Publicans and harlots will go into the kingdom of heaven before the “good“ church members, and many of the children of the kingdom will be cast out (see Matthew 21:31). “The children of the kingdom,“ in one sense, refers to those who have considered themselves among the remnant, who have been born in the faith—second-, third-, and fourth-generation church members—to whom religion has become old hat. Many of these who are apparently first will be the last to enter God’s kingdom, if they enter at all. On the other hand, many of those who appear to be last will be the first to enter.

Let’s take a look at seven major breakthroughs or insights that come to the children of the kingdom who move out of their form and their routine, into the kingdom of heaven. What actually goes on in the lives, in the understanding, of Laodiceans who no longer remain lukewarm, but become excited about the things of the gospel?

Sense a need

No one ever moves from simply occupying the pew each week into the excitement of the gospel until he realizes a great need. I’d like to refer you to Matthew 9:10-13:

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

No one ever moves from lukewarm to hot until he first realizes a great need. No one goes to the doctor until he realizes he’s sick.

How do you come to the realization of your need? It has to be more than someone telling you that you need it. It has to come as a result of your own personal experience, realizing that life is too big for you to handle alone without God—something deeper than religious routine. And it takes some of us longer to get there than others. In fact, it is very difficult for some people to come to that realization. It’s amazing the beating and the bruising some of us will take before we admit our great need.

Happy is the person who realizes his great need as a result of the love of God being uplifted, rather than coming to that realization from ulcers and sleepless nights and wanting to jump off the Golden Gate bridge. One is the long route, the other the short one.

Blessed is the person who realizes his great need as a result of his own personal Bible study and prayer rather than from leaning on someone else. You may not always have someone around to continually lift Jesus up before you. The love of God may not always seem to be present. The reason some of us have felt drawn to God at one time and far from Him at others is that we were leaning on someone else to lift Him up. But the preacher may not always be around.

I’d like to remind you that Matthew lifts Him up, and Mark lifts Him up, and John lifts Him up, and Luke lifts Him up, and Paul does too. If you realize that the short route is lifting up the love of Jesus and the love of God, you can go to the Word and can cut short many ulcers and sleepless nights. Those who are great at lifting up Jesus get it from the story of Jesus, where it is recorded. That’s where they get it, and you can get it from the same place.

Relationship

Whether a person is drawn to God by the uplifting of Jesus, or whether he’s drawn by sheer despair, the second insight is to believe that salvation is based upon a relationship with God. It is not based on our behavior. The Bible says: “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.“ “Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh shall ever be justified.“ Our salvation is not based on what we do. It is based on who we know.

This particular breakthrough has led some Christians to suppose that their good deeds have nothing whatever to do with their salvation in heaven. A T. Jones was warned after 1888 that he shouldn’t say works have nothing to do with salvation. So, please, notice this important difference. Our good works have nothing to do with causing our salvation. That’s the word that should make the difference. Our salvation is caused totally by the Lord Jesus and our acceptance of Him and entering into a relationship with Him. When we begin the relationship, our sins are pardoned. As we continue the relationship, our life with Christ continues to grow.

When you take the reverse position and say that bad deeds have nothing to do with causing a person to be lost, most people, at least in our subculture, become very upset because that seems contrary to what Adventists believe. But wouldn’t it be safe to say that no one will ever be lost because of his bad deeds? He will be lost because of what he neglected to do in terms of fellowship and communion and the acceptance of Jesus Christ. Bad deeds are simply a spin-off, the result, of that. Please notice the heavy emphasis on the word cause. Our bad deeds do not cause us to be lost, nor do our good deeds cause us to be saved. The relationship with God is what counts in salvation. That is how we continually accept His grace. The important question is: Do you know God? Do you know Him as your personal Mend?

Devotional life

This leads to our number-three breakthrough or insight, which takes us from our Laodicean condition and puts us into the excitement of the gospel. What does a good relationship come from? It comes from communication. We know that. We don’t have to look up any encyclopedia to find that out. Communication is always the basis of a relationship with anybody.

How can we talk to God? And how can we listen to Him talk to us? Through our devotional life: Bible study, prayer, and daily communication with God. That is the nuts and bolts of relationship. But right here the atmosphere gets heavy because some of the justification specialists today say that the devotional life is nothing but a system of works again. “You aren’t saved by reading your Bible,“ they say. ‘You’re saved by your faith in Jesus.“

Let’s admit that our devotional life can become a works trip. The devotional life can become one of two things for the unconverted person. When the person who has never been born again decides to have a devotional life and begins reading his Bible and praying, he will end up going in one of two directions. Either he will end up in complete frustration and loss, or he will end up experiencing regeneration, the new birth, and genuine conversion. Notice the case of the people in the days of Christ. He said, You search the Scriptures because you think that in doing that, you’re going to have eternal life (righteousness by devotions). But, He said, “they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life“ (John 5:39, 40). The mechanics of the devotional life are not an end in themselves; they are a means to knowing Jesus.

After getting into the mechanics of Bible study and prayer, what makes the difference between a good and bad result? Jeremiah had something to say about this: ‘Ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me“—how? “with all your heart“ (Jeremiah 29:13). It’s the sense of need, personal need for God, more than just hearing that everybody else is doing it, that makes the difference.

And that really is God’s department. He’s trying to bring every one of us to that realization all the time, and every day. And it isn’t just at the beginning of the Christian life. It’s every morning when we wake up that we really need God. Is this the top of your priority list? Do you need fellowship with Him? Do you need His presence?

One time some students asked me, “Would you come over to our group and talk to us about the devotional life?“ I agreed and went home and looked in my exhaustive concordance for the word devotion. D-E-V-O. There wasn’t anything there. Finally I found it under a different heading—John 17:3: “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.“ That’s one of your best texts on the devotional life, because in order to know God, you have to have communication, and in order to have communication, you must have personal, private time with Him. Which leads to number four.

Involvement with others

For the person who is genuinely converted and enters into a personal private life with God, the devotional life can go one of two ways. It can be wonderful for a short time, and then go bad, or it can lead to deeper and deeper fellowship and love, and a relationship with Jesus. What makes the difference? Realizing that God not only wants to talk to us and listen to us talk to Him, but He wants to work with us. So this becomes one of the major breakthroughs that a person will discover. Even if he’s been converted and has been excited about the things of the gospel, his private life with God will most certainly go sour if it’s only private. It must involve others in witness and outreach. In nine cases out of ten, the reason a private life with God goes sour, even though it’s been meaningful for a while, is lack of involvement with others. That is breakthrough number four.

The primary reason God gave us a work to do in the gospel is for our sake. God wants us to have the fellowship that happens when we go and do and work with Him.

Trials

Even if you have known an exciting personal confrontation with God, and you want to talk about it; and even though you’re involved in Bible study, prayer, and service, things may get worse for you. The book of Job is an extreme example. That story can discourage a person. The reason it can throw a person clear off the track is because he may have understood intellectually that Christianity is based on relationship rather than behavior, but he hasn’t understood it with his whole person yet. This strange sickness of relying on our behavior for our assurance of salvation is not easily shed. We can actually believe it with our minds, but not with our hearts.

Often God has to allow some terrible, hard experiences in the early life of the true Christian to test him to see whether he is in it because of his love for God or for other selfish reasons. We often seek God for wrong reasons. So we can become painfully aware as we move from Laodicea to the gospel, that the roof can cave in: crash!

You can lose your shirt. You may fall and fail more than ever after becoming a Christian. The devil will hound you from morning to night. And you say, Isn’t God bigger than that? In fact, I’d like to suggest that it’s par for the course for most people in most cases when there is real revival and excitement in the gospel, to discover that everything goes wrong. Plan on it. If everything goes well instead, thank God for the bonus, because in many cases it’s not going to.

The crucial question, then, is this: Are you going to continue to know Jesus in a personal, one-to-one relationship because of what He’s already done for you, or are you going to scrap the whole business? You know which of these the devil is after. And too often he succeeds.

Do we love God just as much when everything caves in? Or don’t we? God in His love wants us to find this out. Isn’t it an evidence of His love that He wants us to find out so we’ll know what makes us tick?

The will

The sixth breakthrough is learning how the will works in salvation. I realize that, by and large, this topic is still on the horizon, but I’d like to predict that soon it’s going to come to the front in a big way. We were told a long time ago that we would be in constant danger until we understood the right action of our will in living the Christian life and that through the proper understanding of our will, an entire change could be made in our lives. Have you studied it? It all has to do with these questions of whether sanctification is by faith alone or whether it isn’t. It has a lot to do with this question of human effort and divine power.

I’d like to suggest that before we’re finished with the present dialogue in the church, we’re going to discover that people may be able to accept the premise that justification is by faith alone, but we will be hard put to turn loose of the idea that there is something we can do at some point in the process of salvation. Some of us will fight like bulldogs to keep from giving up the idea that living the Christian life, and sanctification, are by faith plus works.

If we’ve heard heavy dialogue on justification, we will hear heavier dialogue on sanctification. It may not be clear in your mind what God really teaches concerning how your will operates in day-by-day Christian living, but I am asking you, inviting you, pleading with you to study it for yourself. You will be in constant danger until you do. Why? Because if you don’t understand properly how your will operates in living the Christian life, the devil has a built-in method for discouraging you and short-circuiting you in your whole relationship with God. Study it carefully.

Now I realize that I’ve given you a firing order of breakthroughs that comes from one person’s experience. I’m also willing to admit that my firing order may be all off. My old car went “ka-pluey“ once. (I don’t know if that word is in the dictionary.) I found out that the timing chain had gone bad. I was away from home, so the problem was serious. But in the process of getting that car back together, I discovered that it’s very important that my timing be correct.

Maybe my timing order in terms of insights into the Christian life and breakthroughs in the things of the gospel is different from yours. The timing in my experience has been off, particularly on this last one. It should have come in early, and it has only come in solid in the last couple of years.

Assurance

Breakthrough number seven has to do with the certainty of our salvation—the assurance that we can have right from the beginning. What a difference this makes in the life of a Christian in a day-by-day walk with God!

The text that is particularly to the point of assurance is 1 John 5:12: “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.“

What does it mean to have the Son? It means to have a relationship with Him. I have a wife. I have a relationship with her. I have an acquaintance with my friends, fellowship with them. And so, to have the Son means to have fellowship, acquaintance, and relationship with Him, and if we have that, we have life, and we have it now. It isn’t that we are hoping to receive it someday. We have it now. It isn’t that we hope we will make it if we are faithful, if we can perform well. We have it now.

What difference does this make? If this insight comes early in your life instead of late, it will bring you peace. And according to the book Steps to Christ, victory comes from peace. If I study the completed work of Jesus and the certainty of the salvation provided by Him, and accept that assurance, I can have peace now, the moment I come to Him. And this peace in itself is a tremendously transforming element. Have you discovered that? This understanding came late with some of us. Why? I suppose because of an exposure to a certain emphasis in our history and in our subculture that hasn’t really allowed for that. Somehow we have felt, I’m afraid, that it’s just a little bit sinful to be certain of your salvation.

I daresay you still have struggles, regardless of which of these breakthroughs you’ve experienced. Without asking you, I can predict that you are going to have struggles tomorrow, and the next day and the next until Jesus comes. As long as Satan reigns, as long as life shall last, it’s going to be a battle. But isn’t it good news to know that Jesus has made provision that our eternal destiny is already certain? It’s already decided. And if we are right with Him, because we know Him as our Friend today, we can have assurance.

God’s constant love

I’ve only listed the seven breakthroughs that have stood out in my life. The Lord is presently working on number eight. I can tell you what I think it is, because He keeps reassuring me with it really often. It is this—that the love of God is unwavering. The love of God never fails. He’s always there. My love is imperfect, and it comes and goes, but His is constant, and He keeps reminding me of that. It never changes; He’s always there. Are you discovering that? And do you know something? It is that love, and the realization of God’s absolute loyalty to those He died to save, that finally gets us in the end. It will make us so absolutely loyal to Him that we wouldn’t think of turning throughout eternity. Don’t you think so?

The love of God that never changes—I can’t understand it. At times when I feel like I’ve failed the hardest and fallen the greatest, the Lord will lay on me a chance to witness about the things of the gospel. And I say, “Wait a minute, God. Someone’s asleep at the switch up there. You’ve got to wait till I get in a week or two of good track record first.“ No, He wants to tell me that He’s right there, and He wants to work with me again, right now. He wants that fellowship, and He invites me to it.

Please, my friend, whatever the Lord is trying to do in your life, let Him do it. Listen carefully, and let’s all move out of Laodicea into the excitement of the things of the gospel.