Page 64 - SABBATH

These two things are absolute necessities for any who would walk as our Lord walked.
If we are to make the confession He made, and we are to walk as He walked, never speaking
or doing anything of our own initiative, but always doing the will of the Father, then we too
must have an open heaven, and we must have the anointing of the Spirit of God resting
upon us in power.
Any saint who is honest, and who has sought to walk in obedience to God for any
length of time, will confess that they have seen their inadequacy and impotency revealed.
Like Paul confessed, the desire to obey is present, but the performing of it is not. As Christ
spoke of His disciples on the night of His passion, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak.” How often have we stumbled and fallen, to weep tears of regret and bitterness? What
weakness is bound up in this sinful flesh!
And should we be called to ministry (and all saints are ministers in one fashion or
another), consider how soon the Lord will lay us in the dust as we see our inability to walk
as Christ walked. We do not see every demon present as He did. We do not speak a word
and the unclean spirits flee. We are not able to heal everyone for whom we pray, or to raise
the dead with a word. We cannot place the elements under our feet, walking on the waters
and calming the storms with a word. We do not come forth victorious in every encounter
with Satan. Yet this is what we have been called to. This is the land of our inheritance. This
is our promised possession.
How strenuously do we deny that these things be so. We think that Christ walked this
way, but He was God and we are not. We do not see Him as Joshua leading the entire nation
into their inheritance, vanquishing every enemy and possessing the good land before them.
It was not just Joshua who entered in and walked victoriously over the enemy. It was the
entire nation of the children of God. Neither is it merely Yahshua who has been called to
walk in the victory, power, authority, and Sabbath rest that He manifested in His life. He
is the forerunner, but we are called to run behind Him.

Hebrews 6:19-20
This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one
which enters within the veil, where Yahshua has entered as a forerunner for us...

As our pattern Man, Yahshua has shown us the way to enter into the Sabbath rest
before us. We first must be baptized with Him in the waters of the Jordan. This is not
merely some symbolic union that is depicted in the ordinance of baptism. We must have an
experiential baptism. We must allow Yahshua to lead us through many wilderness places
where our flesh is broken until we come to the place where we loathe the flesh and we
despise the initiative and self-effort that we see within it.
We must all enter the wilderness as Moses who was a man “mighty in word and in
deed,” men who have great strength in their own flesh and who wrongly think that this
strength of the flesh can bring forth the kingdom purposes of God. We must all exit the
wilderness as Moses did after forty years of tending sheep, declaring “God, I cannot speak.
I cannot act. I have nothing to offer You.” Only then can the Lord place His great power
upon us and through us destroy every enemy and every false god that stands before Him.
Do we not see this process of death plainly revealed in Scripture. Yahshua said that
He never did anything of His own initiative, and He did not even speak a word of His own
initiative. In action and in word He was completely dead to those things that arise from self.
Compare this to the words spoken of Moses.