Demand Nothing

2/20/1993

Because the process of the seed falling to the ground and dying is the only thing that can keep us from abiding alone. Sitting in a chair in the middle of several hundred people and still being all alone. But if it dies, it’s no longer alone, Jesus said. You’re not alone anymore. Something plugs in when YOU allow the seed to fall to the ground and die in your own life. When you let go, as Jesus did, or willing even to be afflicted and despised of God, as it would seem. When you don’t have to have something out of it for you, the greatest victory, the supernatural victory is not the one where all of Heaven stands up and applauds. It’s when all of Heaven turns around, when you make your greatest act of self-sacrifice and make your most valiant effort to serve God and all of Heaven turns around backwards and folds their arms. They don’t applaud. There’s silence in Heaven for the space of half an hour when you’ve done your greatest deed. That’s the time, when your heart is right, when you are willing to let the seed fall to the ground and die—that’s the time when God can do something supernatural, and the barren woman can sing.

And as I said a few minutes ago, that particular verse is quoted by Paul in Galatians 4 in regard to the Church, speaking of people that are now learning how to walk by faith rather than by sight. People who don’t have to have something for themselves, and they are not trying to hedge their bet with every sort of vain thing in order to make them feel good, but they are emptying themselves, demanding nothing for themselves and laying down their life, as Jesus did for us, with nothing to gain from it. And in that process, those pains of childbirth and then Christ being formed in us—as it says a few verses earlier—and that process, the barren woman, the woman where there is no hope, the woman for whom there is only a certain loneliness and failure. For the barren woman, in that circumstance, that’s willing to be despised and rejected of men, and even by God Himself, as Isaiah 53 says. “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” When we’ve taken that attitude and embraced that. When we have let that mind be in us that was also in Christ Jesus and made ourselves nothing.

As we have had that kind of heart and attitude, then God can do a supernatural thing in our lives. And the barren woman can have descendants as numerous as sands on the seashore and no longer be alone because the seeds fall to the ground and died, and demanded nothing for Himself. If we’re alone, it’s because we haven’t died. That’s the only possibility. If we have died…a hundred mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters—in this life, Jesus said. The only thing that can ever separate us from that is our refusal to die—or Jesus lied. I just want to zero in on that as clearly as I can. That that death process is the only thing that separates us from awesome victory as exemplified in the second Adam, and in everyone, according to Jesus, who has ever lived that way ever since in the history of mankind.

Since Jesus uttered those words, there’s never once—”no one has ever”—those were the Lord’s words. “No one has ever died to self and failed to received a hundred fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. No one has ever let the seed fall to the ground and die and continue to abide alone.” The problem is our refusal to die. It’s not anybody else’s fault. And it’s not we haven’t tried hard enough, we haven’t put in enough effort, we don’t have enough talents or gifts, our circumstances aren’t like everybody else’s. “You just don’t understand. If you knew my mother, you would see why.” That sort of stuff carries no weight. Jesus didn’t refer to any of that stuff when He made those promises. Those are non-issues. None of those promises are contingent on our what happens when our hormone levels reach a certain level, or what happens when our children are all crying at the same time, or what happens when we haven’t had much sleep, or what happens when we got laid off on the job. None of those promises are contingent on anything other than our willingness to die to our own self-life. And then those promises blossom, bloom and multiply and spread and fill the earth. And that promise is for us and for our children, and all who are far off. Unquestionable, nonnegotiable, absolute promises from Rabboni.

So consider all of that and all that was kind of zooming a hundred miles an hour through my spirit and I was remembering what the other brothers had said.