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THE BLESSED
It’s going to be a strange gathering outside the door
of the Kingdom when that door closes. There are going
to be people standing there who just can’t believe it.
Lord! Open up! Lord! You made a horrible mistake!
Lord, don’t you remember us? We cast out demons in
your name and did many mighty works in your name!
Lord, don’t you remember us? We ate and drank in your
presence, and you taught in our streets. Lord, don’t
you remember us? We went to church all our lives.
Lord, don’t you remember us, we stayed out of those
filthy hypocritical churches. We were the real true
totally—committed ones. And from the other side of
the door he will say, “I never knew you. Depart from
me you workers of iniquity”.
Too many people who profess to be following Jesus are
putting their trust not in Jesus but in an idea planted
in their minds by Satan: the idea that they have al-
ready made the grade through some special “in” with
Jesus. They’ve got a special connection with Jesus.
They’re not trusting Jesus, they’re trusting their
special connection.
“I’m a blood relative.”
“I’ve been sitting in the front row of every
preaching mission Jesus ever had.”
“I went to school with the man for goodness
sake. He ain’t gonna forget me.”
“I had a pizza sent over to his hotel room.“
“I gave him a set of tires one time.”
“One year I gave over $500.00 to charity.”
0h, it’s subtle. There’s not one of us that escapes
this kind of thinking.
“I belong to the clique.”
“I’m a true believer.”
“I tell it like it is.”
“I’m for real.”
“God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are.”
“God, I thank thee that I have connections with
Jesus that are going to put me inside!”
John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus by destroying
this idea that you can “have connections”. The people of
Israel were just like 20th century main-line protestants,
living their sloppy mediocre,
safe, comfortable, self-
righteous lives, certain that they were connected to God
through Abraham and had nothing to worry about....until
John came along.
“You brood of snakes! Who warned you to flee
from the wrath to come? Bear fruits that
befit repentance and do not begin to say to
yourselves, We have Abraham as our father,
for I tell you God is able from these stones
to raise up children to Abraham. Even now
the axe is laid to the root of the trees;
every tree, therefore, that does not bear
good fruit is cut down and thrown into the
fire.”
But they soon forgot. Jesus barely got going in his
ministry before there were people who thought that because
they sat in the multitude and listened, they were connected
....because they stood around and admired him they
were connected. “If he is the Messiah we got it made.
After all, Lord, we ate and drank in your presence, you
taught in our streets...well surely his mother, surely
she has a connection, she bore him, she nursed him.”
Blessed is the womb that bore you and the
breasts that you sucked. But he said,
“Blessed rather are those who hear the word
of God and keep it”.
There are no connections. No one,
not even his mother,
has a special claim on Jesus. There is only one way
for any human being to have a claim on Jesus: by hearing
the word of God that comes out of
Jesus’ mouth and keep-
ing it.
The best favor you can do yourself, my friend, is to
relieve yourself of all these connections with heaven
you think you have, (“I belong to the right group”...
“I’m living a decent life”...”I’m doing my best”) and
ask God to show you whether you are, in fact, hearing
and keeping his word.
If you really want to get close to Jesus, hear the word
of God that comes from him. You don’t hear by having
the sound waves bang against your ear, you hear by
opening your heart. When God speaks to you through his
Son, one of two things happen inside you: either your
heart opens or your heart closes. If your heart opens
to what Jesus is telling you, you’re hearing it. If
your heart closes you’re hearing nothing even if you
memorize the words. Some of us have our hearts closed
so habitually, we don’t know how to open them. We sit
under the word of God again and again, and our hearts
are like stones.
Here are a few suggestions for opening your heart. If
you really want to open your heart
--- close your mouth.
Most of us don’t listen, we talk. We’re incessantly
talking. If we aren’t running at the mouth, we’re
still talking inside our heads. Jesus is speaking to
us words from the mouth of the living God, but we
aren’t taking it in. We’re too busy selling ourselves,
or defending ourselves, or expressing ourselves, or
planning what we’re going to say the next time so-and-
so calls up, and it’s all garbage. We talk all day
long and when night comes what have we accomplished?
What have we learned?
Even in our prayers, it’s far too much talk and far
too little listening, When we talk to each other,
our minds are on what we are going to say to our
brother not on what he’s saying to us. How many times
God is trying to speak to me through my brother but
I’m too busy with my own talk. The first step toward
opening your heart to God’s word and really hearing what
Jesus has to say is to close the mouth. Give it a rest.
Be still and know that I am God.
Let
For every hour of talk let there be about 10 hours of
Silence. In the silence you will hear Jesus. And, in
the one hour of talk, your words will be life instead
of death.
The next thing to do if you want to open your heart to
the word of God is shut down the fires of wrath. When
those fires of wrath burn within you, you will not hear
God. You drown out his voice in the clatter of your
anger.
Let every man be swift to hear, slow to
speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of
man worketh not the righteousness of God.
We always try to justify our wrath by saying we’re “just
like Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple”.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, the wrath in us is the wrath of self, self-righteousness, piqued pride, arrogance
...the same wrath that dragged Jesus before Pilate
had him nailed to the Cross...wrath that breaks down
every tender shoot that God has been patiently bringing
along. You cannot hear God when you’re mad.
Even the mighty prophet Elijah couldn’t hear God when
he was mad. Elijah was still seething with anger when
he got to Mt. Horeb in the wilderness, the time he fled
from Jezebel, God had to literally shake Elijah. It
took wind, earthquake, and fire before Elijah would
settle down inside and listen. And how many times God
has to do this with us. He has to give us a taste of
his wrath, shake us up in order to make us cool down
our wrath and listen.
If you’ve got a bonfire of anger roaring in your heart,
shut it down or God might just have to shut it down for
you. There is no grudge, no anger, worth holding on to
if it’s going to dull your heart and deafen your ears to
the voice of the living God. Come off it. Repent of it
and listen. For God is speaking to you in the person of
his Son even this day.
And, after you’ve closed your mouth and shut down those
fires of wrath,
concentrate your heart on what Jesus is
saying to you.
It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the
flesh profiteth nothing. The words that
I speak to you, they are Spirit and they
are life.
Jesus will speak to you through the prophets and the
apostles as you read the scriptures. He’ll speak to
you through your brothers and sisters. Sometimes he’ll
speak to you in your own heart and you’ll know it’s
his voice. He will even use the lips of your enemy to
tell you what you need to hear.
Once you become quiet inside you’ll find that you can
indeed distinguish his voice from the voices of the
thieves, and the robbers, and the false prophets.
I will instruct thee and teach thee in
the way that thou shalt go, I will guide
thee with mine eye....
and as you receive his words into your heart, you are
filled with his life.
Now, after you hear the word, keep it.
Blessed are those who hear the word of
God and keep it.
Don’t let it fly out again. There is only one way to
prevent Satan from coming in and snatching the word
right out of your heart, and that is by doing something
about it immediately. Turn that word into a deed. If
Jesus tells you to step up your prayers, don’t wait
till next week --- do it now. If he tells you to fall on
your face in repentance, do it now in this room. And
if 250 people look down their noses at you for falling
on your face, that’s their problem. They ought to be on
their faces too. If Jesus tells you today that your
covetousness and stinginess is hindering his Spirit in
you, don’t think about it for a month. Go home and write
a check to that family down the street. Pull that wad
out of your mattress and get some groceries for that old
lady across the alley who’s next to starvation.
If by nightfall you haven’t done something about the
thing Jesus pointed out to you this hour, you will pro—
bably have lost all the good of it. No wonder it was
"one day of wonder, and six days
of blunder”, all you
did was wonder, you didn’t obey...you didn’t do.
When the words of Jesus aren’t turned into action, when
all we do is think about them and discuss them, they
become like that day-old manna in the wilderness that
rotted and stank and bred worms. If there’s something
you can do today about what Jesus is showing to you,
do it. Nine times out of ten you can start right in
your home.
How many people sitting here now haven’t even begun to
show the love of Jesus to their own families. You’re
going to forgive all kinds of theoretical enemies but
what about your wife? What about your husband? What
about your kids? Or your parents? Or your brothers and
sisters? If you don’t start keeping the word right there
in your home, you haven’t learned a thing today.
Some of us are trying to comfort ourselves with the
thought that we were very obedient last year, we did
great things in the name of the Lord and bore much fruit
for ten straight years, until about a year ago.
We’re trying to make our past
obedience a special con-
nection with Jesus. It doesn’t work. What you did
last year is wonderful, but what are you doing now?
What are you doing about the word Jesus speaks to you
this day?
As he said this a woman in the crowd
raised her voice and said to him,
“Blessed is the womb that bore you
and the breasts that you sucked”. But
he said,
“Blessed rather are those who
hear the word of God and keep it”.
May God wipe from the mind of every person reading this
the lie that we have a special connection with Jesus.
Not even his mother had a special connection with Jesus.
There is only one way to know Jesus, one way to be free
from guilt by the power of his blood, one way to have
him living within us; by hearing and keeping the word
that proceeds out of his mouth.
Every word that he speaks to us today, tomorrow and
everyday until we see him face-to-face.
Blessed are those who hear the word of God
and keep it.
Theirs alone is the Kingdom of Heaven
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