Devotions

God’s prophet wrote, “Many people shall come and say, ‘Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; he will teach us his ways, and we shall walk in his paths.’...” (Isaiah 2:3, NKJV), and “Even them I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer...” (Isaiah 56:7).

The message of the Holy Spirit today to all God's people is “Get back to the mount. Get back into his holy presence.” Many are now hearing that call and making time for prayer and seeking God. Others, however, go about their way, too busy with kingdom details to climb the holy hill.

Isaiah saw both the glory of an awakened ministry and the tragedy of blind watchmen, asleep. While some watchmen shake themselves and go back to the mount of God to hear a fresh word from heaven, others will be lost in endless activities and self-advancement.

“His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yes, they are greedy dogs, which never have enough. And they are shepherds who cannot understand; they all look to their own way, every one for his own gain, from his own territory” (Isaiah 56:10-11). Isaiah said they got that way — self-centered and preoccupied with the works of their own hands, spiritually dead — because they “forsook the Lord and forgot his holy mountain” (see Isaiah 65:11).

Ministers of God, we had better listen to the warning of the prophet Isaiah when he said, “For the Lord God will slay you, and call his servants by another name” (Isaiah 65:15). The Spirit is raising up an army of ‘mountain men’ who will spend time alone with God, shut up in his holy presence, hearing his voice, getting new vision and returning with joy to deliver “those who wail because of broken spirits” (see Isaiah 65:13-14).

Oh, yes! They shall return but with power and dominion. God’s refining fire is going to awaken new and godly principles in us. For too long, we have been dead to the godly principles needed to save the church from chaos. No longer will the Lord be satisfied with a general good in his house; he now seeks the fire of Christ in the heart.

I can scarcely take it in when I read these words, “And the glory which you gave me I have given them, that they may be one just as we are one: I in them, and you in me; that they may be made perfect in one…” (John 17:22-23, NKJV).

Think of it. We have our Lord's word, confessed before his own Father, that he has given himself to us as fully and completely as his Father gave himself to him. He has given us the same intimate love his Father gave him, and that is his glory manifested in us. We have been brought into the same kind of special love relationship he shares with the Father; even more, he opens up the circle of love between them and brings us into it. We are made partakers of a glory beyond comprehension. How incredible that Christ should bring us to the Father and plead, "That they may be one with us!" We share completely in the fullness of God's love for his Son by being in Christ.

In a true sense, it may be said that God so loved his Son that he gave him the world. Did you not know we are God's gift to his Son, a gift of love? “They were yours; you gave them all to me.” Yet Christ was so in oneness with the Father that he brings the gift back to him and says, “All mine are thine, and thine are mine...” (see John 17:10).

Is it not comforting to know we are the object of such a love between Father and Son? What an honor to have Christ place us in the palm of his great and loving hand, for him to present us to the Father and say, “Behold, Father! They are ours! They all belong to us! They are the object of our love! I will love them, Father! You will love them! We will make our abode in them and show them how much they are loved.”

As we grasp this, we will be able to say confidently, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

I wonder how many of God's people today can sincerely cry out to our blessed Lord, “Glorify me with thyself! Bring me into oneness. I yearn to be closer, more intimate. Master, it is you that I want. More than signs or wonders, I must have your presence!”

When Jesus prayed for all believers, he said, “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their word; that they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you; that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:20-21, NKJV). He was talking about a very intimate kind of love, a love that permits no distance or separation from the object of its affection. It desires a complete oneness, an eternal union. This divine love between our Lord and the Father was so all-important to him that he eagerly longed for the day all his children could behold it with their own eyes.

Glory be to the hallowed name of Jesus Christ for such a glorious thought! Christ is so overjoyed with the glory of his intimate relationship with his Father that he yearns to bring all God's children into heaven to behold it.

Won't that be something when we, the redeemed, are brought into God's great banquet hall to the heavenly feast and are permitted to behold the love of the Father for his dear Son and our blessed Savior? I see on that glorious day our Lord's prayer answered, when he looks to his blood-purchased children and joyfully proclaims, "See, children? Did I not tell you the truth? Have you ever beheld such great love? You now see my Father's love for me and my love for him." What a joy to know we serve a Savior who is loved.

Is it not terrifying to contemplate that Lucifer cut himself off from such glory? He is without love. He has no father. Surely, this was his greatest loss. It is the great loss of all Satan's children, to exist without a witness or sense of a heavenly Father's love. In contrast, God's children are embraced in oneness with Jesus while still on earth. God loves us as he loves his own Son, and this truth ought to give us great peace and hope.

No man can rightly define God's glory any more than a man can define him. Glory is the fullness of God, and that is a subject too high for our finite minds. However, we do know in part.

When God gives his glory, he gives himself. The one who receives his love also gets his mercy, holiness and strength. The one who receives his mercy also gets his love and all else that is the fullness of God. Those who seek the glory of God must learn that he truly desires to give himself to us, which means he wants us to enjoy the fullness of rest and confidence.

Before he left the earth to return to his heavenly Father, Jesus prayed, “And now, O Father, glorify me together with yourself, with the glory which I had with you before the world was. I have manifested your name to the men whom you have given me out of the world. They were yours, you gave them to me, and they have kept your word” (John 17:5-6, NKJV).

Jesus was in the bosom of the Father before the world was. He was one with the Father, and that was glory. Union with the Father was the delight and glory of his being. He had intimacy, union and oneness.

We know so little of his glory. We think only in terms of cosmic power and splendor. We are such strangers to the real meaning of God's glory that we don't even understand what Jesus meant when he said, “All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them” (John 17:10).

Did you not know that Jesus Christ is glorified in his saints now? He abides in us in all his divine fullness. We are complete in him. When he comes to abide, he comes in all his glory, might, majesty, holiness, grace and love. We have received the glory of a full and complete Christ. We have an open heaven. Let us come boldly to the throne of his glory and make our petitions known. How wonderful it is to come away with assurance and hope!

Often believers don’t distinguish between faith and ‘The Faith.’ They may not sound like different things, and many believers treat them like they are the same, but they really are not. In scripture, we see a faith that believes in God for prayers to be answered and God’s presence to come down on us. Many of us only live with this kind of faith. “I have faith for the miracles and a revival in our country. I have faith to plant a church. I have faith to preach the Word of God with power and see the gospel spread to new places.”

Now all of those things are wonderful. In Jesus’ ministry, people came to him several different times and asked him for healing, and he told them, “Your faith has made you well” (see Matthew 9:22, Mark 10:52). We want that kind of faith in the church. It is what happens in our hearts when we let the Spirit move us and when we are believing for God to take action in our lives or the lives of people we love. There’s nothing wrong with this type of faith.

‘The Faith’ is also very powerful, though, and I suspect that it sometimes gets neglected in the church.

Often, Hebrews 11 gets read as a roadmap for believing for great things, the first kind of faith I mentioned. I would suggest to you that it’s not. Abraham never said, “You know what, God? I’m tired of being in this country. I’m believing that you’re going to make me a father of nations and my offspring will be as many as the stars.” He wasn’t believing for any of this, but God spoke to him, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you…” (Genesis 12:1-2, ESV).

That Word from God gave Abraham the faith to go out and obey. He had faith — ‘The Faith’ — given to him by God in order to obey God. If we’re a believer, we’ve been given this gift. We ought to often turn to God in awe of his holiness and goodness that makes such faith possible. ‘The Faith’ is our confidence in what Jesus has done for us, our willingness to be moved by him.