Help from Above

We come from many different backgrounds here, and we differ on a lot of things. Some of us believe in potlucks, and some of us don't. But I believe that there's one thing that we all have in common.

Really I believe that almost all of us here are seeking an authentic walk with Jesus Christ, and that when we come together here on the first day of the week, and I think that's what God is asking us to do, and break bread together and worship the Lord, we're looking for whatever it is we need to make our walk with Jesus real. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, to them he gave power to become sons of God, who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the evidence that they are born of God comes through their living.

Something inside them makes it possible for them to speak the truth, show mercy, forgive, share what they have, makes them reliable, steadfast in storms, disciplined. Now surely we all agree that if these marks of God's presence are not found in our living, then our faith is a sham, and the world has a perfect right to call us hypocrites. Now the problem with most of us is that while we know that we ought to, in our living, be conformed to the image of our Lord, while we know that we ought to live the kind of life that Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount, we're trying to do this in the strength of our own flesh, and it isn't working.

As many as received him, as believed in his name, to them he gave power to become sons of God, and nobody is going to live as a son or daughter of God without that power. And just as surely as Jesus shed his blood to wash away our sin, he also gives power to live as new creatures. And there's not one thing that Jesus tells us to do that can be done apart from that power.

I will not leave you desolate, I will come to you, and what's he going to do when he comes to us? He's going to sit there and look at us? No! He helps us. If you love me, you will keep my commands, and I will pray the Father, and he will send you another Counselor to be with you forever, even the Spirit of Truth. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

When the Spirit of Truth has come, he will guide you into all truth. What are these but promises of specific, definite, down-to-earth help, 24 hours a day? I am going to help you all the time, that's what he's saying. Now, the normal Christian life is simply a human life that is now continuously receiving help from above, through the Holy Spirit, from the Lord, to be able to do the will of God.

And if you're following Jesus for 50 years, you still need that help, and you need it just as much 50 years later as you did at the beginning, if not more. Here's a man who bore all kinds of fruit, more fruit probably than anybody that ever lived other than Jesus himself, the Apostle Paul. And after a long time of following Jesus, what did he say? The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we don't know how to pray as we ought.

The Spirit intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now there's something, however, in our flesh that really doesn't want to believe that we need that kind of help, something in our flesh which really seems to think it knows the answers, and this is why we stumble. Our Lord himself lived on this earth only by receiving continuous help from above.

And if this was normal for him, how in the world are we going to do with less? Especially since the Helper, the Father sent to Jesus to help him, he now sends to us to help us. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was given help so that he could see the Father. In those days, Jesus came up from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens open, and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven, Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased. Now consider what this means, for 30 years at least, from the time he had left the regions of glory and entered into the womb of the Virgin, God the Son had his vision of his Father completely wiped out. And this man, Jesus, this young man, this boy, and now young man growing up, had no more vision of God than any other human being in this sin-sick race.

But now, his work is about to begin, and to do this work, he's going to have to be able to see God. And so as he comes up out of the waters of the Jordan, help comes to him from above. He sees the heavens open, and what does this mean? It means that infinite light-years are wiped away and all kinds of transitional dimensions and everything else that separates him from heaven moves back.

And he looks up, and he sees his Father. He also sees the Spirit descending upon him straight from the throne in the form of a dove, and the Father's voice speaking to him, You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, and for the first time since he left glory. Jesus has an unclouded relationship with his Father.

Now the same Spirit, who opened heaven for him by the power of his shed blood, does the same for us. He opens heaven for us and opens our eyes so that we can see God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and I will manifest myself to him, show myself. I will enable you to see me, to know who I am, to understand what I'm about.

And if there's anybody in this gathering right now who has not seen Jesus, who has never met him, you never will, except by means of help from above. No one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit. But that help is here, and all you have to do is humble yourself, get off your pride, and the helper will come right in and open heaven to you.

Jesus also received help to deny himself. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when Jesus walks into that wilderness, he doesn't go in there alone.

Jesus is able to reject these temptations that are thrown at him that promise him some immediate gratification, and we know what that's all about. He refuses to turn the stones into bread, refuses to jump from the pinnacle of the temple, or to bow down to Satan, because he has help all the way through. And now when Jesus turns around and tells us for our own good to deny ourselves, he knows very well that we'll never be able to do this unless we receive help.

But if through the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. And how else are we going to put to death the deeds of our flesh, self, ego, vanity, but by the power of the Spirit of God. All I have to do is say, Jesus help me, and mean it, and the same help that came to him in the wilderness comes to me, and lifts me up above my insatiable ego, and my childish flesh, into the glorious liberty of God's will, and I find myself now able by this power to say no to temptations, and impulses, and vanities, and addictions that tossed me around like a rudderless ship before, so that I can now get on to the work which God has given me to do.

Jesus had help also to minister. On one of those days as he was teaching, there were Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting by, they're always sitting by, and they have all the answers, who had come from every village of Galilee, and Judea, and from Jerusalem, and the power of the Lord was present to heal. Notice this, Jesus does not heal because he's the Son of God.

Oh yeah, well Jesus could do it, he was the Son of God. No, no. He left his power to heal back in heaven, and when he came into this world he came as a human being, and he was just as human as you and as I am.

So if he's going to heal anybody, he's going to have to have help, and he gets that help from the Lord God. The same can be said for his words, words such as never before had crossed human lips, and all you have to do is even just read them now, and if you have any kind of sense of truth at all, they're going to burn right into you. There are people in this gathering who haven't cracked a New Testament or a Bible in years.

Read his words, see what happens to you, with an honest heart. Any speaker of God could discern as he listened to these words that they were coming from heaven, even if he didn't know where heaven was. See but whose words are these? They're not Jesus' words.

He tells us, they're not my words, I get these words from my Father. I don't speak anything except what the Father gives me to speak. Now the same spirit that enables Jesus to minister, to heal, the same spirit that brings words from the very mouth of the Father down into his mouth, helps us with our ministry.

These signs shall follow them that believe. In my name shall they cast out demons. They shall speak with new tongues, especially in a language people can understand, tongues other than that too, but especially prophecy, words that people can understand, tongues that are understandable.

They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. And notice we have here a description of an aggressive ministry. People these signs shall follow them that believe, they'll go to church and sit in a pew and do nothing evermore, or they'll go to their non-institutional house meetings and do nothing evermore and feel righteous because they don't go to church.

These people are going to be doing something. And if your body is old and decrepit, you still have a, your outer man is wasting away and your inner man is being renewed day by day, and by the power of that renewal, you also have a ministry. There's work to be done.

There are prayers to be prayed and words to be spoken and letters to be written and things to be done and hungry to be fed and naked to be clothed and all these things, and there's not one of us accepted from this. And Jesus never told us that we would minister alone or on our own, promised us always that we would have health. Lo, I am with you always, promised that he would send us the comforter, the counselor, the Holy Spirit to be with us constantly to help us.

Jesus had help from above to lay down his life. When he got up from his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, he was ready to die. The father had not taken the cup of death away from him, but he sure had given him strength.

Help to face the rage of that mob and the venom of Satan and to come to that awful hour when he would have to stand utterly alone, forsaken even by the father as a consequence of human sin. And there are people in this gathering, if they're serious at all with the Lord, many who are going to find themselves moving toward a day when you're going to lay down your life in such a way that every trial you have faced up to now is nothing but a little trial run. You're going to see the door of death looming up.

And as it draws near, pressure from all sides tempting you to deny your Lord. But you're going to have help. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.

And finally, Jesus had help to come out of death into life. It was the same Holy Spirit who came down into that tomb and by that power brought together the spirit, soul, and body of the Son of God in a new way, so that when the earth shook and that stone rolled away, the being that stepped forth from that tomb was the first of a new race, a creature such as this world had never seen before. The perfected, glorified Son of God and the firstborn among many brethren.

And we are the brethren who are to follow Him into that resurrection. We too are to go with Him until we get to the place where we are set free from this death body into a tremendous, glorious life beyond anything we can imagine. And the power that does this is a power that comes from above.

If the spirit of Him who raised Jesus Christ from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead shall also give life to your mortal body by His spirit who dwells in you. Now the mystery of mysteries in all this is how can all this power be available? How can all this help be breathing on us even now? And yet we miss it. And the reason is simple.

And by the way, don't think of somebody else who's missing it. Think of yourself. We miss it because we're so self-righteous and unbending that we won't humble ourselves down to the level where we have to go to reach out and receive it.

Our Lord constantly acknowledged the fact that He was dependent on His Father, not just with His mouth, but by the way He lived and the way He thought. We're forever mouthing the fact that we're dependent on God and the rest of the time that we're not talking about it, we're pretending we are God. Too proud to even reach out and take the slightest blessing.

Too stubborn to get down on our knees and ask. Too self-righteous to acknowledge before God and each other how helpless and desperately in need we are. So that it boils down to one question.

Will we go on in our wretched pride claiming that we have the answers and that we can handle it ourselves, or will we humble ourselves, break, open our hearts, and receive the help we need to do what needs to be done, to see God, to deny ourselves, to minister, to lay down our lives, to pass up from death into life. That help is here for anybody who's willing to humble him or herself, become as a child, and ask for it. And as we go to prayer and ask, I'd like to ask those, anybody in here who's ready to ask Jesus into his life, or people who have been really off in left field who need to come back to the Lord, come down, humble yourself enough to kneel at this rail and ask him into your life right down here.

And may the rest of us really be laying before God the needs that we have. There's not one of us here who is in a desperate need right now. Let's wait upon the Lord in prayer, shall we? Lord God, we just pray that your Spirit will give to us an attitude of repentance and brokenness and just deal with our self-righteousness, Lord God, and our fleshly pride and this phony religiosity and this whatever it is that blinds us from seeing you.

We pray, Lord God, that this will be a day of renewal and refreshment for every one of us, Lord, and that you would just not let us get away with closing up the door of our hearts and marching along as if we hadn't heard anything at all. And Lord God, we pray also that you wouldn't let us get away with this idea of saying, well, I'll do it tomorrow or maybe next week. I'll get there in time.

Don't worry. Lord God, help us by your grace, by the power of your Spirit to see that now is the day of salvation. Right now, Lord God.

And we pray that you'll be dealing with every heart, every one of us here, Lord, and answer every cry and bring cleansing at every point where it's needed, Lord. Bring us to the place where our walk with you, Lord Jesus, is genuine and delivers from everything that's made us false and touch every delusion and break every balloon and remove every kind of vanity from us and help us to walk out of this place today broken, contrite, humble. Your sons and daughters, we thank you, Father, in Jesus' name.

Amen. Father, we just ask that everyone who came up here will receive the cry of his or her heart and that more than they could dare to ask or think will be their portion as they go on their way this day. In Jesus' name.