As we saw previously, there is an emphatic stamp when using “the” before a noun in Scripture.  Consider that Jesus is not “a son of God”, but “the son of God”.  There is a greater specificity when using “the”.  God did not rest on “a seventh day”, He rested on the seventh day”.  Much like the exegetical “law of first mention”, where the first time something is referenced in the Scripture is significant in setting the context by which every mention thereafter can be understood, we can learn a lot about the fine details of the Lord’s craftsmanship by the “filler” words in the Scriptures.

There are certain Scriptures that say things that if we take them for what they say, and realize the implications behind them, our current opinions on how things work would get violently confronted.  John 1:1 is one of the Scriptures which has implications to it that are honestly kind of daunting.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  This verse first acknowledges that there was a beginning.  That makes sense to us because we think about everything as having a beginning and end, limits where one things starts and another thing ends.  Two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time.  Thirty years ago I did not exist.  Thirty months ago, my brother’s marriage didn’t exist.  Thirty minutes ago, this sentence didn’t exist.  All these things had a beginning.

However, the Word already existed in the beginning.  Let’s say, just for arguments sake, that the Word existed exactly at the beginning of the beginning.  The curious part about this comes when you look at the nature of words.  Words have one purpose, to communicate.  They come from someone and are intended for someone.  So the Word proceeded from a Source that existed prior to the beginning.  This means that the beginning was not really the beginning.  But then, how far back does it go?  The Source had to have a beginning, right?  If you let your mind try to go back and back and back, it can get a little freaky.  Realizing that God has been around for eternity past can trip a breaker in your head.  Think about the wisest person you know.  They are wise because they have either had more birthdays than you or because they have been through more wisdom-giving experiences than you.  It is no wonder, then, that when we read Proverbs 8 about the personification of wisdom it sounds like the description of Jesus.

Out of His nature of Divine Wisdom as the Word, the Communication of God, Jesus was already reaching out to us to tell us Who the Father is and who we are to Him.  He was crucified before the foundations of the World.  His mind was already made up before wood, nails and whips existed.  What do you do with Someone who is in no hurry because a millennium and a day feel the same to Him?  He doesn’t get bored, He doesn’t get surprised or anxious.  And what if this same Person took that eternal nature and stuffed it into us?  What changes when we be content in every circumstance because we have no limitation of time because we have become like God, having His nature and likeness?  I’ll tell you what changes, we become consciously eternal people that have a perspective that produces peace that doesn’t make sense.  We become unoffendable, immoveable, immortal, and confident beyond understanding.  Jesus said we are already clean by the Word He has spoken over us.  Maybe our greatest need is to hear that Word echo out of eternity and into our innermost being.

*Word of God, reverberate within us and shake everything in us that can be shaken so that we can find discover that which will remain and live from there.

If the Father was willing to put His Name on the line by promising something, it is probably safe to say that whatever was promised will be fulfilled and that the fulfillment of that promise is worth being a part of.  The First Covenant with Israel was directed towards a specific people group, God’s chosen people – from whom the Messiah would come.  But the New Covenant was open to all people.  Jesus blasted the doors wide open for every son of Adam to become a son of the Last Adam, thus becoming part of the Last human race.  One benefit of the New Covenant is the Indwelling Spirit.  This is not really even a benefit of the New Covenant, it is the New Covenant.

Without the Indwelling Spirit, we are without a transformation agent and therefore can not live free of sin, free in power, empowered by love or superimposed over death.  It is Jesus’ Father who promised us the Spirit.  It is Jesus who made a way for the Spirit to unite with our spirit.  It is the Spirit who is the Seed that supernaturally re-incarnates us.  Before you stop reading because I just said that we are re-incarnated, think about it.  New Age understanding of re-incarnation is that we die and come back with the same spirit and soul, but as a different species.  This is exactly what the Spirit does for us.  We are baptized into His death and we are raised up with Him.  We are resurrected into a new race of men, a race that never existed prior to Jesus.

Just yesterday I was telling a friend of mine that the difficulty in being a New Creation is that I forget to act out of my new nature.  We don’t change physical form and almost nothing changes externally, the immediate change is internal and even deeper than the cellular level, so at first it is hard to live differently.  When I was in college a friend of mine used to say, “It is not hard to be a New Creation, it is hard to stop acting like an Old Creation.”  This is why it is important to be in community with people who are pursuing supernatural life, because in community we provoke each other even when we are not aware of it.  If you compare two runners that run about the same speed on a mile, individually they will run a good mile when they are trying to get a good time.  But if you put them next to each other and tell them to run a mile, even if you do not tell them to beat the other person or get a good time, they will run faster because they will both be trying to do a little better than the other.  Community is an incubator of excellence.

In Luke 24, Jesus told the disciples to wait for the Promise of His Father.  He told them to wait as a group for the Spirit to come upon them.  If He had told them to individually go back to their homes and wait and then come together to discuss it, it is very likely that most of them would get impatient and distracted.  But because there was 119 other people waiting for the same thing, though I’m sure it got awkward and some had doubts, those 120 people experienced something that changed the world.

It is interesting that Jesus called the Spirit the promise of the Father.  It is as though the Spirit was the ultimate result that the Father had intended for us.  He has promised may things, all of which He will do, but this was “the big one”.  It is one thing to be a president of the United States, it is something altogether different to be the President of the United States.  There is a present-tense nature to “the” that highlights the importance of  what “the” is pointing at.

*Jesus, give us a love for the Presence of the Promise that will stir up a hungry addiction to You that will not be quenched or satisfied by anything but Your fulfillment.  Amen.

The purpose of a word is to communicate ideas from one person to another.  Aside from a note that you write to yourself, when you write something you intend on having someone read what you wrote and understand an idea that you are trying to communicate.  Rarely does someone communicate an idea that they do not think is understood by those they are communicating to, most of the time communication is meant to convince someone and bring unity between the communicator and the audience.

John’s gospel begins with “In the beginning was the Word…”  From the very beginning, there was a communicator and an audience.  The Communicator spoke and everything was as He said it was.  This is why His words are spirit and truth.  They have power and reality.  There is power in the words He speaks, to give life (Genesis 2), to clean men (John 13) and to revive humanity (John 20).  And though heaven and earth pass away, His words will continue eternally (Mark 13).

As previously stated, the purpose of communicating an idea is to convince one’s audience.  So, then, the crucial question is: what is God communicating through His Son that we need convincing of?  If we can answer this question, we can embrace His purpose and accelerate our effectiveness in fulfilling the purpose for which He sent His Word.

The Lord spoke through Isaiah the prophet saying that that His Word would not leave His lips without accomplishing the purpose for which it was spoken.  In the previous verse (Isaiah 55:10), He compares the rain to the word He speaks.  The purpose, He says, of rain is to water the earth, cause growth, provide means for a harvest and nutrition for those who would benefit from the harvest.  Likewise, is the purpose of the Word.  He came to bring inject us with living water so that we grow into His likeness again, release a harvest of souls and be fed by His Presence.  We see at the beginning of chapter 55 that the Lord really is trying to convince us of something when He says “Listen carefully to me…listen so that you may live…”  He knows us well enough to realize that unless we are told to pay attention, we might miss it all together.

So what is He communicating that we need to be convinced of?  We know Jesus’ purpose and thus the intended results of this communication, but what is it that His life is  saying?  Simply put, freedom is free.  He implores the poor to come and buy without money.  He says that the terms of His covenant are already set and everything is taken care of.  He declares that He has already glorified His people.  He prophesies that His people will go out with joy and be led forth by peace – with hill-top happiness and arboreal applause, no less.

The problem is that we don’t believe it.  We think that we have to earn blessings.  We believe that His Covenant is still being written, when really His Covenant is a Person who is alive to prove that He wasn’t joking when He set us free – He is guarding our salvation.  We have it in our minds that glorification is a concept of a future event when it is a reality that has already come to pass.  And for some reason we still need to be convinced that joy and peace are truly part of life as a Christian.

The ridiculous decision that we are faced with is whether or not to accept what He has laid in front of us.  The benefits are so great, the alternative is so bleak, and the stipulations are so simple.  The only thing we have to do to receive His mercy is to call it “mine”.  What would happen if we actually believed His Word?

*Lord, I believe, help me with my unbelief in the Word You spoke and are speaking.

Even when you know that someone is trustworthy, waiting for something is a trial.  The disciples had been with Jesus for as long as three years or so.  They had seen Him tell off the Pharisees, ruin funerals, open blind eyes, heal deaf ears, un-cripple people, tell intimate details of people’s lives that He could not have known – not to mention He came back from being dead.  As far as they were concerned, He was worth trusting.  Not only had He done all of these things, but He had done them with conviction, saying what He believed and felt convincingly.  So when He says that His Father has promised something, I’m sure they had great expectations.

He instructed them to go and wait in Jerusalem, the very place that had just been the epicenter of the controversy about Him, for power to wrap itself around them.  The interesting thing about how He gave these instructions was the timing cues.  He said “I am sending the Promise of My Father…” Then He goes on to tell them what to do in response to what He said He was doing at that moment.  This is yet another example of how Jesus was living in two places at once, which is also our inheritance to walk in.

Jesus, from His place with the Father in Heaven, was at the moment He was talking with His friends simultaneously sending the Promise of His Father upon them.  He says that they would be clothed with power from on high, indicating the location of the source of the Promise.  So if He was the Sender of the Promise, then He must be doing it from where it was coming from.  The power of knowing where you are changes your perspective and empowers your words.  We have been removed from the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the Kingdom of Light, seated in the heavenlies with Him.

The incredible reality of the life of one born from above is that we are here and there at the same time.  So when we pray, we are there with Him and we can release things from there, rather than begging Him to send it down to us from where He is.

Some think that the Holy Spirit just “isn’t for them” or that the gifts of the Spirit are not something that is for today.  Jesus identified the Spirit as that which the Father Himself had promised to send.  If the Father was willing to put His trustworthiness on the line for this, I would venture to say that it is a sure thing.  He wants us to have the Spirit and He wants us to trust Him that He will accomplish everything that He has promised.  And He is a good Father who gives good gifts, so there must be something that we really want, really need or both in the Gift of the Spirit that He has promised.  Let us eagerly desire the fulfillment of the Promise of the Father.

*Father, we trust Your goodness and we desire the filling of the promises You have made.  Jesus, thank You for sending Your Spirit from on high and for plucking us up into the very place that You sent Him from.  We love You.

Someone gave me a book a few years ago written by a Jewish man.  His main purpose in the book, whether stated or not, I don’t remember, was to help young Jews not become Christians.  He explained why Jews are not Christians, why Jews should not convert to Christianity and laid out the differences between Christian and Jewish understandings of the Messiah.

He said that the Jewish Messiah was going to come and set the Jewish people free from the oppression they are in politically at the hands of their enemies.  But he said that the mission of the Christian Messiah was “just to set humanity free from its bondage to sin”.  Just.  Option 1: the Messiah sets free God’s chosen people and leaves the rest of the race of men to burn.  Option 2: the Messiah opens the doors of freedom to the entire race of men.  Which would you choose?

Now, before you call me anti-Semitic, you should know that I am Jewish.  Not in a “we are now all part of the Israel of God” way, but in the “my mother was Jewish, her mother was Jewish and her mother was Jewish” kind of way.  And I’m not making fun of this guy who wrote this book.  I think he did a great job of showing that Christianity is a better option, not only in the section I mentioned above, but throughout the book.  His points made Christianity look much more appealing to me, I think I got saved again at least once while reading.

It is true, the Lord committed Himself to redeeming Israel, but He is just one of those guys who does more than is required of Him.  Paul put it well when he wrote that He does “exceedingly, abundantly beyond all we could ever ask or think”.  Call it over-achieving, call it excellence, call it whatever you want, I’m just glad He didn’t just stop with one people group.  It seems to me that it is more like Him in His character as I know Him to search for any way possible to bless whoever He can in whatever way He can.

He has a greater vision than us.  He thinks bigger.  He loves larger.  He believes in us more than we do in ourselves or each other.  He waits longer for the perfect moment to spring up and ambush us with blessings we cannot contain.  He invests more in us than we think we can handle.  He trusts us more than we think we are worthy of.  He knows us deeper.  He understands us better.  He is more creative than we can imagine.  He is more kind.  He is never worried about what is going to happen.  He is your biggest fan.  He does it right but doesn’t freak out when things don’t go the right way.  He can do anything, except remember what you did wrong.  He is not irritable.  He can handle anything you can dish out.  He is very patient.  He is love.

Sure, He was going to redeem Israel, but then He figured “Why stop there?”  Just like in Mark 6, when He walked on water, His intention was to go past the little boat of scared disciples and beat them to the other side.  But He saw that they needed Him, so He stopped by to help out by stopping to contrary winds.  And when He was about to go to the Father as our Great High Priest to sacrifice His Blood to complete the necessary atonement, He stopped to comfort Mary in the garden.  He is still a big proponent of redeeming Israel, setting them free political oppression, but He won’t stop there.  His sights are set slightly higher than that.

*Redeemer, give us Your heart so that we live like You live.

Usually we do not think of God as humble.  Maybe, if we have been around the church world long enough and have really considered the character of Christ enough, then we have a notion of Jesus’ humility.  But the Father is the Source from which we draw all good character, the origin of humility.  We know this, especially, because Jesus is our most perfect picture of the Father.

When the disciples ask Jesus about who will be greatest, He actually tells them the path to greatness – service.  It is part of the divine character to consider others more important than one’s self.  Paul emphasized this to the Philippian church, encouraging them to consider others more important than themselves.  Some translations go as far to have Paul saying others are superior or even more significant than ourselves.  For the self-centered human being, that is a hard pill to swallow.  Ever since the fall of Adam, the epicenter of the human existence has been “self”.  We have been insatiable quicksand when we have been made to be unstoppable geysers.

Digging into the original languages is not always beneficial, but sometimes it uncovers fascinating revelations.  When I was doing youth ministry at Jack Deere’s church, Jack told a few of us in a small group that our problem was not that we didn’t know theology well enough, but rather that we were likely not living most of the theology that we knew.  Jack always had a way of simplifying things.  That all to say that the origin of the word that Jesus uses to describe Himself is interesting.  He says that He is “the One who serves” – ‘diaconon’.

This Greek word is where we get the word “deacon” from.  It designates those who would wait on tables and run errands for the one they are serving.  This is exactly what Jesus does.  He serves us the bread of His Body and the wine of His Blood.  He also runs errands for us and for the Father.  An errand is “short journey undertaken in order to deliver or collect something, often on someone else’s behalf.”

For the Father, the errand that Jesus did was to retrieve us.  The Father loved the world so much that He sent Jesus.  We are the object that He was commissioned to retrieve, but not just what Jesus was supposed to go to, He was to bring us back to the Father.  This is what He did, and what Paul is referring to when He speaks of us as being seated in heavenly places.  Not only did He come to us, He returned us to where we belong, where we were made to reside – next to and in Him.

On our behalf, the errand Jesus did was a delivery.  After His resurrection, Jesus had to deliver His own Blood to Heaven, to sprinkle it and cleanse the heavenly places.  Unlike His errand from the Lord, we never asked Jesus to do this errand.  But that is the sign of true service, doing what someone needs before they know that they need it, before they ask for it, and without demanding recognition.  Jesus also delivered something, rather Someone, to us – the Holy Spirit.  Again, we had no idea we needed the Spirit, yet he met our need without waiting for us to ask.  The only barrier to our benefiting from His service is our acceptance of the services that we have been given.

Through His service and sacrifice, Jesus showed us we are more important than Himself.  In His heart, our life is more important than His own.  He values our lives more than His own comfort.  Like a good leader, the Lord practices what He preaches; and like a good servant, He enjoys serving and goes beyond what is asked or expected.

*Thank You for serving us when we act like an enemy, Jesus.  We are very thankful.

Dealing with misunderstanding and disappointment is one of the hardest things to do.  The two men on their way to Emmaus, along with the rest of Jesus’ followers, thought that Jesus was going to be the Jewish Messiah.  They thought that they knew what that would look like.  And indeed, they were right in their understanding of who He is, what they did not have right is what that would look like.  They thought He would rise up militarily and overthrow the unrighteous governmental system over Israel.  But God just doesn’t do it that way.  His plans always involve changing people’s hearts and releasing them to take over by changing the structures from the inside out.
Replacing one overpowering government with another is not a good change.  Infiltrating the systems and mentalities of culture is the only truly effective way of to change a culture, a nation or a planet.  That is exactly what He intends to do now in our culture, our nation and our planet.  Christians will be up in arms until abortion is made illegal, all abortions, all the time.  One problem with that is that people will still get abortions if it is illegal.  This is because the hearts of the people have not changed, just what they are allowed to do without getting in trouble.  I am not saying that abortion is a good thing at all, what I am saying is that ending abortion means transforming how people think about it.  Even if abortion is legal or even encouraged, people will not do it if their hearts desire their seed to be perpetuated.  Abortions don’t happen in groups that want children.  Islam is taking over Europe by having half a dozen babies per family, encouraged by the religious leaders.  In one generation they will be able to vote in whom ever they want into any governmental position, because the current generation is not aborting their babies and is raising them with their values.
When God does something different from the way that we want Him to do it, the problem is not with His ways, but with our understanding.  When we get offended because God is not doing something, and we think that our anger is righteous anger, I believe that it is wiser to step out and change what we don’t like rather than get upset.  Jesus said that He was the light of the world while He was in the world.  But now we are the light of the world, we are the sons into whose hands the earth has been given.  It is our responsibility to change and transform culture through stepping into it and effecting change, not by complaining and hoping that our whining is going to reach the right ears to change something.  There is a place for intercession, but the Lord told His disciples to pray for laborers, people who would do what is needed for a harvest.  We need laborers.
In principle, no one would disagree with how the Lord does things.  No one would say that He is doing something the wrong way, at least not openly.  But in our hearts we question His ways more than most of us would like to admit.  We know that, just as the Scriptures say, “He is righteous in all His ways”, but we don’t know what to do with the government officials He allows to get into office or the injustice of a friend or family member dying when they die.  Even disasters are from the Lord according to Amos chapter three, verse six.  At some point we have to come to a place of humility where we can honestly say “I don’t understand You, but I trust You and I love you.  I’m sticking with You no matter what.”  We will not always get it, nor will we always agree with what or how he does something, but we know that He is good.  And if that is true, then we can rest assured that He does everything from a place of goodness and love.
*Lord, we trust You, help us grow to trust You more and more easily.  Amen.*

As I was reading Luke today I ran across a curious statement that Jesus makes.

“I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!
But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished.”
Luke 12:49-50

We talk about the fires of revival, God releasing power through the people of God to show His love.  I believe that Jesus was at least partially talking about this.  John the Baptist was obsessed with the coming of a Messiah that would baptize God’s people with fire and not merely water.  The revolution of the human race was what John was longing for, as was Jesus here in Luke 12.  Jesus wanted so desperately to give mankind His Spirit.  The kindling of the revolutionary fire would be on the day of Pentacost when manifest tongues of fire would spark on 120 people’s heads.

Then Jesus says that He has a baptism to undergo.  Paul talks about being burried with Christ in baptism.  Jesus had to be put into the earth and conquer death on our behalf SO THAT He could rise up in resurrection power with us soon to follow.  When Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus on the mount of transfiguration, they talked about Jesus’ departing from the disciples.  Jesus was rearing to get going so that He could let an army of resurrected, invincible lovers of God and man go into the world and take it over.

The wording didn’t seem to make sense to me, though, in verse 50.  I just cannot connect Jesus and distress, it doesn’t seem like His nature.  Distress sounds like stress and worry.  So I looked at the original language of this section.  Luke uses a word that comes from two words, one meaning “to hold” and another “together”.  Jesus essentially says “I’m just trying to hold Myself together until I can go through this baptism of Mine.”  Jesus and the Holy Spirit were united, just like we are united with the Spirit, the difference between us and Him is that in His case, there are two FULL Presences of God.  Imagine trying to hold two full manifestations of God in one human body.  You would be bursting at the seems, too.  Jesus longed to release His Spirit to His people so that the flames of the revolution might be kindled and the spark-heads could take over the earth.

Have you ever heard of someone meeting a famous person and not realizing that they are who they are until afterwards?  Maybe you have actually done it yourself.  These two guys were on a road to a city just 7 miles from Jerusalem, they encounter someone that they don’t recognize, but something is different when they are around Him.  He seems not to know about the intense and astonishing things that have happened in Jerusalem in the previous few days.  So they “enlighten” this Stranger, who just so happens to be the very One about whom they are talking.  They were describing Jesus to Jesus Himself, and they called Him “a prophet mighty in deed and word in the sight of God and all the people.”
It has been that intercession is a hard thing to do, this is partially because of the mental blockage that comes up when you stop to realize that what we are doing is telling God what He tells us to tell Him, or ask Him for things that He has told us to ask Him for.  It just doesn’t make sense to us.  But imagine you are telling the all-knowing God who He is.  That is a whole other level.  It almost seems pointless, like repeating His attributes to Him over and over, as if reminding Him what He is like.  The issue is not His lack of understanding or revelation, obviously, but our own lack.  We need to know.
Though uninformed about the Recipient of their tale, they were absolutely right about what they were saying about Him.  He was mighty in deed, before God and all the people.  He was mighty in word before God and all the people.  Rather than drawing on the awesomeness of His deeds and words, it is important to see how we fit into this part of His identity.  We were made in His image, we are being made into the reflection of the Son, just as He is the Perfect reflection of the nature and character of the Father.  As we look at Him, we are becoming more and more like Him.  So when we see that He was mighty in deed and word, wisdom says “you will be greater in deed and word”.  John 14:12 says that we who believe will do greater works than He did.  Our deeds and words will be greater than His.  That seems impossible, but if the Bible then we must change.
As I write this, I am enrolled in a missions department at a ministry school.  This is my second year in the program and there are first year students that are under us that are learning from our example.  It has often come up in discussion that the first year students have a far greater potential than we do, and we have positioned our hearts and set our goals to advancing them far beyond us.  A good leader does not bring those under them up to their level, but rather lay their lives down, running for all they are worth, to become a launching pad for the next generation that they are leading to accelerate past them.  Jesus did the very same thing, He made it possible for those who follow Him to go further than He went.  He gave all His authority to his followers.  He left the world in our hands.  In a way, though a pre-tribulation rapture theology has its flaws, the situation is similar.  We really have been left behind, but not so that we can cower in fear and wait for Him to come rescue us out of the world.  We have been equipped and left behind to fix the world, save it and redeem it in preparation for His home-coming.
We prepare the earth for that final touch down of the Son of God on the Mount of Olives that the prophet Zechariah spoke of by doing the works of the Kingdom.  We live lives that speak as loudly as the Gospel we preach.  Our deeds back up our message.

*Perfect your image in us, show us how to be just like you in deed and word.  Amen. *

True leadership, as it is meant to be exercised, is a role of service.  The selflessness of our King is astounding, not merely in His sacrificial death on the Cross, but that His whole purpose, focus and goal was to make those in His own Kingdom greater than Himself.  He gave up His Spirit so that we could do greater works and on emphatically showed that He values our lives more than His own by dying in our place.  He is constantly looking for ways to exalt others, promoting them to a place where they can demonstrate the greatness inside of them.  When the disciples came back from doing great exploits in His Name, He does not rebuke them for their excitement at what they did.

When someone sits in meditation, it is said that they are “waiting” on the Lord.  They are serving Him, focusing on Him and directing their attentions and energies upon Him.  Here, in Luke 22, Jesus says that He is the One who “serves”.  The word there means to “wait upon as a waiter or servant”.  He is turning His attention toward us, serving us and waiting on us.  He is not waiting impatiently and irritated, hoping that some day we will get it together, He is waiting for our hearts to turn to Him just a little so that He can meet us there.

Imagine it this way, He is like a spouse who is waiting for His mate to come home from a trip.  At the very moment that we step into the door, He is there, waiting, excited to see how things went, how we are feeling, what we are thinking, or even just excited to share the air with us.  It is easy to look at elderly couples at restaurants that eat a whole meal without speaking nearly at all and think that their love has grown cold.  I know couples that don’t need words to express their love.  They can just sit and be with each other, not communicating anything, even doing separate things in their home, but they are happy because they are doing their separate things together.  The Lord is a lot like that, He just likes our company.  He wants our presence with Him even more than we want His Presence with us.  What we think, feel and say is valuable, but sometimes those things get in the way of just simple enjoyment of the One who is Love.

Moses knew the ways of the Lord, while the rest of the nation of Israel merely knew His works.  As we draw closer to Him we become more interested in the WAY that He does things than what He actually does.  The apostle Paul prayed for the Colossian church to grow in the knowledge of His will, but as you keep reading Colossians 1 you see that the reason we want to grow in the knowledge of His will is so that eventually we will grow in the knowledge of God Himself.  The ultimate goal is always to apprehend God.  His ways lead us to Him.  The woman of the Song of Songs is told to follow the path made by the flock of the Lover to find Him.  If we go in His ways, we will find Him.

Psalm 37:34 urges us to wait on the Lord and keep to His way.  The end result is us being exalted.  Here we see, yet again, that doing things His way results in us being exalted.  So Jesus says, “I come to you as One who serves”, showing us the way that He does things.  The wise believer then waits on Him, keeping to His way of doing things, following His lead and not only does he get exalted, he inherits the Land.  As the Lord is already waiting for us, all we must do is turn to Him and we receive honor and our inheritance.  As kings we receive the inheritance of kings, which is land; as priests we receive the inheritance of priests, which is the Lord Himself.  Seek and you will find.

*Jesus, make us more aware of Your constant, loving watchfulness over us.  Amen.*