Beth Moore - Your Faith Map - Part 4
Something I ask for my own life and the lives of my children and grandchildren all the time, "Lord, get all the glory. Drain us of every drop by the time we're gone. Get every drop of glory you can get from us". Produce much, produce fruit that doesn't make any sense, that the only way someone could explain it, it had to be God. Because really, honestly, they weren't talented. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, I've got to be honest with you. They never really had it. And so, the only way to explain that is it has to be God. That's what we're talking about here. That's what we're talking about. Okay, what's the third? There's a third one. What are the first two? And then? Faith and fruit. Warfare, warfare. This is what we think we're going to get out of, and it is a part of our abounding.
Remember that he is not after just providing manna from heaven in our place of abounding. He's about bringing us to maturity and might, that we would bear much fruit, that he would call out ingenuity and that he'd call out giftedness in us. And we do things that cannot be explained, except that God is God, and he is with us, and that's what this one is about. Well, here's what he said over and over, but I don't know. Did they fully understand it? Because even as early as Exodus 3:8, "I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and to bring them from that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the territory of the Canaanites, Hethites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites". I'm going to tell you something about I'm going to tell you something about the enemy. If you're not in your place of abounding, I promise you he's standing on it 'cause he wants it, and you have to go defend that ground, and the enemy will want to devour you, and you have it in you only by divine means to be victorious against an unseen enemy that knows precisely where your Achilles heel is, precisely.
One thing about the devil is that he's had a lot of practice aiming arrows. He is not going to bother aiming at you where you are fully covered by armor. He is looking for the place you do not have cover. He is looking for your vulnerability, and he's looking for my vulnerability. And the only way we are gong to be able to do war victoriously is in divine strength and with divine courage and covering. I want you to get gutsy enough to start praying that God would make you mighty. And then don't whine when he takes you up on it. I'm gonna tell you one of the things, I say this as one who has, I mean, just been bruised up and cut up from so many battles. But I can tell you this. I looked over my shoulder. I cannot believe what Jesus and I have endured. I can't, I can't comprehend it. I look back and think, people remind me of some of those battles, some things I would've thought, "No, that's going to kill me. No, Lord, I do not have this in me. I don't know why. I do not know why you're putting me to this test. I do not have this in me". "Well, you know, Beth, it turned out that you did, because I put it in you with my own Spirit".
He wants to make you mighty in him, mighty in him, mighty in warfare. Okay, what are our directions there? Because this is extremely vital to us. Directions. There are going to be a couple of words here. I want you to write down all three of them, starting with this one. The main direction we have in our place of abounding is the word abide. That same section of Scripture that talks about, "By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, so proving yourselves to be my disciples". Well, John 15:9 says, "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love". "Abide in me. My words abide in you, and you abide in me, and you will bear much fruit". He says it throughout several different times in the 15th chapter of the gospel of John. And he's telling them this. This is probably their last orders, because he's telling them this on the night of the Passover meal. So, it's extremely vital timing there.
Now, here is a really, really important concept. Because this land of promise, just like it was in the Old Testament, but we're going to see it in spiritual terms in the New. Under the Old Covenant, it was about going and dwelling in a place. So, they were literally moving out of Egypt, across the land of deliverance and in the wilderness, and they were then going to move and rest in it. They were going to abide in it. The land of promise will always be about abiding. But here is what is really, really, really different. They were abiding on land. They were abiding in a place. You and I abide in a person, not a place. There's not like, we don't just go in. Like we, this church is where I'm going to abide forever. It may be, but it also may be that God moves you somewhere else. Your only staying instructions, the only place you know you're staying, if you're obedient to him, and I'm staying in him. I want to remain. I want to abide in him.
The reason why this is so important is because the number one thing Jesus told his disciples to do is go. He brought the children of Israel into the Promised Land and said, "Stay". To us he says, "Go". So, you see, we're supposed to go out through the whole earth, all over the globe carrying the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, the last thing you and I are supposed to do is stay. And so here's what we do. We are called to stay while we go. Anybody getting that with me? So, we abide in Christ, and we go. But what happens is sometimes we'll abide, but we'll forget the going. Other times, we'll do the going, but we'll forget to abide. For instance, we might be a missionary called to a foreign field. And we get there, and I mean just like, we're just going like, you know, it's just a, it's a spiritual desert. There's nothing here. I mean nothing. I mean, I thought God was going to come to the world. Maybe we went, but we forgot to stay. Abide. "Remain in me. Remain in my love".
The second one is obey. He says it right there in John chapter 15. He says, "And if you abide in me, you will obey me. You will do what I tell you to do". It's obey. And the last one is rejoice. Rejoice. I'm gonna tell you something right now. We do not take rejoicing seriously enough. I need somebody to enter into that with me. Because we really think it's some kind of theory instead of, no, he really did say, "I mean for you to be a people of rejoicing. I mean for you to so believe me about where I have you going that you are already rejoicing in advance". He means for us to have joy. Rejoicing is claiming, all right, with our mouth to what God has given to us by his Spirit.
So, let me tell you, and I'm really gonna split hairs here for a second, but see if you can go with me here. So, when I don't feel my joy, then I'm going to rejoice because that causes me to rehearse with my mouth and maybe with my feet with a little bit of dancing, maybe with my hands with a little bit of clapping. I'm gonna rejoice my way back into my joy. Anybody know what I'm talking about? It's when I take, I do the verb to get back to the noun. So, my rejoicing is stirring back up my joy. So, my rejoicing, when I don't feel the joy, my rejoicing is by faith. Then, Lord, return it to me by feeling. Does that make any sense to me? So, whether you feel joy or not, rejoice, rejoice, because that will stir it back up again. Get that music and get it up loud. Get it up loud. Dance and clap your way and sing your way back to joy.
Let me tell you how important it was to God for them in the Old Testament in the type that you and I are studying together. Listen to Deuteronomy 12:5-7. "But you shall seek the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name and to make his habitation there. There you shall go, and there you shall bring your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your contribution that you present, your vow offerings, your freewill offerings, the firstborn of your herd and of your flock". Listen to 7. "And you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your households, in all that you undertake, in which the Lord has blessed you". Over and over he says to them in Deuteronomy, "And you shall rejoice. I have been good to you, and you shall rejoice".
And here's the thing, we're just, live this kind of life. We forget what he has done for us. And he has called us to rejoice over and over in the New Testament. Rejoice, rejoice, take joy that my joy will be complete, and my joy shall be in you. Rejoice always. Again, I say rejoice. Listen, I started thinking to myself, I'm gonna take the time to do this because I started thinking to myself, when we think about rejoicing and joy, it really doesn't hurt somewhere in that to also laugh. Anybody know what I'm talking about? Listen, funny goes a long way with me. Funny is medicine to me when nothing else will do. It's just like tonic to me. It's this tonic to me. And sometimes we need to take our rejoicing more seriously, and we need to take ourselves less seriously. Anybody get what I'm saying to them?
And so, I'm going to show you a little 58 second video that I took about six week ago, because in my older age, my teeth decided to get crooked. I wore braces. I wore wires on my teeth for 12 years, 12 years growing up, because I'd had an accident, and I'd hit my mouth, and it made by teeth needs just like unending. Well, who would figure that late in life things start changing around in there, and it's like what in the world? And I end up having to get an appliance. Well, I wait till the car to talk. Would you please watch the next 58 seconds? Hey, sisters, I just decided to go ahead and bring you into my humiliation because I have just left the dentist office where I've just had to get an Invisalign. After all these years, as old as I am, my bite was getting thrown off, and my teeth were getting off course, crooked, and the dentist said something has to be done, and so it was either this or it was braces itself.
So, I felt like this was the lesser of the two evils, and so anyway this is the first I've had an opportunity to talk. And they said I would get used to it, but we'll see about that. Y'all, I got so tickled at my own self at one point, I almost couldn't go on because I was watching myself, because I was doing it as a selfie. I was watching myself. And when I said Invisalign, I nearly lost it. I nearly lost it. I thought, hang with it, girl, hang with it. Okay, y'all, I mean you just have to laugh. You just have to make fun of yourself some, because that is part of what helps us get some of the burden, the heaviness of this world off of us.
This world is full of trial and affliction, and those things are real, and we don't want to deny their existence. We want to enter in and help one another bear their burdens. But listen, when a funny moment comes, take that baby home with you. Enjoy it. I feel like every now and then God wants to say to us, you know, "I appointed something really fun for you, only you didn't have fun with it. I mean, you just acted like a martyr through the whole thing when I appointed you something to kick up your heels about, and you just acted like it was normal. After I did something divine for you, you're acting like it's just normal to be a person that has the Spirit of Jesus living inside of her". You understand what I'm saying? He's like, get a little reality grip here. You are a supernatural creature in me in these simple jars of clay.
I'm gonna go to our fourth location now. We don't have to spend here long because this one won't be hard to identify. Our fourth location is what? But remember with me, we may never go here at all. On the other hand, we could live most of our Christian lives here. We also learned that these four lands would not, and this type that we're studying, these examples that we're studying, they wouldn't necessarily be sequential for us, that we wouldn't necessarily live all four of them. These are important things to remember, but this is a crucial one. I'm gonna ask you to turn with me to 2 Kings 25. So, you're going to 2 Kings, almost all the way to the end of the book. Now, even though your Old Testaments still have lots and lots of pages before you get to the end of Malachi. This was one of the last things that happens in the Old Testament, chronological order, is that they go into captivity.
And so, it's very important in our locators to understand what's happening here. I'm gonna put it in a paraphrase for you. There are a lot of things I'll put up with. Idolatry is not one of them. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, it was like, you know what? You shall have no other gods before me. I can tell you this. I have no rival. And so when you act like I have a rival, that really tends to tick me off. Anybody? Anybody? It's just like, "There is no god like me. When you take on another one, or you're all wrapped up in your idols, and you are worshiping those things, instead of me, then we are going to have some trouble". And so, he told them that all through, and he warned them, and he warned them, and he warned them, and he warned them. And they were in their land of promise, and he had said, "You'd better drive out that enemy. Because if you don't, you will take up the gods of the people that are around you. You will get to where you're just like them".
And this is what I believe what he would say over the church, too. "Did I not call you to live in the world but to not be of the world? You have to still be different". Or I think he's saying to us, "Or what do you have? How do they see? How do they see me, if you look just like the rest of the world"? Well, they did exactly in the Old Testament, exactly what he warned them would happen if they fraternized too much with the world around them. They took on their gods, all the way to Solomon. He did the same thing because he disobeyed God and took on many wives, and then he took on their gods, and then Israel ended up doing even things in the temple that were just like perverse, they went as far as you can imagine and doing exactly the opposite of what God had commanded them. And he told them, "If you do that, you will be carried off to captivity". And the thing about is it would have been unnecessary because God would have sustained them in victory, if they had continued to worship him as their one and only.
2 Kings 25, 8 through 11. "On the seventh day of the fifth month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guards, a servant of the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. He burned the Lord's temple, the king's palace, and all the houses of Jerusalem; he burned down all the great houses. The whole Chaldean army with the captain of the guards tore down the walls surrounding Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guards, deported the rest of the people who remained in the city, the deserters who had defected to the king of Babylon, and the rest of the population. But the captain of the guards left some of the poorest of the land to be vinedressers and farmers". So, it's just raised, just raised, and they're carried off to Babylonian captivity just like God told them they would. There they remained, according to prophecy, just as God said it for 70 years, and then he causes a king that is a pagan king to hear his voice and call them to be able to go back home and rebuild Jerusalem, and rebuild the city wall. But for this time, they are in what? Everybody say it. Captivity.
I want you to jot down when you are trying to reach in, what would our own look like? I want to throw out a couple of things to you. Galatians 5:1, Galatians 5:1 says, this is Paul talking. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery". He's going like, God did not set you free in Christ, so that you could be bound up in an addiction, bound up in some kind of captivity, bound up in some kind of tie to an idol. He called us to be free in him, gave his life so that we would be free. There's different kinds of slavery. For those that were in the churches of Galatia, the main thing that they were enslaved to, being enslaved to again was religious slavery. In other words, they had turned, they'd gone form their freedom to Christ and gone back and taken on all this legalism, added all sorts of things to what it took. And then everybody would have to be circumcised. He goes, Wait a second, wait a second. Christ is all you need. You don't have to obey the Old Testament law, because your covenant is in Christ, and he is all that you need. And so, he's guarding them from a religious yoke of slavery.
That is something that we would be very inclined toward, especially if we'd been raised up in a really religious atmosphere, adding on all of these things that was not ever said to us, that what happened to the Old Testament law, they did it constantly because God gave them even the law, but it wasn't enough. Then they built up fences around the law and fences around the fences, and fences around, well, since we don't want to do that, well, let's even back up here, and then let's even back up here, and then let's even back up here. We're not going to do any of this. No, he said it here. He didn't say it here. That happens to us constantly, and we'll do it. We can take on a yoke of religious slavery, but also, of course, slavery to the world. We understand how that works. There's something out there that we just become, it could be pornography, sexual addictions of all kind. It could be substance addiction. It could be alcoholism. It could be just all sorts of obsessions, things that have just dominated us with jealousy and, I mean, rivalry, and it becomes so miserable to us. It's not the way he called believers to live.
And here is the thing. I want to say to you, never think that enslaved always, that a place that we'd be enslaved always looks demonic, because Babylon was glitzy and shiny. So, even the Babylon that's in Revelation, when God comes to deal with her, that she's made everything, and I'm talking about she's like this persona that's representing this whole mindset. It's how the world, the devil makes the world look so wonderful and just like intoxicates us on it, and it's just death, it's just death to us. And there's a Scripture. Jot this one down, too. 2 Timothy 2:25-26 says this: "God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will". Captured by him, that's captivity, captured by him to do his will.
Do you know we hear, I mean, well, honestly, Christianity 101 is God has a plan for your life. But I need somebody to know today that Satan also has a plan for your life. God's will for your life is one thing, but did you know that Satan also has a will for your life? And what he's looking for... see, he cannot have us for keeps, once we're in Christ. He cannot take us out from under the blood. All he can do is hold us captive. All he can do is keep us from living a fruitful life, which is what we were intended to do. And so, he holds us captive to something, and there's always a way out. And so, here's what I think that someone might want to ask is, what is the difference, the primary difference between slavery and captivity? Slavery and captivity. Do you know the difference? Well, this one's always going to be for us after we know him. This one will always be that there was a warning.