Dvd 06 - Knowing From Whence He Came

Jesus. We see the beauty of their lives, and their character, and their integrity, and we hear them speak their many languages, and see their intensity, and their passion, and their character, and their nature. And our hearts call upon them for the kingdom of God, that they might be an end-time people of God, proclaiming His salvation throughout the earth.

The issue of history. Which is the issue of demolition. The issue of the church.

Lord, your blessing again, especially at the commencement, to make a beginning to penetrate, and to commence, Lord, to begin the way. Thank you in Yeshua's holy name for great faithfulness in the perilous enterprise of sharing the word. Well, I've always loved the washing of feet, but we're going to focus on one or two verses at the commencement.

Chapter 13 of John. Now, before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour was come, that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end. And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him.

And then come the two key verses. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He was come from God and went to God, He riseth from supper and laid aside His garments, and took a towel and girded Himself. After that, He poured water into a basin, began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded.

Amen. So, how does it sound? Is it good? Is that clear? Natural? Unaffected? Okay. What has impressed me for years, and I don't think I've ever commented, is that this remarkable act of humility was made possible and grew out of a special understanding that Jesus had of His origin and His destiny.

Knowing that He had come from the Father and He was going to the Father, and that had given Him all things, He rose. That's more than just getting up out of your seat. It's almost a resurrection statement.

He went down to wash their feet, but He arose to take off His garment and gird Himself with a towel and take the posture of a servant. We're talking about the Son of God who is God, washing the feet of His disciples. I don't know if that will ever sufficiently penetrate us.

It's an act of uttermost humility, all the more because He's God and the Son of God. But what enables Him to perform it is that He knows from whence He has come and whereunto He is going, and that the Father has given Him all things. Don't think that I have a fixed statement to follow that.

I just want to put it out for our consideration and interact over that. This is more than just a literary flourish. The Spirit of God has inspired these words, and I think that they're critical, not only for Him but for us, that we will be no more capable of acts of ultimate humility to which we are called than He, except that we know from whence we have come and whereunto we are going, and that the Lord has given us all things.

Knowing is more than just cerebral understanding. It's a deep confidence that everyone needs, whether it's the Son of God Himself or ourselves, in order to get up, in order to go down, and to wash and to wipe. Because the washing and the wiping is the summation of every great act.

Everything that is spiritually significant is summed up in washing and wiping. It requires the removal of an outer garment and the wearing of a towel. I'm just thinking aloud.

I'm just talking aloud off the top of my head. I'm premeditated. Didn't have it until 4 o'clock this morning.

That is to say, the theme. This is an introduction to a theme. And the theme is the pre-incarnate life of Christ.

Where He was before He came down from heaven has everything to do with a proper appraisal of Him who came and is coming again. We have an inadequate, defective knowledge of the Lord if we only focus on His earthly tenure. It is imperative and gives greater weight and accent to the earthly tenure when we consider as we ought who He is and where He was before He came down.

I've never before ever discussed this. So, I'll be reading from the source of my inspiration but I want to dwell on this as the introductory statement. Jesus knew from whence He came.

And we share something of this remarkable mentality that enables us to stride in the world as giants rather than pygmies. Not as boastful, but confident. It brings a dimension that permits truth, which is true service, which is true worship, which is truth.

Otherwise, humility without this knowledge is affectation. It's a Puran. It'd be a showy, outward theatrics.

But for Jesus it was total naturalness. It's a kind of an act that a man can only make, even the Son of God, Son of Man, out of a supreme knowledge and confidence of who He is in the Father, which most of us lack, even as believers. And one of the reasons that we lack it is that we've not come first to the adequate knowledge of the Lord's pre-incarnate existence, who always was with the Father and was a creator, had a history of an eternal kind before His earthly tenure.

That means that it's all the more remarkable that He would leave it in order to come down and into the earth to perform what He did. In fact, now as I think about it, and I'm just talking, what He did in the foot washing is exactly in substance what He did in His coming. He took off His garment from heaven.

He took off His heavenly garment of deity in order to come down and put on His towel, which is to put on His earthly human identity. So what He's doing with the disciples is what He had already done. And what He had already done and what He's doing with the disciples is prefiguring what He will do when He takes off His total garment and is placed on a cross in nakedness.

It's all issues out of knowing, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, that He was come from God and went to God. We really need to dwell on that and let it infiltrate our souls, not only about Him, but about us. Because for you and for me, our reality and our life began with the advent of the Lord for us, that we have come from God.

There's a point of with God and we know we're going to God. That's if you really know that you know. There's knowing and knowing, that you know what the eternal consummation is, the glory, the reward, the things that have not been seen nor heard, that will be ours eternally.

You ever think on that? You ought to. The problem with us and why the Church is living beneath its glory and is lackluster and undistinguished and incapable of heroic acts is because it doesn't sufficiently contemplate its eternal future, the reward for its faithfulness in this life, that because we have not considered the Lord's origin and His destiny, we have not sufficiently considered our own. So it leaves us only the narrow scope of this present life.

And that's not enough to give the expansiveness and grandeur and dimension that Christian living deserves and Christian witness requires. So it's healthy to go back and to consider the Lord in that remarkable statement, knowing that He was come from God and went to God. He rises from supper and lays aside His garments and takes a towel and girds Himself.

After that, once you've come to that, then you can pour out, whether it's water in the basin or blood or your life. So the pouring out that characterizes the earthly life of Jesus had its inception in coming down from heaven. He was poured out.

That's why He showed the act of that woman who broke the alabaster box and poured out its content. Didn't just ladle out a teaspoon or spritz a little puff. She poured out the entire content, which moved the disciples to indignation because they were New Zealanders, because they were parsimonious.

I spoke that word here years ago, because they measure by teaspoonfuls and are offended by lavish excess. But Jesus celebrated that act with the highest commendation than any act that He ever saw in His earthly tenure. In fact, He denigrated the works of men, but He said, this that this woman hath done, this work shall be spoken of her wherever this gospel is proclaimed.

Because what she did was the summation of the whole genius of God's salvation, of pouring out, of lavish generosity that is the whole nature of character of very God Himself. Everything He does betrays who He is and reveals His innermost genius. When I use the word genius, I'm not talking about mental acuity.

I'm talking about the distinctive attribute, and character of the thing in itself. What is the genius of the Church? What is the genius of the faith? What is the genius of God demonstrated by a Son who freely and willingly forfeits Heaven? There's no way that we could even begin to glimpse or know or understand what that eternal communion with the Father meant, how He enjoyed that, what that reality is. All we know is that it's unspeakably sublime.

It's beyond words. And that was His environment from His inception with the Father before the foundations of the earth were laid. To know that and to leave that is an act of remarkable outpouring, which is the love of God, which is His nature.

His nature required it, but He could not be compelled. The Father could not evict Him. Jesus had to leave voluntarily because they had conspired and agreed together that there would be a moment in time in which it would be necessary for God Himself and His Son to come into the earth, take upon Himself the form of a man, suffer the abuse of men, and through that means provide the eternal that could only be accomplished through His blood.

So Jesus voluntarily agreed with His Father to do that, but we need to ponder that or else the sacrifice does not come into the full focus of appreciation that it deserves. And you'll know that you have come to it when you have gone from beyond affection and esteem and appreciation unto the ultimate place of adoration. This is all brand new, guys.

Look, man, no hands. I'm happy for this opportunity to ventilate my own heart and to hear my own thoughts that have been quietly brewing and what's the word, simmering on the stove and now the Lord has provided a venue where I'm required to speak it out. So the word adoration has been gestating in my inner man.

I can tell you this, from my earliest believing 41 years ago having been saved in Jerusalem and coming to a Pentecostal church in Oakland, California, among the things that made me wince and there was much that made me wince was the easy, glib, facile use of the word adore or adoration. For some reason I smarted when I heard Christians speaking or singing that word. I almost wanted to go up and blow the whistle and say, no more.

Forboden. You're not at liberty to employ that word until there is in fact a corresponding reality or else you make of that great word a trifle. And the fact of the matter is that the faith has already suffered too much loss from the misuse of the great words that we trivialize by easy and glib employment without insisting on the corresponding reality.

So my wife's, I use my wife's phrase, not the picature, my wife is Danish. Picature. Are you getting the picature? Adoration needs to be jealously gardened.

And as much as in advance of the faith that I am to you, perhaps, I've not yet come to that place. I know that I know. I've not yet come to the place of adoration.

But if I come to it, it's going to be to the degree that I apprehend the pre-incarnate life of Christ. And factor them to the heightened appreciation that explains his sacrifice. If we just see it from the advent of his birth, we'll have an appreciation, but it will not be sufficient.

But we've got to see his pre-birth, his pre-natal, his pre-incarnate existence as factored into the whole mystery of atonement. And summed up in these remarkable words that Jesus was able to rise, to liberate, to move into another dimension in order to take off his garments, which is always the statement of a man's esteem and self-esteem. It's more than just covering your nakedness.

Taking that off, putting on the symbol of a slave. Because the only one who washed feet in that generation were the slaves. Because to pick up the heft of a foot and wash it and then dry it is not pleasant employment.

It's not... What's the word? It's not a polite activity. It's something a slave will perform. Jesus took that identity upon himself.

If he had not, we would not be enjoying his salvation. It was necessary for God to come all the way out, down and into our human situation. And it did not begin with his birth.

It began with his pre-incarnate existence with the Father in Heaven, which he rose, took off that garment, I'm repeating myself, but it doesn't hurt, and came down and into our human situation, which is to say the washing of our feet. And he was unable to do that because he knew where he was from and where he was going. And what is the church? What distinguishes the church? To follow after its Lord.

To reveal him by induct of a kindred kind that we ourselves will be capable of an ultimate humility and service that men will not even honor or even recognize its value as Peter didn't. Nevertheless, it's important to be performed because Jesus said, if I will not wash your feet, you'll have no part with me. So this is an enormously significant act and it's a pre how the age will conclude by that requirement from us.

I'm talking right off the top of my head. As we pick up the feet of another people who will not appreciate the meaning of our humility and service, but if we don't do it, they'll have no part in God. And guess who that people is? The Jew, the Jew, my kinsman, Israel.

If you'll not pick up their feet and wash and wipe it, they'll have no part in God. Be able to do it if there's so much a as a vestige of Anglo-Saxon, British, English, colonial Anglo-Saxon pride that still resides in you. It's got to be in utter humility which can only come because you know from whence you have come and where you're going.

To a degree, I enjoy that knowledge and it explains, I think, a great deal of my liberty as I travel in the world. Doesn't matter in what country or what place, before kings or before paupers. I'm at home anywhere and everywhere in the world and have a sublime and inner confidence of what I am about, who I am in the Lord, what purpose is being served and whether or not men appreciate it.

Often they don't. I know what the end of it will be. Joy unspeakable.

Reward that I have not seen, you have not heard. And the greatest of all rewards is the commendation of the Father. Well done, good and faithful servant.

Dear saints, in order to be saints of this kind and especially toward Israel who will not appreciate this condescension and yet must receive it from us as a kind of foot washing, we must know from where we have come and where we are going and that God has given unto us all things. Isn't that remarkable? There's knowing and knowing as I've said. Another word knowing that has always struck me is in Hebrews chapter 10.

It's a piece of the same thing where the author of Hebrews, I believe Paul, says in verse 34, For you had compassion of me in my bonds and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods knowing, here's that key word, in yourselves. It's not cognition it's not mental assent to truth it's a deep inward appropriation of an understanding of such a kind that permeates the entire personality and opens it to a conduct that could not otherwise be given or expressed. Am I too fancy? Well, you're stuck.

Here's what kind of a knowing? You took joyfully the spoiling of your goods knowing in yourselves that you have in heaven better and an enduring substance. Can you imagine being stripped of all your substance? Your sheep, your cattle, your land, your goods, your life savings and it'll come suddenly in one fell swoop and there'll be an instinctive start and how dear this is, how long you have labored to obtain and now in a moment stripped it even wants to express itself in indignation and anger at those who have taken it and yet these people joyfully took. Why? Because they knew in themselves what the end was that in heaven they will be requited with an eternal equivalent of what they have lost in the earthly place that will far exceed it in measure.

Well you can, yeah I agree with that, that's true that sounds doctrinally sound. Well just merely to cleave to the doctrinal truth of it will not fit you to be stripped. You'll moan and groan and complain and gripe and where's God and how unjust.

Mere assent to the truth of doctrine will not do it dear saints. There's a knowing. Jesus had that knowing he knew from where he had come where he was going.

These people who took their stripping joyously knew in themselves that there would be an eternal recompense. They saw their present distress in the light of the eternal future and it affected the way in which they presently saw and presently lived. Got the picture? Eternity is not given just to serve the purposes of eternal future.

Eternity is given in our knowledge now to affect the present. If you have not sufficiently factored in the things that are eternal you are living beneath the glory of God. In fact you're not adequately living.

In fact you're living very much like the world who's also fearful, apprehensive, nervous, quick to complain. We're not distinguished until we know. Knowing that affects our present no matter how, if we're stripped.

In fact it would be very realistic to anticipate that stripping. So our ability to know from whence we have come and where we're going and that God has presently given us all things is relative to the degree to which we understand this about the Lord. And that has not been taken church's consideration in modern times.

And me for the first time in 41 years in the faith and a lifetime of speaking and traveling have never before ever taken up the subject of the pre-incarnate life of Christ. Until it pleased the Lord to bring into my consideration the discovery of a book in a used bookstore which I debated buying because it was $15. It sounded extravagant even though the author P.T. Forsythe was worth reading.

I had already his little booklet on the cruciality of the cross but I had never heard of the person and place of Jesus Christ and there it was resting right on a row of books in a little used bookstore near Columbia University in New York. What a discovery. So I'm going to treat you now as he takes up an entire chapter on the pre-existence of Christ and understanding the person and place of Jesus Christ.

And he says, such a relation as we believe our Savior now bears to the Father could not have arisen at a point of time. So you're going to have to listen very acutely. This man really uses the King's English.

Not in any way to be impressive but because he's a wordsmith and skillful in the use of the word because he has a burden to convey rich insight into the mystery of the faith through language. So I'm going to I may repeat myself and it's worth it. Such a relation between father and son could not have arisen at a point of time.

It could not have taken place after the birth of Jesus and with his growth as a child growing in stature and the knowledge and the grace of God. Such a knowledge as Jesus had that permitted him to rise and take off his garments and gird himself a slave and wash feet and wipe them had to have a pre-existent relationship. Any Englishman who can say and write and know that can't be all bad.

That's a remarkable insight. Wow. The knowledge that Jesus had the relationship that he had with his father which was so cherished which is what when he said my God my God why hast thou forsaken me has got to be the pinnacle and deep of the great passion of the cross.

The greatest suffering was not the physical torture which was unbelievable in its magnitude but the absence of the sense of the father's presence which he knew from before his earthly existence. It was always with he was always with the father. He lived in that remarkable environment and atmosphere which if we could but for a moment get a sense of it we would be flat on our faces.

We'd be gasping for air. We would be suffocated with tears. That was his environment throughout his eternity.

He came from eternity turning to eternity but for that momentary lapse of 33 years in the earth he had to leave it. Though the sense of the father was always present with him until the cross. Why the father had to withdraw that presence is another great question.

Probably because Jesus was made sin and a holy father could not look upon it or be present with it. So this is a remarkable statement. Such relation can you imagine if we were called in some measure to that relationship that it would please God in his great magnanimity and generous heart that we also would be privileged to have some sense of the reality of the relationship that Jesus had always had with the father? I'll tell you what it would spoil us.

Huh? We would no longer be what did I say about New Zealanders? Ladling at the teaspoons careful. We would be so generous ourselves. We would be spilling over because we would be ruined by this remarkable quality of relationship that the father enjoyed with the son and the son enjoyed with the father.

That's why he uses the word such. Such a relation could not have arisen at a point of time. It's too profound.

It has to have beyond time that's eternal and in heaven. It could not have been created by his earthly life. That's why to think of Jesus only in terms of his earthly life is not to think adequately.

You'll fall short of adoration. The issue of adoration is the larger sense of the Lord that begins before his being born of the Virgin Mary. The power to exercise prerogatives of forgiveness judgment, redemption could never have been acquired by the moral excellence or religious achievement of any created being however endowed by the Spirit of God.

What Jesus did in effecting the salvation of God had to have an origin that was beyond time and beyond earth eternal in the heavens or we cannot fully understand or appreciate or receive the benefit of that redemption. He says, I confess I had long this difficulty which lowered the roof of my faith and arrested the flight of devotion and I'm afraid from the state of our public worship I was not alone in that difficulty. Is this comprehensible? He's admitting himself that he knew himself that he had not come to a place of appropriate worship that there was a roof he was compressed held back that something was wanting in the full dimension of the awareness of the genius of God in the remarkable atonement effected by the son being sent from the father out from heaven into the earth and that I was not alone in that difficulty.

Praise God that he knew that it was a difficulty. Praise God that he sensed that there was a roof that there was a limitation that needed to come off but he did not know what was lacking to answer until he found me. I could not get the plenitude of New Testament worship or faith out of the mere sacrifice of the human Christ even unto death.

If you guys were here when I prayed this morning that you should not be suspicious to be on God lest some heresy be sprung on you here's the moment where you'll be tested. A statement like this in which he says that even apostolic faith and New Testament worship could not get the plenitude out of it out of the mere sacrifice mere self mere self-sacrifice? This guy's skating on thin ice. Mere self-sacrifice? How can it be mere of the human Christ even unto death? Which is to say if you only compute and consider his earthly tenure without his pre-incarnate existence you cannot come either to the plenitude of faith or to the place-ship adequately.

Nor could I rise to it from that level. I was too little moved by his earthly renunciations to rise to the dimension of the church's faith. The cross of such a Christ who was the mere martyr of his revelation the paragon of self-sacrifice was not adequate to produce the absolute devotion which made a proud Pharisee a proud apostle glory in being Christ's entire slave which drove the whole church to call Christ Lord and God in a devotion the most magnificent the soul has ever known.

That is to say the early church had a handle on something that explained its supreme apostolic life worship and service in a way that was lost to him as a contemporary believer. And he says lost to all of us that he's only speaking what was what's the truth of the whole church that he was not alone in that difficulty and that that is the state of our public worship. We need to recognize we've been living beneath the glory and that however much we try to respect the self sacrifice of Jesus it will always remain mere until we factor in his origin and from whence he had come.

Otherwise we're just looking at something like a human devotion human sacrifice that's admirable but it doesn't move you to worship or to adoration. The key for the existential breakthrough into the greater dimension is the factoring in of the pre-incarnate life. The knowing from whence he had come it'll enable you to arise and take off your outer garment which is long overdue.

Your outer garment is almost stuck to you. You're too proper and not sufficiently apostolic because you can't rise so you know from whence he has come and where he's going. So such worship seemed too large a response to anything which Jesus with all his unique greatness did or determined that the course of his earthly life alone.

This man is candid and he really has his finger on a critical point. Merely to occupy ourselves and to full value and respect to what Jesus performed on the earth which is heroic and significant still falls short of obtaining the worship and the adoration that is his due. And it's not merely giving him that full acknowledgement.

It does something for us. Adoration from us does something for us. It brings us into a dimension of a remarkable kind that's yet future.

Are you guys beginning to feel your early morning risings? A little slumber sleeping up on you? What? Did I lose it? Huh? Okay. So you notice that I'm repeating myself here and there. But repetition hurts because we're making up for generations of neglect and ignorance of a critical factor of factor of the whole mystery of God and Christ that accounts for the full faith to which we're called.

So I don't want to rush this. I want to deliberate. I want to repeat this.

I want to get this into our grit, into our consciousness and gasp a bit and take this in. And the remarkable privilege which is ours has given us a saint of this kind who out of his own groanings, feeling something was wanting, identified it and has the skill and gift of God to communicate that dimension to us. His earthly life alone will not account for it.

Such worship seemed too large a response, the worship of the early apostolic church, to anything with which Jesus and all his greatness did have determined in the course of his earthly life alone. The synoptic record alone would not account for the Christian religion nor produce this magnitude of faith. Christ's early humiliation had to have its foundation laid in heaven and to be viewed but as the working out of a renunciation before the world was.

I said in Singapore, the cross did not begin at Calvary, the cross began in heaven. The cross is not just a expediency required of God to affect atonement, the cross is the permanent enduring and eternal hallmark and character of God himself. What happened at Calvary was only the enactment of what always and ever was and the truth of God.

The cross is denial, the cross is sacrifice, the cross is renunciation, the cross is love and total pouring out and giving. It's the willingness to suffer the fate of a slave. Only criminals were crucified, distinguished others were beheaded, Paul was beheaded, the Romans only reserved crucifixion for the most loathsome of criminals or rebels.

That's what God suffered. And in suffering that, he was revealing what he is as God. His character, nature, is revealed at the cross.

That's why we Jews have no knowledge of God. And that's why we have formed our own that we celebrate Judaistically and ritualistically in the Orthodox practices by which we think we're doing God's service by keeping them fastidiously. Because that's not God.

It's a God that we have composed, whom we call God because it fits in with a mode of religion by which we can be self-exalted by our fastidious attention to external observances. But the God who is God does not require it. And why then are we Jews doing that? Because we have no knowledge of the God who is God.

Because the God who is God is revealed at Calvary. The cross reveals him. The cross is his statement.

What I'm saying is, it was always his statement, even before Jesus was impaled on it. The impalement of Jesus is the actual, physical, final manifestation of the genius of God, which ever and always was, even before Jesus left heaven. Got that idea? This is ever and always the intrinsic nature of God.

But it would have been lost to us. We would not have known it, except it came down. Right? And in coming down, it's demonstrated.

Christ's earthly humiliation had to have its foundation laid in heaven, and to be viewed but as the working out of creation before the world was. Because Jesus was the lamb slain before the foundations of the world. There's a before that we have not adequately considered, and has left us with a deficient faith and an inadequate worship, short of adoration.

And adoration is not just the icing on the cake, it's the cake. Adoration is power. I don't know, I'm just speaking by faith.

I think he says it somewhere, but my spirit immediately intuits. When you hit adoration, it's like the connection has really finally been made, and there's a release of joy, which is power, peace, it's like that coming together of the ultimate reality of faith as faith. Joy unspeakable, power, authority, rests on adoration.

And adoration rests on the true comprehension, not of just of Jesus's earthly career, which is awesome enough, but gives it that dimension is that he came down from heaven in order to perform it. That the very coming down from heaven is already the act of the cross, because it's an act of renunciation of a relationship that I have not seen or have not heard that was known only by the son and by the father. To let go, to relinquish that, to come down, is already the cross.

And it's got to be computed, it's got to be factored in, into the totality of our understanding of the mystery of God and Christ, or we're falling short of that mystery, its recognition and its adoration. The thing that affected, I'm paraphrasing, the eternity, the history of the race, was the exercise in his dark conditions of an eternal resolve taken in heavenly places. Where was this determination made? When did the father and son agree that he would have to leave the father's company and come down to earth and suffer the inevitable consequence of falling into the hands of sinful men? That determination was made in heaven, and we need to understand and appreciate that.

This is what it means, knowing from whence he had come. He could not have been king of the eternal future if he was not king from the eternal past. No human being was capable of such will.

It was Godhead that willed and won that victory in him. It was God loving when he loved. It was God willing as he overcame.

The cross was the reflection of an act within the Godhead. The cross was a reflection, the reflection, of an act already determined within the Godhead. It's the genius of the Godhead.

It's the nature of God. It's the self-giving, loving, outpouring, that when he took off his garment and poured water and washed and wiped, he was being God. And it offended Peter because Peter had another notion about God and what the dignity of God should be that he had previously expressed when Jesus said he had to suffer and die.

Lord, let this be far from you. This is unbecoming to you. You don't have to suffer this.

You deserve a more dignified career than the cross. And Jesus gave the most severe rebuke that he gave any man in his entire three and a half year concluding ministry. Get thee behind thee, Satan.

For you stink, you savor, of the things which be of man and not of God. Your notions are religious, human, phony. And the reason you have them for me is because you want to have them for yourself.

You're concerned for my dignity because you're concerned for your dignity. And you don't want to be related to a God who has got to suffer and die on a cross. It's incompatible with my view of who God should be and how he should conduct himself and what end he should meet.

And Jesus said, get behind me. You stink from the wisdom of man. But the wisdom of God, from the Godhead, to express the nature of God who is a servant, put that in your spiritual pipe and smoke it.

God urban by nature. Yes, our God serves. He's a strange kind of a king.

And what he did through his son was to manifest what God eternally and ever is. Do you appreciate that? If we can come to a place of adoration by the end of these days together, worth everything. And if we come to it, we'll come to it because the Lord is opening our understanding in these things.

The historic victory was the index of a choice and a conquest in Godhead itself. Nothing less will carry the fullness of faith, the swelling soul, the church's voice, and liturgy in every land and age. If our thought does not allow that belief, we must render the pitch of faith to something plain, songless, ordinary, and get a more homely, less absolute, less adoring faith.

And that's exactly what we have. A more ordinary, predictable, routine, homely, less absolute, less adoring faith. If we do not allow for the thought of the pre-incarnate Christ in heaven with the Father, that precedes His earthly tenure and gives to His earthly tenure a dimension significance that if you do not understand and factor it in, reduces the meaning of His earthly life, sacrifice, and death, which we can admire, but it doesn't bring us to adoration.

The adoration of Christ can only go with this view of Him in the long run. Nothing less or lower takes with due seriousness the superhuman value of the soul. Okay, let me work on this.

Not only are we aided into a deeper dimension of the Lord by understanding His pre-incarnate life and leaving it to come down, but it enhances our understanding of the souls of men and women. There will be an increase in our own esteem of ourselves in God and of God's appraisal and jealousy and sense of the worth of a human soul. It is lost almost entirely in our generation when they go up like a puff by the carload and 150,000 or 250,000 are wiped out in one tsunami, and men are being beheaded and death and mayhem and destruction takes place wholesale increasingly over the earth without, because there is no adequate sense of the value of the human soul.

It's lost in exact proportion as we do not understand how God values the human soul, and we will never understand it until we understand that He valued it so much that He was willing to forfeit heaven in order to come down in order to save it. And at one point in my sharing in Singapore, I talked about the soul, which is rare, because I don't like soulishness, but the soul, what is it? The soul of man. And before we came here in Auckland, I wanted to change the title of the talk to the soul of a prophet.

The soul is like the quintessence, the genius, the heart of a reality. It's not a faculty like intelligence or personality. These are all remarkably one.

The soul of a man. You know what, you dear saint? You don't sufficiently appreciate your own souls. I would say that to the church anywhere and everywhere.

I said it in Singapore. I'll say it here. You don't appreciate your own soul.

You don't see how distinguished a thing your soul is. The essence of yourself, the uniqueness of it that God has given and wants to see flower and come to full fruition. We've got to value the souls of men as more than arithmetical.

It's not how many people are living. The soul is a unique thing given of God. It's got to do with personality, with its attributes, its conduct, its call, its mission, its function, its eternal destiny.

Your soul, are you jealous of your soul? Are you willing to make sacrifices for your soul? God was so jealous for your soul that he left eternity to come down. What is he saying? Not only are we given eternity to come to a place of adoration for God and Jesus when we understand what he left to come down, but when we understand why he left to come down, what was in it for him, why he felt that the worth of the human soul was so great, it deserved this taking off of his garment to come down to wash it. And what then ought we to have as esteem for our souls will be relative to the degree of our worship.

The two things go together. I've never said this before. I'm talking off the top of my head.

This is not deliberated. I'm not speaking from past speakings. First time, right on the spot, existential moment of truth breaking in to my own consciousness and my own speaking that is appointed, moment in time, appointed, not just for you, but through you to the larger church, to the taping that is taking place.

You have never no idea how historic this moment is. If you fall asleep on me, I'll topple you out of your chair. I was up earlier than you.

You need to savor, appreciate this historic moment. Now, if you're just made of plain clay and your religion is only minimal, what your carnal heart is saying is, this guy is given to exaggeration. He has a sense of grandiosity that I don't witness where the problem is not me, it's you.

I'm not being grandiose at all. I'm esteeming the moment. I'm esteeming the truth because I've been in the faith 41 years all over the world, most of it in the Lord's service and I've never seen what I'm now seeing and expressing.

And you're there to share it. You're not yet believing. Sure.

Pre-incarnate God, His Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and relationship. You said before, He wants to give and He wants to draw. We're for Him.

He wants to draw us in. He wants us to understand the relationship with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He wants to draw us into that.

He says, oh, because they love each other so much. Oh, good. You know why? Because until we esteem our own souls, how shall we sufficiently esteem the souls of our brothers and sisters, that we would be willing for the sacrifice of what true relationship means with them, that distinguishes the church in the quality of its life together.

It's because we have seen each other only as phantoms, as ships passing in the night, as old people passing in the It's only what this guy can do for us, or what we can do, we evaluate him according to his title, his performance. We have fallen short of the distinctive of Christian fellowship, which is the church and its glory and its power and its heavenliness. Of course, we have not esteemed the souls of men not having esteemed sufficiently our own, and we haven't esteemed our own sufficiently because we have not understood the magnitude of the sacrifice that God has made for our soul's sake.

Because we have not computed and taken in what he left, that the cross began in heaven and departure from heaven. We did not factor in the pre-incarnate life. It would almost be not an exaggeration to say, the incarnate life of Christ is equal in value to the carnate life of His earthly tenure as well as His eternal life enthroned in the heavens.

That each of these pre-present and future are of equal value in the sight of God and that we need to factor in the totality from whence He has come and where He's going in order for us to be proper, adoring saints who value souls for that purpose and each other's souls, and because we value, we're willing to be extended and sacrificial in the kind of thing that true relationship requires, which we will not give if we don't sufficiently esteem the souls of our brothers and sisters and our own. I'm glad I'm saying that. It's recorded.

It is done. Finished. Class dismissed.

Okay. Yeah. Does it mean the soul is pre-incarnate? Well, there is a mystery that we did not know there, not trespass, because He says that He was there when we were formed in our mother's womb and that He knew us before our earthly tenure, so I think that we have to look through the glass darkly.

I don't even want to speculate, but it seems that God has a knowledge before our earthly life, which even then suggests another dimension, that we, like Him, were kind of eternal in the heaven and the So we're on thin ground here. I'm sorry. What about Him? His soul? The soul of Jesus.

Yeah. His soul was eternal. The soul of Jesus would be the key to our own soul.

The key to our own soul. Yeah. Yeah.

As to what that origin is. Yeah. Well, if we are in Him to be in Christ, right? Yeah.

That means that we share that being, that personality, that reality, that being. Talk about the uttermost generosity of God to allow us a portion in His, the totality of His reality, and once we glimpse and taste that and move in that as truth, it changes everything. Where then is fear, insecurity, immodesty, timidity, intimidation? How shall we be intimidated by the powers of darkness or earthly things or natural things once we're sharing this identity with Christ who had a pre-incarnate existence in heaven with the Father and esteems our souls and so esteems our souls not only to save us but to allow us the privilege of life and union with Him at the throne of heaven.

So our future destiny is sharing His enthronement, which would be an invitation to become egotistical, proud, were it not that in sharing His nature we share also His humility. Wow, this is off the wall. This is remarkable speculation, but I think we can use a measure of this at least to free us from intimidation, fear, pettiness, narrow life lived, coveted, that seems to characterize most saints today.

We're lacking a perspective that would be liberating and allowing us to walk in the knowledge that God intends by which He will be adored, by which our souls will be esteemed, and by which true Christian fellowship would be encouraged, that would change everything. And it all begins before the earthly tenure in the eternal reality Jesus had and left in order to come down, the pre-incarnate life of Christ. Sounds like an appropriate time for a break.

Can I have an important Let me do this. Oh. It's my pleasure.

Oh. There you go. Is this an important thing? Well, it's a little, yeah, thank you.

Be home for dinner, okay. Okay. They say that it's deadly to read something, but this material is too rich to pass by.

The adoration of Christ can only go with this view of Him. Lacking this view, we lack adoration. That's the long and the short of it.

Nothing less takes with due seriousness the superhuman value of the soul, the unearthliness of our salvation. It would reduce the unworldly value of the soul if it could be saved by anything less than a Christ before the worlds. Souls could be saved with anything less than the requirement of a pre-incarnate Christ, it would not be appropriate or adequate to our souls.

It requires this pre-incarnation. His whole life was not simply occupied with a series of decisions crucial for our human race or filled with a great deed done, but that the life was itself the obverse of a heavenly eternal deed and the result of a timeless decision before it here began. This adds dimension.

This adds weight to the whole sense of our salvation, the mystery of the faith, the mystery of God, atonement, calling, purpose, worship, service, life, and destiny. And the word weight in Hebrew is the same word for glory. We're falling short of the glory to fall short of the weight.

And we're lightweights, we're panty wastes, we're lacking a dimension we need to be conscious of and this is that dimension. So I'll just repeat that last statement. It's more than the great deed done, but that life of his was itself the other side of the coin of a heavenly eternal deed, the result of a timeless decision before it here began.

If we don't reckon that the crucifixion of Jesus was a determination made between father and son in the eternal heavens before his advent, we have not sufficiently reckoned on the weight of that decision and that event. And therefore it will become in short time trivialized and be made merchandise so that in the season that commemorates death and resurrection, people will be looking for Easter eggs, chocolate bunnies, and all of the rest of the kinds of things that have turned the heart of the faith into a culture. This is that reason.

The world has made of it an Easter carnal pagan celebration because the weight of it was lost until we consider where and when the decision was made by whom for what purpose before the actual Jesus in the earth. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all. His obedience, however impressive, did not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon the earth.

Are you hearing that? His obedience, however impressive, and was it ever impressive, does not take divine magnitude. It doesn't come into full focus for what it is in itself if it first rose upon the earth. The magnitude is so great it requires a pre-earthly expression.

And if we lack it, we lose the compelling power. His obedience as a man was but the detail of the supreme obedience which made him man. His obedience as a man could not have taken place without first the decision to become a man.

That's remarkable that God decided and recognized the requirement of taking upon himself the form of a man and a servant and dying in that form. His love transcends all human measures only if out of love he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he came. We have no right to talk of the love of God easily and glibly in a facile manner until we have really factored in what that love means and which we cannot rightly appraise until we understand it and it's in heaven.

It was love that determined the father and the son to fulfill an atonals of men. His love transcends all human measures. We've got to know the love of God in this way or else it becomes a cliche.

How often do we say the love of God, the love of God, the love of God, but we don't know what we're talking about until we understand the love of God that had its origin in the pre-incarnate Christ with the father. His love transcends all human measure only if out of love he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he here became. His love was the renunciation and the giving up of the remarkable and unique relationship with the father in heaven to come down.

That's love. But I think the thing that enabled him to express and do it was he knew that there would be a return. He knew from whence he came and to whom he was going and we need to know that also or we will not be capable of a like expression of love because love in the divine sense, not the human sentimental slobbery stuff.

Real love is renunciation. Real love is sacrificial giving out in a pouring way that you're only capable of if you know from whence you've come and to whom you're going. Jesus knew and we need to know also and our knowledge will be relative to the knowledge of that pre-incarnate life as being a statement of love willing to leave the comfort, the security, the joy.

We don't have an adjective. How can we have it? Because all of our adjectives are earthly. How can we find the word appropriate to what Jesus enjoyed in timeless eternity with the father which he left? His leaving that to come down and into our situation is the ultimate statement of his love.

And until we really understand, until that's really penetrated our hearts, we have only a shabby sense of the knowledge of love and the shabby capacity ourselves to perform it. That's why adoration is power. Only then could one grasp the full state and comfort of words like these.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Paul's statement because he had a sense of the love of Christ as even being more than what he saw and understood expressed by Jesus in his life and sacrifice and death on earth. Because Paul saw the love by which the Lord left heaven and came down, he could say who could separate us from this love? He saw love in a greater fullness than we have understood. Got that? And therefore because he knew that, who can separate? It is so awesome.

It is so much more than just what was demonstrated in the earthly history of Jesus. It is what preceded that history is the statement of that love in its totality. Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and the humiliation of life.

Coming down was not a picnic even to take upon herself the form of a man for God is an extreme humiliation. It will require the humiliation of bowel movements and urinating and sweating and hunger and pangs and all of the kinds of things we take for granted. But for God they are a humiliation, a confinement, a restriction, a reduction, a sacrifice which he chose freely.

He consented not only to die but to be born. Isn't that a great statement? His life here like his death was the result of his free will. It was all one death for him.

It was all one obedience and it was free. What he gave up was the fullness, power and immunity of a heavenly life. He became a man from heaven.

I just want to break into a little prayer here. Lord, Jesus knowing was critical to Jesus acting and we need to know, my God, not just review and that will take a supernatural grace because everything in our humanity, the world and the devil wants to keep us from this dimension of knowing of the love of God because the devil does not want the church to come into its full inheritance but to be the predictable kind of thing that it presently is that does not threaten the kingdom of darkness and does not provide an island of sanity for the world or an exactly fellowship and relationship by those who esteem their souls and the souls of men. So, Lord, I'm conscious that we are being opposed even now and not only from without but from within.

Our own humanity is contending against this knowledge and understanding even as we nod to agree, yes, what you're saying, God, is true. We're not appropriating. We're not deeply knowing.

So, Lord, I'm asking for grace that this occasion not be missed and just receive a nod of agreement. It needs a breakthrough, Lord, a breaking in that it might be a breaking through that this church of New Zealand will be something more than a little dot on the map of insignificance for the nation and for the world because there's a destiny even for this church as it touches the people Israel in days whose feet will need to be washed by those who can come to them as servants because they share the identity of God who is a servant. And if Israel will not have its feet washed, nor will they have a place with you.

So, there's a great thing that is yet to come. There's a great future that requires a change in the character of the church, a coming to full maturity, understanding. And you're putting me before the issue, Lord, and I'm not persuaded that we're getting it.

I'm not persuaded that it's being adequately expressed. This requires something from you, Lord, because evidently the church has lost this, has not known it since time immemorial except in its earliest existence when that church was a glory. Now it's a commonplace, and I'm asking, Lord, with these saints to restore what has been lost.

This is an hour of restoration, and you're touching something, my God, of uttermost profundity, and it requires a grace to break through our limitation, our humanity, the low level of our consciousness in which we cannot and yet not be affected. I'm praying, Lord, for mercy. Come, my God, break upon our hearts what this love is, what this pre-incarnate thing means that without which the earthly life of Jesus is not adequately understood, appreciated, esteemed, unto adoration.

Lord, we confess that as much as we think we love, as much as we sing and know the rest, we have not come to the place of adoring. Adoring is ultimate, and you're trying to give us the reason for adoration, the basis for it. You're not asking for something magical.

You're not asking for us to get whipped up into a frenzy of emotion that we could say we adore. You're giving us literal, graphic, historic reasons that deserve your adoration. And so I'm asking, my God, interrupting myself to pray that you would help us with a little help right here at this juncture.

For how should we go further, my God, if we don't get this point here now? Come, Lord, sink deep into our consciousness, into our awareness. Help us to understand, Lord, that the cross was only the practical, earthly, necessary, facticity of something that already and ever and always was. Before Jesus ever came, the cross was God.

Sacrifice was God. Outpouring was God. Love was God.

Esteem for the souls of men was God. Thank you, Lord. We have not understood.

We don't know as we ought to know. And those people who took their stripping with joy knew in themselves that they had a greater recompense in heaven because they understood the origin of heaven. They understood the end of heaven, that whatever in their earthly life would be stripped away would be far more compensated for in the eternal dimension to come.

Therefore, they could be joyous now in the midst of their stripping. And, Lord, that's a saint, and we're going to be put to that test in one measure or another, and it can only be met by joy. When the powers of darkness see us joyous in our stripping, not just biting our lips and tolerating it, waiting for the moment to pass, though inwardly there's indignation and anger at those who dare to touch our stuff.

When they see our joy that cannot be feigned, you don't put it on as a performance. It issues out of a deep knowledge of where we have come from and where we're going, that no matter what is taken away in this earthly life, there'll be an eternal comfort cannot be measured. And for that we're joyous.

In fact, the more we strip, the more we receive eternally. And that joy destroys the powers of darkness. When they see that joy, they're finished.

What can they do to intimidate a believer who can come to joy in his stripping? And when the world sees it, the world will be liberated that is under the bondage of these spirits, that fearful timid hanging on to their pennies and waiting for their retirement. When they see a people who are free, and joyous, emancipated, my God, this salvation, they'll come trembling and call for light and say, what must I do to be saved? How do I come into this freedom that you guys are enjoying? Lord, we have fallen short of that. And we thank you that you're showing us the missing key for the appropriation of eternity now, because we have understood the appropriation of the eternity before, from eternity to eternity.

He came down, he's returning. And we also, oh, my God, lift us into these transcendence that Paul knew that he can say who can separate us from the love of God, because he knew the love of God in dimensions and depth beyond what we know. Because he factored in not only the love of God expressed while Jesus was in the earth, he factored in the love of God by which Jesus came down into the world.