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"To You we give thanks, Lord God
Omnipotent,
for assuming the high sovereignty and the great power
that are
Yours and for [taking things into Your own hands and]
beginning to reign." Rev. 11:17 Amplified.
As a child of twelve, I distinctly remember standing in front of a metal sculpture of the three angels of Revelation 14 flying in the midst of heaven and finding myself unusually drawn out to them. What is the real message those three angels are bearing? was the earnest question in my young heart. I knew their words by heart, but what did they mean to me personally? At the time I didn't think about why I found myself standing there pondering things of the Spirit, when I had walked right by numerous times prior to that without a second thought. As I look back I recognize that an awakening was taking place deep within me, and I was yielding to the drawing that I was feeling to experience in a real way the things of God that I had always heard of but hadn't known and felt in my person.
I had no idea the impact that quiet moment would make on my young life when I yielded consent to be drawn out to know God more intimately. I see clearly now that the desire I found in my heart to really know God and not just know about Him, and the responsive yielding with which I consented to it, were both divinely supplied. Like a bit of yeast introduced into a lump of dough which immediately begins leavening the whole lump, I began finding all other desires in my young life changing and being affected by this new desire which had been planted in me and to which I had responded.
One year later at the age of thirteen, my physical life was reflecting this change of desire. Through a series of unexpected divine leadings throughout that year, marked by the fore planning of my heavenly Father, I found my heart being naturally inclined away from settling down in the place in which my family lived and where it had previously appeared that I would finish school. The Father was calling me away to a school where heaven had decreed that I was to begin to be broken open to know God.
In this school I was strongly drawn out after God. I received much spiritual instruction and nurturing that the Father ordained for me, first as a student, then a student teacher, then a full time teacher. During the next twelve years I started becoming aware of the depth of my personal need of God, as I began finding who I really was, of myself, in contrast to what I was beginning to see of God. It was also during this time that the Father brought me to the end of my spiritual rope for the first time. I saw that I had received a lot of religion but I wasn't consumed with the love of God in the depths of my being. He brought me to the knowing of my utter helplessness to rectify the situation in which I found myself, and my only prayer became, God, help me to fall in love with you. If You don't put this kind of love in my heart for You, it won't get there!
In answer to those deep heart yearnings that only God can breathe through us, the Spirit of the Father came upon me and gave me to experience being truly in love with Him for the first time. It was a very precious time. I remember slipping away to the quiet eves of the house I was living in and communing with God at night. I had never thought about God the Father before, but now I found myself being drawn out to Him and knowing that He personally loved me. Because of what I was experiencing with Him, I realized that prior to this time I had unconsciously judged Him as austere and distant. I also found that in my time of communion with Him, instead of remembering the things throughout the day that I knew I had done wrong and asking for their forgiveness as I had always done previously, I found that I could not recall any time during those days when I had done anything against the inner knowing in my heart.
At the same time the Father was imputing this precious experiencing of Himself to me in the Northwest, unbeknownst to me He was pouring Himself out in the Southwest on a gentle soul I had never met, preparing us together for His purposes. It was twelve years after my childhood awakening, that the Father providentially and quite unexpectedly brought this precious man into my life that He had preserved and ordained for the divine purposes of this hour.
We had been married for only one year when I had another one of those quiet, life-changing moments of consent. I had been sweeping the walkway of our country home when I found myself standing still and feeling my heart being drawn out to consider reflectively what was ahead spiritually. The precious experiencing of the love of the Father that He had imputed, gratis, to us both, had given us a personal taste of the experience recorded of Enoch who "walked in habitual fellowship with God; and he was not, for God took him home with Him." Gen. 5:24 Amplified. Yet we had found that we didn't know how to abide in the continual experience of it. We knew that "because of faith Enoch was caught up and transferred to heaven, so that he did not have a glimpse of death; and he was not found, because God had translated him." Heb. 11:5 Amplified. We knew that at the very end of time Enoch's experience of walking in habitual fellowship with God would be lived continually by those "which are alive and remain" and who, without seeing death, would be "caught up ... to meet the Lord in the air." I Thess. 4:17. We earnestly desired to know how what the Father had imputed to us was to be imparted into our very being; how it was to become who we were, an inseparable part of our very character, instead of only being an influence upon us.
As I stood there quietly on the walkway, I distinctly remember wondering, What will make the change that will bring us to where we need to be? And again I found a responsive yielding in my heart to be drawn there by the Father. Right away we began to feel the providential movings of heaven in our behalf, as we began finding ourselves unencumbered by the things we had been so attached to before; and one year later, thirteen years from my first spiritual awakening, we found ourselves completely freed to leave our home in response to the call of the Father. The unexpected and unforeseen event that follows was the catalyst that brought to us the key which began unlocking the mystery of living in the continual experiencing of the presence of the Father, which we had been drawn out to desire with all of our hearts.
And the third angel followed them saying ... Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. Rev. 14:9,12 KJV.
Shortly after that second quiet yielding, on the Day of Atonement in 1987, which marked the beginning of a year of the biblical rest, we felt the personal presence of the Father in a special way. The longing that He had put in our hearts, He had now personally come to satisfy. He drew our attention to prophesies in the Old Testament that described the coming of His Son, the Messiah, to live among men. They contained prophetic details of how His earthly life-to-be would be lived. We had read the Bible many times before, and these passages had never particularly attracted our attention. We already knew about the details of His earthly life because we had viewed them in hindsight through the eyes of the New Testament witnesses of it. But this time as we read, we found ourselves seeing through eyes we had never seen through before. As I look back now I realize that we were seeing through the Father's eyes, and that made us aware of extraordinary details of His Son's coming of which we had never noticed before.
What now stood out to us with such precious and liberating divine light from those Old Testament passages, were the inspired descriptions of the faith that God's Son would possess and by which He would live His life here on earth. The Father began touching deep places in our hearts through those Messianic prophecies as we became aware that His Son had a quality faith of which we hadn't even suspected the existence. The Father was personally connecting the passages through which He was leading us, with this "faith of Jesus" that we had always heard about for as long as we could remember. Now it was as though we were reading these prophecies through the eyes of the child Jesus as He sat at His mother's knee, and "the faith of the Son of God" began dawning upon us. The Father was opening up to us how awesomely mysterious and foreign to human nature the faith of His Son was, while at the same time He was revealing how simple and natural it was.
We saw clearly that we didn't possess the kind of faith His Son had, nor could the faith we had so diligently cultivated all of our lives ever come up to that quality of faith. It was of a different nature altogether, and from a different nature altogether. Considerations that had never entered our minds before were drawing our rapt attention and wonder. How did the Son know which passages in the Old Testament were referring to Him? How did He know that He was the one being referred to? What was it that caused Him to know?
Three Scripture passages especially revealed to us the details of "the faith of Jesus," its way of thinking and its nature of knowing in advance.
The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. The Lord God hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. Isa. 50:4-7 KJV.
Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law." Isa. 42:1-7.
I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Ps. 16:8-10.
With the prophetic descriptions revealing Jesus' faith came the illumination of how the Son of God recognized His Father's word to Him and received it as His own. We realized that the personal presence of the Father that had been leading us to the very passages that would open up to us the Faith of His Son and Whose very presence illuminated them with the light of His own understanding, guided His child Son in exactly the same way. We saw that the faith of Jesus, His power of divine knowing and identification with the word, was communicated to Him by His Father.
When He heard the Scriptures at His mother's knee or read them for Himself, as He came upon a prophetic passage describing the details of His life and faith, the Spirit of His Father within Him would feel the identity and kinship with those particular divinely spoken words, and with a true childlike spirit, He simply let that identity, that stirring of conviction, that inner knowing, be the "sign" that it was His Father Who was moving Him and giving His Word as to how His faith and life would be. The Spirit, or personal invisible presence of His Father, moving upon His mind and His heart bore a twin witness to the prophetic words His Father had recorded for Him personally to nourish and sustain His divine life.
An inspired account of the movings of the Father's Spirit of divine faith and identity upon the child Jesus when He was twelve years of age, is recorded of His initial visit to the temple in Jerusalem, when for the first time He saw the Passover lamb being offered as a sacrifice for sin. "Every act seemed to be bound up with His own life. New impulses were awakening within Him. Silent and absorbed, He seemed to be studying out a great problem. The mystery of His mission was opening to the Saviour." DA 78.
As we saw the divine kinship that the Son of God felt with His Father's words because the personal presence of His Father was upon Him, we recognized that the Son simply took His Father at His word because He was given to do that from His Father. He knew in advance that He would "not fail nor be discouraged" simply because His Father said so. He could say, "I shall not be moved," "The Lord God will help me," and "I know that I shall not be ashamed," because His Father had led Him to believe Him.
We found ourselves to be naked in the light of this revealing, and we felt the Father drawing us out in great longing to experience that very faith of His Son. We felt the presence of the Father Himself standing there gently holding out to us personally the gift of the "faith of Jesus."
I counsel you to purchase from Me gold refined and tested by fire, that you may be truly wealthy, and white clothes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nudity from being seen." "And anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. Rev. 3:18. Amplified, KJV.
So that the genuineness of your faith may be tested, your faith which is infinitely more precious than the perishable gold which is tested and purified by fire. This proving of your faith is intended to redound to your praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ the Messiah, the Anointed One is revealed. I Peter 1:7 Amplified.
For the first time we saw that this divinely offered "gold tried in the fire," had already been refined and tested for thirty three and a half years in the life of His Son. This faith in and personal identity with His Father's words, this divinely provided connection to the Father through His word, had been subjected to every test the adversary could conceive of, only to find that the Son could not be moved from His quiet trust in and patient waiting on His Father, no matter what pressure of feeling or appearance was brought against Him.
The yearning of our hearts was, How are we to come into possession of this faith? Or rather, How are we to become possessed by the Father's Spirit of divine faith like His beloved Son was? Inspired words that we had recently read came back to us:
For any gift He has promised, we may ask; then we are to believe that we receive, and return thanks to God that we have received. We need look for no outward evidence of the blessing. The gift is in the promise, and we may go about our work assured that what God has promised He is able to perform, and that the gift, which we already possess, will be realized* when we need it most. Education 258. *Felt in all its force - Webster's 1828 Dictionary.
And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have the faith of God. Mark 11:22 KJV, Margin Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. Mark 11:24 KJV.
I counsel you to purchase from Me gold refined and tested by fire. Rev. 3:18 Amplified. Yes, come, buy ... simply for the self-surrender that accepts the blessing. Isa. 55:1 Amplified.
As we knelt and asked the Father for the precious gift of His Son's own divine Spirit of faith and returned thanks for receiving it, that same implicit trust in His Father's word that had already been tested and tried — His own simple knowing that His Father's word was His present reality and would continue to be, because His Father was present with Him and would continue to be — came into us and was conceived in us.
We felt no different after we prayed that evening and saw no outward evidence that any change had occurred. But there was a simple inner knowing that we had received that for which we had asked. With the Father's offer had come the knowledge that the Father was the One Who wanted us to have the faith of His Son, and that He was there and had heard us when we asked Him for it, so we had received that which He had drawn us out to ask of Him.
And this is the confidence, the assurance, the privilege of boldness which we have in Him: we are sure that if we ask anything according to His will, in agreement with His own plan, He listens to and hears us. And since we positively know that He listens to us in whatever we ask, we also know with settled and absolute knowledge that we have granted us as our present possessions the requests made of Him. I John 5:15 Amplified.
The next morning when I awakened, the first effects of the faith that I had received began to appear. I found myself thanking God in advance for His precious keeping power to keep me from falling back into myself. This was quite different than the asking and hoping and looking around for evidence, and searching my feelings to see if I had received what I asked for, only to begin wondering how long it would last, if I did find some kind of evidence. His living word of present reality was exceedingly precious to me.
Now to Him Who is able to keep you without stumbling or slipping or falling, and to present you unblemished, blameless and faultless before the presence of His glory in triumphant joy and exultation with unspeakable, ecstatic delight — to the one only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord. Jude 24,25 Amplified.
Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the saving of the soul. [margin — them that believe to the obtaining of life. Heb.] 10:38,39 KJV.
We experienced another effect of the faith of the Son of God when we opened the Bible that morning and it was a new book altogether. The Father had anointed our eyes with the eye salve that comes with "the faith of Jesus."
"The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that which is born of thee shall be called holy, Son of God." Luke 1:35 KJV, Margin. This tiny divine offspring, only begotten by the Father's Spirit of faith and His Word, began to make its presence felt. This divinely inseminated Life from the Father began to systematically undo and bring to nothing every thought and feeling in the human soul into which it had been birthed, that wasn't of God.
Our God sees our hearts in a different light from that in which we see them. He is acquainted with our secret thoughts. He searches into the hidden recesses of our nature. He sends answers to our prayers, when we are filled with uneasiness and distress. He gives ear to our inward groanings, and reveals to us the plague spots in our characters, that we may overcome defects, instead of being overcome by them. When unknown chapters in regard to ourselves are opened before us, the test and the trial come; and the question is, whether or not we will accept the reproof and the counsel of God. Will we cling to our own ideas and plans, and value ourselves more highly than we ought? God knows better than we do what is good for his children; and if they could see their real necessity as he does, they would say that the Lord had dealt most wisely with them. The ways of the Lord are obscure to him who desires to see things in a pleasing light to himself. God can discern the end of his purpose from the beginning; but because the Lord's ways are not man's ways, they appear dark, severe, and painful to our human natures. But God's ways are ways of mercy, and their end is salvation and blessedness. RH 7-03-88.
Chapter 1, page: 1, 2
