness.
And like we talked about the students, you
know, there's a happiness.
God is moving, this is great, this is
wonderful, this is glorious.
There can be another meeting, another ministry.
And yet, because the minister has within him
a different experience of God, beyond his words,
beyond his expression, beyond his gestures, there is
transmitted spiritually a totally different awareness of God
to the people.
And it's vitally important, not that we have
in order to express, once again verbally, but
that we have in order to transmit spiritually,
spiritual depth, spiritual reality.
Jesus, then, the son of David, and the
son of Abram.
Abram, of course, speaks of faith.
I like to think of Abram's faith not
as the faith to do, but as the
faith to follow.
There came the time when his faith produced,
but it wasn't always that way.
In fact, it wasn't that way right till
the very end.
But he had the faith to follow.
He'd seen something, and because of what he'd
seen, or rather he'd heard, and because of
what he'd heard, because of that inner vision
which he'd captured, he left everything.
Some of the effects of faith are just
the same as the effects of love.
It separated him from all the old.
He left that old land.
Many times I say to our people down
there in South America, you know, we read
the Bible so fast and we don't think
much about it, but I imagine to walk
those hundreds and thousands of miles that Abram
walked, it wasn't an easy thing.
You know, it's not just Abram woke up
one morning and said, okay, I'm going to
believe God, and then by the night he
had all the blessing and the journey was
finished.
There were days, I'm sure, of headaches there
in the sun, days of choking sandstorms, days
of perplexity, days when things didn't go all
right with the animals and didn't go all
right with his servants, and they wondered if
they were going to get to the next
waterhole, and all those things that happen to
anybody that travels in those regions, he went
through it.
This wasn't a kind of effete, passive type
faith, you know, that sat back, I'm believing
God.
It wasn't that type of faith.
Abram was a real man.
He got up and he got the animals
and he got the servants and he got
the thousand and one things that he needed,
and he started his journey, and he never
quit.
He never quit.
And Isaac never quit, and Jacob never quit.
I like that.
The Bible confirms things by the mouth of
two or three witnesses, right?
Abram, Isaac, Jacob, Abram, the father of the
faithful.
And faith separates us from everything earthly.
Doesn't mean we can't have a car, doesn't
mean we can't have a house, but it
does mean that something within us is separate
from all of this.
I'm following a voice.
The story is told of the followers of
St. Francis of Assisi.
After St. Francis had died, his spiritual life,
the group he'd formed was making a big
impact, and things started crystallizing, started polarizing.
Leaders came in, they started organizing, they started
laying down the rules.
There was one of the monks there, I
don't know exactly how high up he was
in the scale of authority there, but he
wanted to maintain that which St. Francis had
taught, that freedom, that lack of stricture, that
obedience to God, that spontaneous thing.
There was one of the others, apparently in
charge of everything, and he said, Brother John,
he said, come down from that mountain.
Kind of like, listen, you've left the real
country where everybody dwells.
You're way up on a mountain.
He said, come down from that mountain.
And the reply was, but I've heard another
voice.
But I've heard another voice.
This is the kind of faith that Abraham
had.
It's so easy to think of faith as
being that spiritual substance which enables me to
produce certain concrete things.
Faith to heal the sick, faith to minister,
faith to bring conviction.
Yet, first of all, it's the faith, and
I believe Abraham's faith is this kind of
faith also, the faith that works by love.
He couldn't believe at the beginning to see
all that he saw at the end.
It was a long journey, many steps, much
testing, much preparation, much trial, much failure.
What does the Bible say?
The just shall live by faith.
Right?
And the just shall fall how many times?
How many?
Seven.
Okay.
Now, does that mean one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, and if I fall eight,
I'm out of it?
No, no.
Seven is the perfect number.
We've got a saying in Spanish.
We say, any number.
Fall any number of times.
Fall and fall and fall.
You know, you keep on falling.
So then he's not just because he fell.
Yes, he is.
He's just because he gets up.
Is a mountain climber not a mountain climber
when he falls?
No, he's a mountain climber when he quits
climbing the mountain.
Right?
He ceases to be a mountain climber when
he quits climbing the mountain.
But as long as he keeps going, and
this is the kind of faith that Abraham
had, there comes the time that you walk
without falling.
There comes the time when Isaac is born.
There comes a time when your eyes on
coming out of the tent in the morning
see the promised land.
When the old things are passed away, all
things are become new.
But it's because there's something in the heart
that's driven it on beyond logic.
Like the little bird that hears the call
of a springtime and he doesn't know how
to explain it.
There's just something in it that says, fly.
He said, this is all I know.
When it gets colder around, the leaves start
falling off the trees and something says, fly,
and he finally takes off and leaves it
all.
He's driven by something within until he comes
to another land where everything's springtime.
Every leaf on every tree, every plant, every
flower.
It's a land where all things have become
new.
In the other land, everything's died.
And so it was with Abraham.
He couldn't explain it.
I'm sure he couldn't explain it.
But he knew within himself, God has called
me.
I've got to go on.
Everybody else says, Abraham, come down from that
mountain, man.
What do you think you're doing?
You know what you're talking about.
You realize the mountain you're going to have
to climb, the deserts you're going to have
to pass, the ravers, the bandits.
Well, later on he knew all about it.
It would have been nice to have his
autobiography.
We don't have it.
It would have been nice, you know, How
I Reached Canaan by Abraham.
We'd have learned a lot of things.
But anyway, here's Jesus, the son of Abraham.
When there's that faith that wants, that desires,
that longs, that longs, it'll cross the deserts.
It'll cross anything.
It's beyond our mind.
It's beyond the arguments.
I remember an old missionary in Argentina telling
me how to Bible school.
He said sometimes the kids would come in,
they got problems.
He said, spend two hours, time to straighten
out their mind.
He said, then they'd go out the door
and somebody come across their pathway and they'd
say two words and it'd all be back
to the beginning again.
Because that which is born in the mind
can be attacked in the mind.
But that which is born in the spirit,
you ever try and talk a young person
out of his girlfriend?
It's not in the mind.
You can say, listen, you know, you shouldn't
get married with this person because of this
and this and this, and forget you.
I love this person.
God is spirit.
His words are spirit.
Those that worship him, worship in his spirit.
The apostle talks about serving him in spirit.
He wants to speak to our spirits.
Doesn't mean we're going to understand it all
with our mind.
There's some things we will and there's some
things we won't.
Won't ever.
Some things.
And yet, as our spirit understands, look if
a woman had to understand when the child
was about to be born, when she's awaiting
a child, if she had to understand all
that's involved, then there'll be any babies born.
It's a natural process from within.
And so the things of God, I'm not
against, you know, reading and understanding and studying
the word of God, but the life, that
is the structure around it.
Life itself is far more simple, far more
direct, far more demanding, that I put God
before my vision.
But like Abram, I walk.
And as I walk, the vision becomes clearer.
As I walk, the old things are left
behind.
As I walk, my faith is enlarged.
God puts a vision before us.
We don't have any chalk, okay.
Puts a vision before us this big.
You know, we want to possess it, but
our life's this big.
Now, how do we get, how do we
possess it?
We walk towards it.
We go through trials, and we go through
testings.
We go through doubts, and we go through
fears, and we go through battles, until when
we get there, our life, instead of being
this big, is being enlarged.
And we can possess it.
We want something.
God has given us a vision of something.
But we can't possess it today.
We can't possess it tomorrow.
But as we keep going, our capacity grows,
until the day comes when we do possess.
God has promised to give us the desires
of our hearts.
Once again, not the desires of the mind,
not the desires of the emotions, not that
which somebody has taught us should be the
thing for which we give our lives, but
the desire which is born deep within.
God will give us those things.
So once again, it's Christmas, a time to
remember the coming of Jesus, the Son of
God, the Son of Man.
And in our appropriation of Him, I believe
these are two of the most vital aspects.
Things we need to seek in God, God
give me that love which will carry me
through.
Give me that love which will separate.
Give me that love which will inspire, which
will produce faith and a going forth until
every earthly thing that I ever knew and
ever depended upon, leaned upon, is left behind.
I come to that land which you give
me.
Come to that place where Jesus becomes real,
not a historical Jesus, not a mental Jesus,
not an emotional Jesus, a real Jesus.
Amen.