Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Let me take you to Isaiah, same place as Isaiah chapter 50, and that's where we'll be. Dear Lord, open our eyes to behold wondrous things out of your law, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

If we need to know that we're significant, then our significance lies in our relationship with God. That's where we finished the little thought that I had on significance, and that's where it's at. The more time you spend with God, the significant God, in your significant relationship with the significant God, the more significant you'll feel. It's as simple as that. You'll find that you matter. You matter to Almighty God if you matter to no one else, and that will begin to give you a sense of worth and value, which is a search that people are on. You need to spend time with your words nesting at his feet. You need to spend time in worship.

Many times people ask me what my favorite verse is, and I don't have a favorite verse. I have many pieces of Scripture that are very special to me, but if I had to pick, if my life depended on it, I'd probably say Isaiah chapter 50 because there's just a couple of little verses on this theme of worshiping that have been a huge help to me. Beginning at four, this is talking about Christ, the servant of the Lord, but we can apply it because we are the servants of the servant, and we can apply it to ourselves. The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary. He awakens me morning by morning. He awakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears, and I have not been rebellious. I have not drawn back.

The picture is of the Rabbi shaking the pupil awake early in the morning to come and learn his lessons and be instructed. Early, early in the morning, our Heavenly Rabbi wants to shake us awake in the morning, and we are supposed to go and listen. That echoes chapter five. Remember, when you go into the house of God, go there to listen and not to offer the sacrifice of fools. Do not be hasty with your mouth. Let your words be few and stand in awe of God. Here again, there is this wonderful picture that the Sovereign Lord is shaking us awake in the morning. He's trying to get us out of bed so that we can meet with him.

We have no idea who we're going to meet during the day who is weary—weary of life, weary of their marriage, weary of their job, weary of everything. Their whole life has not turned out as they wanted it to be, and they're disappointed with life. You and I bump up against people like that all the time. If you have met with him in the morning, God will give you a word for the evening or the afternoon or whenever it is that you meet the weary one. He'll give you a word, and it will match absolutely.

I think my most famous recollection of that was writing my book on Job, which was a stupid thing to do. Don't do that. If you want to write a book, don't write it on Job because I did have this feeling as I began to write the book that maybe God's going to give me all sorts of personal illustrations for this book, which was true. I was just finishing my chapter on feelings and faith because Job did not feel God. His whole world had collapsed plus he got sick. He did pretty well until he got sick. When you feel terrible, then your faith somehow gets all mashed up in that, and he had had it at this point in his life. He doesn't know where God is. He cannot feel God near just when he needs him the most.

I am writing on this, trying to find answers from Job and other places, and I go and take my best friend, my dearest friend, for her last chemotherapy treatment. After it, at this point, she's dragging an oxygen tube around with her, and it's all over basically. We go and sit in her van and we look over Lake Michigan. There's dead silence in the van, and I said to her, "What's your concept of God at the moment?" She said, "God is cruel." I asked, "What do you feel about God?" and she said, "I feel nothing. I look here, I look there." She almost used Job's words: "I go to the north, he's not there. I go to the south, I go here, where is he? I can't feel him."

God had given me, as I sought a paragraph to finish that very difficult chapter, a phrase, a one-liner. It was this: When you can't feel him with your feelings, feel him with your faith. That feels different. It was in his "knowings" he was going to survive what happened to him. It's the next couple of chapters where he says, "I know that my redeemer lives." Job did not say, "I feel that my redeemer lives," because he didn't.

But you know him in your knowings. What do you know about God? Let's play a little game. What do you know about God? I'm going to start: God is good. There was dead silence. I shut my eyes and prayed for her. After a long, long silence, very quietly she said, "God is here." I said, "Right. And God is merciful." Then she began, and we began, and I watched her climb up out of her pit of absolute despair into faith. When you can't feel him with your feelings, feel him with your faith. What do you know about God? Affirm it, get on your knees and start, and worship. You are God when everything's bad. You are here, even when I can't feel you. Just go through who he is and what you know he is.

It's what we think and what we know that save us when we're in a Job-like situation. I have written in my very first Bible when I came across these words, "God said to me: Get up, Jill, and listen to me, and then go out and listen to them. Get up and listen to me, go out and listen to them, and match the word I give you as you worship with the weary one that you will surely meet along the way."

Solomon is doing that in chapter 12. He's coming to God, he's worshiping, and words that have worshiped are words that work. He's writing them down and he's saying, "I'm on a mission. I'm on a mission, and I'm going to use every single piece of my life that's left to me that God gives me to help you not to do what I've done and to shore up your spiritual disciplines. Don't get lazy. Be reading that scroll, reading, marking, memorizing while you're young because you sure won't be doing it when you're old. You'll just be trying to remember the way home after all of that. So wake up, listen up, speak up." That's the three things that come out of that and are also echoed.

What I love about this story of Solomon is he always gives you that last chance—the second chance, the third chance, the fourth chance to get back on track, to make a significant mark rather than a significant mess. That's your choice. You have a choice. I have a choice to make a significant mark in the world because of the significant relationship you have with God.

I said the devil will get you at your Achilles' heel. It's a bit like Edinburgh Castle. Edinburgh Castle is a beautiful castle in Edinburgh in Scotland. It's only ever once been taken in war. It's a magnificent castle and had a huge moat around it. It's one of the widest moats there are. When it was being beleaguered one day, I don't know who was trying to take Edinburgh Castle, but what happened was they had a spy within. They had one of their men planted inside the castle. Late one night, he let down the drawbridge, and they came in and took the castle.

Within us, we have that spy within. We have that dissenter. We have what we call the flesh. We have that person that we're born with, and they're going to let down the drawbridge at the point of your weakness. Your Achilles' heel, they let down the drawbridge. Every single person will have that Achilles' heel, and you have within you the enemy. You've got Satan without, and you've got yourself within. The more you worship and the more you get to love God to distraction so you can hardly stand it, the better you will be at dealing with that enemy within and dealing with the enemy without. Guard your heart, because out of it are the issues of life, says Solomon in the book of Proverbs.

Solomon's heart clung to those women he should never have married. He was forbidden to marry foreign women, and he married a thousand of them or whatever. For us, women outside our marriage vows are the foreign women. I sometimes have nowhere else to go for a meal at the end of a journey but the bar. I get there, and there are these groups of businessmen there and these groups of businesswomen there. I just watch all the stuff happening, and I pray quite honestly. In my mind, I know there's a little woman at home with two or three kids who has no idea that her husband's going to end up in bed with one of those businesswomen he's traveling with. That's what happens. You go along the corridor and you just see this thing, and you see the parties, and you see people coming and going. At 2:00 in the morning, it's still going on.

Solomon, being wise enough to get his life right with God, wants to move us towards keeping our lives right, never having all those regrets that I trust we'll never have. A life lived doing it his way is a life of fulfillment, and you get to that point and you get the peace, you get the joy that never ends and a life of no regrets. Somebody put eternity in your heart and said this is possible. The God of eternity can inhabit your life, and he can be dressed with your humanity. Divinity dressed with your humanity, that's Christianity.

We have a friend called Johan who lives in Israel. His story is an incredible story. He was a young man in the 70s who put a backpack on, started to go around on the drug route, and ended up in Eilat on the beach in Israel where a lot of kids were ending up. He was looking for the Lord. He built a little hut in the Sinai Desert along with three or four other travelers, they called themselves. Judy Pecks was one of them, a Jewish girl who left an Ivy League school and took the drug route to Alaska. She fished for a bit with the boyfriend she was living with, left him there, went to Israel to find her roots, and ended up in the Sinai in another little hut in this little community.

A Dutchman ended up there—about seven or eight in this little community of travelers. One day John, another John, not Johan, knocked at his little hut door, at Johan's hut door. The night before, he had got to the bottom of his backpack—it had taken him a couple of years to ever empty it—and he found a Bible that his mother had put in his backpack. He'd never found it until that moment. He stayed up all night, and he read most of the Bible, all that he could, that night. In the morning, John appeared at the door and, rather like the man in the desert that stopped the Ethiopian eunuch, said, "Do you understand what you're reading?" Johan said, "How can I except somebody explain it to me?" almost in the words of the Ethiopian eunuch.

This John had just come to faith through a Messianic Jew in the marketplace, and all the lights had gone on in about a week. Once the Holy Spirit comes in, one of his jobs is to be our teacher to make it all make sense. He sat down by Johan and led him thoroughly and totally and irrevocably to Jesus Christ. God had put eternity in his heart, and Stewart and I had the privilege of having a week there with the incredible collection of people that live in that shelter. It was fabulous. I think there were 19 or 20 nationalities in that meeting that night. As I listened to their testimony and as I saw the non-Christians who'd found their way there, as I listened to their stories through interpreters in all these different languages, I just kept thinking God has put eternity in their heart. God has drawn them to a place where somebody can tell them all about it.

Life is brief, brief, brief. The word meaningless can be used in different ways because Hebrew is such a rich language. In some places, it is brief. Right at the beginning, the words of the teacher, the son of David, King in Jerusalem, say meaningless, meaningless. That nuance of it there is brief. Everything is so brief, so let's get on the bandwagon and do something about it. One thing that the Bible says is that we are busy chasing after the wind when life is like a mist and the word is vapor. If you ever go out in the cold air and you breathe, you see this vapor that just disappears like that. That's the word that's used here in the book of Ecclesiastes to describe how quick it is.

In fact, if you use different translations, you'll find, "What is your life? It's like a puff of smoke, visible for a little while then dissolving into thin air." Your nothing but a wisp of fog catching a brief bit of sun before disappearing. This comes from the book of James, where he picks up the theme. The brother of the Lord Jesus, this is what he says: Now listen, you who say today or tomorrow we'll go to this or that city, carry on business and make money. You don't even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You're a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Indeed, you should say, "If it's the Lord's will, we shall live and do this or that." As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. How do you know what will happen tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog.

We do not know, and when he calls we have to go. Have you ever met anyone that's managed to stay? I haven't. Your life is a mist, not a must, and the world needs to know it. The only deeply lasting, everlasting significant element of joy that you'll find is in your relationship with him. You need a spiritual dimension to your life.

I told this story when I first did Ecclesiastes in the church service, of finding myself sitting on a plane next to the poker champion of the USA. I knew he was somewhat colorful when he came in the airplane. He had all this gold on and his clothes were quite incredible. As he was heading down the aisle, I thought I was the only one with a seat empty here, so he's going to sit right by me, which he did. He was talking to me halfway down the plane. He was bright, he was loud, and he was very colorful. I had no idea if he was a race car driver or someone flashy and important. We were near Las Vegas, so he sits down. Before he sat down, he's saying to me, "Do you know that I'm the poker champion of the USA?" I said, "No, I didn't know that, but I'm glad to meet you. My name's Jill Briscoe."

He sits there and I listen to him going on, and I learn a lot. I said, "I don't know anything about poker champions at all, so tell me about yourself." I didn't even need to say tell me about yourself. He didn't need permission. He was a real neat guy, I really liked him. He just kept me absolutely fascinated and told me he was going to one more poker championship and he was going to win it because there was nobody there that was going to do anything about this.

I listened and listened, and I said, "I've listened very carefully. You've told me about your wife and your children, your houses, and all of this and all the championships, and that you retired at the age of 28 because you had enough money. I haven't heard that you've got a spiritual dimension to your life. Do you have one of those?" He said, "What's that?" I thought you might not have one, so I just wanted to check. But to be really happy, you need a spiritual dimension. You have all these dimensions to your life, but you don't have a spiritual dimension. He said, "I'm happy enough without one." I asked, "Wouldn't you like to be happier?" He said, "If I say no, that would be silly. Who wouldn't want to be happier? But I couldn't be happier." I said you can't know that because you haven't got a spiritual dimension to your life, so you cannot talk with authority about what you'd feel like if you had.

But I have, so I can talk with authority about it. I don't have all the dimensions you have, but let me tell you. I told him about my dad who had all the dimensions he had, who lived in a castle, his own salmon river, and had done it as Ecclesiastes said with the labor of his own hands. He started buying bicycles and fixing them and knocking on doors and saying, "Can I help you mend your car?" as a boy of 16, swearing he would never work for anyone else, only for himself. He did, and he built one of the biggest automobile empires in Britain, then he bought his castle.

I told him about my mom coming to visit me in my little tiny cottage at the youth center where we served and her very wistfully saying as she was leaving, "God lives here, doesn't he, Jill?" I said, "Yes, Mom." Then I took a deep breath and I said, "I'd rather live in my cottage with Jesus than in my castle without him, Mom." She just nodded sadly and said, "I understand." Then she left. She didn't want to leave. Little tiny cottage we lived in, nothing like my castle I'd been brought up in, but the joy was almost tangible.

God brings into life new life. It's a miracle, a mystery, and man cannot figure out what God is doing. "I use my wisdom," says Solomon, "to figure it out, but it was beyond me." What he needed was the wisdom of God, which God gave him.

Everything is weary, it just goes round and round. Life is boring, life is brief, and life is boring. But somebody put eternity in my heart, and somebody gave me the gift of time, though brief, to realize it. Somebody whispered to my soul that I was made for another world. When you find within yourself a desire that nothing on earth can satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world. Though I live my life this side of the front door of forever, somehow I know someone is at home in the universe and he's waiting for me. According to Ecclesiastes 12:9-14, he is going to ask me, "What on earth were you doing?" That's what he's going to ask all of us. Will I answer I was chasing the wind? Or shall it be I will answer him, "Lord God, as best I knew how, I feared you and I kept your commandments, for that is the reason you created me, and that is my chief end and my highest joy."

There can be joy in being obedient. Of course there can. This is the grace place, and Jesus is joy. God in Galilean cloth making my heart smile. Then I realize that it's good and proper for a man to eat and drink. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work, this is a gift of God. He can give you the world, he can give you a castle full of things, but the enjoyment in the things he gives you is also a gift. That's why people can have all these things and people and amass and accumulate and be miserable because you have to know him to receive as well the ability, the enabling to enjoy the gifts he gives you.

Specifically, the simple things and gifts of life like eating, drinking, and labor. See that theme all the way through this book. The incredible thing is contentment with your lot in life in the work, whatever it is, is a gift, and he gives with the blessings that he wants us to have in this life the joy in them. Because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart, what are you occupied with?

Joy has to do with the presence of God. The idea is to be occupied in the inner recesses of your life with God himself—not God and anything, not God and people, not God and things, not God and fun, not God and pleasure, not God and sex, not God and anything. God, God, God. God's presence gives new dimensions to all things. Legitimate things are all God's gifts. Know the joy. God and freedom, outside this country, people don't understand the Americans that are saying if I lost my freedom I could never smile again.

Joy is not to be found even in the freedoms that we are incredibly privileged to enjoy. As I sat in attics and cellars and moved around the underground church in an Asian nation, I saw joy, and I didn't want to come home. I miss those sweet women who walked into my life and kicked their shoes off and made themselves at home forever.

I wrote about them, and this is what I said: These sweet women know the difference between hardship and inconvenience. I wonder if we do. Happily, though not without tears, they count ministry a privilege, not a punishment. They don't whine in the middle of trials. They show up at church even if it takes them two hours by foot to get there, even with the constant threat of imprisonment for their faith. What an incredible privilege and joy to get to know them, love them, serve them, and pray for them. Having a ministry of presence, silence, and tears among them changed me and hopefully my soul will never return to its original small shape. Thank you, sweet women, for walking into my heart and showing me Christ. From your eyes, he beckoned me. From your heart, his love was shared till I lost sight of you and saw the Christ instead.

Did their joy depend on freedom? No. On money? No. On things? No. Even on the relationships that are all they have? No, it depends on God. Joy is Jesus, God in Galilean cloth making my heart smile. You know you're on holy ground when the joy is there. Deep, deep joy. Well, fear God and keep his commandments, that's the whole thing. Realize that one day you'll be held accountable not just for what you knew but what you had a chance to know. Bibles all around, and the fact that you didn't open one will mean nothing at all to God on that day. He will simply say you could have walked into any church you wanted to, and I will hold you accountable for what you could have found out.

The man who does not accumulate without being the steward you require him to be and hold the things, the gifts of God you give him so lightly and not tightly, that man will be miserable indeed. But the man who is happy with his lot, content in his work, may we remember the content of contentment is Christ. May we never forget that if Christ is all that we need and all that we want and all that we love in everything we do, then we will indeed be content and we will know the joy.

Every hidden thing will be brought to light, hidden things like the chances we had that we never took, the Bibles that were lying around that we never read, the classes that were provided that we never attended, the services that were there seven days a week that we picked and chose and took time off. Lord, those are the things you're going to ask us about. Every hidden thing, whether it be good or bad, Lord, may we not stand front you just ashamed and cover our face with our empty hands and bow our uncrowned heads. May we, of the life that's left to us, just yield it to your hand and take us and make us and break us to the pattern that you have planned.

Teach us what really matters for our lives are a wisp of fog, a vapor, and soon we'll be in your presence. We ask you to sober us with these thoughts and straighten us up, God, and make our lives significant, a significant blessing and not a significant mess. We ask it for Christ's sake. Amen.