Bill Johnson - How Your YES to the Lord Impacts the Next Generation
Your decision to say yes, to guard your heart, and to walk in the fear of God will have a tremendous impact on your life. You will see it have an even greater impact on your descendants. Why? Because nobody’s yes is confined to their own little world. The yes shouts the yes to God that was a whisper in private, shouts in public, and changes and transforms atmospheres. I want you to go with me to Genesis 22. I can read it to you; it’s verse 18. It’s a story where Abraham takes this incredible risk to obey the Lord by offering his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. The Lord, of course, stops him. It’s a profound story, but what I’m going to read to you is the verse that concludes it. Verse 18 says, «In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you have obeyed my voice.» Now listen to this: «In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.» Why? Because you have obeyed my voice.
Here’s the deal: our obedience never just affects our life. There’s a domino effect. Multiple generations are impacted by the lifestyle of obedience. The wake created by the one who says yes to God will live a lifestyle of risk, no matter what. I believe for this outcome, it’s like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into the fiery furnace. They said, «God will deliver us, but if He doesn’t, we’re still not bowing.» Yes, this is what we anticipate, this is what we believe; we declare it with our mouths, we confess it. This is what we expect, but if it doesn’t turn out that way, we’re still not bowing to this false god. That’s right, and that’s the lifestyle of the believer who lives with a passion for the yes, the yes unto God.
So good. Here, the scripture says that the nations of the earth are blessed because of Abraham’s obedience. Our lifestyle of obedience affects not only our family line. In fact, I love seeing this in the Psalms, especially for some reason. Psalms 25, for example, says, «If you fear the Lord, your soul will be prosperous.» Now listen, everybody wants a prosperous soul because everything that happens around you, from health to finances, is dictated by the prosperity of the soul. That’s good. So he says if you live in the fear of the Lord, your soul, your inner world, will have more than enough—emotional, mental, creative health—all that area will be overflowing with life. If you live with the fear of the Lord, then he says your soul will be prosperous and your descendants will inherit the land. Are you alive, or did I talk too long? You’re still alive!
You will live with a prosperous soul, but you will have an effect on the next generation as they inherit the land. Yes, you! Your decision to say yes, to guard your heart, to walk in the fear of God will have a tremendous impact on your life, but you will see it have an even greater impact on your descendants. Why? Because nobody’s yes is confined to their own little circle, their own little world. The yes unto the Lord changes and confronts atmospheres. The yes shouts, come on! The yes to God that was a whisper in quiet shouts in public and changes and transforms atmospheres. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is with Jonathan, the son of Saul, and his armor bearer. They are standing together; they’re out on their own. I don’t know why, but they’re out on their own. They look across this little rise, this little hill, and they see the Philistine army up on the hilltop.
Now there’s just Jonathan and his armor bearer. The armor bearer is kind of like an equipment manager. If you remember in school, he’s the one who takes care of the equipment at recess. That’s the armor bearer; he’s the equipment manager. Jonathan sees the Philistine army up there and turns to his armor bearer and says, «I think we can take them.» The hero of the story is the armor bearer. He goes, «Yeah!» The guy with the equipment says, «Yeah, we can take them!» Jonathan has this plan; it’s one of the worst military plans in Bible history unless God is in it. In this case, God was! Jonathan says, «I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go out in this little opening over here. I’m going to make myself conspicuous, and if they tell us to come up here, then we know God has given them into our hands.»
Why is that a bad military strategy? Well, number one: we’ve got an army there, and we’ve got one soldier and an equipment manager here. If they say, «Come up here,» it means they have to crawl on their hands and knees to an approaching army, right? Not a good plan! So Jonathan says if they invite us up there, we’ll go up there, and God has delivered them into our hands. I don’t even remember what their plan was, but anyway, they go into the open. Jonathan makes his move, and they said, «Oh look!» They start mocking and they said, «Hey, come on up here; we want to show you something!» How many of you remember when you were 12 years old? Anytime that someone who was 16 or 17 years old said, «We want to show you something,» it was never good; it never turned out positive at all!
So that’s the moment these guys are in—Jonathan, his armor bearer, and the army. They say, «Come on up here; we want to show you something,» and Jonathan is as encouraged as you can get when he shouldn’t have been, but he was! The Bible says they crawled on their hands and knees to this approaching army. When they got close, the Lord knocked them all down. The armor bearer forgets who is the soldier—Jonathan is the soldier, not him! He gets so excited he just starts killing everybody. It’s a bizarre story, but it doesn’t end there. Israel was in a time of horrible backsliding. Some, the Bible says, had sinned so badly that they actually left their Israelite identity as Jews, joined the Philistines, learned their language, wore their clothing, fought in their army, and tried to be what they weren’t.
When they heard the story of Jonathan’s courage and his obedience, something woke up in them. If you could just see this picture—they were numbered with the Philistine army, but they heard the story of radical courage and radical obedience. They began to strip off the Philistine garb. They began to throw down their Philistine identity, and it says they ran to join the Israelites in the fight. They left the lie to embrace truth because they heard of somebody else’s obedience. Your obedience never just affects you. Yet there’s another part to the story; it doesn’t end there. There’s one more part.
Not only were there some who joined the Philistine army, but there was actually a group of people who didn’t have the courage to join another army. They were so afraid they were paralyzed by fear. It says they went and hid in the mountains, in the caves, I believe of Ephraim, if I remember right. They hid. They no longer identified with their people; they didn’t identify with the Philistines. They were just too afraid to take a stand for anything and they hid. Somehow, good news traveled fast, and people carried them back into the cracks and crevices of the mountains of Ephraim. They found these fear-ridden people and they heard the story of Jonathan’s courage, of the armor bearer’s courage, and their radical obedience.
Listen to this: they left the caves, they left the hiding places, and it said they ran to the front lines of battle. They didn’t just join politically with the movement; they joined putting their yes, their lives, on the line for what they knew they were born for. The obedience of Jonathan created a sense of identity in those who were bound by fear. Fear could not hold down anyone who knows who they are. Yes, fear cannot hold back anyone who knows who God made them to be, and it’s all because of radical obedience.
Chapter 15 of 1 Samuel gives us the story of Saul. Saul was instructed by Samuel the prophet to wipe out a group of people, to kill the king. He was a bad man. He was to take all the sheep, slaughter everything—nothing lives. Regardless of what you think about that plan, this is what happened in the Old Testament. Saul spared the king and the best sheep. Samuel comes and greets him. Saul basically says, «Welcome, wonderful man of God!» and the prophet Samuel says, «Be quiet!» In our language, «Shut up, shut up!» Saul goes, «Whoa, what’s going on here? What’s the bleeding of the sheep that I hear?» You were instructed to kill all the sheep.
When you’re not living in radical obedience, you want to deflect blame onto someone else. Saul says, «Oh, it was the people! They insisted we kept the best sheep to give to the Lord, to sacrifice to God.» It’s amazing how sinful lifestyles often get explained away through phony spiritual terminology and purposes, hiding sin under the guise of «We’re going to sacrifice to the Lord, so that makes it okay.» This is where we get the statement: it’s in the middle of 1 Samuel 15. The prophet says, «Obedience is better than sacrifice.» Say that with me: «Obedience is better than sacrifice.» Say it again: «Obedience is better than sacrifice.» Let’s be honest: God doesn’t need burning sheep!
Everything He has us do is for us. Everything we do in giving, serving, loving, dying, and rising—all the stuff that He has us do is for us; none of it is for Him. He is not in need. He’s more committed to what I become on the inside than what I experience on the outside. In this passage, the prophet says, «Obedience is better than sacrifice,» and he pulls no punches with the second statement: «For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.» So we’ve got two bookends here: obedience and rebellion. Obedience is better than sacrifice; rebellion actually connects you—what is rebellion? It’s the insistence on being in control. What is witchcraft? Witchcraft, at its most basic foundation, is manipulation and control. He says rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.
Obedience is better than sacrifice; say that with me: «Obedience is better than sacrifice,» and «Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.» I think there’s a unique reward, a unique promotion, a unique grace, if you will, given to people who get up on the third day after two losses. I did exactly what He said to do and didn’t get the intended outcome, but I am still willing to go to war again. There’s something I believe that God is raising up: you know, the green berets, whatever you want to call them in this hour—people who will say, «I will obey regardless of the outcome because my obedience is unto the one I call Lord.» Come on, sir, it is unto the one I call Lord!
I have this sense that there are planned outcomes and breakthroughs that God has for all of us in ways that we’ve never imagined. I really believe that what’s coming our way is greater than we have the intelligence or faith to ask for. I do, but I also have this sense that some of us are in the middle of a lesson, and the lesson is, «Can you get up on the third day and pray, 'Do we go out again? Do we go out again? '» There are measures and realms of triumph and victory that you were born for, that I was born for. Some of which you only get to taste of on the third day.
All right, stand! Woo! Yes, we just say yes to You, Lord! We do! We just say yes, God! I honor You, thank You, and give You praise that You are the rewarder of those who seek You. We celebrate that amazing reality. Thank You, thank You, thank You! I pray that You give great courage to everybody in the room—every one of us in this family—to get up again on the third day and ask, «Do we go out again?» The cry of our heart is for You to receive all the glory, all the honor, all the praise, and that Your name would be held in highest honor throughout the earth because of our yes.