Three Stages 1982

I want to read one verse from John 14 verse 21 and then skip over to John 15 starting at verse 12. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me and he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and manifest myself to him. This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.

Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what his master is doing but I have called you friends for all that I have heard from my father I have made known to you.

You did not choose me but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask the father in my name he may give it to you. This I command you that you love one another. And these simple words to his disciples and not just the eleven gathered in the upper room that night but all disciples of all time.

Jesus is explaining how we can come in to the life of the kingdom here on this earth. We enter into the life of the kingdom of God on this earth in three stages. First, he who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.

This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. It begins with commandments, words that Jesus speaks, words which call us into a life of radical love, radical trust in him, and radical purity. And when we first hear these words we don't even know who Jesus is.

We have no sense of his identity or his presence with us. All we hear are words that if we're at all open have the ring of the divine. We just begin to know these words come from God.

And so we begin to take these commands, these high, wonderful, far above where we are, words that come from God and we start to do them. We stumble. We don't make it the way we want to.

We fall far short. But even when we're doing this we know that this is the way we have to go. And we pick ourselves up and we keep on going.

And as we struggle to turn these words of Jesus into reality and light in us, we move into the second stage, which is friendship with Jesus. He who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and will manifest myself to him, to her. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

No longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what the master is doing. But I have called you friends for all that I have heard from my father I have made known to you. Friendship with Jesus.

See here we are trying to turn these words that we know are right into obedience in our lives. We're trying to do them and we're having such a struggle and suddenly while we're doing this Jesus manifests himself to us as our friend. Not only as our Lord, not as only as our master, which he is, but as our friend.

One who opens his heart to us and who leads us into the very heart of God. And now the kingdom of God becomes for us something much much more than a set of lofty commands, wonderful as they are. Now the kingdom of God becomes for us fellowship with God the Son.

Heart union with the Christ which is so comforting and so rich that all our fears begin to dissipate and fly away under the impact of his burning blazing wonderful love the love of Jesus. And in the power of that love we begin to love each other and we begin to reach out to the wounded world. Which is the third stage.

Bearing fruit. You did not choose me but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide. So that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give it to you.

This I command you to love one another. So now we're bearing fruit. We're beginning to experience this tremendous joy of praying life for other people and seeing these prayers answered.

We're finding it possible now in a way we could not do before to love each other. As friends of Jesus we move out into the world with life, healing, prophetic words, signs of hope, authority over evil, power to set people free from their chains. Three stages.

The commands of Jesus. Friendship with Jesus. Bearing fruit in the name of Jesus.

Now we're not ignoring the cross as we describe the kingdom light in this way. Because the cross is the event which makes it possible. It's the fountainhead of all this light.

And as we walk with the Lord we begin to know Jesus not only in the power of his resurrection but in the fellowship of his suffering. And we become like him in his death as we begin to learn to lay down our lives for others. But we only begin to see the power of Jesus' death and resurrection as we first get to know Jesus in these three stages.

So somebody may ask you or object as often people do. You talk about Jesus as if it's possible to have a direct personal relationship with him. But how can this be? I mean, even in scriptures we see that Jesus has returned to the headquarters of the universe, to heaven, and that we're to look for his return.

So how can he be here and there at the same time? Reading on then from Luke 6, John rather 16, I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all truth. For he will not speak on his own authority but whatever he hears he will speak.

And he would declare to you things that are to come. He will glorify me for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine.

Therefore I said he will take what is mine and declare it to you. Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit, and this was again in the upper room when he made the promise, that the Holy Spirit will come and will remain on this earth until he, Jesus, returns. And that the Spirit will convey the presence of Jesus, the life of Jesus.

Where the Spirit is, Jesus is. And so it's the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the living, burning, blazing, awesomely Holy Spirit of God that draws us on in these three stages as fast and as far as we allow. It's the Spirit who wipes away the distance between earth and heaven, who opens our eyes to see the unseen.

It's the Spirit who brings us into the first stage by causing the words of Jesus to begin to burn like fire in our hearts. It's the Spirit who brings us into the second stage, opens our eyes so that we begin to see Jesus as our friend. Then the Spirit takes us on to the third stage, anointing us with power to go and bring forth fruit in Jesus' name.

So the first stage becomes the call of the Spirit. And the Spirit of God calls us by quickening the words of Jesus to us, making them life to us. Jesus himself says, It is the Spirit that gives life.

The flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you, they are spirit and they are life. And so we hear those words, perhaps spoken by a stranger, or we read the Sermon on the Mount in the Bible, or right in the middle of a crisis, we come to our senses and we remember one phrase or perhaps one sentence that Jesus spoke.

And we grab hold of that. That's what I want. I want to make that my life.

And we may not realize it at the time, but what's really happening is that the Holy Spirit is calling us out of darkness into God's light. He's quickening those words to our mind and our will. And we grab those words and we begin to attempt, no matter how the struggle may be to do this, we attempt to do those words, to obey them.

And even sometimes we get all angry. Lord, how can you expect me to do these high things? And in the process, we begin to find that we are loving Jesus. We begin to love Jesus.

The simplest way for people to come to know Jesus is simply take his words, even if they don't know whether they believe or not, just take those words and look at them, soak them up and then start to do them. And pretty soon it begins to happen. The second stage now becomes the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

The baptism of the Holy Spirit is simply to be flooded and filled and overwhelmed with the love of Jesus so that we become conscious that Jesus is our friend. Reading from Acts chapter one, verses three to five. To the disciples, Jesus presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking of the kingdom of God.

While staying with them, he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, you have heard from me. For John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit. When they were baptized with the Holy Spirit, these disciples knew the friendship of Jesus from within.

They knew Jesus in a way they never knew him when they were walking with him in flesh and blood. And for anybody in this assembly to whom this has not yet happened, expect it. Ask for it.

Open your heart to receive it. John baptized with water. Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit, floods your life with the life of God and specific things begin to happen as he does this.

Suddenly, Jesus becomes real to you. Suddenly he's my friend. He's at my side.

He's with me. He's in me. I know his presence.

I know he loves me. I know his hand is on my life. And with this remarkable sense of the presence of the Lord actually with us that comes with the baptism of the spirit, the scriptures begin to open passages in the Bible, which before may make no sense at all.

Now begin to speak. We begin to see things and understand things there that never made sense, that were always confusing. Now they open up.

Prayer begins to flow from your heart with a freedom and with a power you never experienced before. Your tongue is set free. And to your own amazement, you find yourself giving testimony to Jesus.

Perhaps there are some people here for whom that all happened some years back. But now it's like a fire that died down and it's almost out. Stir it up.

Put some kindling on there. Get down on your knees and blow it to whatever you have to do to coach that thing back to life. Work with it until those cold, which are almost out, begin to glow and burst back into flame.

For the Holy Spirit was given so that you could know Jesus and love Jesus and follow Jesus and serve Jesus, not just for a year and a half, but forever. The third stage becomes walking in the spirit. If we live in the spirit, says Paul, let us also walk in the spirit.

So now I'm baptized in the spirit. Jesus has become my friend. I begin to know this.

So now it becomes possible to do the commands which before were absolutely frustrating. They were impossible. I couldn't do it.

Now you can love your enemy and you can get rid of those grudges. And you can be pure and you can go the second mile. Now, friendship with Jesus is no longer something you experience out in the desert, alone, away from the hassles.

Now, friendship with Jesus is something that you begin to live right in the middle of the pressures and the temptations and the trials and the problems. You did not choose me. I chose you and ordained you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask the father in my name, he may give it to you.

This I command you that you love one another. Now we move out into the world. In unity with each other and with prayer in our hearts and we move out into that world with the same words on our lips that brought us into the kingdom and we begin to speak those words and we speak them under the anointing of the spirit.

We speak them as friends of Jesus who know Jesus and walk with Jesus. And while not everybody listens and while not everybody takes us seriously, there will always be those who will respond. We will bear fruit, fruit that will remain.

Every person in this assembly can experience the life of the kingdom at one of these stages right now. At very least, we can reach out and grab hold of the words of Jesus, make them ours, do them by answering the call of the spirit. We can enter into friendship with Jesus by coming off our high horse and humbling ourselves and opening our hearts to the baptism of the spirit.

We can get under the yoke with Jesus and begin to bear fruit in his name by getting serious about walking in the spirit. Let me read this passage from John 15 one more time. And may we all keep in mind, God help us to keep in mind that these words of Jesus are addressed to us at this moment.

And that as we respond to them, there absolutely will be a visitation of life from God to us. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing. But I have called you friends for all that I have heard from my father, I have made known to you.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you, that you love one another. Let's pray.

Lord God, we just thank you for your presence and we pray that you help us now to just hold still before you. And we ask that that you would help us. We're at so many different places on this journey and we have so many different problems that you just help us, all of us now, just to wait before you and help us to open our hearts to you.