By D. Brandt Berg
http://anchor.tfionline.com/post/old-bottles/
Download Audio (7.6MB)
To stay alive, everyone must have movement. There must be change, movement, motion. The signs of life are principally manifested by motion, action. There is no standing still. Every movement has to have constant change, revitalization, movement, action, to stay alive.
They say Alexander the Great died weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer. But he hadn’t even begun to conquer the world! Half the world hadn’t even been discovered yet, and all he had was a little bit from Greece to India. But because he had discovered and conquered all the known world that they considered worth anything or valuable, he figured that was all that was worth conquering.
It appeared he hadn’t conquered the emerging nation, Rome, the rising world power which was soon to conquer his whole empire. So Rome finally conquered him and established an empire that went much farther than his ever went—England and Spain and places Alexander hardly ever heard of. Yet he wept and died of a broken heart because his world conquest was over, the revolution was over. He was blinded by his own egotism and drunken with power, conquest, and glory, as well as with liquor. They say he died weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer, yet he hadn’t even heard of most of the world that had yet to be conquered.
The reason some people begin to sit back and settle down is simply because they have lost their vision. And when they lose the vision, they lose faith. When they lose faith, they no longer have any initiative to forge ahead; this is the reverse of pioneering. People who stop pioneering, because they no longer have faith to take the initiative, to do something different or pioneer something new, have often lost the vision, and without a vision the people perish.1
It’s going on the initiative, to the attack, that brings victory. The minute an army stops attacking and just settles down, it will be defeated, because the enemy will then launch a counterattack. Or the army’s very immobility and its lack of vision and progress and initiative will cause it to have a loss of faith in its own cause, and to quit and give up without even losing.
This is one of the Devil’s favorite tactics. The Devil can never win. The only way he can get the victory is to persuade you to quit, that you have a hopeless cause, so you might as well give up and quit and surrender and leave the field to him. “It’s no use,” he says. That’s the only way we can ever be conquered, if we give up and stop having the faith to take the initiative, stop forging ahead to gain ground, new converts, new tactics, new victories. People with this attitude are already licked because they have lost the battle of the spirit! They’ve given up and fainted in their mind.2 From there, you can go back down the chain reaction in reverse from what makes a pioneer—you have lost the initiative, the spirit and courage because you have lost faith; and you’ve lost faith because you’ve lost the vision.
What are the four things that make a pioneer? First of all, vision. Because of the vision, you have the faith. Because you have the faith, that gives you the courage. Therefore with the courage you take the initiative, and you pioneer and make progress!
Without a vision, the people perish. How do you lose the vision? Somewhere there’s been a break in the contact with the source of power. Somehow there’s been a disconnect with God, that intimate contact with God, that direct, personal hotline to God.
If you have lost the pioneering spirit and you’re not going forward to establish the kingdom of God on earth, and you’re content short of that goal, if you’re satisfied with what you’ve already got, and you’re not interested in progressing until you see the kingdom of God really established on earth and righteousness covering the earth as the waters cover the seas and the coming of Christ, then you’re losing ground.
Jesus died and gave His life and started a new church. As long as His followers had the vision and kept in that hot contact with the Lord, they were sweeping the world, and they overthrew the Roman Empire with the good news of the Gospel! But when they got to the point where they thought they had arrived and had overthrown the temporal power of Rome and it now rested in their own hands, they became the Roman Catholic Church, and the church ruled Rome and it became the Holy Roman Empire.
The church had arrived and they were satisfied. They had power, wealth, and glory. They had taken over the world, or all that was important in the world. The church now ruled the world—all of Europe and the advanced, civilized part of the world that was important to them. Then they were more or less satisfied, and they quit progressing. The fact was, they hadn’t conquered India or China or Russia or Africa or all of North and South America or the islands of the sea, but they slowed virtually to a standstill.
The minute we come to the conclusion that the church has arrived and are satisfied it has come as far as it needs to go, watch out! I’ll never be satisfied until everybody on earth is saved, which will never happen, of course. But I’m looking forward to the day when everybody, or at least almost everybody, will be saved—at least there won’t be many left in hell, if any, and I think that’s when God will be satisfied, too. But that’s a long way off!
We’ve got a lot to be thankful for, but we’ve still got a lot to do! We haven’t got just a few years—we’ve got thousands to go! Some people are waiting for Jesus to come, when they think He will solve all their problems, but in eternity our responsibilities will carry on. If you think just because people have gone on to be with the Lord that their job is over, we can prove from the Bible that their job is far from complete! According to all we read in the Bible, the spirit world is a heaven of a lot busier than this life on earth. We will have rest in a sense, you might say in the spirit, but like the angels, we’ll fight on.
We’re a long ways from the end of the road, and death from this life is just graduation from this grade, and praise God for that! Right now we’re burdened by this body, but in the spirit you won’t have this weight. You’re no longer weighed down with the flesh and burdened with the problems of the physical life. You’ve graduated from the grade of this earthly life. But when you graduate from one grade to another, the work in the next grade usually becomes a little more difficult with a little more added responsibility, new and added duties that you didn’t have before. With new abilities come new responsibilities, and you will have new power to respond to those new responsibilities.
The work is not even over in heaven or in the Heavenly City after the Millennium. We’ll still be serving God, and quite a few things will not be finished yet: total redemption, universal reconciliation, cosmic restitution. Paul spoke about these and they are recorded in the book of Revelation, but they will not have happened completely even by the time you arrive in the Heavenly City. There will still be kings and nations who need healing. (You can read about it in Revelation 21:24 through 22:2.)
Heaven is not the end; it’s only the beginning. God only knows how much more we’ll have to conquer after we’ve conquered the earth and all the souls who have ever lived on it and all the problems. Who knows what other worlds we may have to conquer, what other universes we may yet have to reach.
My idea of heaven is not floating around on a cloud strumming a harp by some gift of God. That would be my idea of death! Total inactivity, cessation of movement, total rest is total death. And it doesn’t seem to be God’s idea of heaven either. His universe is full of movement, and He’ll never stop. We’ll go right on through the coming of Christ and the Millennium and the Heavenly City and right on out to outer space, and God only knows how far we all have to go. And we’ll enjoy every minute of it if we’re faithful servants.
We’re a long way from the end. In fact, according to the Bible, for us there isn’t going to be an end. Eternity has no end!
Originally published July 1973. Adapted and republished June 2014.
Read by Jon Marc.
1 Proverbs 29:18 KJV.
2 Hebrews 12:3 KJV.
http://anchor.tfionline.com/post/old-bottles/
Download Audio (7.6MB)
To stay alive, everyone must have movement. There must be change, movement, motion. The signs of life are principally manifested by motion, action. There is no standing still. Every movement has to have constant change, revitalization, movement, action, to stay alive.
They say Alexander the Great died weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer. But he hadn’t even begun to conquer the world! Half the world hadn’t even been discovered yet, and all he had was a little bit from Greece to India. But because he had discovered and conquered all the known world that they considered worth anything or valuable, he figured that was all that was worth conquering.
It appeared he hadn’t conquered the emerging nation, Rome, the rising world power which was soon to conquer his whole empire. So Rome finally conquered him and established an empire that went much farther than his ever went—England and Spain and places Alexander hardly ever heard of. Yet he wept and died of a broken heart because his world conquest was over, the revolution was over. He was blinded by his own egotism and drunken with power, conquest, and glory, as well as with liquor. They say he died weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer, yet he hadn’t even heard of most of the world that had yet to be conquered.
The reason some people begin to sit back and settle down is simply because they have lost their vision. And when they lose the vision, they lose faith. When they lose faith, they no longer have any initiative to forge ahead; this is the reverse of pioneering. People who stop pioneering, because they no longer have faith to take the initiative, to do something different or pioneer something new, have often lost the vision, and without a vision the people perish.1
It’s going on the initiative, to the attack, that brings victory. The minute an army stops attacking and just settles down, it will be defeated, because the enemy will then launch a counterattack. Or the army’s very immobility and its lack of vision and progress and initiative will cause it to have a loss of faith in its own cause, and to quit and give up without even losing.
This is one of the Devil’s favorite tactics. The Devil can never win. The only way he can get the victory is to persuade you to quit, that you have a hopeless cause, so you might as well give up and quit and surrender and leave the field to him. “It’s no use,” he says. That’s the only way we can ever be conquered, if we give up and stop having the faith to take the initiative, stop forging ahead to gain ground, new converts, new tactics, new victories. People with this attitude are already licked because they have lost the battle of the spirit! They’ve given up and fainted in their mind.2 From there, you can go back down the chain reaction in reverse from what makes a pioneer—you have lost the initiative, the spirit and courage because you have lost faith; and you’ve lost faith because you’ve lost the vision.
What are the four things that make a pioneer? First of all, vision. Because of the vision, you have the faith. Because you have the faith, that gives you the courage. Therefore with the courage you take the initiative, and you pioneer and make progress!
Without a vision, the people perish. How do you lose the vision? Somewhere there’s been a break in the contact with the source of power. Somehow there’s been a disconnect with God, that intimate contact with God, that direct, personal hotline to God.
If you have lost the pioneering spirit and you’re not going forward to establish the kingdom of God on earth, and you’re content short of that goal, if you’re satisfied with what you’ve already got, and you’re not interested in progressing until you see the kingdom of God really established on earth and righteousness covering the earth as the waters cover the seas and the coming of Christ, then you’re losing ground.
Jesus died and gave His life and started a new church. As long as His followers had the vision and kept in that hot contact with the Lord, they were sweeping the world, and they overthrew the Roman Empire with the good news of the Gospel! But when they got to the point where they thought they had arrived and had overthrown the temporal power of Rome and it now rested in their own hands, they became the Roman Catholic Church, and the church ruled Rome and it became the Holy Roman Empire.
The church had arrived and they were satisfied. They had power, wealth, and glory. They had taken over the world, or all that was important in the world. The church now ruled the world—all of Europe and the advanced, civilized part of the world that was important to them. Then they were more or less satisfied, and they quit progressing. The fact was, they hadn’t conquered India or China or Russia or Africa or all of North and South America or the islands of the sea, but they slowed virtually to a standstill.
The minute we come to the conclusion that the church has arrived and are satisfied it has come as far as it needs to go, watch out! I’ll never be satisfied until everybody on earth is saved, which will never happen, of course. But I’m looking forward to the day when everybody, or at least almost everybody, will be saved—at least there won’t be many left in hell, if any, and I think that’s when God will be satisfied, too. But that’s a long way off!
We’ve got a lot to be thankful for, but we’ve still got a lot to do! We haven’t got just a few years—we’ve got thousands to go! Some people are waiting for Jesus to come, when they think He will solve all their problems, but in eternity our responsibilities will carry on. If you think just because people have gone on to be with the Lord that their job is over, we can prove from the Bible that their job is far from complete! According to all we read in the Bible, the spirit world is a heaven of a lot busier than this life on earth. We will have rest in a sense, you might say in the spirit, but like the angels, we’ll fight on.
We’re a long ways from the end of the road, and death from this life is just graduation from this grade, and praise God for that! Right now we’re burdened by this body, but in the spirit you won’t have this weight. You’re no longer weighed down with the flesh and burdened with the problems of the physical life. You’ve graduated from the grade of this earthly life. But when you graduate from one grade to another, the work in the next grade usually becomes a little more difficult with a little more added responsibility, new and added duties that you didn’t have before. With new abilities come new responsibilities, and you will have new power to respond to those new responsibilities.
The work is not even over in heaven or in the Heavenly City after the Millennium. We’ll still be serving God, and quite a few things will not be finished yet: total redemption, universal reconciliation, cosmic restitution. Paul spoke about these and they are recorded in the book of Revelation, but they will not have happened completely even by the time you arrive in the Heavenly City. There will still be kings and nations who need healing. (You can read about it in Revelation 21:24 through 22:2.)
Heaven is not the end; it’s only the beginning. God only knows how much more we’ll have to conquer after we’ve conquered the earth and all the souls who have ever lived on it and all the problems. Who knows what other worlds we may have to conquer, what other universes we may yet have to reach.
My idea of heaven is not floating around on a cloud strumming a harp by some gift of God. That would be my idea of death! Total inactivity, cessation of movement, total rest is total death. And it doesn’t seem to be God’s idea of heaven either. His universe is full of movement, and He’ll never stop. We’ll go right on through the coming of Christ and the Millennium and the Heavenly City and right on out to outer space, and God only knows how far we all have to go. And we’ll enjoy every minute of it if we’re faithful servants.
We’re a long way from the end. In fact, according to the Bible, for us there isn’t going to be an end. Eternity has no end!
Originally published July 1973. Adapted and republished June 2014.
Read by Jon Marc.
1 Proverbs 29:18 KJV.
2 Hebrews 12:3 KJV.
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