Gird Up Now Thy Loins — Emanuel Esh

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Encountering God's Glory and Human Wretchedness

Can we stand for prayer? Our Father, we humbly bow before you this evening again and acknowledge that we love you. We delight in your word. We are so thankful tonight that you have wrought righteousness in our hearts through faith and that you are still working in our hearts.

Oh Father, I pray that somehow you would be able to work through your word tonight and that somehow this vessel would in no way hinder you from that which is a burden of your heart to be shared tonight.

Lord, it's not about me. It's about you, Father, and your Son, and the Holy Ghost. And so, Father, tonight I just resign myself to you as a vessel in your hand. Yes, wherein abides the Holy Ghost. Father, we look to you for all that shall be said tonight.

Would you receive all the glory and the honor through Jesus' name? Amen. You may be seated. I can say that I am enjoying this week very much. Very much. Are you enjoying it this week? As I also thought about some of the distractions that so easily are there claiming for our attention, taking our attention away from the word that is shared and so forth.

It's my desire that somehow God would in his mercy hold back or take away the distractions tonight. So I appreciate the family of verses and songs. I want to speak tonight about that holy temple. And I'd like to begin with the verse that Mark shared about in Revelations when John saw the Lord Jesus.

And it says there that, When I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. Places in the Bible where men had a revelation of God and they fell on their faces as dead. Ezekiel, when he saw the glorious vision of God, it says,.

And when I saw it, I fell upon my face. What makes them fall on their face? Isaiah says that when he saw that he laid and he said, Woe is me, for I am undone. Because I'm a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. It's my desire to somehow unload the burden that's on my heart tonight by God's grace. To me it would be one of the most beautiful things if God in his mercy would reveal to us his glory.

And would really, and would open up our blinded eyes to see that which we don't even know is there in our own lives. But I have no doubt in my mind that if God were to do that to any one man here tonight, he would fall on the floor.

If God were to open his eyes and he could see a little bit of the glory of God and could see his own wretchedness, he would be unable to stand. He would fall flat on the floor. Many things on my heart, but I'd like to share a message.

Girding Up the Loins for the Christian Life

And I think I will call it something like, gird up now thy loins. And I think that we don't have a very good picture of that. Us men don't wear robes that go down to our feet. And so I brought one of our bedsheets along tonight just to illustrate this.

In the Bible days, the men, they wore robes. And it may not have looked like this, but they were down, it was like a dress that went down to their ankles. And it's a little difficult to run when you have a robe on like this.

And so there's Peter, he says, gird up now the loins of your mind. But there's other places in the Bible where we can read that the men, they girded up their loins and they ran. And so what they did, they would reach down, they'd take that thing up and they'd pull it up around their waist and tuck it in and then they could run.

And so tonight, if somehow God would get glory that he could convince you, convince me. As men, that there's work to be done. There's work to be done. I'd like to just look a little bit at several things here.

Salvation as the Beginning of the Christian Walk

First of all, I'm going to look at salvation. I would hope that there's most of the men here are born again, but I know there's lots of women and children here also. And I know that there must be many people here who are not born again.

But I want to look at salvation a little bit. And basically what we're looking at is the walk of the Christian life. Looking at salvation, that's the initial experience in the Christian life. And then we'll look at sanctification, if I can spell it right.

And then there's other steps. There's more steps to the Christian life than just that. There's a lot more to the Christian life than just being born again. There's something called sanctification. It's where you go on in Christian life.

And there's also, I would like to talk a little bit about a couple of other areas. And this one is consecration. While they are very close to each other, consecration. I don't know if I can spell. They may be very close to each other, yet they are also very different.

And I don't want to talk about brokenness. And lastly, anointing. And I'll look at this a little bit as these are different phases of the Christian life, you might say. And I don't know in which phase or which area that you are in.

And there's another little drawing I'd like to put on the board. And that is that of the inward man, as it speaks of in 2 Corinthians, I think it's chapter 4. It's called the inward man. And then we have another one that is called the outward man.

And then we have what I would call the physical body, or the outermost man. One of the things about this, one of the burdens on my heart is that we need to recognize that the inner man, the inward man is where the Spirit of God dwells at salvation.

Working in and through us and using the outward man and the body to manifest the glory of God and so forth. Let's look a little bit at salvation. We know that Jesus Christ has come to save the sinners, those that are lost.

And I don't know if you're here tonight and not saved. But I suppose there may be some. But God has sent His Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. If you're here tonight and you're not saved, then I would say you are missing out in some of the best of living.

But I also recognize that in order for someone to be saved, there needs to be coming into their heart a drawing from the Father. And when that begins to happen, there also needs to be for him to be able to see.

For a man to be able to see what he really is in the sight of God, there must also be some revelation. Light must shine into the heart. Light needs to come down upon the person. And unless God in His mercy reveals to the person his lost estate, he will not cry out for salvation.

That's the picture I see. And the means to be saved is what? When a person sees his need of a Savior, he needs to confess that he's a sinner. He needs to repent of his sin. And he needs to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

As it says in Romans, that with the mouth confession is made, with the heart man seeth unto salvation. This is more than just a lip profession. This is where you actually engage your heart to the place where you are saved.

That's the picture. I don't want to dwell long on that, but I would like to make comments also about baptism. This would be my heart about baptism. I believe that when adults get saved, they should be baptized.

Baptism and Immediate Obedience

I would long to have the kind of testimony. Let me ask you this. What is the testimony of the charity churches? Is there a testimony out there that when people get saved, they get baptized? I believe that we should be baptizing new converts very shortly after salvation.

I would long to have a fear struck into the hearts of the heathen around us. To such an extent about baptism. So much so that when someone gets converted, they also hear that they've gotten baptized. I believe that our forefathers in the Anabaptists way back in the 1600s, the issue was baptism.

And I believe there's a reason why in every account of the book of Acts, when there's a conversion there and baptism follows it, it is immediately. The longest one is three days. Well, you might say we like to have the church there to baptize them, to witness it.

That's not even scriptural necessarily. They baptize them in the spot. Oh, what a longing it would. And I do believe, brothers and sisters, that we need to follow these things. It would strike fear in the hearts of the people around us.

And they would hear that dust and dust got baptized. I believe God would honor some of that. Let's go on to sanctification. I want to put a little more time on this one. By the way, I'll take this thing off.

It's too warm. Sanctification. Now, in one sense, I believe that God does a work of sanctifying in our hearts at the place of conversion. When we repent of our sins, we acknowledge that we're a sinner, we acknowledge that we're lost, and we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

There's a place there where God does sanctify us and He cleanses us and He washes us. And this word sanctify simply means to clean or to wash. It also means somewhat to separate or to consecrate, it might mean.

Another meaning is to purify by expiation or by making amends. And so one part of this sanctification is, and this is how it was in my life when I got converted, I had a lot of amends to make. I had restitution to make.

And I want to lift it up a little bit here this evening and say, Brother or sister, if you have gotten saved and you've never went and made amends, if you've never gone back and made all those things right as the Spirit of God brings them to you, then I believe that you are somewhat staunched or stayed or stopped in your Christian growth.

Maybe it's a pack of gum at the store. I shared this message last Sunday and a brother came to me and said, I just thought about it. I never made it right when I stole a bicycle. And I don't know what it is in your life.

But if there's anything back there, this is a picture of sanctification. And my burden in my heart is that somehow we as men would rise up, would gird up our loins, may I say, and do something about these issues.

How can I continue on in my Christian life if I don't rise up and take the bull by the horns? How can I say, if I don't gird up my loins and begin to run? There are people who get saved when they sit in front of a television set, they listen to a TV evangelist and he's preaching salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and people can be saved that way and they do get saved.

Just simply repenting and acknowledging that they need a Savior, you can be saved that way. But all the struggle, the difficulty that many have worked through, that many have walked out afterward. Why am I not having victory?

Why am I continually tempted in this certain area or this area? What about all this baggage I have back here? There's a need. Is there a need in your life to cleanse, to sanctify? I feel sorry for those who have never had a very thorough session of repentance in their life.

They have never sat down with an open heart and just acknowledged everything, every sin in the past, where you might say, why is that necessary? I've been saved, I've been washed in the blood. That's right, my brother and my sister, but if those things are still back there, if they're still standing back there, if they still bother you, if they're still coming to you at times, especially when you go to kneel in prayer and some memory comes back to you again and again and again, I say it must, you need to confess it, you need to repent of it.

Cleanse your ways, my brother and my sister. How are we sanctified? Well, is that all the Lord's work? 1 Peter 1, 2 says, elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ, through sanctification of the Spirit.

God does his part in sanctifying us, in cleansing us, in washing us. But there is also a part that you and I have, 2 Timothy 2, 21. If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.

That is our responsibility. I need to do something, and there may be, maybe you're sitting here tonight and you've never thoroughly searched the records that are written about you and went back there and sought them out and cleansed yourself of all these unholy, profane things that you've done either in your body or you've thought you've sinned in your soul.

Maybe you've sinned in the body, but the soulish part of man is where you think and you desire and all those type of things, even though you've been born of the Spirit of God and this is where the Spirit of God dwells, a holy temple.

But the Spirit of God, you can bind the Spirit of God in a sense, you can keep the Spirit of God from flowing freely. And if you and your soul and your outward man, if your outward man is a strong, defensive type person, if this is who you are and the Spirit of God dwells in your spirit and they're so synonymous you can't divide the two, the Spirit of God in your spirit, but you can hinder the Spirit of God from flowing freely out of your being.

God wants you and I to be freely, to be vessels whereby He can use, He can come in and He can flow freely out through us. But brothers and sisters, if in your Christian life you have a lot of undealt with issues in your past, these things will hinder you from becoming effective, from becoming a useful servant in the hand of God.

Are you, have you ever cleansed yourself? What about, I would recommend any one of you fathers take the book of Leviticus and read how to have a clean home, a clean body and so forth. Clean foods. No, not according to the Old Testament law, but there's principles there that are still standing today.

There's many unclean spirits that have gone forth and troubled many homes because the Father has not cleansed His ways. This is a burden on my heart. One of the burdens of the Lord laid on my heart this morning was personally for myself.

This is how I feel. If I don't get it this week, woe is me. Let me explain. I'm so blessed with the messages that we're getting, incomparable Christ, a picture of the church, the body of Christ, but especially on the Father-Son issue.

That's where I, that's my greatest need. And I'm crying out to God. I'm saying, God, unless you do something in my heart this week concerning this issue, woe is me. Woe is me if I don't get it this week.

Woe is the man who sits on the sound of my voice and doesn't get it this week. Woe to the church, to the church leaders, and woe to the churches. Woe to the charity movement if we don't get it this week.

Woe is me if I don't get it. Unless God will open my eyes, unless God by somehow brings a revelation to me of my need as a father, then woe is me. In every one of these steps, every one of these things, it takes revelation from God to go on.

Some of us carry a lot of baggage around. You know, a man who carries a stick on a pole traveling down the road. That's kind of the picture we have of the son leaving the father in Luke there. He put his stuff in a bag or so, and away he goes.

He carries his baggage with him. I wonder how much baggage you've brought with you this week. How big is the cart behind you? There are some people who carry a lot of baggage with them all the time. Old sins that have never been dealt with.

Old things that have never been freely opened up and confessed. But I want to encourage you. God wants, God has made a way for you, not just to be saved, but God has also made a way for you and I to be sanctified, to be clean, to be holy.

And you and I have something to do. And I want to say to my brothers tonight and my sisters, gird up the loins of your mind. Gird up your loins now, like a man, and run. Do something about it. In Psalm 64, you could turn there, but I see that Satan and his hosts, they accomplish a diligent search.

They commune together to lay snares. And they say, who shall see it? They have the records of your life, my brother and my sister. Satan knows. His evil ints, they can search your records. What does your record look like?

Are your records clean? Are you sanctified? Or are there things in your life that open the door for them to come in and to torment you or your family, your wife or your children? It's a grief. When a father comes to you and he says, my six-year-old girl, about a year ago, she started doing these odd things.

Just kind of spacing out. And he said, she also has nightmares. And I only need to ask one question. And I asked him, I said, what happened just before she started acting that way? Did anything happen at that time?

Was there any kind of trauma in her life? Something major? Did something major happen to this innocent, little, beautiful girl at the age of six years? Oh yeah, he said. She was molested. And her heart just broke.

Are you clean? Fathers, is your heart right? If you have allowed the enemy, if you have the enemy who has searched the records of your life and he has found that there's some things there that have never been dealt with.

He can see that they're not under the blood of Christ. And there's access there into your life and you're being troubled by those things. You've heard it mentioned on Monday evening. All the evil things that should not even need to be mentioned.

But this is the reality. When Satan finds an avenue through the father or through the mother who have never cleansed themselves, who have never been sanctified through and through with a great desire and a zeal to be clean and holy and pure in every area.

Satan has an access into your lives and he has access into your homes. And he's allowed to come in there and trouble your children. And so you think, we go to a good church. It's safe. Never. Don't trust.

Know where your children are at. And this isn't just one of many instances that I could tell you about. Fathers, mothers. Let's face it. Have I taken care of all those issues? I thank God that when we got converted, we dealt with all these issues as far as we knew.

Everything was brought out in the open. Everything was out there. Even for the next couple of days, the next couple of weeks as we heard the word of God preached and we kept on being cleansed and cleansed and the altar call was made.

We hit the altar again because the Lord had spoken and had revealed another area of my life. And so I want to say, unless God reveals to you some of these things in your own heart, which you don't even know are there maybe, you will never take care of the things that you don't know about unless you begin by dealing with the things you do know about.

There's much more that God wants to do in our hearts and lives. You will never, I don't think you'll get past this area. You won't be able to go on your Christian life unless you deal with this area of sins committed in your body.

God wants you to be clean and pure. So my heart, my burden is to your fathers, to the person who's here tonight who has not thoroughly dealt with every area in his life. I want to say to you, gird up your loins.

Now, like a man. You can find that in Job. Gird up now thy loins like a man. And do something about it. I'm not preaching a gospel of works, no. We're saved through faith in Christ, but you and I have a responsibility.

You and I need to follow through with these things that we've done in the past. Oh! That you would recognize the urgency of it. Children. Well, children can be set free. I remember the testimony of another father who recognized his...

I think it was like an eight-year-old girl was acting strangely. And so they did some research with their sons, younger sons, and they said, Oh, the neighbor boy. And they took their sweet, innocent eight-year-old who had been defiled.

And they walked her through that. They helped her walk through that. And prayed over her. And claimed her back to the Lord Jesus Christ. And today that girl is a godly young lady. It's possible, fathers and mothers, for your children to walk in holiness.

And it's possible that you as a father, you have the right in your home. You are the authority in your home. You should be able to walk your children if they have been defiled. Take them and walk them out of that in cleanliness and holiness.

Even as an innocent little six, seven, eight-year-old. Woe unto you if you don't do something about it. Oh, woe is me. Woe is me if I don't respond when God reveals things to me. Consecration means to set apart or to fill up.

One of the meanings is to add what is yet wanting in order to render a thing full. It certainly means to take something and add to it so that it might be full. That's the picture of consecration. And so we come as a...

So when we get saved, our sins have been washed and cleansed. We walk a while, we begin to walk in the spirit of God in us. Begins to enlighten us to some of our past, some of our things. And we begin to confess, we begin to repent.

There should always be such an open heart. Open heart, willing, quick and free to repent and make things right. Oh, I had the blessed opportunity of working with a couple just recently. They had asked for some time together.

So we planned it out ahead of time, a week or so. We planned to meet there on a certain morning. And we went there and it was such a beautiful thing. One of those blessings for ministers, may I say. They were just like putty.

They were just so sweet and so open. The Lord had been working in their lives. We just barely got there and the father, he grabs his tablet. He says, oh, come on in and sit down. I want to share with you what the Lord is showing me.

And he had a list of the things God has shown him that week. Just little things in the back of his life that I never uncovered, you know. Those things that happened back there in my teenage years. He had never uncovered them.

He just... Maybe he never knew it was needed. But let me plead with you fathers. If you have things in your background, you have never opened up freely and shared with any one person. Oh, I beg you, gird up your loins now like a man.

And do something about it. You only open the doors to destruction to your family, to your children. And so this couple, they just openly confessed everything in the back of their lives. Everything that was back there.

What a blessing. And the children were there. Sweet, pure, innocent. That type of person is ready to go on with God. That type of person can make large strides in his life with God. That brings us to the place of consecration.

Consecration as Total Surrender

It's almost like, in one sense, it's like sanctification. But I want to say that it's a little bit different in this way. I think of Abraham. Abraham consecrated his son Isaac to the Lord. It doesn't give us a specific time when he did that.

I'm not talking about Mount Moriah. This Abraham had consecrated everything he had to God long before Mount Moriah. And consecration is simply coming to a place of willingness in your heart and saying, Lord, I am laying out to you everything I have.

I'm giving you everything in my life. I give you the right to do whatever you want in my life. That's the picture of consecration. This is where we wholly offer ourselves unto God. And we simply say, Lord, I don't care what it costs.

I don't care how it happens. But, Lord, I am giving myself wholly unto you. And what God does with a person who does that with all of his heart, he begins to work deeper and deeper on that person, in that person's life.

Working out some of his character flaws, may I say. Working out in those areas which most of us have rights. Consecration is simply allowing God to have his full right in my whole life. That is the picture.

This is where we let go of our most cherished dreams. This is where we let go of our visions and desires. Even our gifts and abilities that God has given. Including the ministry which we believe God has given.

Consecration is simply offering everything to God. Laying it on the altar and taking your hands off with no strings attached. We allow and we give the right to the Lord to do what he sees we need. Without reserve.

Neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as though they are alive from the dead. And your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.

Holy. Holy. Don't even try to consecrate yourself to God unless you're holy. And pure unto God which is acceptable unto him. Which is your reasonable service. One of the problems that we have is that the inward man, where the Spirit of God dwells, needs to be able to move freely and flow freely through the outward man and to be manifested in our bodies.

Maybe some of you preachers know what I'm talking about. You ever have a deep burden in your heart? You have something deep in here that you'd like to get out and share, but you really can't release it.

You can't let it go. You just can't open up and let it flow. There's not a flowing stream coming out of you. It's your unbrokenness. Because you've never been broken of your own way. Never been allowed God to work deeply in that area.

This is the place of when we consecrate ourselves to God, we're simply laying everything on the altar and taking our hands off, allowing God to work. And when Abraham was tried, he took his son Isaac and he offered him up on the altar.

You see, Abraham had already consecrated Isaac long before that. This was just the outworking of the reality of it. And so, okay, you say, Lord, I give you my farm. I give you my property. I give you my bank account.

I give you my wife. Doesn't Jesus say, accept a man for sake, father, mother, houses, wife, land, and yea, his own wife cannot be my disciple. Don't you see a clear break there? I wonder how many of you I've lost.

Is there anyone who's not following with me? Which place here are you saying, well, I'm just not going to go any further. I doubt whether any of you would actually do that, where you would just back away and say, well, I'm not going to go there.

My Christian life is okay. I'm okay where I'm at. You're missing it. Woe to the man. Woe to the person who won't continue on. Woe to that person who looks back and goes backwards. Except the corn of wheat, upon the ground died, abideth alone.

Brokenness and the Release of the Spirit

But if it died, bringeth forth much fruit. Turn with me to John, chapter 12. A little bit on brokenness. Verse 1, John 12, verse 1. Then Jesus, six days before the Passover, came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.

This is just before he entered into Jerusalem. There they made him a supper in Martha's third, but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of the ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with their hair, and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.

What a blessed picture that is. Here's Jesus sitting at the table, sitting there fellowshipping and eating, and Mary comes along with a bottle of some kind of very costly, special ointment, and she breaks that bottle, I don't know what it was made of, and she pours that oil, that spikenard, on the feet of Jesus, and it says that the odor of the ointment filled the house.

This picture of breaking that vessel, that vessel is in a sense like our outward man. The outward man is where our soulish part of our being is, and this outward man is what contains the inward man. The inward man is where the Spirit of God dwells.

That's where the anointing is. That's where the costly spikenard is. And unless this outward man is broken, this ointment cannot be smelled or tasted, you might say, or you hinder the work of God. And I think I know what it's like.

There's a place in my life where I was just longing to release and to be used of God, and I trust most of us have a deep desire to be used of God. But unless this outward man is broken, this ointment, this Spirit of God cannot flow freely through us or unhindered through us.

It's an amazing thing how the Spirit of God dwells in us and uses us, and even uses our character, our nature, and our flavor. And so when the Spirit of God comes flowing out of me, it's flavored with who I am.

And when the Spirit of God comes moving and flowing through you, it's flavored with who you are, in a sense. But unless the outward man is broken, unless this outward man is broken, the inward man is constricted or held back and not free to be released outward.

But when the outward man is broken, then the Spirit of God is free to flow out through that outward man. But there are some who might say, why was this waste? We shouldn't have broken that vessel. We should have gotten the oil out without breaking the vessel.

There are some who would honor the bottle more than the ointment. The bottle is too precious to break. But we're not collectors of antiques. We don't want to collect antiques. Give me the ointment. Who cares about the bottle?

Give me the anointing. I don't care about the breaking of the bottle. I want to be a useful vessel where the Spirit of God is free to flow through without hindrance. This, again, is the work of the Holy Spirit.

And this, again, comes by revelation. Each step of the way there needs to be a revelation. I was so blessed this week. This is the revelation. This is the revelation, my brothers. The Word of God. But I also know, blessed, blessed is the man.

How happy is the man when God, in His great mercy, will open a man's eyes a little bit to see, to get another glimpse of the glory of God, to get another glimpse of who He really is. Oh, blessed is the man whose eyes God has opened to see who He is.

Because when you really see who you are, again, and you see the glory of God, and you see yourself, it's simultaneous. You fall on your face. You fall on your face. Now, some of you may not have experienced a Christian life in all these certain steps, and that's not what I'm saying.

They may vary. You might have, and they integrate someone and all of that. I'm just giving you a little bit of an overview, a picture of what I believe is some reality in our Christian life. The Word of God is quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, dividing asunder the soul and the spirit.

The Word of God is sharp. It can divide between these two. The problem is if your soul and your spirit is not divided, if there's not a division made between those two, there's a mixture there. The soulish part of you is still in control.

The Spirit of God is hindered from flowing through you. That old man likes to get the glory. The old man stands there beside you when someone compliments you, and he's just grinning away, a big smile.