Aggressive in God

Among many believers these days, it's considered a virtue to be passive. Thou art the potter, I am the clay, mould me and make me. And certainly this is true.

God is the potter and we are the clay. No question about this, but imagine what it would be like if when the potter begins to mould the clay, as soon as he takes his hands off the clay, it flops right back down on the floor. With no change.

And all too often, what we see among believers all over the place, is a pliability, a passiveness, a softness, that never holds the shape that God gives it. Once we submit ourselves to God, once we submit ourselves to the hand of God to be moulded by Him, and He moulds us into shape, then we are to hold that shape, and we are to become firm in the shape that God has given us. This means that we become strong and even.

Another aspect of us being moulded into shape by God is that we become aggressive. You can't possibly read the Gospels and observe our Lord's life, and listen to the things He teaches, and get the idea that passivity, being passive, is a virtue. It is not.

We see our Lord, for instance, aggressive in seeking the Father's will. We must work the works of Him who sent me while it is day, the night cometh when no man can work. We see Him aggressive at prayer, getting up early in the morning, seeking His Father's face.

We see our Lord aggressively going out there looking for the lost sheep of the house of Israel that nobody else pays any attention to. And once our Lord sets His face to Jerusalem, there is no turning back. He sets His face like Flint, and He aggressively pursues the Lord.

Now you may say, well, it's not my nature to be aggressive. That's just not so. We are, all of us, aggressive in the things that we love.

If you love money, you're going to be aggressive in the pursuit of money. And if you're not married and you love this young lady or this young man, one way or another, obviously or in a subtle way, you're going to be aggressive in the pursuit of that person. And you're going to pursue that girl until she either says, yes, I will marry you, or no, I won't.

And very often after she says no, you still... If you're a politician and you seek power, then you become aggressive in the pursuit of that power. And nothing stops you. And if you love God, then you're going to be aggressive in the pursuit of God, and nothing is going to stop you.

You're going to ask until you receive. You're going to knock until that door opens. You're going to seek until you find.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength. Now, basically there are two kinds of aggressiveness. One is sin, and it leads to hell.

And the other is eternal life itself. First is the aggressiveness of self. Simply being aggressive in self.

The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully. And he thought to himself, what shall I do? He said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.

And there I will store all my grain and all my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.

But God said to him, fool, this night your soul is required of you. And the things that you have prepared, whose will they be? So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. Now, it doesn't matter whether you're aggressive in building bigger barns, or whether you're aggressive in building a bigger church, or a bigger evangelistic association, or a bigger gospel blimp, or a bigger anything, you know, if it's self that's involved.

And some are very dramatic on you, and it's a curse on every life that you touch. And it brings death to everything around you. And many people get themselves sucked into one of these gospel blimps, where people are forever building bigger barns, and extending themselves, and buying more air time, and doing more of this and more of that, and that's death.

But there is another kind of aggressiveness which is not only pleasing to God, and this is to be aggressive in God. And I don't see how a person can be a follower of Jesus without being aggressive in him. A nobleman went into a far country to receive kingly power, and then returned.

Calling ten of his servants, he gave them ten pounds, and said to them, trade with these till I come. But his citizens hated him, and sent an embassy after him, saying, When he returned, having received the kingly power, he commanded these servants, to whom he had given the money, to be called to him, that he might know what they had gained by trading. The first came before him, saying, Lord, your pound has made ten pounds more.

And he said to him, Well done, good servant, because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities. The second came, saying, And you are to be over five cities. Another came to him, saying, Lord, here is your pound, which I kept laid away in a napkin, for I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man.

You take up what you did not lay down, and you reap what you did not sow. He said to him, I will condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked servant. You knew that I was a severe man, taking up what I did not lay down, and reaping what I did not sow.

Why then did you not put my money into the bank, that at my coming I should have collected it with interest? He said to those who stood by, Lord, he has ten pounds. I tell you that to everyone who has will more be given. But from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

The aggressiveness in God. These servants never forgot who they belonged to, and they never forgot who the talents, or the pounds, or the money belonged to. But they were active.

They did something to be alert, to be active, eternal life, to be born again, and to walk with Jesus Christ involves nothing. Where I pursue my own will, my own pleasure, my own security, my own fame, or gain. I give up all that, and I now become aggressive in God.

And I aggressively enter into the mind of Christ, and aggressively seek to accomplish those things that God has given me to do. But the problem is with many of us, we think this is a sin. We're afraid to be aggressive.

We think it's wrong. Notice, at no time did our Lord ever rebuke anybody for being aggressive in seeking Him. He rebuked people for their unbelief, and He rebuked people for their disobedience, and He rebuked people for their lukewarmness, but never once does He rebuke anybody for being aggressive in seeking Him.

Lord, come down and heal my child. Lord, my little girl is sick, you have to do something for her. Lord, that I might receive my sight.

Lord, make me clean. Or take the woman who came to Jesus when He was having dinner, and pressed right in through all these fancy people, when she was a prostitute, and wiped His feet with her tears, with her hair, washed them with her tears, and there was an aggressiveness about this woman's activity, and it was absolutely beautiful. And she was seeking forgiveness, and she was seeking peace, aggressively pursuing it, and it was a beautiful thing in the eyes of all the world.

And my belief is that none of us will ever begin to experience the things that God has prepared for us. Let's suppose that tomorrow evening at 7 o'clock, we have agreed that we're going to gather with some brothers and sisters for prayer. You come to the front door and it's locked.

So you try the next door and it's locked. And so you say, well, I guess nobody came tonight. And you go back in your car and you drive away.

Where there were brothers and sisters in here, there was a door open, but you never found it. If you were aggressively seeking to be with these brothers and sisters, you would try every door three times. And how many blessings you and I miss, because we don't try the doors.

One door is open, all the other doors are locked, and we'll never find that door that's open unless we try it. Now we are called to be, first of all, aggressive in faith. You know, we're going to hang on to Jesus.

Lord, my little girl has died. Come down and lay your hand on her even now and she will live. Lord, you promised me.

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We're not going to leave you no matter what. And we hang on.

I was impressed yesterday. Ralph Morrison was here and Morse Rosen was here, and Ralph wanted to spend some time with Morse. And Morse was really trying to shake Ralph off because he had some things he wanted to do.

But Ralph had driven a long way, and he wasn't going to let Morse get away with that. And no matter what Morse tried, no matter what device Morse tried, Ralph said, what do I have to do to kidnap a six-footer? And it's the same thing with Elijah and Elisha. When it was time for Elijah to be received up into heaven, Elisha had the sense that this was going to happen.

And he stuck to Elijah like glue. And Elijah tried to say, you know, get out of here, Elisha. I have things that are important.

Why don't you go back to the other prophets? Why don't you go home? Go home and tell your mother she wants you. Nothing would shake him loose. You know, he went right with him all the way, and finally he saw this beautiful thing.

He saw his master taken up to heaven, and he received his mantle, and he became then the successor to Elijah. And it was only because he stuck with it. And if you look back over the years, in any fellowship of believers across the city, across the earth, who are the ones who survive? They are the ones who have and exercise an aggressive faith.

The lukewarm saints, the half-baked saints, the ones that are after their own thing, after a while, they die away. They fall asleep. They get their feelings hurt.

They get angry. They go someplace else. And what we have in every fellowship is a constant flow of half-baked ones coming in and going out.

But if the thing is really accomplishing the purpose of God, in addition to the flow of the half-baked and the half-asleep, you will have those who will be aggressive, and they will stay with it, no matter what. We are called to aggressive prayer. And our Lord Himself is our example.

Early in the morning, He's up at it. And all through His ministry, He remains this way. And when He comes to the end of His ministry, in Gethsemane, you don't see Jesus lying down in the grass with a reed sticking in His mouth, pounding on the very stone with His fist, crying out to His Father, sweating blood, His whole mind, soul, and body aggressively praying to His Father.

And He teaches us that we are always to pray and not to faint, not to lose heart. We are to pound on Heaven's door. We are to hang on to God.

We are to be unfortunate. We are to wrestle. We are called to be aggressive in worship.

And a lot of us don't understand that. We think that worship means that you're to be half-hypnotized. You're supposed to be in a trance.

Everything is to be just so beautiful and quiet. Now, even when it's beautiful and quiet, the whole mind ought to be concentrated. Everything ought to be concentrated on it.

But read the Psalms, or better still, sing the Psalms. I was reading something in William Law, and William Law was saying, if you really want to get something out of the Psalms, don't just read them, chant them. Even if you don't know how to chant, just start to sing.

Stay on one note and then go up on another one, go down on another one. But let yourself learn to begin to sing these Psalms. That's the last Psalm of the Psalms, 150.

Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet. Praise Him with the psaltery and harp. Praise Him with the timbrel and dance.

Praise Him with stringed instruments and organs. Praise Him upon the loud cymbals. Praise Him upon the high-sounding cymbals.

Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord. That's an active, aggressive worship of God.

And the same thing we find in Psalm 100. Noise, joyful. You know, put something into it.

When David led the procession of bringing the ark back into the city of Jerusalem, or up into Jerusalem, after he had been in captivity for a while, he danced before the ark. And he was jumping high in the air and kicking his feet and throwing his fists out. And one of his wives, Michael, a daughter of Saul, looked out of the window and saw this, and she despised David in her heart.

And he will be delighted by us, too. And you say, well, look, we got this liturgy. How can you put it? Life or death depends upon it.

More than half of them had never been to a liturgical service in their lives because they became aggressive. They sang it. You could hear every word enunciated.

The S's were sounded together. These people put their hearts into it. They adjusted themselves, and immediately it became life for them.

We are called to be aggressive. Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, if you love me? You will keep my commandments. Now, once it's clear that God would have you do a certain thing, once you know that, don't waste a lot of time praying about it some more.

You prayed about it, and God showed you. Now, don't go counseling with 15 elders to find out what their opinion is. Once you know what God has told you, the elders and the brothers and the sisters may confirm it, but some of us endlessly talk about something we already know what God has told us to do.

You don't know forever. Talk about what you're going to do. Do it.

Don't talk about it. Shut up about it and do it. Do that thing.

Write that letter. Make that change. Go back to school.

Quit that job. Get that job. Whatever it is you're supposed to do.

Go to that person and ask for forgiveness. Whatever it is that God has shown you to do, once you know, stop talking about it. Now, your circumstances will try to get in your way.

Your own mother may try to talk you out of it. Everything will get in the way of this. All kinds of confusing things will be... Never mind.

And finally, we are called to be aggressive in the harvesting of men and women for the kingdom of God. And this is something we see very, very, very little of these days. Anywhere, including here.

We seem to have the idea that the kingdom of God will just grow by itself. You know, if we really have something good in here, people are going to be drawn to us. That's the theory.

And many a fellowship grows on that theory. But if we rely on only that to draw the souls in, we got something good in here, the souls are going to be drawn to it. Or a cult, where people who have similar attributes or similar ways of thinking or similar religious views will simply come together and... If we're going to find the poor, the maimed, the whole, and the blind, and the people who differ from us and who don't look at things the way we do, but who are loved by God, we're going to have to go out there and find them.

And that means an aggressive pursuit, an aggressive harvest. And he said to them, The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest, and send out laborers.

Notice that. Send out laborers into the harvest. Go your way.

Behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals. Salute no one on the road.

Whatever house you enter, first say, Peace be to this house. And if a son of peace is there, and remain in the same house, eating and drinking, do not go from house to house. Eat what they provide.

Whenever you enter a town and they receive you not, heal the sick in that town that receives you, and say to them, The kingdom of God has come near to you. To me, aggressive harvesting means that we're going to keep at it, regardless of how we're received. Whether people respond to us, or whether we don't, and come in the back door.

But we come up to them boldly, and proclaim the truth we know. We announce Jesus. We touch their lives with healing.

We call them to repentance. We urge them to turn their lives around and come through the door of the kingdom of God. Never since Detroit began has it been more ripe for a harvest than at this time.

And this is probably true of every city, town, or village, or township on the face of the earth. But it's certainly true here. But Detroit is not going to be harvested by half-baked, self-conscious, self-centered, lukewarm saints who huddle together.

It is going to be harvested by who aggressively obey the command of the living God to go out and bring them in. Heavenly Father, we just look and to show us in those areas where we have really been and timid, and frightened, and self-centered, and terribly comfortable, and deal with us in whatever way necessary, Lord God, to deliver us from our bondage to the things as they are. And make us to be the men and women that you would have us be.

That you may use us, Lord God. That we may be those earthen vessels through which holy things begin to happen and flow. Wake us up.

We ask you, Heavenly Father, in Jesus' name.