The Way Of The Lord: “Reveal, Then Respond”

“The Way Of The Lord: Reveal, Then Respond”

Dorian J. Owens

June 4th, 2009

In the few years that I’ve been on this earth, I can tell you that I have heard the following phrases many times: “Come, Lord Jesus”, and, “We invite you in”, and “Show up and show out”, etc., etc. As time progressed, and because I heard those phrases so much, I eventually assumed that we (as believers) have to talk to Him first so that He could reveal Himself to us. I can’t tell you how many Sundays I experienced where so much human effort was exerted in worship services to “invoke His presence in the room,” (through much singing, shouting, and praising, and people falling out, etc.) and then, over the course of time, I’d notice that people were leaving the church and not coming back. The reason was quite simple: People were “trying” to “respond” to Him first, and then think that the Lord would “show up” in the midst of the service. Then, when there was no evidence of the Lord “showing up” in the service, no revelation took place, which set up the scene for religion to take hold. The good news is that the Lord has already given us a general pattern of how He works “revelation” and “response”, and even the order of how both are to be arranged! All we have to do is RECEIVE what He already said, so here goes:

Here’s the truth: The Lord FIRST reveals Himself to us, and then we respond to Him, NOT the other way around. I’ll say it again, because this is the point of this article: The Lord first REVEALS Himself to us, and THEN we respond to Him. Often times, we (in our religious ways) “respond” to Him first (through praying about our situations, and invoking His presence, etc.), and then we THINK that He reveals Himself to us because we “responded” to Him first. But here’s another truth about Him: We can’t “find Him out”, or “discover Him” because He’s the Lord! Just think about this: How can we “find out” about someone that is not visible to the human eye, but yet is the very One that created you before you even KNEW what the word “creation” was? (That’s like trying to find out/discover “The Force” in Star Wars: you know it’s there, you know it’s powerful, but you can’t see it or touch it, and if you didn’t hear about it, you wouldn’t have even known that it was called “The Force”….) The answer is we can’t find Him out UNLESS He reveals Himself to us. Think about this: When Adam was created and walked the earth, the ONLY evidence that He had that there was such a person as The Lord was His voice. If the Lord hadn’t spoken to Him, Adam would not have known that the Lord existed! But, just for context sake, let’s look at this pattern of “Revelation and then response” in more detail….

A good place to start is our lives in general. I don’t know about you, but when I look back over my life, I found that I learned things by HEARING, which then brought about REVELATION, which created a RESPONSE within me…. For example, when I learned how to spell, I first heard the word, and then (because I knew the alphabet, and how to put letters together in order to form words; “Line UPON line; precept UPON precept”; you’re hearing well if you got that last point (lol)….) I got the REVELATION of the correct spelling of the word (ex: I heard the word, “cat”, and then the teacher would spell the word out for me). I then would RESPOND by writing the word down, and saying it, and then form sentences with it… In essence, that’s how the Lord works in us: He initially reveals Himself to us (through the preacher TESTIFYING about Him). After hearing comes the REVELATION of who He is. The word that came forth is left in us, and it’s built up in us by His Spirit (and the evidence comes through us “seeing” Him, along with situations differently, our vocabulary changing and growing, etc….). Because of the transformation taking place (from the word that we heard….), we simply RESPOND back to Him regarding what He said (which is faith/worship; see Romans 10:14). Also, the word that we initially heard continues to be built up inside of us with MORE words, which allows us to form sentences (i.e. establish the connections between other scriptures that we heard in the past together as one body of text, which helps us establish who He is, how He operates, acts, sees us, what He would do for us, etc.; this, in essence, establishes “the Way of the Lord”….). The sad fact is that we tend to operate from the OPPOSITE way, which is to think that we “know” Him first, then respond to Him (by saying things like, “show up and show out”, or “we invite you in”, or “try” to get Him to work our situations according to our terms, etc.), and then we THINK that He will reveal Himself to us, when the reality was that He wasn’t there because we didn’t get any initial revelation from Him in the first place (heavy!!!)….

Another fundamental truth about Him is that He came to live IN US, and when He comes to live in us, He doesn’t leave us (Hebrews 13:5)! Think about this: In the Old Testament days, the Lord would COME UPON a person, and then leave, but in the New Testament days (which started on the day of Pentecost), He came and lived INSIDE us, and He doesn’t leave! So, in essence, there is no need for us to say, “Lord come in”, or “we invite you in”, or “show up and show out”, because He’s already given us His Spirit to live inside us….

Lastly, keep in mind that He is the one who reveals Himself to us, and that we can’t “find Him out”, no matter how hard we try. We simply hear what He’s already said, which brings about REVELATION, and then He creates the RESPONSE so that we can live each day unto Him….