Present at the Birth (Part 1): The Fellowship of His Purpose

Now, brothers and sisters, once you begin finding this place and going into this place and fellowshipping in this place, you make a marvelous discovery. You truly, genuinely, honestly, really, not theoretically, get to know, livingly, breathingly, actually, you get to know your Lord. I don’t mean by salvation. I mean, you get to know Him. You get to sense Him. You get to feel what He’s like. You begin to touch His mind and understand Him a little bit; there is a fellowship with Christ. Now, isn’t that wonderful? No, it is not wonderful. That is the most dangerous thing that can happen to you.

Out of the fellowship of the gospel comes the fellowship of the Spirit into a fellowship with Christ. You’re beginning to leave the realm of the fall, and when you get over the Lord, you begin getting over to God’s original intention. You begin to get over to this thing of why God created, and the destiny of man, and the destiny of creation, and the destiny of this age, and the destiny and the purpose of this age, and the destiny and the outcome of the age to come. That’s dangerous. And then you get to know him, you get to love him, you get to appreciate him, and he does the worst thing in the world; he’s just unfair. You just fall in love with him, you get to know him, it’s wonderful, and what happens? Alright, say it. You move into the fellowship of his suffering, and we’re going to talk about that some more, too. Brother Prem, you have my permission to talk about suffering all you want to here, brother.

I have to tell you, saints, I’m not good at suffering. Prem and I were saved in the same year. Did you know that? Do you remember what month you got saved, Prem? Okay. About five weeks later, on July 17th, about three in the afternoon. What year was that? 1951? Oh, wait a minute, Prem, that I’m wrong. I was saved in 1950. I’ve known the Lord longer than you have. No, in the summer of 1951, I was on my way to Europe to study theology. See how far ahead of Brother Prem I am? (laughter) I was saved in July of 50. He was saved in June of 51. Okay, we’re about the same age in the Lord. Prem is 10 years older than I am; he looks years younger.

Prem, God has given you a marvelous ability to accept suffering. I’ve never seen anything like it. I also want you to know, I’ll just tell you all this story. By the time Prem was saved, I could tell you the population of Nepal and the fact that it was one of the four or five nations in the world that never had the gospel preached. And, however, in five or ten years, I’d pick up a new mission book just to see if there’d be any progress made somewhere I didn’t know about, and in about 1967 to 1970, I don’t know when. In 1974 or 1975, I picked up a mission book. History of World Missions, and I was turning to the unevangelized nations of the world because I’ve always kept up with them, and I turned to Nepal, and there were three sentences about some man who had brought the gospel to Nepal, and this is what it said about him. He rejoices in his suffering for Christ. Well, I’ll tell you two things.

One, I was jealous. And secondly, I wanted to meet him, and I did. I don’t suffer well. I bellyache all the way through. I know I’m the only one in the room like that. I have asked the Lord to give me a greater grace, to suffer with greater grace. I want to look beautiful when I suffer. Man, I don’t. Do you think that God loves me anyway? I get discouraged. I get down. I don’t get real down. I don’t get down like I’m going to quit. I get down like I wish this would go away. I hurt. I cry. And I get discouraged. But I gave my Lord permission to work in my life. And then you know what I found out? I found out in the Philippines one summer that He wouldn’t take it back. I gave Him permission one day, and I asked him to take it back. I didn’t mean it; I was only kidding. I want out of this. That was in 1964 or 65, and I learned that that doesn’t get any higher than the ceiling. At least not in my life, and He’s never let go. But I wouldn’t be worth a toot if the Lord did not enter suffering into my life.

There’s only one place to suffer, brothers. In Christ, in the church. I cannot tell you when that will come, and I would like to tell you there is a definite order of fellowshipping in the gospel, fellowshipping in the spirit, fellowshipping in Christ, fellowshipping in suffering, in His suffering, and fellowshipping in the mystery. But that suffering part moves around an awful lot. It can show up anywhere. We will never get beyond fellowshipping in the gospel, nor in our spirit, nor fellowshipping with Christ. But if you fellowship in Christ, then you really give Him your life. And you make your life unto Him. If you dedicate, consecrate, and give your life unto Him, you have granted him permission to enter you into the fellowship of suffering. And I will add another word. It gets hellish, but you have granted Him that.

And I’m not sure that we, especially those who minister the holy things of God, I am not sure that we can continue serving Him without his continually bringing us into suffering. We have to be made low again and again and again. I will speak for myself, I know I’m still loved and I’m still His when I’m still under the gun, and I’m still in the fellowship of his suffering. But I don’t ask you to come this way. You peopIe watching this on television, this gets really romantic. Boy, I’m going to learn; I’ve suffered. Hot dog. I’m going to be one of those who gives himself to the Lord. No, it’s not to the Lord. It’s to the Lord, unto God, in his eternal intent. That’s when it really gets dangerous. And none of us ever gets what we think we’re going to get. I told you about the brother in Quebec who really prayed that God would just really show him this and show him that, and he’d give himself to God for anything. And then his pastor raked him over the coals for fellowshipping with me, and he could not stand being socially outcast. Well, brother, that’s a small thing.

Let me go on. All of this moves toward one thing. Do you understand that before God ever created anything, there was a mystery hidden in Him? Before there was an angel, before there was an earth, before there was a heaven; in some ways, even before there was an eternity, because God had to make room for eternity. There was a time when there was simply God, and He was all. That far back, there was a mystery hidden in God.

Now we can spend the rest of our lives here in this town getting to know the Lord on many levels, but I intend to keep you to one thing, and one thing only, to His eternal intent, that which is far outside the reaches of redemption, and to keep you headed for, committed to, involved in, saturated with your life unto the mystery hidden in God. Brothers and sisters, that’s about all you’re going to get out of me. If you want to study in the bearish tales of Revelation and the dragon’s tooth in Ezekiel and the lion’s tail in Ezekiel, you’d better go somewhere else; forget me. Brothers and sisters, the Church of Jesus Christ is perfectly content to let the mystery remain a mystery. If I were to ask in this room right now, What is the mystery, I believe I would get a dozen different answers and a whole lot of blank stares. You know what the mystery is? I’m going to tell you something, brothers: it can’t be told in one sentence. It is so grand, and it is so glorious, and it is so wonderful that it is beyond putting into a sentence. If you do that, you do a terrible injustice.

You know, brothers and sisters, I’ll never be part of a movement. I’m going to live and die. Probably the greatest thing I will have ever done on earth is marry my wife. It is so important that we be. Churches have so many purposes; this, that, and the other. How about a church that will just be? For Him, to Him, through Him, in Him; committed to the heartbeat of God’s own passion. Gene, don’t we have other things to do? Yeah, but let’s take care of the big thing and see what happens. We can let the interdenominational organizations concentrate on this and this and that. I would like to concentrate on God’s eternal purpose. If we begin there, we are in the right center. If we do not begin there, no matter where we go from that point, we will be off course. Do you understand? It’ll be like Copernicus trying to figure out the motion of the stars with the Earth as its center. Then we will begin with God’s intent, which is far outside the realms of redemption and outside of your needs and mine. Not His need; His intent. His purpose in creation, before creation, and after creation.

I’m going to tell you a story I don’t think I’ve ever shared with anybody. I believe it was 1963, and the Lord had just opened my eyes to so much. He showed me His church. I mean, He showed me the Ecclesia; what she really was. Do you notice that I said ‘she,’ not ‘it’? This beautiful girl, the bride of Christ. It was a revelation. It was from God. I was a young man, very zealous. I was an evangelist, but I was giving that up. I had never seen an Ecclesia. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t one, and I didn’t know what to do about that either, by the way. There was a lady who had lived in China, had seen the Little Flock and had been part of it, and had come home and shared what she knew of Christ with a tiny little group of people in 1945. They had no leader. They had no help. They were about four families. They were in the town of Louisville, Kentucky. And I went there.

I hope I’m not misunderstood. I’m not holding this up as the way it ought to be. I doubt those 4 or 5 families had led anybody to the Lord in 10 or 15 years. I don’t know that they had done anything since 1945, except meet. They had nobody to lead them. They’re very simple people, but they’d seen something, and they had a sense that they ought to stand for God’s purpose on this earth.