Getting Into Spiritual Battle

Where do you say the battle is? Where do we fight the battle? Do we ask him—all this “Lord, you do it?” [man: We fight it.] What? What does the Lord say in that? It’s supernatural, moving against the enemy. What was it?

[man: Going out into the spiritual heights, the territory that he wants us on, because that’s where the battle is and there are those who have been out there. But we have to get out there ourselves. And there are demons standing in the way of us getting out there. And when we get out there, there will be demons too. But we have to break through every step. And it’s going to be a battle every step. But there is the power from God here today. The power has come down, and He has spoken to us. And we can just move out.]

Do we have ears? “Let him who has ears hear what the Lord says to his church.” It’s out there, and you don’t keep…. What did… when Moses was there with these rods and he kept on hitting, “Lord, Lord, Lord!”, and what does the Lord say? “Use what you’ve got.” We use what we’ve got. “For the weapons of our warfare are” what? [Not carnal, mighty in God.] “We wrestle not against…”? [Flesh and blood.] So it’s a wrestle, with the fight to take victory over him. You don’t keep saying, “Lord, Lord, Lord,” until you get weary calling “Lord.”

But you rise up, you men of God. Against the enemy, the powers of darkness—that’s where the battle is. And we’re not out there where we should be. You can cry till your throat is dry and then some. But if you don’t rise up and take it. And that’s not presumption. As you can say, “Well, I’ll implement this for faith,” and you don’t have it, so it goes on presumption.

But the battle is fought and then as you know it’s finished, you’re out there. And you’re invincible. The sword of the Spirit, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the loins girt about with truth, the feet shod and the shield of faith, wherewith we can quench every… is it every or all? I think it’s every, but I don’t know. “Every fiery dart,” but it could be all, the same [?]. “All the fiery darts,” “every fiery dart” of…? [The wicked one.] Same thing, but it’s better to know the Scriptures. So we can quench every fiery dart—all. Every or all? All. Praise God.

[man: It says, “Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.”]

Praise God. Of course, every is all and all is every, but we’d rather know what it says, King James at least. [man: “Bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”] Every in that place, every thought to the obedience of Christ.

“For the word of God is” what? [Quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

Did you ever see any cleaver go down on a bone, a knucklebone? Or a knee bone of an animal? Or what’s left of it? The marrow is there. And that’s the two-edged sword that is quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.” So that cuts away all your soulishness. If you’re still emotional in your soul, it cuts it away, and it has to go. You cannot ride on emotions. You cannot be up one day and down the next. You cannot think, well, I feel a little sobby today and sob a while, a little homesick or a little “I wish I could hear my mother and cry or call or my father’s stern rebuke or….” Any and all of this goes.

“Piercing even to the dividing asunder…” The cleaver goes in and you see the marrow come out and the bone there shattered. Dividing asunder of soul from spirit, joints from marrow. And is a discerner of the thoughts. It goes all the way down to where you are. All the thoughts and intents of the heart.

You put things in their place, in other words. God, Jesus said, Let the things that belong go to Caesar, that belong to him, let’s render, let’s give him that. Well, and the things that belong to God, give Him that. And we belong to God—our souls, our spirits, our bodies. Let’s render to God what belongs to Him. Hallelujah.

Soul, it has to be dominated by the spirit. So all the soulish ambitions, desires, and all the ups and downs of the soul must be conquered by the Holy Spirit. And if we’re in Him, we’ll allow Him. It’s only when we have this that we know. (We can sit down.) Death life is so important. Because if you don’t have the death life, how are you going to come out in the Spirit life?

Because when you would rise up, like poor Peter and cut off the ear, he did the wrong thing. He really stuck out his neck there for Jesus. He rose up and he really guarded Jesus. And also when Jesus said plain that he was going away, he wouldn’t be with them. And Peter said, “Not as long as I’m around, this won’t happen to you.”

But He said, “This doesn’t savor of the Spirit. It’s not savoring of God, it isn’t God in what you’re saying.” But He said worse than that and to the devil… He said, “Satan.” And He didn’t talk to Peter anymore. He talked to Satan that was putting this sense into Peter’s mind, because Peter wasn’t in the place to discern the spiritual, the part of the cross as yet. So he rose up in his strength, impetuous Peter. Rose up in his strength and said, “Well, as long as I’m around, great!”

Anybody else that [?] by and say, “Look, there’s a great hero for Christ.”

“As long as I’m around, you won’t have to suffer.” Well, I’ll teach you at that. Nothing but soul. His emotions were moved upon. You couldn’t say that… you couldn’t say his emotions weren’t moved upon. His emotions were moved and he was sorrowful. There was a time they were all sorrowing, and it would be sorrowful. But the thing was, to let the souls dominate the spirits. The spirit must dominate the soul. The spirit must have that soul in utter subjection. Or then when the time comes and we rise up to do something, it’s the wrong thing, because our emotions and our flesh and the fact that we haven’t let God’s will take over in our lives.

So there’s where the death-life comes in. I will be quiet, I will be silent. I will let God take this out of me. I will ask Him to work it out. So when you do, when you are moved, when the time comes, it is absolutely spirit and it doesn’t have the mixture.

We were talking to a young man Friday night from Caracas, and he hasn’t been too long in the Way. And he was working in Caracas. And he was saying he was led to look into the teachings. Thank God that he had that much sense. Because he realized that different brands of Pentecostals who hadn’t gone into the place where they would want to be taught. So they reveled with their music or their song and as we could…. It’s wonderful to have the emotions when they’re Spirit-led and Spirit-guided. But he said he looked into that and he saw that there was so much of the flesh mixed in with what could be the Spirit. I was delighted that he said, “We have to take into consideration that there’s the fleshly instruments,” which we know. And the Spirit of God…

For instance, if somebody uses wrong grammar. Well, when they bring forth a prophecy, it’s the wrong ground. And somebody could be led to put it in question and say, “Well, does God use wrong grammar? Or does God use such talk as that?” Or something. But that’s the person. And if the person goes “hah” while they’re talking or praying and then they bring forth something that’s rich and they’re heaving or going on, well, is God doing that? No! That’s the person’s flesh doing that. Because you have found people that maybe could have stuttered or stutter, stammer or when the time comes that it is solely spirit, it will come forth solely spirit. It will be that much less flesh.

So the more you die out to your flesh, that much more the Spirit of God has the right of way to bring forth a pure message or a pure anything. If it’s the gift of the word of wisdom or it’s the gift of the word of knowledge. As that old man as your old will and old man dies, there has to come purity, because God has more of the life. It’s very understandable. It’s very simple. All the things of God are simple. And you wonder why you couldn’t see it before. But it was there all the time. But just if God sheds light on that or you come into that place of experience where you know that you’re in that channel and that you’re not speaking of yourself or it isn’t mixed with flesh and that prophecy hasn’t any twinge, we could say, or tint of the flesh upon it. Because those that are there moving or on a higher level, be they whom they will, then they can sense that immediately and know that there’s still…. And that doesn’t mean that you could never do anything as long as the flesh drags on, you have to so to speak when you’re new, you have to be like chosen, you practice.

I heard someone say that when he—the father himself was speaking—he said, “Well, when my boy practices the piano or practices one of the musical instruments, I’m there. But I certainly don’t want him tooting or banging on a piano when company comes. I don’t want that. I want him to have learned in the private or learned when the family’s around. But when company’s there, I want him to come out when he knows what he’s doing.”

And so it is. We’re in practicing days and we’re called here and there, just like the Father. My grandfather used to sit with me every day beside the piano. Every day, “Hannah, come in,” and he sat there, in a rocking chair. And my lesson had to be 12 times…I had to go over my lesson. I wanted to play something a little fancier, and a little better. And no, I had to go through 12 times. And sometimes we’d get mixed up in the counting. Sometimes he would say to me, 10. I would say, No, that’s 11, Poppy. “No, that is 10, I know.” Finally I’d have to come up to it, because he wouldn’t let me get away with it. And when I absolutely got to place where I went through all those practices and all, then he’d say, “Now I want you to play something I want you to enjoy.”

But he went through the ding-dong with me. Praise God. I had somebody that went through the ding-dong days with me. And with patience. And he let me practice and hammer there. And he didn’t know too much about music. But somehow he got it that that was a mistake. And I would say, “Well, Poppy, you don’t know.” But he’d say, “I know that that doesn’t sound right.” And I’d think, Well, I don’t like to argue and say…. “But no, you didn’t play it right; you’ll have to go over it again.” Well, it would have been much better if I had someone who knew music could have helped me. But he did; but he knew that much. God gave the old man some wisdom.

And so it is. We come here and you hear one say, Well, then the natural thing is to shrug the shoulder and say, “Well, you know, I won’t bother and stick my neck out again. I won’t be in it.” But we’re in, say, the ding-dong patient days. But then that stops. And as you go on, if you are not out there, I don’t know what about that you can go back into the baby class again. I don’t know if that would be wise or profitable, to take you all the way back again and start, any more than it would have been…. I started when I was eight years old. And I don’t think when I was 12 that my grandfather would have sat with me the same as when I was eight. I had to be going. I had to be moving in just the things.

And we must move on in the Lord. And when we make the mistakes that we’re old, it gets worse all the time. As you’re older, it’s worse all the time. Because it means that you haven’t let the death-life work in you. You haven’t died out to that much flesh. It stands to reason, that heart is there, the soul or whatever it is there, it has so much room. There’s room, and Jesus wants, the Holy Spirit wants to take that room. And the more you insist on your own way, the more you insist on having your way and filling that in, there’s a level there and you come up and come up as the years go by. And the more you insist that I have to have my way, the more He can’t have His way. And who knows when He would depart. I don’t know, I’m not trying to scare somebody. But I do know that He doesn’t have His way.

So it smells like that, it sounds like that. It has a wrong note. And this young man said, “Well, now, what do you think that is? Can that be the devil or what it is?” He was asking questions, he was young in the way.

I remember that Donald Gee says that sometimes it’s pure flesh and he said maybe less times—let’s say, to be kind—that it’s the devil. But then what we see is a mixture more or less. The mixture of the flesh, the will of man being so predominated, God can’t get all the way through. So He doesn’t have the clear platform, you could say, to step out upon and do His performance and do what He wants and give the message absolutely pure and dripping just fresh from heaven, saturated with the power of God, so that where it goes, the hearts and the lives and the crevices and the caverns and the things, even in the sinner it could be.

If a sinner would be in a congregation, he gets hold of that and knows—as my husband used to say—there’s a supernatural there and that he has what has never been there. And he bowed before God, he clutched his bench. Oh, he would have run straight to the altar to have given himself up, clutched there, clutching. Because there’s a supernatural there that he had never touched. Just like when there’s an earthquake and the room rocks and the lamps start to come over and the chandeliers shake, you know if you have any sense at all that there is a God. And that if He doesn’t straighten it up in a few minutes, you know what will happen. And you are awed under the hand of God’s mighty power that it could finish anything up at that moment and will finish up the things at the end, because the heavens will melt with fervent heat, the combustible sense, ready to be a light at all and go and just blow things into space. That’s what the power He has. He has the power today to do all that.

It’s so foolish that people will breathe the very air and their lungs will be filled with the very air that God…. It’s God’s air and God submits. And to think that there is rebellion in the smallest heart. In the tiniest child, we see it manifested as he comes to squirm and kick and fuss and pout and put out the lip. The Lord talks about the putting out of the lip. But the whole message is that we must allow God to press out.

It’s like if you take something unto…. Say you had a piece of money and you wanted to bring that up to the partway. What do you call that comes out? It’s not engraving. You bring it out. Throw it into relief. You push in here. You push in the back and then the back would be empty and hollow. Because you want to throw into relief the…Jesus said the superscription. Whose superscription is it? You want that brought out and thrown into relief. And then the back of it is empty.

So it is that God pushes and empties out. That He might be thrown into relief in our lives and that His superscription will be so that we are the likeness…made in the likeness of His blessed and glorious image. And then His shine is upon us, His power is upon us, His will is being done. And we’re not thinking, “Will I do your will or will I not do it?” You’re doing His will, you’re in His will, because the mind…. And you’re not thinking as Oswald Chambers said so much, “Well, now I’ll do this and that will be the will of God.”

You don’t say… I’m not thinking, now if my heart’s beating; I know it’s beating, praise God. Is the blood going coursing through my veins? I know. And I’m not taking temperatures and watching for my heart to beat or feeling my pulse and all, because I know it’s going up until now. And so we can know that we are in the will of God. Hallelujah. And we can know. We don’t have to stop, check, stop, check, stop. It’s all right when you start, like a stop check business. And you can’t get into presumption where you say, “Well, I don’t have to check.” Don’t get on that side now. But you can get into the place where you’re in the flow and the will of God and the channel where He is doing His will and you know it’s being done and yet you don’t have to check every minute and say and get into some bind about it, praise God.

So the whole thing is done in the secret. Or maybe it’s a time in the open that you wouldn’t realize. But God is doing you to death. He’s doing you to death in that time. And He wants you down and He wants you under and He wants you so subdued. Why? If it is that He is such a slave driver as I’ve heard some people say, “Well, you wouldn’t want somebody like that that did you.”

But it’s for your good. It says that He that doeth the will of God…. Don’t love this, don’t do that, because he that doeth the will of God…. What He wants you is doing His will. Because His will abides forever. And if you’re in His will, you will abide forever, no matter who you are, that he will abide forever. I remember I once said before, you, that’s a pronoun that you can fill in with your name. And you will abide forever, because you are doing His will. You.

His blessing, His power, everything is upon you. Who you are—that’s not the question—that you’re doing the will of God, you will abide forever. So let Him press you and let Him get out the impediments and all of those of things and press you, that you will be your best for the Lord.

I’m glad you prayed that, Dan, about… I think I overheard you saying about the speaking the right grammar and to do the right thing. We should be our best for the Lord.

Talking to John yesterday, and he had to look at the circus and he had to write on that. And this Barnum and Bailey said, “Well, we don’t want something that’s inferior. We want the highest kind of performance, the most dangerous kind of performance.” And those people absolutely put themselves in lions’ hands or a trapeze there to plunge off. It would be that much and they would be gone. But the highest for Barnum and Bailey. The highest possible performance that they cannot entertain with what went on even last year; it has to be a new thing for this year, and outstanding thing of danger, of peril, all round about them that they would perform for Barnum and Bailey. And people are living on that. They like that because they are on the edge. Well, so if that man falls, I’m being entertained with his death, imagine. It’s horrible, but it entertains.

And here we are. The same slow-going, without the progress, when we should aim, as Oswald Chambers says, My Utmost for His Highest. What words. It tells you everything in that type. My Utmost for His Highest. And we are in the performance. You are in the performance of it all. And it won’t mean that you come to the top, unless you allow Him to press you at the bottom.

And those entertainers, they didn’t get like that overnight. Time after time they went through that somewhere in back of the scenes. That it’s all going on until the night comes for the performance. Well, it’s either make it or be broken forever.

But praise God we can, by His grace, be pushed through until… thrown into relief, the will of God, the Spirit of God moving upon us. God is moving by His Spirit, and move, oh Lord, in me and on me. That’s what we need. Until His likeness is thoroughly coming through the skin to thoroughly coming through the…this all would hold it, this flesh, we’re flesh. This would all hold it. But as the inner man… The outward man perishes day by day, the inner man should be coming forth and getting stronger and more able to perform. And it’s nothing less than perfection. Don’t think that anything botched will do: “I’ll throw in this now, because I haven’t done something.” It won’t do. I’m out there where we’re heading for. It’s a great chasm that no one knows the heart that is out there. And we won’t… we would really be swallowed up easily.

We’ll be swallowed up if we can’t make it. As Jeremiah says when the foot runner…you’re running along with the foot runner. What would you do when the horses? And when that day comes who will know? We must be ready or we will be wiped out. Or we’re making it now. Are you making it now? If you’re not making it now, you can honestly say to yourself, “I’ll never make it out there.”

It would be a good thing that these people that have come along saying, well, they sigh and cry for the rapture. Well, it certainly would be a convenient thing to be taken up in a cloud out of it all. Of course, it’s not true. It’s not true that there will be a rapture to get them out.

There will be the facing the wiping out. And then through all eternity, they will suffer loss. Whether it’s soul or reward is lost, recompense is lost, you’ll suffer loss. Suffer loss. Because you would not allow the cross of Christ to be pressed in to your poor soul that you might allow the Spirit of God to rule you, rule me. Rule, Lord. It’s easier for Him to rule the winds and the waves than to rule a man, because he has to give in. And the more you try to get out of it, the more you will miss, the more you do not have that portion of the Spirit of God that would be yours. Let Him have His way. Let Him have His way. As you allow Him to have His way. And He uses, as we say, as I saw there in [?], Amsterdam, a diamond to cut a diamond.

But you say, “I could expect anything from a sinner. But when it comes to my husband, or when it comes to my wife or my brother or one of the boys,” or something or somebody there, “I can’t take that. It’s not what they said, it’s how they said it.” Or anything you can bring it out, “and I can’t take that; that’s what I can’t take.”

And there’s where the Lord is trying to rub in on you and punch you out to the other side. And you say, “No, I’m so….” You’re minus that which you would have had in God. So you’re still brabbling and grinding in your own dust, and failure comes and you wonder why. But praise God there is… as David said, “I will never be satisfied until I’m made into your likeness.”

I’ll never be satisfied. We have this unsatisfied satisfaction. We have an unsatisfied satisfaction. We’re very satisfied with Jesus. But we’re very unsatisfied with ourselves. And we must say candidly and frankly today, “I am unsatisfied, Lord. I know that you have more.” But we can’t keep on with that. We can’t keep on with that.

You’ve got to get to the place where it will be that the just will be just, the unholy will be unholy, the righteous will be… The whole decree will be past and the time will be over. And the decree goes forth: unjust, unjust; unholy, unholy; just, just; holy, holy. No more judge, finished. We’re on this side, thank God, this, right now. We don’t know how much longer it will be.

But we’re this side of that. We’re this side of that, so we can make the choice, “Lord, whatever it takes.” Bare your souls to Him. Just bare your souls to Him, say, “This I know and I want this punched out, and I might be out [?]—Thy work, Thy will that Thou hast wanted me to do.” Hallelujah. Is it time? (Yes.) Praise God.

Anybody baffled by this message? Anybody just say, “I can’t understand it”? Can you understand it, Eric? You can understand it. Well, praise the Lord. Glory to God.

Imagine yourself in that measuring cup that’s been given out. You know, you hold it with glass; you hold it up. And you see one up? The recipe says how many ounces or pints. Just hold yourself up there and look at yourself. Where are you in the cup of measurement?

And then, call on God with honesty, wherein you fail. And you will prove it. When you come here, there won’t be any drag whatever; you will be bubbling and waiting to get into the old swing of it. And it will be spiritual, and not spinning there with flesh. Praise God, hallelujah.