Secrets of the Secret Place - Part 6

Welcome back to Secrets of the Secret Place class. We are in session six. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we love you. We are after you. The knowledge of Christ, we pursue you with all our hearts. We ask, Lord, as we together are studying how to come after you, how to pursue you in the secret place. We're asking that you would help us, empower us by your Holy Spirit. May the anointing of the Lord rest upon our study now today. In Jesus' name we ask. Well, I'm an advocate of prayer retreats. They've actually been a lifesaver for me, and I would like, if I could, to talk you into the power and the joy of encountering Jesus in a very focused way by going on a prayer retreat. Now, I stumbled onto this personally in a way that the Lord had just kind of starved me out and cornered me, and so I went into a prayer retreat on one occasion that I have in mind where I was just desperate for the Lord, and I stumbled onto the ingredients that really make a prayer retreat significant. I want to share those with you. First off is fasting. I encourage you, when you go on a retreat, if at all possible, fast on your retreat. Now, if you are physically able to, I highly recommend a water fast, and if you need to do otherwise because of health issues, that's certainly understandable, but if you can do it, a water fast actually adds intensity, and the Lord just seems to honor it. So, that's my recommendation. Now, the second element is solitude. I have found, if I can get away, I've done a few retreats where I've actually just unplugged from everything and gone away, be it a facility, a retreat center, an apartment somewhere, or a campground, or whatever you can do to just get away and just be with the Lord for however many days you can manage it, and then word immersion, just devouring the Word, living in the Word of God, minimal distractions, the Lord's Supper. I personally take the Lord's Supper to almost every retreat that I do. I just, I love Jesus, I love His cross, and I love the Lord's Supper, and that goes with me, and prayer. So, those elements combined, I have found to make a prayer retreat, those are the elements that really make it work for me. Let's look at Jesus' comments in Matthew 6. He said, when you fast, verse 17, anoint your head and wash your face so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. There is no such thing as apostolic Christianity without fasting. It doesn't exist. If we are to uncover the fullness of apostolic Christianity, it must include fasting. Fasting has been such a gift in my life. I'm so grateful I have fought. I would say my number one battle that I have fought with in the 17 years that I've struggled with this vocal affliction, my number one struggle has been with depression. I hate that beast. I've smelled demon's breath. I've engaged that thing in a pretty significant way, and beloved, I'm just going to say it real clear. I would not be here tonight if it wasn't for the gift of fasting. The book Secrets of the Secret Place would have never been written. This class would never be happening. I am here tonight because I'm so grateful to God for the gift he has given us in fasting and prayer. Fasting is a gift helping us to pursue the kingdom of God with spiritual violence. I don't fast to change God. I fast to change me. I'm the one that doesn't hear. I'm the one that has a hard heart. And so, I fast in order for my heart to be softened, for my hearing to be sharpened, that I might hear what the Lord is saying to me. God is shifting everything in the church right now. The church is going through birth pains as God is changing the understanding and expression of Christianity in our generation. And beloved, you will never make the transition to what God is doing in these end times without fasting. I believe that. I know it's a strong statement, but I believe fasting is significant to helping us make the transition to what God is doing. So, get to the wilderness. Get along with God. Fasting, prayer, the word, the Lord's Supper, getting along with God. Get yourself to the wilderness. Follow in the steps of Jesus. Follow in the steps of John the Baptist. And let's hear what the Lord is saying to the church in this hour. So, a personal prayer retreat. Put it on your list. Must do. And may the Lord meet you in that in a mighty way. Now, in this session, I'd like to talk about being awakened to the word of God. There is an awakening that comes to us in the word of God. And I want to encourage you to pursue it with everything you have. When you're awakened to the word of God, one thing that happens is this book goes with you everywhere. You just can't get caught without it. You'll just take it everywhere you go, because it means so much to you. I sit on airplanes sometimes, and I just groan in my heart when I look at the stuff people are reading. You are using this time to read People magazine. You could have life coming into your spirit right now, and you're eating vultures food. And my heart just groans for me. The stuff that people will do when they have time, the things they read. And I go to churches, and I'm like, can I just be a bit transparent? And I hope you can hear my heart in this. I go to churches, and it pains me that believers come to the house of God. They have no Bible in their lap. They have no pen, no paper. They got nothing to treasure the word of God with. I'm like, oh, and here's what I realize. The church of Jesus Christ, and I'm speaking broad general strokes, if for the most part, generalities, body of Christ, has not been awakened to what we have here. We have the living word of God that feeds the human heart, that empowers us. And somebody says, well, it was just a prayer meeting, and so I didn't think I needed it. But this is exactly what you needed at the prayer meeting. 31,103 verses to empower your prayer life. Somebody says, well, it was just a night of worship, so I didn't take my Bible. What? You didn't take your Bible to a worship night? 31,103 verses to empower your worship life, and you didn't take it with you to the worship service? Lord Jesus, my prayer is, would you awaken the bride of Christ to what she's got? Now, I'm just going to tell a little bit of my own journey in this thing, if you don't mind. I took over a pastorate of a church when I was 29. So, in my age 30 to 35, in that vicinity, I was a pastor of a church, and at the time, I was quite disciplined in my prayer life. I would come to our sanctuary at six in the morning, and would spend, I don't know, much time, maybe a couple hours in prayer, just be by myself. And I would read through different translations of the Bible every year. And my point being, I had a measure of discipline, and it was a part of my everyday life. But here's what I found. I would pretty much always be relieved when it was over. I'd be like, you know, put in my time, and then I'd be like, check the box off, did my prayer for the day. Okay, now we can go. And then the Lord helped me to see it. And the way the Lord helped me was, basically, through this, went through a profound darkness, darkness, grievous trial. And in the process of that, the Lord began to show me all this stuff. How many know that when God's got you in the fire, He doesn't just deal with one little area. He kind of, while you're there, He just deals with the whole thing. So, God's getting me at multiple levels all at once. And one of the things He's showing me is the motivations of my love life with Him. It was a duty. He was showing me I had been living out of a performance kind of mode with the Lord related to my secret place. It was like this, you know, I'm a pastor, and they're paying me to do this. And if I'm going to be a good pastor, I really ought to pray. And if I'm going to preach on it, I ought to, you know, I don't want to be a hypocrite, so I guess I better do it if I ever want to preach on it. And so there was all this performance, because if I didn't do it, I felt like an incompetent pastor. And the Lord started revealing all this stuff to me. And I remember that the time when the Holy Spirit helped me to see this. He says to me, Bob, you come to the secret place like a gas station. You come to get filled up so that you can go do what you want to do. How many folks here know you don't enjoy going to the gas station? I mean, I don't go to the gas station because I like the gas station. I go to the gas station because I like to drive. And the Lord was showing me, Bob, you don't come to the secret place because you love to be with me. You come to the secret place because you like to get in your vehicle called ministry and run the thing. And I said, oh, Lord, and in a pain in my heart, I said, Lord, I have a gas station relationship with you. And when I saw that, I mean, I wept deeply before the Lord. I said, I don't want you to be a filling station for me. I want you to be the love of my life. I want to come to you because you energize my heart, because you are the center of my universe, because I am in flame with love sickness for you. Lord, I want to have a divine, glorious, living romance with you. I want this to be a love thing. And I could imagine the Lord saying, yes, and I know that's what you want. And here we're getting there, okay? We're on a journey here. So that's kind of the way the Lord took me. I found that I came to the secret place absolutely for one reason, to survive. It was like, God, I have got to get something from you today, because if you don't talk to me today, I'm going to lose my mind. If you don't give me something from your word today, oh God, I think I'm just going to go insane. My God, what's happening in my life? You have got to show me. Do you do this kind of stuff with your friends? And if you do, who are you? And where are we going with this? And I found myself with this desperate, coming after the face of God. And then what would happen was, he would begin to speak a living, ramble word to my heart. And when I would get that thing, I'd be like, oh, the knowledge of Christ God. And then I started to become awakened to the word of God. Because when the word of God is literally your lifeline, when it becomes a matter of survival, when you literally live because of what God has given you in his word, now something becomes awakened in your heart. Whoa, I've got something here in my hand. This is a gift from heaven. Man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So, that's kind of in a nutshell how the Lord worked in my life. And it's a lot different for me now. Now, if I miss my secret place time with the Lord, I don't feel condemned. Now, I feel ripped off. I'm like, oh, I just got robbed. And because the secret place becomes your oxygen, it becomes your life, it becomes, when it becomes the place you live in, and you're awakened to that thing. Now, if I've been robbed of that thing, so now I come to the secret place because I know this is the only way that I can live in God, is to sit at his feet, hear his words, allow the exchange of love to happen, the flow of the fire of the Holy Spirit. Those who devote themselves to the secret place because they're trying to gain the Father's affection or approval need to recover the freedom of the gospel. Because God doesn't love you. He loves you not because of something in you, but because of something in him. You are never going to be able to perform your way into earning God's affections. If you spend an hour in the secret place, two hours in the secret place, three hours, the more time you spend, it's not like he likes you more. It's not like, oh, now he thinks you aren't you something. Now, if you pursue the secret place to try to satisfy an insecurity or a valley in your soul, you will never find the joy of the secret place, and you will be burdened because that's a burden that the Lord never intended for you to carry. I don't pray in order to gain his smile. I pray because I have his smile. I don't pray to get his affection. I've got his affection, and that's what gives me the confidence and the courage to come with boldness into the throne room and live in the presence of God. And when we get ourselves into a performance mode, you know, when we start doing that and we start trying to perform to somehow meet God's expectations or whatever, you know, it actually makes God angry. Romans 4 verse 15 says, the law brings about wrath. Now, for law, just substitute the word performance, because the law was all about performance. If you did this, this, this, and this, then God does this, this, and so the law performance was the basis of the law. But Paul says, this performance thing brings about wrath. Why? Because when we try to perform our way into gaining Abba's acceptance, we are actually dishonoring the performance of Christ. It's not my performance that gets me accepted to Abba. It's Jesus' performance on the cross, and so by faith, I accept the performance of Christ. The righteousness of Christ is now mine, and I am accepted before Abba because I believe in the performance of the Lord Jesus Christ. What he did on the cross, I believe not in my work, but in his work. Not in my performance, but in his performance. It's all about faith in the performance of Christ. One of the most common feelings among believers is this feeling of never doing enough. Now, we are recording these classes at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, and I haven't talked with any of you about this, but I've talked to a couple people here and there, and you know what's amazing to me? Is that here we are at a place unique in the earth where we are praying literally 24-7, 365, around the clock, all year long, and we have a community with so many people who feel like they never do enough. At a 24-7 prayer ministry, and it's still not enough. My point is that the enemy tries to use this against all of us. It's universal. You're never doing enough, and if we come to our secret life in God with this thing going inside of us of, I've got to do more, I have to give more, I've got to give more time, I've got to read more, and if we have that kind of a negative motivation of it's just never enough, we will never find the fullness of the joy of the secret place from a negative motivation. That's what I'm trying to say. So, what is our motivation? My best answer is to be awakened to the glory of the Word of God and prayer, and when your heart comes alive to what you've got, they can't keep you away. You will do whatever you have to. Distractions get out of my way. Calendar you will submit, and you will start doing whatever you have to do to safeguard the secret place, because you have learned man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, and this beloved is the whole reason that this class is happening. That's why we're taking this course. Lord Jesus, we have to be awakened to the glory and the joy of the Word of God. Would you do this kindness in the heart of your saints? I would like to just say to you this, say it to you this way, my desire is that you would be awakened to the Word of God as I have, and that you wouldn't have to walk through the darkness I had to walk through to get it. Pray the Lord would have a gentler way for you, but I also pray whatever it takes, awaken your bride to the power and the glory of the Word of God. There's two words in the Bible that are translated for us into English word. There's the Greek word logos, which means word, and there's the Greek word rhema, which means word, and one way that they are commonly distinguished, we will often say that the logos is the written Word of God, and the rhema is the spoken Word of God. Here's how I distinguish the two. A logos is a rhema God gave somebody else. Let me explain what I mean by that. When the writers of scripture got their download from heaven, it came to them as a rhema. They were like, whoa, that is incredible. That rhema set them on fire, and they put that thing on paper, but when you got it on paper, it came to you as a logos. They got a rhema from heaven, but when you got it from them on paper, you got it as a logos, because nobody can give you a rhema. They can only give you a logos. The only way to get a rhema, you have to get it directly from heaven. Not a soul on the planet can give you a rhema. There's not a book can give you. There's not a conference can give it to you. There's not a speaker. There's not a pastor. There's not a preacher. Nobody but God can give you a rhema. Have you ever gotten a rhema from God and then told it to a friend? Like you got this rhema, like, yes, that is it. That's my answer. Lord, I've been after this thing for four years, and that's my answer. It lights you up like light bulbs. You get on the phone. You tell your friend, listen to this. God just gave me the answer, and you tell your friend your rhema, and your friend goes, praise God, and you just want to slap her. Is that the best you can manage? I just gave you the hottest download I've gotten in years from heaven, and that's the most excitement you can muster? Well, remember, you got a rhema. She got a logos. You get it from heaven, it's rhema. Share it with somebody else. It gets downgraded to logos. But now, we have a localist right here, but here's what I've discovered. The more time you spend in the logos, the better your chances of getting a rhema. Now, I just gave you a jewel with that statement right there. That's why we pursue the secret place. That's why we come after the Word of God, because sometimes the Word can just be a little bit dull, a little bit logosy, if you know what I mean. But if you will stay in it, there will come a time when a rhema will come to your heart. Galatians 6 verse 8, he who sows to the flesh will reap of the flesh corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life. And if you will sow to the secret place, beloved, I think I can say this with confidence, sow to the secret place, you will eventually reap to the secret place. God will give you a rhema, and once you get a rhema from heaven, you're hooked. Once God feeds your spirit with the living Word from heaven, oh, you will become awakened to the glory and the wonder. This is such a remarkable book. I love this book. Every time I get depressed, I come back to this book. You cannot get depressed reading the Bible. It is such an awesome book. In fact, the most depressing chapter in the Bible, I think Psalm 88. I used to think Psalm 88 was one of the most depressing chapters in the whole Bible, because it starts with pain, it's filled with pain, and it ends with a cry of pain. That's all Psalm 88 is. There's no thanksgiving, there's no praise, there's no joy, there's no hope. There is just one massive cry of pain. I used to think it was a morbid Psalm, but when I found myself in the throes of depression, I came to Psalm 88, and I realized the Scripture validates a place in God where all you feel is pain, all you see is blackness, and all you've got are tears, and there's a Psalm to validate being in that kind of blackness, and even in your darkest hour, the Word of God encourages you and says, God has a purpose even in this darkness, and He will bring you through. I love this book. It lifts my heart. It empowers me. It's my life. It's my sanity. It's our source. Beloved, I pray for you and awakening to the Word of God. Let's just pray right now. Lord Jesus, I am asking that you would awaken the Church of Jesus Christ in this hour. I am asking that you would use somehow in a small way even this course, this book, Secrets of the Secret Place. Would you help us in our discussion groups? Would you empower your people to be awakened to the joy and the glory of a secret place, living relationship with you and your Word? I ask you to do it.