Standing Before the Lord 1983

I'd like to read from Revelation chapter 7, starting at verse 9. After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb. And all the angels stood round the throne, and round the elders and the four living creatures. And they fell on their faces before the throne, and worshipped God, saying, Amen.

Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen. Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, Who are these clothed in white robes? And whence have they come? I said to him, Sir, you know.

And he said to me, These are they who have come out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes, and made them white from the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple.

He who sits upon the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more. The sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat.

For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. This is our goal.

To stand before the throne of the Lamb. To be in that great multitude which no man can number. Living in the unclouded presence of God.

Serving him day and night. No more hunger. No more thirst.

No more weeping. No more weariness. No more pain.

No more death. Following the Lamb to springs of living water. But to reach that goal of standing before the unclouded presence of God, we have to learn how to stand in the presence of God now.

What does it mean to stand before the Lord? It means basically that there's nothing between him and ourselves. At the moment, the living God can look down upon us and into each of our hearts and see everything there. Nothing's hidden from him.

But we can't look up and see his heart. We can't look even into his face really clearly. There's a barrier between us and the living God.

Something between hanging on our side. When we first came to faith, that barrier shook and came down. And for a while, we experienced in a wonderful way the presence of God.

We had washed our robes in Nathan White and the blood of the Lamb. Thank God for that blessed moment of repentance and faith that first brought us before the throne of grace. But to continue to live in this world with any light from God burning inside us, we have to somehow learn how to stay before that throne all the time.

Our problem is that we have a tendency to lose the vision. We have it, and then it seems to fade. We get it, we walk before God, but we are inclined to keep sinking back into the confusion of the world around us and within us, to be drawn down into the suspicions and the fears and the hatred, to be sucked into the illusions that are part of this world, so that pretty soon our vision of God dissipates and fades into nothingness.

Reading from Ephesians 6, verse 13 and following. Therefore, take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all, to stand at the end. And the next verse begins, Therefore, stand therefore now, in other words, having girded your loins with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace, above all taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darks of the evil one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Who are these people who conquer evil consistently and manage to keep going on and on through the rough times and never seem to give out or burn out? They are the ones who have learned to discipline themselves to get in front of that throne and stay there every day. They are wrapped in the armor of God because they live in the presence of God. The armor of God is made of His very presence.

For these people, the glory of God is not something off in the future. For them, the whole earth is full of His glory. They are able to penetrate and see beyond the evil and the injustice and the absurdity of this world.

And somehow through that they see the throne. And seeing the throne and the land and worshiping the glory that is there, they are flooded with the life of God. And by the power of that life, evil gets way before them.

Chains break at their command. Satan trembles. Death itself shrinks back at their approach.

And our question, of course, is how do we get to the point where we can live like that all the time? How do we come out of our shadows and out of our continuous dullness to live before that throne? Once again, we have to follow Jesus through the veil. When He died on that cross, the veil was torn from top to bottom in the temple, symbolizing that barrier between us and God taken away. He goes through into the presence of the Father as a man for us and calls us to come in behind.

And often He keeps beckoning and beckoning and there we stand, somehow or other glued to the floor. From Hebrews 4.14, Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, meaning through the veil, Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession, for we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we might receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. It becomes a daily discipline. We have to train ourselves.

I have to make myself go through that veil every day, come into the presence of God daily and find my center there. And to remember when I stand before that throne that I'm not standing there alone. I'm in that company of the redeemed.

I'm in that multitude which no man can number. I have brothers and sisters. To live by faith is to live before that throne, surrounded by my brothers and sisters, recognizing their presence, honoring them, and to stay before that throne.

What we need to do is come out of our shadows and get in before that throne and stay there. Get there every day, every day, all the way through this life, on through death, into the next life. The Spirit of the Lord is calling us all to stand before God as a people who have been raised from the dead.

Reading from Ezekiel 37, 1. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me up by the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley. It was full of bones. And he led me round among them.

And, behold, there was a man, and there were very many upon the valley, and, lo, they were very dry. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. He said to me again, Prophesy to these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

Thus says the Lord God to these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you. And you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.

So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a noise. And, behold, a rattling.

And the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh came upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.

Then he said to me, Prophesy to the Spirit. Prophesy, O son of man. Say to the Spirit, Thus says the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O Spirit, and breathe upon these slain that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me. And the Spirit came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet in exceedingly great host. If we read on in this chapter, we see that those bones, at that particular time in history when that prophecy first came, applied to Israel.

But looking back, in the light of what we now know and see and experience, those bones are that great multitude which no man can number of all people and nations and tongues and tribes. We were those bones until the Lord called us to life. The hour is coming, and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear shall live.

He brought us to life. We didn't do it. He called us.

We stand on our feet, filled with the life of God, an exceeding great army. And when we come to life, where do we find ourselves but before the throne? And to stay alive with the life he has given us, we have to remain before the throne because the one who sits on that throne is our life. When we leave him, we die.

The Spirit of the Lord is calling us to stand before God as a people who have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. Reading back in that same passage in Revelation 7, then one of the elders addressed me saying, Who are these clothed in white robes, and whence have they come? I said to him, Sir, you know. He said to me, These are they who have come out of the great tribulation.

They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. And flipping back to 1 John 1.5, This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him, while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth.

See, to walk in the light is to be before the throne. To walk in darkness is to be walking away from the throne. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.

To walk in the light is to be standing before the throne with our eyes upon that glory and our hearts open to God's searching spirit. We get to the place where we just have to stand still and wait and listen. And when this happens, God brings us into fellowship with each other.

We don't do this. God creates unity with one another among us, and then we are washed in the blood. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.

We stand before God clean, not by our own worthiness, who has it, but by the Lamb's blood. And we are able to put our feet on a new path and stay on that path which is life, not by our own wisdom or by our own willpower, but by the Lamb's blood. Worthy is Christ, the Lamb who was slain, whose blood set us free to be people of God.

The Spirit of the Lord is calling us to stand before God as a people who have burned their bridges behind them. John 6, verse 66. After this, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.

Jesus said to the twelve, Will you also go away? Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. These were the men who had burned their bridges. They had nowhere else to go but Jesus.

Father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, their own lives, all this had been put behind. And as they stood before the Lord, there was nothing, nothing between them and him. And every escape route back to Egypt had been blown up.

And you could say they were stuck with him there. And that's how it has to be with us. There has to be an act of the will and renewed every day in which we blow up our bridges and all our escape routes so that we're standing before the throne and there's no way out of it.

We're crucified to the world. The world is crucified to us. And now there's nothing left but Jesus.

Anything less than that won't work. When we come to that place where there's nothing left but Jesus, then at last we're free to begin to serve him. Which brings us to the final thing.

The spirit of the Lord is commanding us to stand before the throne as a people who have accepted the prophetic call which has been put on them. A call to speak for God, to live in God, to manifest his mercy and his holiness to the world. Reading from 1 Kings 17, 1. Now Elijah the Tishbite of Tishbe in Gilead said to Ahab the king, As the Lord God of Israel lives before whom I stand, there shall be neither dune nor rain these years except by my word.

Now for Elijah to speak like that to this king that would kill anybody at the drop of a hat, he had to be standing before God first. As a prophet, as a spokesman for God, as a servant of God. And everywhere Elijah went, he went with that theme.

Again and again he was saying, As the Lord God of Israel lives before whom I stand. Standing before God, Elijah brought the power and light of God down into the world through himself. And when he spoke, it was God speaking through him.

Because he was standing in the presence, the unclouded presence of God. Now the Elijah role in this age has been given over to the body of Christ, the kingdom of God. Call it what you want.

We are being called to stand up and get before God the way Elijah did. So that we can go out into the world and speak for God and live in his mercy the way he did and in his power. Now many of us already know, somehow we know, that there is a call of God upon us.

But we're still sitting around waiting for the lightning bolt of God to blast us out of our chairs. The lightning bolt of God has already come. It's the word which he has been speaking to us and is speaking to us again.

Simply the word that calls us to stand up and speak, get up and serve, and not only in here where it's relatively safe, but out there where it becomes increasingly dangerous to live and speak in the name of Jesus. The events of this world have long since moved up to the fast track. We're living in the days of Matthew 24, days of multiplied false Christs, days of multiplied war and catastrophe, days of hardening hearts and fearful minds.

We will survive these days and stand before the Lord at his coming by standing before him now. That's the only preparation there is. Therefore, take the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand.

Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace, above all, taking the shield of faith with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the spirit with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance.

Put on the whole armor of God and every piece of the armor of God is a piece of God. His presence. He has raised us from the dead.

He has washed us in His blood. He now calls us to burn our bridges behind us and to stand before Him together as a people who have accepted the prophetic call that's been placed upon them to go out into that world and speak His name and fulfill His purpose. Let's wait upon Him now in silence.

Let's just hold silence.