From the Prophetic school: "Waiting upon the Lord." (Part One.)

Isaiah 40:31

King James Version (KJV)

³¹ But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

It is inevitable that somewhere in the course on spiritual perception and revelation, we have one lesson on waiting on the Lord.

Waiting on the Lord has a twofold function: It is a procedure to come into spiritual perception, and it is also the actual mechanics of deep spiritual perception.

No one can adequately wait upon the Lord without having his spiritual perception and revelation greatly quickened.

The people who have very little concept of the will of God, who are stumbling along just hoping to find it by accident, are people who know little or nothing of waiting on the Lord.

There are other people who find God directing them from day to day. They have a general attitude of waiting upon God moment by moment, in an appropriation of His guidance and His will for their lives.

But they also have intensive periods in which every other thing that would distract is laid aside, and they are on their faces waiting upon the Lord.

There is no practice that should be encouraged more then prayer and waiting upon the Lord.

I class the two together because there are prayers of petition and there are prayers of listening. Prayers of listening are equivalent to waiting on the Lord.

A prayer does not necessarily involve giving God our counsel as to what we think is wrong with the world and our situation in particular.

Prayer can instead be a submissive bowing before Him to hear what He would say.

It can be done with such an aggressive expectancy that we are literally drawing from the Lord the Word we need.

This is important for us. God is always speaking, and God is always moving, but there are not many people who are aggressively and actively listening and tuning in to what He has to say.

I think our illustration will show what we really need.

Find a young man who wants to be a Ham Operator and notice what he does. He practices for hours so that he can get the code just right, and then finally he passes the tests and becomes a ham operator.

After that, he sets up his equipment and starts broadcasting, hour after hour. He is hoping that somebody out there is listening, that someone is in tune with that particular wavelength and will answer his call and send back a message.

Maybe after several months, he gets a message from somebody way off in Australia. He answers and says he is getting their message.

He is thrilled. And so he hangs up a little sign, "I heard from Australia." He generally exchanges postcards or letters and tacks them up in his room, confirming that hs signal has been received on a certain date and he has had a response.

It gets to be quite exciting, just to have somebody answer back and say, "I heard your hello, and here's a hello back." That is about all it amounts to.

What can you say to someone in Australia? Ask him how are the Kangaroos doing? There is not much that you have in common except that you both are ham operators.

Many people who come into a walk in the Spirit think that they are going to graduate into maturity immediately. They will have all the answers right now.

They are going to grow tremendously; in six weeks time they will be getting a clear signal.
Several messages will be coming at once from the Lord and they will know all about it.

We know that God, in His wisdom and grace, sees that some of us need to grow before we can receive anything in way of deep revelation.

In view of this, it is amazing to see how people in this walk with God come into the leading of the Lord as rapidly as they do. You could go month after month, spending every spare moment waiting upon the Lord in order to truly understand the leading and the voice of the Lord.

This may not seem important to you, but there are always those who do not want to learn the essentials. There are those who go through life, trying to type by the hunt and peck system.

Then there are those who will sit down at the keyboard, and in two hours time learn the first lesson of finger position. Soon they learn to type. It may begin painstakingly slow, but soon they begin to build up speed.

All it takes is memorizing the keyboard and learning which finger goes where.

Similarly, some people will plunk and plunk on the piano and finally get a little song together. But others will learn their scales so they can put chords together.

It always comes down to the same thing.
There are people who would love to be authors, but the trouble is that they do not know how to put words together and how to construct sentences. So they live in the land of wishful thinking.

Reality is with the people of God today, but there is one essential element that you cannot bypass.

You are not going to be a prophet unless you know the Word of God and you know the voice of God.

I do not know any shortcuts. I wish I did. I wish I could tell some of the young people who are undisciplined in the study of the Word of God, "I know God is going to use you to be a great prophet of God," but I do not think they are going to come into it, for they do not know Genesis from Revelation.

Sometime you will have to want God enough. You will have to want His will, want to think His thoughts after Him, want to learn His ways, want to come into spiritual perception so that the Lord God is a realm of reality to you and not simply something that you hear about.

How do you come to know it?

By the disciplines of prayer and living in the Word. Long after it becomes boring and irksome, a good miner will keep working and battling away until the rock is broken and yields forth its gold to him.

The same principle is true of waiting on the Lord. There is no other way you can do it.

I am afraid that the further we go in our walk with God, the more dangers there will be where the discipline of waiting upon the Lord is concerned.

The burden of this message is upon my heart and I hope you are already under conviction. This is the thing that I see and I want you to grasp it: the farther we go in this walk with God, the busier we will be. More activity will be opened up.

At the beginning people criticized us, saying,"Where are the works of these people? we are out winning souls, punching doorbells, and passing out tracts. What are they doing?"

We were waiting on the Lord. What happened then?

As we were waited upon the Lord, a new strength came to us. We received a new anointing, a new plane of understanding. The things of God began to open up.

Oh the tremendous walk with God that opened up for me by that first waiting upon the Lord!

Many people came looking for wisdom and counseling, wanting to receive ministry ministry. It all came about because I first waited upon the Lord and then found that there was something to give.

After you get into the place where you have something to give, the ministry becomes more dangerous than ever because of the constant demands which people make in ministry requests.

Suddenly they are always there- draining, draining, draining, reaching out.

In the compassion of the Lord, you find yourself reaching desperately to the Lord for a portion because you see the people of the Lord in their hunger, reaching for help, reaching for a Word.

However, that in turn has a tendency to dry up your own waiting upon the Lord. It can be self-defeating.

Ministry can be self-defeating.

A man can come into a ministry which is so successful that he becomes a failure. He can be giving out so successfully that he finally reaches a dead end himself.

He does not grow because he is so busy preaching the revelations that God gave him five years ago. The people may be wanting them and loving them and growing on them, but he does not have time to spend the necessary hours waiting upon the Lord for the fresh revelation that God wants to give him this month, this week, today.

In the life of the most effective ministry, there has to be a balance between the waiting upon the Lord and the waiting upon His people in ministry, or waiting upon the Word.

There must be the waiting upon the Lord that draws strength, blessing, wisdom, and guidance from the Lord.

The early disciples had to face many problems. As their ministry began to expand, they soon learned that there was nothing so deadly as a fresh open door.

This is why we hear of so many moral failures today by "mega~church" leadership.

Weigh that.

When Satan cannot defeat and hinder us by keeping doors closed through harassment and hindrance, he will reverse his tactics. When he cannot succeed in hindering, he will kick open every possible door.

He hopes to get you on such a mad dash of ministry that you blow out or burn out like a sky rocket.

With a sudden blaze, the ministry is gone; your health and strength and spiritual depth are all destroyed because every door is open. When Satan cannot hinder, then he will help you to do more than God wants you to do.

The early church came into this problem (Acts 6). Suddenly people were selling their land and giving their money to the Church. The widows were being cared for; a daily administration of food was being provided for people who needed it.

And suddenly there was a complaint. The Hellenist- Jews with a Greek background and a Greek culture behind them- were complaining that their widows were being neglected, and so there came contention.

The disciples were immediately pressured to supervise it and see that there was equity and impartiality. They said, "nothing doing. You get busy and find seven men who can take care of this job.

We are going to give ourselves continually to the Word of God and to prayer (Acts 6:1-4).

As ministry begins to open up, you are aware of the demands. There is always a demand to do something more, to take an open door.

What are we going to do as a New Testament apostolic company? Are we going only where we have invitations to preach?

No, that is not the concept of it at all. We had enough opportunities to preach years ago. That is not the idea, to go and help.

Suppose that some of the leading denominational churches suddenly opened their doors and asked us to come and preach. That is not our job.

Our job is to lay the New Testament apostolic foundation in groups where there is submission to New Testament order. There needs to be not only an invitation to come, but a submission to build a church in the will of God.

There can be a hundred such churches with in the course of a year, once the New testament apostolic company is fully established.

But do you want to go and help someone pump alive a thing that God is killing right on the hoof?
I do not think so.

I do not want to go and give a shot in the arm to a corpse that is settling into rigor mortis. I do not want to sustain something of Babylon anymore.

I do not want to just look for a place where I can go and preach. I am not looking for a name, nor are any of our brothers. All they want to do is glorify the Lord as He is restoring the New Testament Church.

There must be the vision of the New Testament apostolic company.

Many missionaries may ask us to come and help them. When you look closely, you see that a man is building a little kingdom for himself.

Forget that as far as I am concerned. I want to find some man who is only interested in building the Kingdom of God and the New Testament church order.

We are not trying to create a denomination. We would not have one if we could.

None of us would. We are through with that forever.

All we have are local free New Testament churches.

We will have all we can handle if we just build what God is setting in order in the earth. What does this mean? What do we do? We have to wait on the Lord.

The New Testament apostolic may be no more than fifty percent action, if that much. It is more likely that ninety percent of the time will be devoted to waiting on the Lord.

The time will come when men will spend several hours meeting together, praying, calling upon God, on every free day they have.
Nights will be spent in prayer.

There should be a blessing and an anointing in everything we do for the Lord. Waiting upon the Lord is, and will continue to be, one of the basic functions of this restoration of the New Testament church order.

What makes the difference in this business of ministry? It is coming into a oneness with divine strength and divine wisdom.

Waiting upon the Lord is for that purpose, that we would come into oneness with the Lord, in order to draw His wisdom and His strength for the thing we have need of.

(To be continued)