Saving Souls

 

LR: in Malachi. And then I was reading like Luke 6:38 and Galatians and Philippians. If you read Philippians 4, oh, my goodness, God opened you the windows of heaven.  And it says that He pours out His riches where there is not room enough to contain them all from Malachi.

 

But He says, if you read Philippians, it’s according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Now that’s pretty heavenly riches.

 

So I was thinking about all these different Scriptures, and the Lord really ministered to my heart, “You’re missing one really strong Scripture on debt and what people go through.”

 

And I thought, “Okay, what am I missing?”

 

And He said, “The 23rd Psalm.”

 

RR: We read it every day, don’t we?

 

LR: Every day

 

RR: We quote it every day

 

LR: of our lives and never have I associated it with debt. Never!  Now, what could I possibly be missing in the 23^rd Psalm concerning debt. It didn’t connect.

 

And so I said, “Okay, let’s go back and read it again.”

 

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  Well, that’s a good point.  If the Lord is your shepherd, you have no need of anything, you don’t want for anything.  I thought, “Well, that’s a good start.”

 

RR: Hey, that means no debt.

 

LR: Correct, unless you want debt, which I don’t.

 

RR: I don’t either.

 

LR: So He said, “I shall not want.  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures and leads me beside the still waters.” Okay, what does that sound like to you?  Rest, relaxation, letting down

 

RR: Peace.

 

LR: unwinding, peace.  People who are in debt don’t let down and they don’t unwind and they don’t have peace and they don’t lie down and cool out beside the still waters. No, they’re frustrated, they’ve got ulcers, and they’re tied up in knots.  People jump out of buildings because of debt.

 

Okay, let’s keep going, and this is what the Lord said to me. “He restoreth my soul.”  The Bible says that your soul is your mind, you will, and your emotions.

 

RR: The soulish realm, yes.  Mind, will, and emotions.

 

That is the most interesting illustration of breathing out and breathing in. You can’t do just one and live. You can’t just breathe out. You have to breathe in. You can’t just breathe in. You’ve got to breathe out. You have to. And what I’ve learned from it, Lindsay, is how to make my life a seed, to get into a rhythm of sowing and reaping, of sowing and reaping, of giving and receiving, of planting and expecting God to bring the harvest in.

 

LR: You know, the Bible says that as long as the earth remains, there shall be seedtime and harvest.

 

RR: Book of Genesis.

 

LR: It started right from the beginning.

 

RR: It’s not a sideline. It’s a main line from Genesis to Revelation. The principles of sowing and reaping are from Genesis to Revelation throughout the book. You can’t find a book in the Bible where there isn’t seedtime and harvest.

 

LR: And, you know, the Bible also talks about that there are principles, there are laws established, God’s laws established in the earth, eternal laws that you cannot change. For example, the Bible says, day to night, winter to spring, seedtime and harvest. There’s no way to stop day from becoming night.  As a human being, you cannot stop it. How can you stop day from becoming night?

 

RR: How can you stop summer and winter?

 

LR: How can you stop summer from becoming winter?  How can you stop seedtime from becoming harvest?  It’s a principle eternal of God. If you put seed in, harvest will come.

 

RR: But you’ve got to expect it. When you sow your seed, Lindsay, you have a Bible right to expect God to multiply it back. You can’t just give indiscriminately and say, “Well, there it is.”  No. Focus it. Focus it against a need that you have in your life and then expect God to multiply it back.  That’s what we’ve done at ORU. That’s what we’ve done in this ministry. That’s what we’re doing in our personal lives.

 

LR: I’m reading right now a sermon that your dad preached about aiming your seed to defeat a need.

 

RR: Oh, I like that.

RR: Oh, come on, give the Lord praise tonight. Oh, God bless you, ORU Singers. Give them a big God bless you. When we get to see Jesus, we’ll sing, Lindsay, we’ll shout and give Him the glory and victory. I’ve got news. Jesus is coming soon.  I believe that with all my heart. When?  I don’t know, Lindsay. Even Jesus himself doesn’t know. The Bible says that only God knows.

 

And we are to be prepared for His coming in the twinkling of an eye, and we are to work as if He’s not coming for a thousand years, to be ready. And I’m ready. I thank God that Jesus is coming soon, and that’s the blessed hope, Lindsay, is that Jesus is coming for me.

 

LR: That’s right. You know, the Bible says that Jesus endured the cross, and it doesn’t say that’s it.

 

RR: It doesn’t stop there.

 

LR: For the joy that was set before Him. He knows what lies ahead. He knew what was set before Him. He knew that here’s the cross, here’s death, here’s all the stuff that He was going to have to go through in order to get to what was set before Him.

 

And many of us sit back and we just think, “Oh, I’m not going to do this.  Oh, I can’t do this.”  What’s the bottom line?  What’s the final outcome?  What’s the purpose? You know, God may have a final outcome and a final purpose for our lives, but we aren’t willing to walk through the process that it takes to get to that purpose.

 

RR: Or, Lindsay, we say we’re not worthy.

 

LR: That’s right. And, you know, that is not from God. There’s a final outcome, even if it’s a process, even if it’s steps, even if it’s a procedure, whatever it is, to get you to the outcome. Jesus endured the things that He was going through for the moment because He was focused on where He was headed after that.

 

And too many times we miss the resurrection of what God has for our lives because we’re focused on the death and the burial. But without the death and burial, there can be no resurrection. And we’ve got to see that, “Okay, the Bible doesn’t say all things are good.” It says, “All things work together for good to them that love the Lord and are called according to his purposes.”

SL: Well, her day was today, mine was yesterday.

 

RR: Oh, you had this testimony.

 

SL: Same day.

 

RR: But you had it in California.

 

SL: Exactly.

 

RR: You mean Satan also fights people in California?

 

SL: A little bit. Especially when he knows you’re coming to a conference, like out there, there are a lot of stories just like that.

 

RR: I see many ladies here tonight going like this.

 

SL: But, see, what happens is, if you will remember, in the book of Joshua where God said, “I have given you the land.  Now go take it.” And they had to take it like we have to take it.

 

LR: Yeah, possess it.

 

SL: You bet. And if we don’t go and take our land, who will take over us.

 

RR: You mean it doesn’t fall in your life.

 

SL: You bet it doesn’t fall. And it didn’t for the Israelites either. They had to fight city by city, wall by wall, stone by stone, and river by river.

 

RR: How do you do that?

 

SL: With God’s Word. We’re going to have to get a lot into the Word in this conference, all of us.

 

RR: You mean you just carry the Bible around and that’s it?

 

SL: Almost. One of the things I’m going to talk about and teaching women how to do is to get into Bible meditation. The world has destroyed meditation, and the God, way back, Isaac was doing it. It said he meditated in the morning before God brought Rebecca. He was meditating.  And we have forgotten how to do that, and that’s part of what we’re going to be talking about is showing women how to get into the Word for a now word for themselves, for an immediate word for themselves, not just a story.