Dwelling Place

Al Pittman: We need some brothers around us that will help us press. Not be depressed, but to press into Jesus. Come on, bro. Come on, get it up, man. You knew it. Come on. Come on, man.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to the Dwelling Place, a radio ministry from Pastor Al Pittman of Al Pittman Ministries. The purpose of this radio program is to encourage you, strengthen your walk with the Lord, and grow. To support this ministry financially or learn more about the ministry, visit us online at alpittmanministries.com. That is alpittmanministries.com. Your donations keep this radio ministry going. Thank you for partnering with us.

Today, we finish the message, "The Pursuit of God," from Philippians 3, verses 8 through 11. In this message, we are encouraged to press intentionally toward God's call, supported by fellow believers while remembering that God's goodness and mercy are pursuing us. Now, here's Pastor Al.

Al Pittman: A weight loss article said to take stock of where you are. Applied spiritually, we think of 2 Corinthians chapter 13, but the first part of verse 5 says, "Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith." In other words, do not deceive yourselves. If we're going to keep that sin off, don't give it a new name. That is a problem with sin today is that it used to be sin yesterday, but mankind takes it and gives it a new label, calls it a disease, and gives you a pill for it. It is still sin to God, and it must be repented of. Do not deceive yourselves. If it is sin, call it sin.

Physically speaking, if this was a weight loss conference, I would say to you: if your waist is 38, stop buying 34 pants. Examine yourself in the mirror. In the mirror is God's word, we could say that. But examine yourself. Stop deceiving yourself. The third step in keeping the weight off, if you will, is to set realistic goals. Spiritually speaking or the spiritual application, you could say Romans chapter 12, verse 3, for I say through the grace given to me to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.

I love that. Not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to. Set realistic goals. In other words, hear me now, be careful that you are not adding unwarranted condemnation to your life. The enemy, the devil, is the accuser of the brethren. He is making accusations against you even now. A lot of times those accusations come because we have set unrealistic goals for ourselves and we bring upon ourselves unwarranted condemnation. And yet the Bible tells us there is now no condemnation, Romans 8:1, for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Rather than trying to impress God, let God put the impression of His love and grace upon your life because that is what we live by: by God's love and by His grace. Rather than trying to impress Him—God is not impressed with me—He wants me to be impressed by His love and to respond to His love and His grace. The fourth thing in regards to weight loss physically, but in the spiritual sense we are talking about here today, the fourth thing is identify resources and support. If you are going to continue to keep the weight off, identify resources and support.

Spiritually applied, the primary spiritual resource and support, number one, the resource is the fear of God. The support is the word of God. We need that in our lives. Proverbs chapter 3, verses 7 and 8 talks about the resource: do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and depart from evil. It will be health to your flesh and strength to your bones. We need the fear of the Lord. We need the word of the Lord as our primary resource and support. The fifth thing that the article talked about finally is that you should continually monitor your progress.

Spiritual application of that is Philippians chapter 2, verses 12 to 13, where Paul says, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure." Listen, living for His good pleasure is progress in our pursuit of God. Pursuing Him, as David was a man after God's own heart. In order to pursue Him, I have got to keep the weight off. Those are those great five spiritual weight loss steps that we can apply to our own lives that we might be found in Him, Paul says.

Not with a righteousness of my own, but with that righteousness which comes from God, the righteousness of Christ and is by faith. Here is the third and final evidence. We talked about losing and gaining, and now finally, knowing. The third and final evidence of a genuine pursuit of God is to know Him. Why are we here? To know Him. Why do we read our Bibles? To know Him. Why do we pray? To know Him. It is about knowing Him, not appeasing men, not impressing people, but knowing Him. Do you know Him? You will become the very thing that you pursue.

If we want to know Him, we are pursuing Him, then we will be like Jesus. It is important for us to understand that Christ must be our pursuit. We are pursuing Him that we may know Him. I did not pursue my wife so that I could live in the same city she is in. I wanted to know her. It was pretty serious. And so it is with the Lord. We want to know Him. Lord, we seek to know You. Verses 10 and 11, Paul says, "That I may know Him." That I may know. "Ginosko" is the Greek word for that phrase "to know." It is to learn to know, to come to know intimately.

I love that. To learn to know. Having been married so long, all my illustrations are marriage illustrations. But to know my wife, you thought you knew her when you married her. You are standing there with that goofy look on your face saying, "I do." And now you do not know. You said "I do," but no you do not. And she changes over the years, I am telling you. You have got to keep up with her. It is not just head knowledge; it is experiential knowledge. Experiential knowledge. I want to know.

I do not want to just read a book. I do not want to read about great men of God who had a relationship with God and God did these mighty things through them. I want God to do something mighty through my life. I want to know Him. A genuine pursuit of Jesus is a daily encounter with three things: daily God's divine power, God's divine fellowship, and God's divine hope. I want to know Him and the power, Paul says, of His resurrection. The power of His resurrection. What does that mean? That means that I want to know Him and I want to live by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

Are you living by that power? If you are not living by the power, the devil will make a punk out of you. He has got power; you are going to be a punk. It is the power of the Holy Spirit. It is not by might nor by our physical power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord. Lord, I cannot do this without You. That is why I love that last song they sang because it talked about God's faithfulness. In that song, "Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine," Lord, this is my story. It is Your power that has brought me this far, not my program, not my personality, but Your power.

The power of God. Paul said, "I want to know You and that power." The power of Your resurrection and to know Your power. I want to live by Your power. And I thank God for that because God gives power to people like me and people like you, people who are weak. He gives power to those who are weak. He chooses the foolish things, the unwise things, the weak things that He might be glorified through earthen vessels that cannot do it on their own. He gives us power. In fact, the Bible says in Isaiah chapter 40, verse 29, that He gives power to the weak and to those who have no might, He increases strength.

Hallelujah. Do you feel weak today? Do you feel like you have got no might? Oh, there is power in the name of Jesus. Every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. There is power in His name. Paul said, "I want to know Him not only in His power, but to know Him also in His fellowship." What fellowship? Fellowship of His suffering, being conformed to His death. We talk about, "Oh, I want to know Him in His fellowship. Fellowship in the church." We have got fellowship. No, the fellowship of His suffering.

Something I have learned a long time ago in my pursuit with the Lord: in order to make a man, God must break a man. Many times when He is making us, He is breaking us to make us into the men that we need to be. Lord, I want to fellowship with You. I want to go to the church services and get my Holy Ghost dance on. I want that kind of fellowship. But true fellowship is when you are by yourself, when nobody answers your call, when you have got to lean on Jesus and nobody else.

When you are alone in that suffering, I want you to know just as it was with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, there is somebody in the flames with you. His name is Jesus. He will never leave you. He will never forsake you. He is there with you. Your friends may abandon you. Listen, everybody that started with you when you came to Christ will not finish with you. But keep your eyes on Jesus who is the author and the finisher of your story, of your faith. He is there in the furnace with us. The fellowship of His suffering.

Why do we go through the fellowship of His suffering? We enter the fellowship of His suffering because of the pursuit. Sometimes the Lord is leading us and Lord is guiding us, and you are in a situation right now maybe you are thinking, "Lord, I have been pursuing You, but this situation I am in, this cannot be You." But it can be because in order to make you, sometimes God has got to break you. God has got you in this place where you are right now, and you are wondering how did I get there. You got there because you are pursuing Jesus.

A lot of people will pursue Jesus as long as it feels good. But when it gets rough, that is where your fellowship is really sanctified. That is where in the furnace of affliction where your faith becomes real and your pursuit becomes real. Anybody can pursue Him when the sun is shining and you are on the beach. We do not have beaches in Colorado. But pursuing Him when it is raining and it is freezing and snowing, when it is rough and it is hard, that is truly the pursuit of fellowship with Him.

And why do we pursue Him even when it is suffering? That we might be conformed into the likeness of Jesus. Being conformed, the Greek word for that phrase is "summorphoo." It means to sympathize, to feel for the wretched, which is interesting, to have compassion on. That is really interesting to me. So Lord, You want me to pursue You to have fellowship in Your sufferings so that I can be less like myself and more like Jesus, so I can sympathize with my wife, I can sympathize with my friends, I can sympathize with that sinner that is lost.

You see there? That is why we pursue You, Lord, because He wants us to be like Him so that we can be light and salt to those who are lost in the world. I mean, we are always picking on the younger generation and all that, and I thank God for all these young people that are here. Listen, we were young once and foolish too. Well, we are still foolish. But we were young once. As soon as I started getting on these young people and started thinking about how they dress and all this kind of stuff, then I remember platform shoes and I just shut up.

Silk shirts, bell bottoms, elephant pants, hip huggers, tie-dye shirts. All these things that we were jacked up, our generation. We were messed up. And God had mercy on us, and God will have mercy on the younger generation. But where is that mercy going to be poured out through? It is through those who are like Jesus, who are conformed to His likeness. And that is why Paul said, "I want to know His fellowship. I want to be like Jesus." You are impatient with your wife, you need to be more like Jesus.

Impatient with other people, need to be more like Jesus. Brokenness found in fellowship with His suffering enables us to have more empathy for those around us. Lastly, Paul said, "I want to know Him not only in His power and His fellowship, I want to know Him also in hope." What is that hope? It is the hope of resurrection that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. With heaven before me—I have to remind myself of this all the time when I am going through stuff. Sometimes I forget. With heaven before me, the best is always yet to come.

With heaven before me, the best is yet to come. Paul's hope—we live, we have a living hope the Bible calls it within us—the hope of resurrection, that to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord. We have this hope that is immovable, it is irrefutable, it is sealed in faith through faith in Christ Jesus: the hope of resurrection. He says that I may attain the hope of resurrection. Paul lived with a hope. And all those apostles who were martyred for their faith, for their pursuit of Jesus Christ, they carried within them a hope.

What is going to get us through all this mess that is going on in this country and in the world today? It is the great hope, the undying hope, the living hope that we have through faith in Jesus Christ of resurrection. That this too shall pass. Heaven and earth will pass away, the Bible says, but God's word will remain forever. Resurrection, the hope of resurrection we have. Regardless of our present condition, we have a hope. Don't let the enemy rob you of your hope. In conclusion, in our pursuit of God, we are called to lose that we may gain, that we might know Him.

We are called to lose to gain that we might know. And that, my friend, is an ongoing process in our lives. So Paul says in Philippians 3, he says, "I press toward the call that he has in Christ Jesus." And we have to press in our pursuit; we have to be intentional. Now when I was a young man, I used to be a gym rat with a bunch of other guys, we were all trying to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And you had to press. Remember you had that guy straddling your head, helping you to do that last bench press, 315 pounds or something?

And he'd yell at you. Come on, man! And he would start talking about your mama and everything. But they always tell you that last one is the best one. Come on, we need to press. I know there is that gymnasium out there that is called the "no judgment zone." Any of you belong to that gym? Turn your membership in and get to a real gym. Because back then you could judge people when I was lifting. It was yelling and screaming, and you had those metal weights and you are clanging them on and you are throwing them on the ground.

You are doing that so all the girls are trying to look and say, "Ooh." I just say that because we need some brothers around us that will help us press. Not be depressed, but to press into Jesus.