Hi, this is Dave Olson. I'm the senior leader of
Heartland Church located in Ankeny, IA.
I hope the following message challenges, encourages and
ultimately changes you. Thanks for joining us.
All right, let's get into the word this morning.
If you want to turn with me, go ahead and turn to Hebrews
chapter 12, verse 18, Hebrews chapter 12.
And so we're going to be looking at, I'm going to continue in the
theme that we've been looking at thus far that the last number of
weeks. I'm going to try to find my
notes if I can here. So we've been talking about the
last few weeks on how the Book of Revelation, the, the
Revelation chapter 3 and 4, how John hears from the Lord.
He's giving a message to the Church of Laodicea and he and
the Lord calls attention. He said, behold, I stand at the
door and knock. If any man would open the door,
I will come in and I will eat with him and him with me.
I'm going to feast with you. And so if you hear his voice,
there's a knock, there's an invitation to a feast.
There's more than what you're just hearing in the moment.
If we'll, if we'll give, give our attention to that.
There's more. We used to have a saying that we
used to say a lot that if you, if you sense his presence and
you give way to it, he'll come more.
There's a sensitivity that our walk with God requires of us
that we lean in and we're we're sensitive to what he's doing.
And so he tells us there's this, he's knocking on the door.
Then a few verses later, John says, Behold, I heard a voice
and I looked up and there was an open door and the Lord said,
come up here and suddenly, behold, he was in the throne
room. And all through that, that
passage again, the Book of Revelation is apocalyptic
literature. Apocalyptic literature isn't
what a lot of people often think of.
It's not, it's not about cataclysm and and necessarily
even end time events. It's the record of prophetic
encounters, whether dreams or visions and, and so the, the
prophets of old, there's a long tradition in Hebrew writing of
these prophets, Ezekiel, Jeremiah.
And so Isaiah they would record and they'd leave that behind for
you and I so that you can you and I can learn from it.
And so John writes down this encounter.
And so we see the 2 doors. There was the door that we open
that God comes to us and then there's the door that he opens
and he ushers us up. He said come up here.
And so this idea of ascending is all through Scripture.
And so we need to we need to pay attention to that.
We we shouldn't just ignore that and kind of brush over that.
I was reading something fascinating this week.
I should have brought it up with me by a theologian.
I've really come to appreciate. He just recently went to be with
the Lord, but he was talking about how we have a tendency to
read the Word through our creeds and our confessions and our
denominational stance and all of that.
And while all of that is good, it's not the lens through which
we read the Scriptures because creeds and confessions were
formulated in response to a contemporary problem.
There was a problem. And so they, they developed a
creed to deal with that. This is our doctrinal stance.
It's similar to if you, I was just alluding to this a few
minutes ago with the whole thing of, of gender distinction and,
and God, God made man and woman and, you know, marriage between
a man and a woman. And if you look on our website,
we have a doctrinal statement again about that.
It's not because we feel that is, you know, that you need to
know the nature of God. And then the and and one of the
primary foundational things in discipleship is so much that
we're responding to a current cultural crisis.
So now, 100 years from now of Jesus, Terry's our great, great,
great grandkids are studying the word and they're looking for
they're looking through the lens of gender distinction and
reading the word through that. Now, you can come to some valid
conclusions, but that's not the purpose of that statement.
It's addressing A contemporary problem.
I hope I'm making sense. And So what we need to do is we
need to read the word through the lens of the people living in
that moment of history. And that's the only, that's the
only way we're going to understand the word.
And so we need to get inside their heads.
We need to know what it meant in order to know what it means,
what it meant to them, in order to know what it means to us.
And all through Scripture we see this, this idea, this thing of
ascending the hill of the Lord. We see way back in the book of
Genesis. We see the latter, the ascending
and descending, the connection between heaven and earth.
In fact, we see the very first verse of all of Scripture.
You open your Bible, Genesis 11. What does it say?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, so he
introduces this cosmological idea.
He wants to give us a framework for the context of everything
else. He's going to do that there is a
spiritual realm, if you will, called the heavens, and there is
a physical realm called the earth, and God sets it up like
that right away. The tragedy is that much of the
church only lives in their awareness of the earth and
ignores their ignores this reality of the heavens and so
the heavens that it's a description of the spiritual or
the unseen realm all around us. It's plural in the Hebrew
heavens. Same thing in the New Testament,
and Paul says he talks about heavenly realms, plural.
And so there are spiritual realities around us that God
intends for you and I to be aware of.
We're not to be just ignorant of that and kind of relegate that
to poetry and just think that, OK, I said a sinner's prayer and
now I live in the earth and I try to be a moral person and
then I go to heaven. No, we're God never intended
heaven, the heavens and earth to operate independently.
That's why he introduces them simultaneously.
That is precisely why he created them simultaneously.
I I've had to repent of a lot of things I've taught over the
years and here's one of them. This is my disclaimer.
If you heard me say this years ago, that the spiritual realm is
more real than the physical realm because the spiritual
realm is eternal and the physical realm is is temporary.
That is not true. The heavens were created the
same time the earth was and that that is really, really
intriguing to me. Why is that?
Because God meant for them to function together.
And it was through the fall the connector between those two
realms were mankind. You and I were uniquely created
by God with the equipment to function in both realms, and we
were the connection between the two.
And in the fall, when man's spirit died, you know, the Lord
told Adam and Eve in the day that you eat of that fruit, you
will surely die. Their body began to die, but
their spirit immediately died and they lost the equipment, the
satellite dish, if you will, that can interact with the
spiritual realm. And in salvation, God restored
that equipment in what is known as regeneration or the born
again experience. Our spirit man was born again.
All of a sudden, that equipment came back online.
The red light came on. You can hear the engine running.
And we're supposed to function in that.
And we're to lean into that and understand how to be spiritual
men and women, not just people that are born again and going to
heaven someday, but we're to be men and women who are born
again. And our spirit man is now the
component, the third component of our nature that not only
comes online, but is the dominant component in our
nature. We're to be spiritual.
Second Corinthians chapter 2 talks about this.
It it talks about the carnal Christian who's a mere infant.
And Paul rebukes them. So baby Christians are those
who, even though they're saved, they're still living for their
flesh. That is not a category of
Christianity. It's not a class of Christian.
It's a stage of Christian maturity.
And if you're still a baby Christian after five years, then
you probably need to get saved. And so when we first get saved,
we're our spirit man comes alive, but our flesh is still
dominant. And So what what do we do is we
learn to deny our flesh, discipline our soul and develop
our spirit because what God wants are spiritual men and
women. So what does that mean?
I mean, we, we throw those terms around.
It's kind of mystical, spiritual.
What does that mean? It means that our spirit man is
strong and can exercise dominion over our flesh and even our
soul, that we're no longer drug around by our fleshly desires.
It's our spirit man, we we're communing with God and we're
discerning things spiritually rather than from the flesh, Paul
said. I know no man after the flesh.
Paul evaluated all his relationships through the Spirit
and that is not only a possibility, it is what God has
called each and every one of us into.
And so this this idea of us growing up.
So in in first Corinthians chapter 2, he talks about the
carnal man who is a mere infant. He talks about the natural man
and the Greek is the the The Greek is the Grecian word for
soul. It's something to the effect of
psychicos. It's the soul.
The soulish man would be the best English translation.
The man of the soul receives not the things of God.
They are foolishness to him. Unfortunately, some of our
translations translates it. The natural man receives not the
things of God or in the NIV, it says the man without the spirit.
That's real unfortunate because that's not what Paul is saying.
He's not saying that the guy who looks at spirit, spirit,
spiritual things as foolish. It's he's not saying that that
man does not have the spirit. What he's saying is that the
dominant element of his nature is his soul.
So he evaluates everything through his own understanding,
his own mind, will, and emotions.
And in fact, God's got to sign off on his understanding before
he'll allow God to do anything in his life.
And all I can say is good luck with that one because the Lord
calls us to go beyond our understanding, to walk by faith
and not by sight. I loved what what Pastor Drew
said this morning. We taste and then we see, we
experience and then God explains.
But if we, if we demand God you, I demand you sign off with my
understanding. You explain all this before I
follow you. What did, what did he say to
Abraham, the father of our faith?
He said, hey, leave this place and go to a place you don't know
about yet. And then I will bless you and
you will be a blessing. That is the Christian life.
And so we have to trust him and we learn over time to trust his
great trustworthiness, but that that grows us up spiritually.
And so we use these terms and a lot of times we're not really
thinking about what they mean. So the, the carnal man is still
following the, the lust of his flesh.
I remember when I got saved, the lady who led me to the Lord gave
me money for a Bible and I went out and bought a keg with the
money and felt very, very guilty over it.
The difference between before I got saved and after I got saved
was not what I did with my money, but how I felt about it.
Because before I'd have been thinking, boy, I got her, I need
to find another lady. Look at me, some Bible money.
After I got saved, I was so broken.
I sat there and just cried in my beer.
There was a bunch of bikers drinking with me, and they're
probably that weird little kid, man.
I was a skinny little dude crying in my beer.
It wasn't that I was acting different.
It was my conscience now bothered me.
I was still a man of the flesh. I was a baby Christian.
My spirit man could barely make itself known within me.
The only thing it was saying you shouldn't do this.
Oh, no. And I was feeling guilty in my
flesh. Oh yeah, dragging my spirit man
around and I oh, no, no, no. And so then as we begin to walk
with the Lord, we begin to learn we got to deny our flesh.
But then the real issue in the Christian life begins to happen.
We've got to begin to discipline our soul.
No longer follow our own understanding.
Lean not on your own understanding.
Don't be led by your emotions. Your emotions are to be like
salt. They enhance the experience, but
they're not the meal. Don't ever sit down with a
bucket of salt and eat, OK? It's not healthy.
It's to enhance the, the, the, the experience, but it's not to
be the experience. But we're taught in this world
that emotion is the goal that I want to be happy.
It's not the pursuit of happiness.
Happiness is a result and not a it's not the goal.
And so we, we need to discipline ourself and then we need to feed
our spirit man. And as we understand spiritual
realities, we begin to grow and we become spiritual men and
women that are led by the Spirit.
That's why Paul says in Romans 8, he said they who are led by
the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
And understand when when Paul talks about sonship in the New
Testament, there's a difference between being a child of God and
being a son of God. In the Greek it's very clear the
the the child of God. It's Tecnon born 1.
The Greek for sonship is like hois.
I don't remember how to spell it like HOUISS or something like
that, but it has to do with sonship and sonship.
And the Roman Grecian mindset that Paul was writing to is
somebody that's mature and therefore can be given
responsibility in the household. And within the Roman household,
a child was a child within the house, but he was, he was
actually ruled over by a pedagogue, a male nanny that
would that would one day work for him.
So if that nanny was smart, he would treat him well, but he was
going to make him do with external pressure what he would
one do with internal discipline. That's Christian maturity, and
so there's And then what? Once he had reached at the point
of maturity, they would go through a ceremony of adoption
where there was a formal ceremony that they were brought
into adulthood and now they were given the right to use the
family name in the marketplace. And so that's why in the New
Testament, some translations will translate the Holy Spirit
as the spirit of sonship, others will translate it the spirit of
adoption. It's talking about the same
thing because Roman adoption was not the taking of a child, you
know, that didn't share the genetic code of the father and
making giving him a name. A child had the nature of the of
the father, but the the adopted son had the character of the
father and that was the difference.
And so God is wanting to grow us up.
Now, all of this is very, very important because you and I are
called to be spiritual men and women.
And we want to, we want to confront this lie that will keep
us living so far beneath what our inheritance is as sons and
daughters of God. Because we only have a mindset
for the, the, the, the seen world, that which is seen.
And God wants us to be men and women of the Spirit that are
accessing the things of the Spirit like John.
John had dreams and visions. He saw spiritual reality.
He was functioning according to that.
There are resources verses Paul says in Ephesians chapter one
verse 3, he says God, this is the King James Version.
God hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly
realms in Christ. In other words, there are
deposits of blessings that are for you and I God has reserved
them for us. There are inheritance, but
they're in heavenly realms. They're in the spirit.
It's not, it's not a physical thing.
It's not a personality thing. It's not a skill set.
There are spiritual blessings reserved for you and I and that
is not a someday thing. That's a right now thing.
And so we need to learn to access these spiritual
blessings. Now, I know we had a meeting
with the the elders the other night and we were talking about
kind of around this kind of stuff.
And I told him, I said I have this liability anytime I'm
talking about this kind of stuff.
I'm also listening through this lens, this ear.
They're thinking, what would a brand new newcomer who has never
been to Heartland, what are they hearing when I'm talking like
this? And it's this voice in my ear
that I've got a silence because it sounds so mystical.
But I'm telling you, it is thoroughly scriptural.
We are not limited to that which we see.
We are not limited to our natural skill set.
Ministry is not to be reduced to what we can do and the skills
that we can develop. There is a supernatural realm.
There is an unseen realm that God created simultaneously with
the scene realm and He wants to reunite them through you and I.
So. We see in the book of Genesis
that Jacob, he's, he's running from his brother and he stumbles
it and says he went to a place, but it was a specific place
unbeknownst to him. It was a place called Luz.
Luz loves and Jacob lays down there.
He puts a rock for his pillow and he takes a nap and in while
he's asleep, he has a supernatural dream.
Dreams are a way that God speaks to his people.
Do you know that? Not every dream.
Is a pizza dream. Not every dream is from God
either. But you know.
We, we were talking in the school this couple weeks ago and
it really struck me. I'd never, never really thought
about this, but Nebuchadnezzar, A Pagan king, has a dream and
he's ready to kill his his counselors because they can't
tell him what the dream was. He was so convinced that this
was a message from another world.
And it was, and it it struck me that this Pagan king had a
greater value for dreams than most Christians today.
Most. Believers, when the New
Testament says your young man shall see visions in your old
man shall dream dreams, it's a promise, it's a declaration from
the word of God itself. And we kind of just marginalized
that stuff. And we're, we want to take a
stand and say no, we want to resurrect those things.
We want to we want to enter into those.
And one of the primary ways in which God speaks is through the
dream stream. And Jacob experienced that.
So Jacob's laying there and all of a sudden he saw a ladder.
I love the NIV how it says it resting on the earth and
reaching into heaven. That's beautiful.
That will preach, not this morning, but resting and
reaching those two postures of the human heart.
We rest in Him and we're reaching.
It's not all rest. There's a contending and there's
a desire for more. But it's not all contending and
desiring for more. Because what will happen is you
will lose the gratitude for what you already have.
There's this thing of gratitude for what we already have,
resting in the finished work of Christ, but also reaching to
access more of what He has for us.
And we need to live in this tension.
And so there's this ladder. And that says that he saw the
angels ascending and descending on this ladder.
And then at the. Top God was standing and
speaking over Jacob, his future destiny.
And Jacob wakes up and he says wow, God was here, God is here
and I knew it not. And he calls it two things.
He gives 2 names to this place called Luz.
And it was actually it it, it became a new name for this
place. It was re renamed based on
Jacob's encounter with God. There are places in the earth
that are now identified with the encounter people had with God.
The Hebrides, Wales back in the 90s, Pensacola, Toronto.
There are places that become synonymous with an encounter
with God and this place, Jacob calls it two things, he said.
This is none other than the gate of heaven and the House of God.
He said. From an earthly perspective,
this is a dwelling place for the presence of God.
Do you know that God longs to have physical locations where
His presence dwells and people can go there and encounter God?
That is, that is a thoroughly scriptural idea all through the
Bible that God longs to have those places.
So it begs the question for you and I, how do we create that?
How do we make sure that this place, 1212 NW 36th St. in
Ankeny, IA, is that place? There are things that we can do
to cooperate to make sure that God, this becomes the House of
God. That's not just a term we use
for church buildings. There are church buildings that
are not houses of God, and there are other places that are houses
of God, but there's not so much of A church building.
It's because of the human activity in those places to
consecrate them that God begins to visit.
And he also said it's the gate of heaven.
It's an entry point for Heaven's activity into the realm of the
earth. When God can establish a place
on the earth, a physical location that is a place of His
presence, it becomes a gate or an entry point for the spiritual
realm to begin to interact with the physical realm.
We see this. Way back in Genesis and so this
place is renamed Beth El, Beth being house Elohim Beth, the
House of God. And it was Beth El from that,
from that time on. What Jacob didn't understand is
that he had stumbled into a place his grandfather Abraham
had sacrificed on it at and two different occasions and he had
created an environment through sacrifice that God was attracted
to this place and Jacob entered into it and encountered God
because of the price paid by a forefather.
I'm telling you there is a spiritual principle there that
others can enter places that have been established by the
sacrifice of others. Now that that some of you that
makes you a little nervous when I talk about sacrifice, like
wait, wait a minute, I thought Jesus paid it all.
He did. He paid everything for your
salvation. But there is a.
Price to pay for ministry that you and I must pay.
There is. There is the price for my
entrance to heaven. My reward in heaven will be
based on what I do with that on earth, and part of that is the
price I'm willing to pay, the sacrifice that I'm willing to
enact. There is a warfare to establish
those places, and a lot of people won because they don't
understand there's an ignorance about these things, about
spiritual warfare and the battle for those places that God wants
to establish his presence. There are people that are easily
pushed off their post, they're easily distracted or offended
and they'll back off and get caught up in their own struggle
because of it. It it hurts.
I get caught up and I leave the pursuit.
Andy and I were talking during the transition about Pastor Drew
when he got up here and I felt wait.
I don't know about you, but I felt wait on what he said.
And you know what? They've just recently gone
through, but there's this stand in the spirit and I felt I felt
an extra weight on his words. The enemy tries to get people
offended in the back off and we get caught up in and and I I say
that with all compassion. A lot of people have been, you
know, pushed off their post, but there is there is in the pursuit
of God. There are things that happened
that we don't understand and all of that, but we take that stand
and we keep pressing and things begin to move and places are
established as places of His presence.
There is such a thing as spiritual geography.
There are. Places that are more significant
in the spiritual realm, hovering over distinct geographic
locations. Not every household.
I'm talking family houses. Not every household carries the
same measure of God's presence. Not every.
Church carries the same measure of God's presence and it's not
it's not a competition. What I'm saying is that we we
yield and that our hunger and staying the course attracts the
presence of God. And it's so essential because
they are the regions of the earth need places where people
know if you need deliverance, if you need healing, if you need to
encounter the Lord, there is a place you can go to.
I don't know how. Many of you have been to
different locations that are in in an hour of tremendous
outpouring, but I'm telling you, there is an open heaven in those
places. It is you go in there and man,
that the voice of God is clear. It's just easy.
It's wonderful to be in those atmospheres.
So what is that? Are you just getting caught up
in the emotion? No, there is a spiritual reality
called an open heaven that we need to understand.
And there's a. Contention at the gates of those
places that when God finds a people who will stand there and
keep pressing in through thick and thin hardship and
heartbreak, they they can have a breakthrough that others like
Jacob can enter into. He didn't even understand that
his grandfather had paid the price for something he entered
into. I don't know about you, but that
stirs my heart. I want my kids.
I want my grandkids. I want my great, great grandkids
to be able to enter into something.
I want to pay the price so they don't have to.
I want them to go farther. I want them to pay the price to
go deeper. But there's more in God that's
available to us. And let me just kind of push on
this a little bit. OK, We have some other things,
but I'm telling you there is a, there is this thing called
paying the price. Don't.
Confuse your Christology and your pneumatology.
Your what? All that the studies of you know
what Jesus has accomplished and what the Spirit accomplishes.
Jesus accomplishes it for you. The Spirit accomplishes it
through you. Jesus accomplishes it for you
and you are you receive it as a gift.
But when the Spirit accomplishes it through you, you have a role
to play and that's where your reward comes in.
You're not rewarded for what Jesus did.
You are Jesus reward. But there is there are levels of
rewards given to believers in heaven and it's based on how you
respond to the purposes of God for your life.
And there's a very real enemy that will thwart that and stand
against you and you know, try to fight tooth and nail to get you
off your post. But if you will stay the course,
God will use you to make a different in the realm of the
earth. And one of those is to open up
open heavens. So we need to understand this.
This is very, very important because if we don't rightly
divide the word, then talking about paying a price sounds like
legalism. We just shut that down.
And what happens is we, we're securing our salvation, but
we're ineffective in ministry. It's the, it's that reaching
element. Now we need to be thoroughly
you, you don't want to you don't want to reach, you don't want to
get on a ladder that's reaching if it's not resting.
OK, so we need to have rest the finished work of Christ, we
solely on him. He he paid the price for me to
be right with God. But now when I'm thoroughly
resting, then I want to I want I want to experience more.
I want to do all that he's called me to do.
I want to experience all that he's given me to experience.
That makes sense. Thanks for listening to our
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you can do so at Heartland Church online.com/give.