Open your heart's door. When God sows the seed, open the
heart's door. Let Him sow the seed in your heart and close
it up. As He says, a little later, hide it in the very
center of your heart. That is the place where it cannot be
taken away from you. He that receives the seed on the
wayside ground is he that hears and has no understanding,
and the fowls come and pick it up. This type of person
gets no experience with God.
God made
very plain concerning the kingdom, saying: "it is
within you." It is a kingdom of life. Paul said:
"For by one man's offence death reigned, much more
they which receive abundance of grace and the gift of
righteousness shall reign in life by one Christ
Jesus." We open our heart's door to God by old time
repentance, confession of our sin, and turning from sin. I
would like to deal with the thought of turning from sin.
Repentance
changes the purpose of our lives. Repentance means to quit
sinning. There is scripture telling us that God repented.
Do you mean to tell me that He quit sinning? No. He
changed His purpose. So repentance means to change
purpose. Then we confess our sins unto God and He takes
them away. When Christ finds us out in the world, the
purpose of our lives is to satisfy ourselves. We live
after the lust of the flesh. We seek after the natural
things. When we hear of the goodness of God, it leads one
to come to an altar of prayer, and that is when we change
the purpose of our lives. We then tell God that the
purpose of our lives will be different, we now purpose to
do His will and not to satisfy ourselves as of yore. When
we confess our sins He removes them as far as the east is
from the west, never to be remembered against us again. I
thank God for His wonderful goodness.
Suppertime
is at the close of the day. The Revelation tells us there
are two suppers going on. God has sent the word out to
gather in the people. The enemy is using his unclean
spirits to gather in the people also. We are either being
gathered in to the supper of the Lamb or to the beast of
the fowls of the air. Either we are gathering into the
camp of the saints or the camp of their enemies.
Some
people are afraid of the frogs, (the three mentioned In
Revelation), but they need not be if they stay alive; if
your experience gets stagnant then the enemy will see that
a frog or two are there. But if you keep it flowing, well,
frogs can't live in moving, gurgling water. Let the river
of life flow right through you and there will be no frogs
there. The devil is working on people to let their
experience get stagnant. When your spiritual life begins
to shrivel up, you are very liable to inherit one of these
frog spirits. If you will keep your life open to God you
don't need to worry about cleaning it out. The river of
life will do that. If we will own ourselves as we really
are, God will make a new creature out of us.
There are
four kinds of ground which covers all mankind--they are
the wayside, the stony ground, the thorny ground, and the
good ground. We cannot mention much about the church until
we come to the good ground. God can never bring forth a
people or bring forth fruit unto Himself in stony and
thorny ground. When we come to the good ground then we see
the very body of Christ come into being.
Mystery
is that which is beyond human comprehension. Christ is
teaching us in these parables the mysteries of the
kingdom. So every one of them (the parables) is beyond
that which the human can lay hold on. We must be born
again. One of the greatest reasons that we have so much
confusion on the thought of the kingdom Is because men
that have never been born again (who do not possess the
spirit of God and so make light of the new birth), try to
teach the kingdom and tell all about it. "Except a
man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."
There
are multitudes that have never been born again, but they
think they see it and try to teach it. The other reason is
that some have been born again, but because of erroneous
doctrine and false leadership they have lost sight of the
kingdom and would get so bold as to teach from Daniel's
prophecy that the 69 weeks have passed, but God stopped
His clock. We want to be able to see through these
parables that Christ set up a kingdom in His first advent,
what kind of a kingdom it is, and if it will truly never
be destroyed. It is an everlasting kingdom and will never
be left to other people.
