Read Hebrews 11:1-11.
I believe that there is only one way to all the treasures of God, and
that is the way of faith. By faith and faith alone do we enter into a
knowledge of the attributes and become partakers of the beatitudes, and
participate in the glories of our ascended Lord. All His promises are
Yea and Amen to them that believe.
God would have us come to Him
by His own way. That is through the open door of grace. A way has been
made. It is a beautiful way, and all His saints can enter in by this way
and find rest. God has prescribed that the just shall live by faith. I
find that all is failure that has not its base on the rock Christ Jesus.
He is the only way, the truth and the life. The way of faith is the
Christ way, receiving Him in His fulness and walking in Him; receiving
His quickening life that filleth, moveth and changeth us, bringing us to
a place where there is always an Amen in our hearts to all the will of
God.
As
I look into the 12th chapter of Acts, I find that the people were
praying all night for Peter to come out of prison. They had a zeal but
seem to have been lacking in faith. They were to be commended for their
zeal in spending their time in prayer without ceasing, but their faith,
evidently, did not measure up to such a marvelous answer. Rhoda had more
faith than the rest of them. When the knock came to the door, she ran
to it, and the moment she heard Peter’s voice, she ran back again with
joy saying that Peter stood before the gate. And all the people said,
“You are mad. It isn’t so.” But she constantly affirmed that it was even
so. Zacharias and Elisabeth surely wanted a son, but even when the
angel came and told Zacharias that he should have a son, he was full of
unbelief. And the angel said, “Thou shalt be dumb, because thou
believest not my words.”
But look at Mary. When the angel came to
her, Mary said, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” It was her Amen
to the will of God. And God wants us with an Amen in our lives, an
inward Amen, a mighty moving Amen, a God-inspired Amen, which says, “It
is, because God has spoken. It cannot be otherwise. It is impossible to
be otherwise.”
Let us examine this 5th verse, “By faith Enoch was
translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God
translated him: for before his translation, he had this testimony that
he pleased God.”
When I was in Sweden, the Lord worked mightily.
After one or two addresses the leaders called me and said, “We have
heard very strange things about you, and we would like to know if they
are true. We can see that God is with you, and that God is moving, and
we know that it will be a great blessing to Sweden.”
“Well,” I said, “what is it?”
“Well,”
they said, “we have heard from good authority that you preach that you
have the resurrection body.” When I was in France I had an interpreter
that believed this thing, and I found out, after I had preached once or
twice through the interpreter, that she gave out her own ideas. And of
course I did not know. I said to these brethren, “I tell you what my
personal convictions are. I believe that if I had the testimony of Enoch
I should be off. I believe that the moment Enoch had the testimony that
he pleased God, off he went.”
I pray that God will so quicken our
faith, for translation is in the mind of God; but remember that
translation comes on the line of holy obedience and a walk that is
pleasing to God. This was true of Enoch. And I believe that we must have
a like walk with God in the Spirit, having communion with him, living
under his divine smile, and I pray that God by His Spirit may so move us
that we will be where Enoch was when he walked with God.
There are two kinds of faith. There is the natural faith. But the supernatural faith is the gift of God. In Acts 26:19,
Paul is telling Agrippa of what the Lord said to him in commissioning
him. “To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, from
the power of satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins,
and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in Me.”
Is
that the faith of Paul? No, it is the faith that the Holy Ghost is
giving. It is the faith that He brings to us as we press in and on with
God. I want to put before you this difference between our faith and the
faith of Jesus. Our faith comes to an end. Most people in this place
have come to where they have said, “Lord, I can go no further. I have
gone so far and I can go no further. I have used all the faith I have,
and I have just to stop now and wait.”
I remember being one day in
Lancashire, and going round to see some sick people. I was taken into a
house where there was a young woman lying on a bed, a very helpless
case. The reason had gone, and many things were manifested there which
were satanic and I knew it. She was only a young woman, a beautiful
child. The husband, quite a young man, came in with the baby, and he
leaned over to kiss the wife. The moment he did, she threw herself over
on the other side, just as a lunatic would do. That was very
heart-breaking. Then he took the baby and pressed the baby’s lips to the
mother. Again another wild kind of thing happened. I asked one who was
attending her, “Have you anybody to help?” “Oh,” they said, “We have had
everything.” “But,” I said, “have you no spiritual help?” Her husband
stormed out, saying, “Help? You think that we believe in God, after we
have had seven weeks of no sleep and maniac conditions.”
Then a
young woman of about eighteen or so just grinned at me and passed out of
the door. That brought me to a place of compassion for the woman.
Something had to be done, no matter what it was. Then with all my faith I
began to penetrate the heavens, and I was soon out of that house, I
will tell you, for I never saw a man get anything from God who prayed on
the earth. If you get anything from God, you will have to pray into
heaven; for it is all there. If you are living in the earth realm and
expect things from heaven, they will never come. And as I saw, in the
presence of God, the limitations of my faith, there came another faith, a
faith that could not be denied, a faith that took the promise, a faith
that believed God’s Word. And from that presence, I came back again to
earth, but not the same man. God gave a faith that could shake hell and
anything else.
I said, “Come out of her, in the name of Jesus!”
And she rolled over and fell asleep and wakened in fourteen hours
perfectly sane and perfectly whole.
There is a process on this
line. Enoch walked with God. That must have been all those years as he
was penetrating, and going through, and laying hold, and believing and
seeing and getting into such close cooperation and touch with God that
things moved on earth and he began to move toward heaven. At last it was
not possible for him to stop any longer. Oh, Hallelujah!
In the
15th chapter of 1st Corinthians we read of the body being “sown in
weakness,” to be raised in power. It seems to me that, as we are looking
for translation, the Lord would have us know something of that power
now, and would have us kept in that power, so that we shall not be sown
in weakness.
There is one thing that God has given me from my
youth up, a taste and relish for my Bible. I can say before God, I have
never read a book but my Bible, so I know nothing about books. It seems
to me better to get the Book of books for food for your soul, for the
strengthening of your faith, and the building up of your character in
God, so that all the time you are being changed and made meet to walk
with God.
“Without faith it is impossible to please Him; for he
that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of
them that diligently seek him.”
I can see that it is impossible
to please Him on any line but faith, for everything that is not of faith
is sin. God wants us to see that the plan of faith is the ideal and
principle of God. In this connection I love to keep in my thoughts the
beautiful words in the 2nd verse of the 12th chapter of Hebrews:
“Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” He is the
author of faith. God worked through Him for the forming of the world.
“All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that
was made.” And because of the exceedingly abundant joy of providing for
us so great salvation, He became the author of a living faith. And
through this principle of living faith, looking unto Him who is the
author and finisher of our faith, we are changed into the same image
from glory to glory, even by the Spirit of the Lord.
God has
something better for you than you have ever had in the past. Come out
into all the fulness of faith and power and life and victory that He is
willing to provide, as you forget the things of the past, and press
right on for the prize of His high calling in Christ Jesus.
Sunday, 4 November 2012
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