"We will glorify Him when we understand His purpose and fall into line with His purpose. What is His purpose? What is His purpose? I suppose there is no place to find His purpose so succinctly and clearly set forth as in our Lord’s High Priestly prayer. The moment of moments in the crisis of our Lord’s experience when He brought to bear all of the eternal longing of the Father’s heart, and there we hear Him say, 'Father, I neither pray for these alone, but for them also who shall believe on Me through their word, that they all may be in union.'
And thus He gives us the key to this eternal purpose. 'Just as Thou Father art in union with Me, and I am in union with Thee, they may be in union with us, and the glory Thou gavest Me I have given them that they may be in union even as we are in union. I in union with them, Thou in union with Me, that they may be made perfect in union.' (John 17:21-23)
Now, this is our Lord’s prayer. This is His desire. Let us reduce it down to terms that may be simpler for us to grasp. Actually this is what our Lord is praying, Father, I want to live in her and in him. And I am thinking of you, not the one next to you, or on either side of you, but you. He had you in mind. He said, I want to live in him. I want to live in her with the same freedom, the same liberty, to be myself in her and in him, as You have lived in Me and have had freedom and liberty to do through Me what You have wanted to do. And so it is reciprocal indwelling indeed.
This is His prayer. This is His desire. And it ought to be your desire above all other concerns. You ought to want to satisfy His heart. Not even that you be satisfied. You will be. You will be satisfied, but your concern here ought not to be just primarily that you be complete, and you be fulfilled, and you be happy, you be satisfied. This we have got to go beyond. We have got to see that He has interests. He has a desire. And His desire is that your human body, clean through His precious Blood, be presented to Him so that He can dwell in you, tabernacle in you, live in you.
When you understand this, then you realize that the answer to the question, Where is He?, has another answer to it. He can be in you as the source of life, and yet not have been given the key to every room in your heart, and have been allowed to fill you with His fullness and to exercise the same liberty and freedom in you that the Father exercised in Him.
Our Lord Jesus declared this of His relationship: 'I do not speak of Myself. The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works. I do nothing of Myself. I only do what I see the Father do.' And this is the life of rest. This is the life of blessing. This is the life of joy. For He said, “In Thy presence is the fullness of joy. And the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, faith, self-control.” (Gal. 5:22,23)
So thus when the Lord Jesus Christ is at liberty to fill me and fill you and live in us His own life, His primary purpose is not to make us successful, not to make us notable, not to even bring us into outward peace or calm, for He promised frankly that it would send a sword and distress, and many difficulties and problems would confront us, and you have no reason to think you will have any more general acceptance in your day than He had in His day.
The idea that if you are filled with the Spirit you are immediately going to be an outstanding success is totally contradicted by our Lord, and that you are immediately going to do this or that or some other preset prototype of thinking dictates. Oh, no. Not at all. Not necessarily. You may have... You see, it was not only Peter. It was also Stephen. Stephen was stoned. It was not only Peter delivered from the prison. It was James beheaded inside of the prison. And James was just as full of the Spirit as Peter was. Stephen was just as full of the Spirit as Peter was.
And so, being filled with the fullness of Christ simply insures that God’s longing from eternity past is going to be fulfilled in you. So, I would speak a word this morning for God, saying, He has interest in us. Let us not view Him as a means to anything, but the sublime, glorious, supreme end, and desire Him for His own sake, for what He will get out of us, and leave the matter of what we get out of Him entirely to His hands and to approach it entirely from the standpoint of almost indifference.
Really, what difference does it make whether He gives you this token or that token. If you have Him, you have all He is. And thus it behooves us to recognize that when David saw Him exalted and enthroned, he then could say In Thy presence is fullness of joy. And the fullness of joy that is going to come to you as a Christian is not from your achievement, from your success, from your prominence, from your being known, or used or accepted; the fullness of joy that will come to your heart will only be there when your realize that He has in you what He wants. And then you will rejoice, not because He has made you happy, but that somehow you, stained by sin, and ruined by the fall, have been instrumental in making Him happy.
Now there is a great price for this. He said, “My name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place. With him that is of a broken and a contrite a spirit, to revive the hearts of the broken and to revive the spirits of the contrite ones.” (Isa. 57:15 )
And so it behooves us to recognize that the means whereby He is going to fill us with Himself is on the level of our brokenness. When we come to that place with the Apostle that we are broken by the Cross, I am crucified with Christ, then we have made it possible for Him. You see, He won’t force us to the Cross. He will present it to us, but it is our choice as to whether or not we will walk that extra step which is going to mean that we are pierced by the circumstances God has put in our way. We can avoid the circumstances, but if we avoid them, we avoid the Cross, and if we avoid the Cross we deprive the Lord Jesus of what He is after.
So when it comes to that point, we are prepared to say, Well at any expense, at any price, or cost, I want Him to be glorified in my life. Then it will be as John said, “He must increase; I must decrease.” (John 3:30) And it will be, with Paul, “The things I counted gain to me, I count loss to Christ.” (Php. 3:7) And so we find that there is a tremendous price, but oh my there is such blessed fruit. For when He fills you with His own fullness He Himself becomes the supreme satisfaction of your heart. A human being is made for God, and the fulfillment of humanity is to be filled with the fullness of God. No one knows the dignity, the honor, the glory of being a human being until he has been filled with the fullness of God, and walks in that fullness.
Now this is not that we make God an instrument for anything, but that this is simply the purpose for our being, the reason for our being. And the great desire of my heart for us as a people today is this, that there is going to rise up within us a passionate longing that Jesus Christ will in us see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, that He will get out of us that which He wants.
Now I believe that when this becomes our unified and common desire that there is no limit to what He will do, for if we look at what we want Him to do for us, we have gotten our eyes off of the source. But when we say, O Lord, the only interest of our hearts is what you get out of us, then it is amazing what He can do. And so for the sake of those about us, around us, and on every side, let us desire above all else that we might enter into His presence and the fullness of what His presence means, for there and there only is the fullness of joy. This is a wonderful life, to be filled with the fullness of Christ, worth everything.
...Have you been born of God? Do you have the witness of the Spirit that you have passed from death to life? Have you ever had any taste of fellowship with God? Has God ever said one word to you? Have you ever had one moment of awareness of God? Or is it all just words and ideas and doctrines?
...Do you know He died out of longing for you, and He longs to be longed for. He wants to be wanted, not for anything He will bring or give, but just for Himself. He made us for Himself. Now He wants us to want Him just for Himself. Do you know Him at all? Have you had any beginning contact with Him? Oh, does not your heart hunger to know Him better? And with the apostle Paul, you can say, 'All the things I counted gain to me, I count as refuse that I may know Him..' "
-- Paris Reidhead
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SI Moderator - Brandy Gordon
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