Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: We all need basic thinking and principles in our Christian life. We need to get back to them over and over again. So often, I think I'm getting too complicated. I just need to get back to the old "pray and read your Bible and witness" because if we're not careful, we get the idea that we might have graduated from all those things. Of course, this isn't true.

As I began to look at this series, using the pictures in the book of Exodus to illustrate the things that make the Christian life go, I realized the Christian life is like a wheel. It has a hub in the center, which is Christ, and it has spokes. If any of those spokes are out of sync or too short or too long, the wheel isn't going to go around and you're going to have a bumpy journey. We're going to be talking about what some of those spokes are and how important it is to make sure that Christ is the hub and everything is in place in our life. I'm just going to recap for five minutes so that you know where I am.

We talked about the war that is waging, the war between good and evil. We talked about the fact that this war has been waged since the beginning of time, since man fell into sin. Satan came to this earth to mess the whole thing up. When did the greatest conflict this world has ever known begin? It began in Genesis when man rebelled against God. God became man's enemy and the war broke out. It's been going on ever since. The problem is Satan, who is God's enemy, has a grip on the souls of men. He wants to keep them; he's clutching them. There's definitely a war going on.

God wants the nations to be blessed. That's His plan; He has a great plan of blessing. His idea was that He would choose a nation starting with one man out of whom would come this nation. His name was Abraham, and through his sons, He would bring this nation into being, bless them, and keep them. He didn't choose the nation of Israel because they were better or bigger than anyone else. In fact, He says they are one of the smallest countries. When you look at that map, doesn't it ever strike you what a little tiny country Israel is? It is a tiny country, yet the nations of the world are gathered around it.

There has to be something more about Israel than the fact it's one tiny country in this world. We talked about how God had this great plan to bring blessing to the whole world. He said to Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel, "In thee, from thee, shall all the nations in the world be blessed." He began to put His plan into operation. His plan was to use individuals from this nation to lead the nation to be holy, to be an example, and to be missionaries that they might take God's message of this great plan of redemption and blessing to the whole world. That's His plan today: He takes individual people to implement His great plan.

Now, the war is on and the lines are drawn. Satan is on one side, and God is on the other. The people that God uses are going to be under constant attack from the enemy. That's how it's been from Genesis onwards. One of the problems God has is that this nation He chose, full of individuals He wanted to use, weren't sure whether they wanted to be God's people or part of the plan. They weren't sure if they wanted to stick their necks out and get their heads shot off by the enemy. A lot of them decided they didn't want to be God's instruments.

Even the very best of them God had trouble with, like Moses. He saved Moses when he was a little baby from being chewed up by the crocodiles on the Nile. He nurtured him in Pharaoh's palace and gave him palace training. Every single thing that happened to Moses was wonderful preparation for what God had in mind. He learned how to be a soldier and a statesman. He learned how to stand on his own. He needed all the skills he learned in Pharaoh's palace to be the deliverer he was delivered to be.

Everything that's happened in your life, the good and the bad, is your palace training. That's what God has built into your personality and your life in order that you might be His instrument and His soldier in this war. We looked at how God called Moses on a very ordinary day in the desert, where he had been for 40 years. Walking past a scrub bush, he suddenly saw it burning and yet not burning up. He turned aside to see, and God arrested him and called him.

It's funny how you can be in an ordinary day and God alerts you to the fact that He wants to use you, that you are His instrument and His Moses. When you're walking along doing nothing very much, He can press the alarm signal inside your spirit, and you think there's something more going on than the ordinary day-to-day things. I think about visiting the United States of America. I've never really understood what a call was. You hear people say they were called to the mission field or called to this work or that work for God. I don't know if you've ever wondered what a call feels like.

We were missionaries in England for 10 years, and my husband was traveling over here preaching a lot. One day he made it possible for me, after eight years of doing this on his own, to come for five weeks and to see what he had been doing. I was so excited. I came to America, but I didn't have a very happy first three weeks because I had a bad cold. By the time I got off the plane, it had gone to my inner ear and I'd lost my balance. They said the one thing I mustn't do is travel, but we were starting a trip all over the United States preaching and teaching.

I didn't see too much of him even though this was the only time I'd ever been to the States. For the first three weeks, I went by car and he went by plane. However, it was a wonderful five weeks. When the time came for me to say goodbye to Stuart and go back, we stood at Toronto Airport. I remember watching all the people saying hello and goodbye. Airports are very happy places because everybody's greeting someone, and also very sad places. I remember standing there not wanting to say goodbye. My life had been made up of goodbyes.

He asked me what I thought of America. I said, "Well, this might sound silly and I don't know why I'm going to say this, but I think for the first time in my life, I know what a call is. I feel called to America." It was just like walking through the day when Moses saw the scrub bush he'd seen for 40 years and suddenly it was different. Suddenly he was alerted to something deep inside. I went home that day and I began to pray, "Lord, why did I have this incredible love for America and this pull and this sense of rightness?" Home is the will of God. You feel at home when you're in the middle of the will of God. Suddenly I felt at home.

That's what happened to Moses. God said, "Take off your shoes; where you're standing is holy ground." For the Christian, that's true. Wherever you stand every day is holy ground because God's there. Remind yourself of that in the supermarket. Any time of the day is holy ground for the Christian because you and I are called to be where we are and to be who we are for Him. God's plan is always to use a person. After a lot of arguing, He got Moses to say, "All right, here am I." At first he said, "Here am I, send Aaron." Then he said, "Here am I, send me."

Moses went home and met Aaron, who started off being the spokesman. It was interesting that Moses had been telling God that he couldn't speak, even though God said, "Who made man's mouth? I'll give you the words; you just go and do what you're told." He argued and argued, and in the end, God said, "I know Aaron can speak well. He'll be your mouth. You tell him what to say and he'll speak for you." Moses went home, Aaron met him, and they decided to go and stand in front of Pharaoh.

Satan has a grip on men's souls. Moses is delivered to be the deliverer, but he's been in the backside of the desert, and you never deliver anyone if you stay there. If you're going to grow as a Christian, you're going to have to get out from that desert where you've been stuck for 40 years. Get this sense of calling and importance that God wants to use you. He can use you with your neighbors. I can't reach your neighbors, but you can. You can't reach my neighbors, but I can. We'll never do it if we're in the backside of a spiritual desert. We've got to go and grow.

Pharaoh has a grip on the people of God, and that's a picture of Satan's grip on people's lives. If you're going to grow as a Christian, the first thing you have to do is learn how to pray. I don't mean learn how to pray for yourself or your family specifically, although all that's important. I mean how to stand in front of Pharaoh and say, "Let my people go." That's growing in prayer. Do you know what it is to stand in front of the devil in the name of Jesus? Moses asked, "What am I going to say to Pharaoh? Pharaoh is bigger and stronger than me."

God said, "Tell Pharaoh I sent you. I AM. Jehovah God, the all-powerful one." When we stand in front of Pharaoh and tell him to let somebody go, we go in the name of Jesus. We'd better not go on our own or he'll have our lives, for he's far stronger than we are. We go in the name of Jesus and say to him, "Let my people go." Remember we're in a war. Satan is behind a lot of the things that are happening. Prayer takes Satan's fingers off the people we love and undoes his grip.

Maybe it's going to take a lot of prayer. You know what happens when you start to really pray for someone who's in the grip of Satan? He tightens his grip. You can see that in the illustration of a war. The more you bomb the guy, the more he tightens his grip. The madder he gets, the more determined he becomes. As you throw prayer bombs at Satan on behalf of whoever it is you're praying for, don't be surprised if he tightens his grip. I remember years ago in England there was a very famous man called Tom Rees.

He got himself thoroughly converted, but he had a wild brother named Dick. Tom began to pray for Dick. The more he prayed, the worse Dick became. He became wilder and more profligate. Tom would lay off for a bit and not pray, and Dick seemed to improve. Then he'd start and pray again, and Satan reacted. He never bothers if he's got somebody. Don't be surprised if you really start to grow in prayer and attack a stronghold, the enemy tries to tighten his grip. That's exactly what happened when Moses and Aaron stood in front of Pharaoh.

Pharaoh said, "I will not let your people go." God began to plague Pharaoh because He is on our side. He'd told Moses, "I'll go with you and give you the words to say. You be obedient." He'd already warned Moses, "I know Pharaoh will not let you go unless I come against him with a mighty hand." So you can expect him to tighten his grip. Just go on praying. To grow as a Christian is to go on until the people are free. Sin shall not have dominion over you; that's a promise of the Scriptures.

If you know someone in the grip of a habit that's destroying their lives, begin to pray for them consistently and powerfully. Stuart and I have a big photo album with rows of pictures of people, and we pray through them: the missionaries, the friends, the staff, and our enemies. You can make a picture album and attack for God's sake. Don't be surprised if the frogs and the lice come and the person you're praying for just gets worse and worse. Be encouraged! Say, "Aha, it's working!" That is to grow in prayer.

We give up far too soon. When you're jogging, there's a "wall" you hit. Most of us stop on this side of the wall where prayer is concerned. You come to a point of push and you say, "I can't pray anymore; this isn't working." Well, pray on. That is to be mature. If you've got somebody in mind who has a form of godliness without the power, pray for them. Pharaoh began to propose things. He said, "I tell you what. I won't let the people go. Why don't you just serve God here?" He was suggesting they be religious without reality.

I remember one of my relatives asking if I would have one of our young cousins to stay. She was having an affair with a married man and she was 15 at the time. The family was aghast. Stuart and I were at a mission center at the time. All my relatives thought I'd gone off my head. They said, "This woman's got religious mania." They must have felt dreadful about me and this weird man Stuart until their kid went wrong. Then they called us and asked us to talk some sense into her since we were religious.

Just as I was getting off the phone, my aunt said to me, "Now, we don't want her converting; we just want her made respectable." I remember saying to my aunt, "Auntie, I don't know any other way to make her respectable than converting her." She never came. They didn't want her converting. Yet you know what we've got to do? We've got to pray. You cannot serve God if you're in the grip of Satan and have never been converted. That's what prayer is for.

Then Pharaoh made another proposal in Exodus 8:28. He said, "Why don't you just stay in sight where I can see you? Leave an escape route so you can come back." He sees he's losing his grip on someone and so he suggests, "Well, okay, get into Christianity, but leave yourself a way of escape." We need to help people to see that's not going to work. If you're going to be a Christian, you've got to leave Egypt right behind. Full commitment is the only way to help people into Christ. You cannot become a Christian and stay in sight of the devil.

I was talking to a woman not long ago who asked what becoming a Christian would mean to her marriage. She said, "What happens if he doesn't like the person that I become?" I told her I had no idea how he'd react. She said, "Well, maybe I'll just get into it but I won't tell him." I said that's not going to work. Pharaoh said, "You that are men, go and leave your family behind." That's what Satan says to people. Religion's a private thing. You keep it to yourself and let them be whatever they want to be.

Moses said that's no good; the whole family has to go. God's intention is that the whole family come into the Promised Land, just like it was His intention that the whole family came into the ark. I know because I have prayed for an unbelieving family all my life. I know what it is to lose momentum and just give up. The temptation for me is to say, "Well, I'll just be the Christian and get on with it. Somebody else can witness to my family." Who's going to pray for my family like I can? If you are not growing in Christ, you will not have the prayer power to see your whole family come out of Egypt.

It is terribly important that we grow in the Lord, not for our own benefit only, but for God's and for the people we love. Satan's last proposal was, "All right, you go if you must, but leave the cattle and the goods behind." Moses said the cattle are needed for sacrifices and they had to take their goods with them because they were going to camp in the desert. You see, a Christian commitment isn't only a spiritual thing; it's a lifestyle that touches our person and our possessions.

There again, it's a sneaky thing. Maybe you're praying for people that are "saved, satisfied, and stuck." We need to pray for people like that, too. They're Christians spiritually, but they've never let their Christianity invade their possessions. I remember having a real battle over that when we were asked to come to the States. The church asked us to sell everything and come, and they would provide everything we needed. I thought that would be easy until I started to do it.

I discovered that I didn't have things, but things had me. That was very hard for me to realize. If I was going to follow Christ, sometimes He might say, "Well, pack it all up, sell what you can, and come." In the end, we came with two suitcases apiece. I remember laying the children's suitcases out and Judy saying, "Well, mine isn't very big." I told her that's all she was going to get. I remember her putting her dolls on the bed and talking to them. She said, "Now, you can come, but I don't think you'll fit and I'll have to leave you."

It was hard for the children, but they got the message that Christian commitment means everything. Satan's goal is to keep you in his grip anywhere he can. It is prayer individually that releases our souls, and then it is prayer that we can engage on others' behalf that releases other people. You need to know the victory first in order to help others in prayer. In this war, there's a winner, and the Christian knows who that winner is. Remember at Christmas we talked about God walking down the stairway of heaven with a baby in His arms.

God told Abraham, "I'll use one of your children's bodies. I'll come myself because there's nobody big enough, powerful enough, or holy enough to win this war but me." Eventually, God did that in the man Jesus Christ. If we're going to grow, we've got to understand that the war is won and it was won at the cross. Satan is not yet finished with us, and there are still battles going on, but the end of it is understood. God is the winner.

In the book of Exodus, you can see this in pictures. What was it going to take to make Pharaoh release the Israelites? The death of the firstborn. "Take a lamb," they were told. Thousands of years later, the death of the firstborn of God would release us, just as the death of the firstborn lamb released the Israelites. The blood was put on the doorposts. This little lamb was to remind them of what was going to happen in the future. The death of Christ was prefigured in this lamb.

The lamb had to be perfect without blemish. In John 1:29, John the Baptist said, "Behold the Lamb of God who's come to take away the sin of the world." I always remember the tragedy I felt in the play that I wrote called Majesty. I told somebody to find a lamb, but I hadn't checked it out and they got a black one. The orchestra was playing, and we couldn't go and look for another lamb. The lady was really upset with me, but I told her it should be white. It's a picture of Christ. We had to powder it with talcum powder, which made it sneeze all the way across the stage.

The lamb was to be one year old, the age of innocence, prefiguring Christ. It had the nature of meekness. It's a picture, and if you understand the cross, you will grow as a Christian. I recommend John Stott's The Cross of Christ. You need to understand the cross because then you'll never be the same again. It explains that you have been saved for a purpose, to be this missionary people for the world. Now we are the Israel of God.

God intends to use the church to reach the whole world. So we have to understand redemption, but we also have to understand that Satan is not going to give up. Pharaoh began to pursue the people that had got away from him. If you are used of God, you can watch out. The biggest arrows are kept for the soldiers on the front line. If you're on the front line for God, you're just an easy target. You're going to be the first ones to receive what the rage of Satan wants to do. Satan is mad, and he's pursuing you.

You will find yourself pursued by Satan, and as you grow in the Christian life, you'll come to the Red Sea, a sea of impossibilities. I remember saying as a young Christian, "I never expected the other side of redemption to find any trouble at all." I expected once I came to Christ that everything would be wonderful, but my troubles really began as soon as I accepted Christ as my Savior. As soon as the Israelites came through the Red Sea and were on their way to the Promised Land, the trouble really began. Satan began to instigate trouble in the camp.

Satan is like a great big angry wounded beast. God has him on a long leash, but He lets him out on that long leash. What he does is come to cause trouble in the camp. As the people began to go on and grow on, they began bickering among themselves. In 1 Corinthians 10, it says God got so fed up with them complaining. Christians spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. God says, "If you'd only quit complaining about everything." We must realize that we mustn't do the devil's work for him.

They started complaining about Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Watch it, because Satan is so mad you've got away. He will turn us against our leaders. After they'd finished being angry at Moses, God told them, "There's the cloud and there's the fire, and I've done all these things to protect you. Remember that." When I start complaining, I try to look at the situation through the cloud, which is the presence of God. I try to look at it through God's eyes and remember that it wasn't so good before.

There is trouble in the camp because that's what Satan does. They were angry at Moses and then they got angry at God. God told them to go forward. Sometimes I hear Him saying that to me. Grow on. Go on. I make birthday resolutions and decade resolutions. Whenever I became 30, 40, or 50, I spent a day in fasting and prayer. I set my mind towards praying that God would make the next 10 years of my life more productive for Him than any that had gone before.

That's a great way to spend time with the Lord. In Exodus 14:15, God tells the people to go forward. He told them to do that in front of the Jordan, which was huge in those days. The people looked at the Jordan and asked, "Does He want to drown us all?" But as they went forward and their toes touched the water, the waters parted. However, the waters didn't part until they put their feet in it. God sometimes has to say to you, "Just go on with the Lord, however impossible it seems."

What is it stopping you from growing in Christ? You have to figure out what it is and then you just keep going. It's up to you how long it takes you to get to the Promised Land. Pharaoh represents Satan, Egypt represents sin, and Canaan represents the victorious Christian life. You can spend 40 years wandering around in your spiritual desert, or you can get there in about three weeks. That's how long it would have taken them if they'd gone directly. The frightening thing to me is that the choice is ours.

We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go for it. Instead of griping about our leaders, use them as mentors. I heard about a famous preacher who made a list of all the great preachers he wanted to hang around. He asked them for an hour of their time because he felt that if he could hang around them, something would rub off on him. I did that when I was a young Christian. I asked people I admired in the Christian faith if they would give me a little bit of their time.

I asked one girl if I could sit in a room and listen to her pray. That's how I learned to pray. I found a mentor because I was determined to grow in the Christian life. Find a mentor and then be a mentor for someone else. Then you'll arrive at Marah, a bitter experience, but from Marah, you'll see Elim with all the refreshment. God will make those bitter waters sweet. There's going to be bitter things and sweet things, but the thing to do is to go on and arrive in the Promised Land. Know that the war is won, set your eyes on Jesus, and be determined to get there.

Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your goodness. We thank You that You choose people who feel inadequate and You help them to deliver people that need to get out from the clutches of Satan. You promise to be with them and give them the power and the words. You give them a weapon in this war: the weapon of prayer. Lord, I would like to know more personally about standing in front of Pharaoh and saying, "Let my people go" in the name of Jesus. Teach me to be a prayer warrior.

Teach me to grow in the area of my prayer life. Lord, so often we face difficulties and we get disillusioned perhaps with leaders. Help us to know the difference between having a mentor and worshipping people. Don't let us make the mistakes that the children of Israel made. Remind us that these things are written in our Bible that we might use them as good examples of how to grow on in God. Above all, Lord, help us to remember that the war is won and that what it took was a cross on a hill.

Help us to understand and learn the cross. Help us also to have a realistic realization that Satan is mad with us as soon as we begin to be effective and holy. As soon as we begin to pray effectively, he's going to be there. Help us to look at him through the cloud and to go straight ahead and to grow. Help us to remember above all that we are Your Israel, the body of Christ. You want to use us to tell the world that everybody should be blessed by coming into a right relationship with Him. For Christ's sake, Amen.