Bill Johnson - Running Your Last Mile Well
There’s something about first love that needs to be revisited on a regular basis for every one of us. The key verse for my life is Proverbs 4:23, which says, «Watch over your heart with all diligence, because from it flow all the issues of life.» Monitor the condition of your heart. Hey, please be seated. Wow, I have missed you! Where have you been? My goodness gracious, you sure don’t come very often! Actually, I think it’s my first time in about six weeks or so. I was scheduled a few weeks ago, and Benny had a really rough week, so I chose to stay with her. But this week was good, and I’m thankful—so thankful!
Thank you. A Pennsylvania man is suing Smart Water for not making him smart. I’d like to formally announce my lawsuit against Thin Mints. Sometimes, I get road rage while walking behind people at the grocery store. Every once in a while, I go outside and run the vacuum cleaner over the driveway just to ensure that my neighbors leave me alone. I asked my daughter to give me the phone book, and she laughed at me and called me a dinosaur. Then she lent me her iPhone, so now the spider is dead, the iPhone is broken, and my daughters are furious. Some of you followed that one; that’s good.
You know, my mind still thinks I’m 25. My body thinks my mind is an idiot. Have you ever taken a nap so good that you thought you missed the school bus, but it was Sunday and you’re 50 years old? All right, I just watched my dog chase his tail for five minutes and thought, «Wow, dogs are easily entertained.» Then I realized I just watched my dog chase his tail for fun. I tried donating blood today—never again! Too many questions: «Whose blood is this? Where did you get it from? Why is it in a bucket?» If I had a dollar for every time socialism worked, I’d have no money. Coincidentally, if it did work, I’d also have no money.
I have to be able to get one of those in every once in a while. All right, I’m going to—this will be the last one. No, there will be two more. Research shows that laughing for two minutes is just as healthy as jogging for 20 minutes, so now I’m sitting in the park laughing at all the joggers. All right, last one. If you’re fasting and still gossiping, go ahead and eat!
All right, Jason and Lauren Belton have a little girl, Edie, and they sent me a little video of her. You have to pay attention quickly—it’s Chris’s granddaughter. You guys ready to play that? Why don’t you play that for us?
«Hey Edie, who’s on that dollar? Don’t pass the bill.» Oh my goodness, he must be very special. I’m going to demand royalties! All right, I was more famous than I thought I was—it’s a little scary! All right, grab your Bibles; open, if you would, to 1 Kings. We can actually have two portions of Scripture—one is chapter 3. We’ll read one verse, and then we’ll spend a little bit of time in chapter 11. So put your finger there.
Let me talk for a few minutes to try to set this up. I think it’s been about six weeks or so since I’ve had the chance to talk to you, so I’ve been pondering a lot—just thinking a lot about the hour that we live in. In fact, you know what? We need to pray just for a moment. I forgot to do this—Roe v. Wade was defeated this week; thankful for that! I think, yeah, it’s very important. It’s important to realize it’s not over—and much prayer is needed. Pray for our Supreme Court justices for their safety, but also I think if our nation saw the root demonic inspiration for that value system that chooses rights over responsibilities, I think the entire nation would be in absolute shock to see the roots of the devilish worship that existed in the Old Testament where they would sacrifice children.
It’s critical that we can’t win that with— you know, with retaliation, arguments, and accusations; it really needs to come from the spirit of God. So I want you to stand with me just for a moment. If you’re watching from home, sit or stand—unless you’re in your car, don’t stand. Let’s take just a moment to pray. I want you to pray, number one, for safety for all of our decision-makers—that the Lord would give them safety. And secondly, that the Lord would release an understanding over this nation, because I think if we could see it for what it was, I think we’d be appalled at what we’ve tolerated.
All right, so lift your voices and pray out loud. Let’s go for this. Thank you, God. Just bring great safety in the world—great, great safety! Great safety to our Supreme Court justices and their families—that there would be literally a circle of fire, the fire of God, around them for safety. And we also pray for our media—that you would put revelation on our media that would be known for wisdom and for truth. Help us, as a nation, to recover what we’ve given up so easily. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen, amen.
All right, thanks so much. Go ahead and be seated. For the last several weeks, I’ve had something on my mind that I’ve just been giving more thought to than I normally do, to be really honest with you. I’ve been pondering and thinking about how it is that people can go from this passion for the Lord, this zeal for the Lord, and then just go through the experiences of life where they become almost defiled—maybe embittered, disappointed, maybe betrayed—all the stuff that just happens in life.
Let’s be honest; the longer you live, the more history you have of things that went wrong. What I’ve noticed is that some people, as they go through life, actually end up in a place where they become quite jaded, quite resistant to what God is doing. They still have the routine, but see, routine without surrender is just religion. Routine without surrender—the surrender is the element that makes everything we do come alive. If you give «quote-unquote» the sacrifice of praise without surrender, you’re not giving a sacrifice of praise; you’re making a business deal. You’re giving Him this because you want this in return, and the Lord is working at bringing us literally from glory to glory.
Now this is His design—His design is that I go from faith to greater faith, from glory, the realms of His presence to greater realms of His presence. There is no end to that cycle or to that routine, to that progression. He never wrote in, «They’ll come to this point and then they’ll level off for the rest of their days.» He never ended that; we’re the ones that ended it. We end up becoming embittered, becoming disappointed, letting these things control and rule the attitudes of our heart—and that determines where we level off. But the Lord never determined that we would ever level off at a place shorter than being like Jesus. He never designed that we would ever level off at a place that was shorter than us actually being like Christ. That’s the design—all of us have been predestined to that target; it’s all the same.
Sometimes we fight to persuade people that we are right, and we never become like Christ in the process. There’s a personal gratification, but there is no Christ-like transformation. Surrender is always the target in this journey. Great faith does not come from striving; it comes from surrender. It comes from yieldedness. It comes from our «yes» to cooperate with His purpose, His plan, His heart, His mind. So, as I’ve been pondering this, I was actually— we don’t have time to do a very extensive study, even if I had the full time today, but I’ve been thinking about three guys: Saul, David, and Solomon.
King Saul—I don’t know if you remember this or know this, but King Saul actually started quite good. He started off as a humble man; he was not exalted in his own eyes, he was not arrogant—he actually was sheepish to take responsibility. He was hiding when he should have been standing, and he just wasn’t this arrogant guy. He didn’t start off that way. He demonstrated zealousness for the name of the Lord; he rose in a time of great conflict, led the armies of Israel into tremendous victory. It took amazing courage and faith for him to do that, but he was the guy—he stood as it is. May we recognize his moment. The Spirit of God came on him, and he led Israel into great victory.
So here’s Saul, who later becomes this guy that consults with a witch to get information on what God wants. I mean, he just compromises the extreme issues of his own heart for personal gain and personal protection. He tries to kill the very guy whose military prowess has exalted his own position as king, but he’s jealous. Jealousy comes from fear. Everything we do is out of fear or love, and this issue of jealousy, this thing of fear exposes an insecurity. Insecurity is wrong security; exposed insecurity is God being merciful to us, exposing where we have wrong securities. It’s never shame; it’s always an invitation to find a correct security, a correct place of stability.
So we have Saul—he starts off as this tender-hearted, innocent lover of God, saying «yes» to a commission that was far above his pay grade, and he knew it. It was a place of dependency, a childlike innocence that he had in his beginning. But he ended up this jaded, calloused, resistant defiler of the name of the Lord. David—David, probably most of our hero; you know, many kings for hundreds of years afterward were compared to David. He followed the Lord like his father—David, it was always that standard that was said. David, even in his older years, became—can I say it—entitled? Why? When kings would normally go to war, he was at home in the comforts that he deserved as king, and it was in that moment of not being where God gave him grace to be that he faced a temptation he had no grace for.
In that moment, he fell with Bathsheba and ended up having Uriah killed. Even the Lord, when He spoke of David, said, «You know, there’s nobody like David. David followed me with all of his heart except for that situation with Uriah.» I’m glad that the Lord tells the truth about all of us—all you. But here’s the guy I actually want to look at for the next 10 or 15 minutes: I want us to look at, real quickly, the life of Solomon. He’s one of my heroes.
I’ve studied so much about his life in the last 15 years—maybe more than any other figure—because I admire him so much. I admire his «yes.» And he blew it bad! In fact, we’re going to end with one of the saddest stories in the Bible. Let me tell you, I called your project; you saw us announce that once again earlier and we bought an additional 20 acres to the original 30. One of the first things we’ll be building on the 20 acres is called the House of Generals. It’s actually a library-museum about revival—the revivalists of history.
I’ve been buying stuff for over 25 years now. I mean, we’ve got over 12,000 volumes just in books—thousands of them. We’ve got Kathryn Kuhlman’s white gown that she ministered in; I’ve got John Alexander Dowie’s pulpit chair. We’ve just got all kinds of stuff—from full Gospel businessmen’s first, you know, plastic podium that they had. Just all this stuff from revivals through the years, but I mention it for this reason: I felt early on, 25 years ago, when this journey started for me of collecting this stuff, that I was supposed to honor the «yes» of those whose lives ended poorly.
They ended in drunkenness, maybe suicide, whatever. At some point in their life, they said «yes.» God used them powerfully, and then they became hurt, betrayed, offended. I want the whole story, but I want especially to honor all the «yeses» and I don’t want to hide the fact that this life ended in tragedy. I just want to hold it into perspective that God used them for a season.
So anyway, that’s just beside the point, but Solomon is one of those guys whose «yes» to the Lord was so extreme that literally the only time in all of history the nations of the world came to sit at the feet of a man to hear about God and his perspective on life—it’s never happened in the measure that it happened with King Solomon. I believe it will happen in the coming days with the body of Christ. But let’s read just a few verses and then I’ll talk to you.
All right, in 1 Kings, chapter 3, we’ll read one verse—that’s verse 3. Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of his father David, except that he sacrificed and burned incense at the high places. Okay, look at it again. Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of his father David, except, how many of you can say you don’t want there to be an «except» when God’s talking about you? Yeah, except he sacrificed and burned incense at the high places—the surrounding nations. There was something in Solomon that was broken.
I think it started off as something very subtle, but he never dealt with it. He had some sort of admiration or a value for the surrounding nations and how they worshiped their false gods, because they sacrificed on the high places. This was an unsanctified place of worship; it was a place that violated God’s design. God had designed ways, processes, locations, and what they were supposed to do in response to God. He violated that to copy the surrounding nations. Now, to his credit, he was only worshiping the Lord.
So sometimes the end justifies the means to our ways of thinking, when I’m doing it for the Lord. But the more self-will becomes involved in our worship, the less worship it actually is. If self-will drives my worship, I’m worshiping self-will. Chapter 11, verse 1: King Solomon loved many foreign women, as well as the daughter of Pharaoh—women of the Moabites, the Ammonites, Sidonians, Hittites—from the nations of whom the Lord had said to the children of Israel, «You shall not intermarry with them, nor they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods.» Solomon clung to these in love and had 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines, and his wives turned away his heart.
Stop right there! These are from the surrounding nations that worship these demonic gods, and part of their worship was the sacrifice of children—burning alive their own kings would even offer their sons at times to appease or to please their god. So these surrounding nations, that’s what they are steeped in, and their entire worship system is interwoven with gross, extreme sexual perversion and immorality as a part of their worship for God. Solomon marries 700 of them—demon-possessed devil worshipers who are perverts, and they are all vying for his affection. He no longer stands in a place of resolve for worshiping only the Lord; he gets sucked in because of his own appetite for wrong things. He gets sucked in to establishing a way of worship in Israel.
I’ve not researched this myself; somebody else gave me this information, but they said it took Israel 300 years to recover from what Solomon brought into the country when he was king. They were so deeply steeped in the worship of demons. The devil’s real! Mario Merola told us years ago, «The devil’s real; he’ll enter a bar of soap if you worship it. He just wants attention; that’s it.» So here’s Solomon, who is trying to bring peace to Israel. Here’s the bizarre thing: why is he marrying the daughters of these kings and these leaders from surrounding nations? He wants alliances so that they have peace.
All right, that’s the intent—bring peace. The intent was kind of stupid, to my way of thinking, because he was trying to obtain what he already had. He already had peace; they were already leaving everything—even kings leaving the comfort of their own throne to sit at his feet to receive instruction on the nature of God in the heart of his kingdom. He’s already got them eating out of his hand, if you will. There’s absolute peace. They are paying him—because I figured out the amount of money: once, just the surrounding nations, something like a billion dollars a year just in gold tribute to him. There’s already peace, but he feels somehow again this self-will thing, the sacrifice on high places, that self-will never got dealt with, and it surfaced later and led him into the worship of false gods.
These subtle little things that get ignored, if they’re not dealt with, creep up later at the most inconvenient time, and they affected, in this great man, a value system that he wrote against! Solomon would have done fine if he would have just kept reading his own book! You know, if he just would have kept reading Proverbs, he would have been fine. He already warned everybody about what he just did. Verse 9 says, «The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned from the Lord God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.» I have that phrase circled: «who appeared to him twice.»
Look at it again—verse 9. The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned from the Lord God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. This is the Lord’s description. He says Solomon loves me with all of his heart, except for the high places. And now He says, «I’m angry at him because I appeared to him twice.» Most people don’t get one; Solomon got two! Most people, in all the record of Scripture, never got one; Solomon got twice, and he was the most exalted—in my opinion—the most exalted human being in stature, intelligence, perception of reality, human power, and a sense of being able to persuade and to train and to raise. Nobody higher!
And yet certain years go past, and things happen where there’s betrayal, and I don’t know what happened to him. I just know there was this thorn under the saddle that he never stopped long enough to remove from the self-will involved of sacrificing in high places. And pretty soon, that thing demanded expression, and then we have a guy who God’s angry with because he has now welcomed the demonic presence of all the surrounding nations that were eating out of his hands. He has welcomed them in and brought an entire nation into compromise! That’s a bummer of a story and I don’t mean to depress you—just be thankful I’m not sending you home now.
I’m going to give you a few more minutes and a little pep talk here. So I’ve been pondering this stuff for a while because, you know, one of the great privileges of my life is—as I have friends all over the world, and I mean some of the greatest people I’ve ever met in my life, I’ve become acquainted with in the last 20, 25 years and personal friends where we visit one another. We even take vacations together and share meals together and just do life together. Just talk about what God’s doing, pray for each other. Benny and I have been on numerous, numerous FaceTime calls with some of our dearest friends—praying together. They’ve been ministering to her and we’re just thankful.
But also in that journey, I’m running into a number of people that in one season, we knew them well as the childlike, innocent lovers of God, who just had tough stuff happen. And somehow, the joy’s gone. They still do the routine, but somehow the surrender is not there anymore. There’s the outward; there’s the same songs; there’s the same, you know, encouraging sermons—all that stuff—but something’s missing here because the innocence is gone.
The first love passion just isn’t there anymore. It doesn’t go away in one day. It’s not like somebody wakes up one morning and goes, «I’m tired of loving God first. I’m going to do something else.» You know, it just doesn’t happen that way. You just kind of get hurt, you know? You get spoiled, you get different. Maybe distracted. So many people lose that love for the Lord because they get distracted by the blessing of the Lord, and then they get sucked away into all kinds of things—things that are wrong.
And I listen, I’m saying this today for me as much as I am for you. I didn’t come this far for that long to be stupid in the last mile. That’s all I’m saying. I haven’t said «yes» to God a million times over and over and over again—about so many different critical and difficult and challenging things. I’ve not done that so that I can now just get stupid and lose the first love, lose the child-like approach.
So, in my ponderings and my thinking and my praying about this subject, I felt impressed of the Lord. It wasn’t a voice; I don’t want to exaggerate it. I just felt this impression of the Lord that there were two themes in Scripture that, if I could grab hold of them, they would complement each other. And these two themes—this is what I felt He said—they’re different sides of the same coin. The two themes are this: Mark chapter 10, where Jesus says, «Unless you become as a child, unless you receive the kingdom as a child, you can’t enter.»
Think through the words here. Unless you receive as a child, you can’t enter. You can only enter kingdom realities in the measure you’ve received it as a child. There’s an innocence of the child; there’s adventure; there’s humility. Children think of themselves as dependent. They don’t wake up with a burden to go earn money. You don’t have a five-year-old saying, «Man, we gotta get some groceries for the family.» You just don’t have that! Not in a healthy environment, you don’t. You’ve got this sense of adventure in children; you’ve got this, you know, put a Batman cape on them, and you’ll find out what they’re capable of doing.
I mean, there’s nothing impossible for them! I remember, Gabe, my son—one of his kids was playing T-ball. T-ball is the ultimate expression of baseball. It’s baseball in its purest form where you put a ball on a stick and the kid hits it and isn’t sure what direction to run! That’s just the coolest thing in the world! And so Gabe was out with his little five-year-old that was out there, and he was supposed to be playing third base. He wasn’t quite in the right position, so Gabe walked out and kind of walked him over and put him in the right position. And this little guy looked up at his dad and said, «Dad, you better get off the field; you might get hurt.»
So that five-year-old was pretty certain he was the greatest ballplayer to ever live, and he was protecting his dad! But that’s the innocence of being childlike. There’s childish, but there’s childlike! So here’s what I felt impressed of the Lord. There’s the childlike nature of the kingdom—the innocence, and the other was Revelation chapter 2: «I have this against you; you left your first love.» We sang it this morning. Now we should sing that like every day for the next 100 years: «First love!»
There’s something about first love that needs to be revisited on a regular basis for every one of us. The key verse for my life is Proverbs 4, verse 23, where it says, «Watch over your heart with all diligence because from it flow all the issues of life.» Watch over your heart, so monitor the condition of your heart. When you start seeing unbelief, mourning—whatever. The mourning will take you one of two places: «Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.» So mourning will take you to the Holy Spirit to be comforted or it’ll take you to unbelief.
And every one of these situations in our life has the potential of taking us into greater expressions of the kingdom or into greater rigidity and resistance. First love and childlikeness—two sides of the same coin. I don’t know that I’ll ever think of those two things the same way ever again because I see them as so unique and different and yet so complementary.
So what did He say in Revelation 2? He said, «You’ve lost your first love; repent.» And then He said, «Do the deeds you did at first.» This is fascinating because what He didn’t say, He didn’t say to this group of believers, «You’ve lost your first love—put on a worship CD, worship Me for eight hours today. By the end of eight hours, I will have renewed your heart, your spirit. You would have been restored to your first love.» He didn’t say, «Go on a water-only fast for 21 days, and then you’ll recover first love.» He didn’t say, «Triple your Bible reading, because that will help you recover.» He didn’t say any of the stuff that we might encourage someone.
He said, «Do what you used to do.» Why does He say that? He says here, «You need to rediscover what you used to do in your childlike innocence, in your deep, profound affection for Me. You need to go and reactivate those exact things you used to do.» Well, I don’t want to be phony if I do that now. That was real then, but I don’t want to be phony; I don’t want to go into just a routine.
«Oh shut up and do what He said!» He said, «Do what you used to do.» Why? Because God looks at physical obedience and He touches it with power, and something gets reactivated in us—our own history with God. It’s like He brings out the pen again and is ready to write right where He left off on that page where we stopped having Him as our first love. Something happens; it gets reactivated simply by our raw obedience to acknowledging Him for who He is.
I believe these two themes are going to be really important for us in this next season. We’ll understand. I just told you to shut up; I’m so sorry. It felt so inspired when it came out of my mouth, but now I’m starting to wonder. I didn’t tell you so. It was them other people! You know, all the other ones—the ones that don’t listen—that’s the ones I was talking about!
It says He takes us from glory to glory, takes us from faith to faith. Is it possible for you to end your life and your days with a greater joy than your first day of salvation—with a greater faith, with a greater sense of presence, a greater sense of innocence, a greater sense of affection and delight? Father, that’s what we pray for! I pray for that right now! Lift your voices; come on! We pray! We invite You to teach us deeply and profoundly what real innocence and childlike lifestyle looks like and this first love thing—remind us of the simple things that we used to do to reactivate them again.
I’m just—my cry is that we honestly would go from glory to glory, from victory to victory, from triumph to triumph! I pray this in Jesus' name. Real quick question: Is there anyone here that you’ve never given your life to Jesus Christ? You’ve never said, «I give my life to Jesus to be a disciple, a follower of Jesus—the only one who has the right to rule and to direct my life.» If that’s you, you’ve never been what the Bible calls «born again,» but you want to be—I want you to put a hand up right where you are. We’re just going to make an agreement today for a miracle in your life. Put you in the park, because I don’t want to miss you. Wave it at me if I miss you.
All right? All right, well, I’m going to assume you’re all in. All right, we’ve got a banner up here, and anyone who would like to receive prayer, we’ll have a ministry team up front helping me. Here, who’s coming to deliver me? You are; come and deliver me. Wonderful! Listen to her; she’ll tell you what to do!