This special “throwback” episode was originally preached in 1994, but shares timeless truths. The full series is available in the Vintage Joe Vault. This episode further clarifies and reinforces the following from Part 1:

In John chapters 14 through 17, Jesus mentions preparing a place for his disciples, and that in his Father’s house, there are many mansions. Many believers interpret this passage as a discourse about the second coming, heaven, and our future home there. Pastor Joe gets into the Greek (spoiler alert: the Greek translation for “mansion” is actually “an abiding place”) and paints a picture for how we are designed to be God’s abiding place, his new temple (mansion) here on earth.

Also discussed:

• The proper balance between embracing the necessary (hard) truth of the fall and, simultaneously, the grace and the glories of redemption
• Why the church has so often failed to enter into the realities that are portrayed for us in the scriptures
• The posture for us to take when “in the wilderness”
• How Martin Luther’s original revelation that started the Protestant Reformation has been distorted in the modern church

Listen to last week’s episode, Part 1, here.

Additional Resources

Abiding In the Father’s Love (1994) – Full MP3 Series

Abiding in the Father’s Love – Paperback book



Full Transcript

You had a series last week, that was one of the very first series I ever did in this church many years ago. And it relates to so many things. I’m excited. I’m thrilled. I am compelled, driven, turned on excited. Because I believe God is going to do a great thing in our midst. I believe God’s going to do a great thing, a wonderful thing, a marvelous thing, a marvelous work and a wonder that if somebody told you about it, you wouldn’t believe it. But you’re gonna believe it.

Now, last week, we began a series and the series is called abiding in the Father’s love. Because the secret of the life of faith, the secret of a real walk with God, is the knowledge of God the Father. Jesus came as a revelation of the Father, and his purpose was to unveil the hidden father. He came and he said, I am the Way the Truth, the life, no one comes unto the Father, but by me. His desire was to unveil the heart of his father to God’s people, so that they could have a walk of a different kind, and a different quality than men had ever had, since the Garden of Eden. A few great men and women of God here and there found the father’s heart, Moses, David, Elijah, some of the others throughout the history of God’s people. But it wasn’t possible for every covenant believer to walk in intimacy with God. But the New Covenant, the establishing of the kingdom of God, the establishing of the reign of Christ, the opening and cleansing of the heavens through the blood of the Lamb of God was going to open up a new and living way for God’s people. And God’s people were going to be able to enter the presence of God as though sin had never been. They’re going to be able to enter the Father’s presence and know his heart and know his mind and know His love, and become sons of God, indeed, who do the will of their father.

And yet, over the years, the church has so often failed to enter into the realities that are portrayed for us in the scriptures as belonging to us, for one reason or another. But basically, you can boil it all down to one thing, unbelief. The revelation of Scripture is so high, so lofty, and so glorious, men have just, they’ve just been unable to say, “Well, it really must be for us.” And it’s been a challenge to the hearts of God’s people to believe. You see, it’s so difficult to keep the balance between preaching the reality of the fall and the glories of redemption. Some people swing so far to showing the sinfulness of man in order to show men why they need a savior, that after they’re saved, they don’t really tell them that they’ve changed. And some people believe they’re still depraved after they get saved. And then you know what they do? They act like what they believe.

And then some people have tried to show the grace of God. Well, God is love, God is kind, so that the sinner on the street is no longer fearful for his eternal destiny, because he doesn’t believe a good God will send him to hell. And it’s difficult for us to balance the truth of Scripture, but we must. We must. We must preach a God who is so just, that if people today reject the offer of his son, they will spend eternity separate from God. That’s a reality. But on the other hand, we must preach that those who have come to know the Son of God have become a new creation, and are right with God and have no condemnation in Christ Jesus, and we stand before God by faith, as though sin had never been. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to grow. It doesn’t mean we’re not responsible for our behavior and responsible before God for how we live. We are. But it means that I change the way I live through fellowship with God without condemnation, or I don’t change.

You’re not going to change without the grace of God. And if you don’t know grace is available to you to come to God to stand in His presence, to know His love, then you never have the right motivation to change and you always stay in that shadow land between guilt and forgiveness where faith cannot function. John, chapter 14, verse 1, “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you maybe also.”

Now we pointed out last week. And of course, this is, as some of you recognized last week as your many, many years of teaching got slapped right in the face and you went, “Argh.” that this has been traditionally interpreted as talking about Jesus going to heaven and then coming again in his second coming to take us to Heaven. And what I pointed out to you is that John 14 through 17 aren’t about going to heaven when you die. They’re about the Holy Spirit coming after Jesus is raised, and us being seated with Christ in heavenly places, and extending His kingdom on the earth, while he is in heaven. And the problem here is it says, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” And that word for mansions there is only used twice in the New Testament. Now the verb form of it is used many times. In fact, it’s used throughout this chapter and the 15th chapter.

Now I want you to look with me in verse 17. “The Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.” Now, does anybody have a little note on that word dwells? Anybody have a little marginal note there; little number by that? Does anybody? You may not. No one? All right, that word there is the verb form of the noun for mansions. It means to abide or to dwell. Alright? Now he says, The Spirit abides with you, but he’s going to be in you. In my Father’s house, are many abiding places is the literal translation of John 14:2. In my Father’s house are many abiding places. Now, we pointed out last week, that until the time of the resurrection, the Father’s house was the temple in Jerusalem. You have made my father’s house, a den of thieves. Right? But he said, destroy this temple. And in three days, I will raise it up.

And his disciples realized after his resurrection, that he was speaking of the Temple of his body. Where was the real temple of God, while Jesus walked the earth? It was his body. I was talking with one of the brothers in the church, he was in a Bible study on his job and the scripture came up that talked about the resurrection, Jesus dying, and the temple, the veil in the temple being torn. And somebody said, “Well, that was so that we would have access to the temple.” And Walt pointed out that, actually, when the veil was rent, it showed there was nothing behind the veil. Because the Ark had been lost hundreds of years before. There was no Ark in Herod’s temple. They put a rock in there to take the place of the ark. And when the veil was rent, it showed that the whole system was devoid of God. Now it may symbolize that the opening to the heavenly tabernacle through Christ is reality. But it also at the same time showed there was nothing behind the veil. The Jewish system was an empty system, and the fact that they rejected the Son of God, when he walked in their midst proves that. Do you see what I’m saying?

In Matthew 23, when Jesus left the Pharisees for the last time, he said, your house is left unto you desolate. Alright? Well, where it was God’s temple? The body of Christ, physically. But he said, the temple that I’m about to take to the cross, in three days, it’s going to be raised up and there’s going to be a new temple. My body. And we are the body of Christ. We are the temple of God. Doesn’t the Bible say, You are the temple of God? So where’s the father’s house? Its Christ, head and body. And there’s a place in the temple for you. Jesus went to prepare a place for you. And then he came to Paul, and he unveiled the reality of that temple. And we looked in Ephesians chapter two which would be good for us to look at for just a moment. Something happens to people if you’ve heard something for a long time, and it’s wrong. When you hear the truth, it sounds wrong. See, mansions doesn’t represent any idea that the original languages portray. It’s just an unfortunate fact that the old King James of 1611 chose that word. You see, it doesn’t relate to the context. A literal translation would be abiding places or dwellings. And you can consult any commentary, and you’ll find that to be so.

So in Ephesians, chapter 2 Verse 19, it says, “Now, therefore, you (Gentiles) are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” In my Father’s house, are many dwelling places, I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go, and I prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself that where I am, there you may be also.

“Well, we’re not in heaven yet.” Who said? The New Testament didn’t. The New Testament said, I’m in heaven now. I have been made alive, raised up and seated with Christ in heavenly places now. Isn’t that right? That was the revelation that Paul received. You don’t have to die and go to heaven. Now, let me assure you, if you do die and go to heaven, there’ll be a lot less difficulty. But let me also encourage you, you’re not supposed to go before your time, you got work to do, shape up. Don’t think you’re gonna get out of here easy. You try to get out early we’ll raise you up. No early departures. You got work to do, and we need you.

I want to be very slow and methodical in laying this foundation. Because you see, as I read you a quote last week about Jesus being a revelation of the Father, but because the father is Spirit, because we’ve never seen the Father, we tend to want to conceptualize God. And the only images we generally have are Jesus with long hair and a robe and a sheep under his arm. And so we develop the habit of praying to Jesus, because he’s the only member of the Godhead that we have any way to image or think about or picture. Because Jesus is the only member of the Godhead that’s ever been revealed to our senses. You see? And when man fell, he fell out of the realm where he could perceive spiritual realities, and became limited by his five physical senses to what he can see, hear, taste, touch and smell.

And you see God dwells in the invisible realm of spirit, and God in His mercy, love and grace, dealt with man, but until the Incarnation we could never see God. And even when we saw Jesus, not that we did, but when the disciples in the early, the people at the time of his Earth walk did, when they saw him, they really didn’t see God, they saw a human being in whom God dwelt. I mean, he was equally man and equally God, we understand. But you see, when on the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James and John went up on that mount with Jesus, and Jesus was transfigured before them. And it says, His face shone like the sun, and his garments were like the stars or like the brightness of light, brighter than any man could get them. What was happening, the veil was taken away, and they were seeing him as he really was, he was veiled by flesh.

So the revelation of the real God has to do not with flesh. And you see, Jesus came to meet us on our level, but not to leave us there. Otherwise, he would have stayed incarnate so we could always get to God. But he said, it’s to your advantage that I go away because if I go away, the Comforter will come, the Holy Spirit who will guide you into all reality. The Greek word for truth can equally be translated reality. All of reality means no limitation by the physical realities. You see, God is real. How many believe God is real? How many have ever seen him, felt him, tasted him or touched him? You haven’t. Your senses can’t touch God, but by the Spirit of God, you perceive and know God, don’t you? So there is a sixth sense, if you will, the spiritual sense of faith that can touch God and know his reality. But you see, men could not touch that reality, except on rare occasions. Apostles, or I mean, prophets, kings and priests were the only ones that really could know God intimately upon whom the Spirit would come. The average believer under the Old Covenant couldn’t know God the way you and I can, because the Spirit of God could not dwell in them the way he dwells in us, because the new creation wasn’t possible till Jesus rose from the dead.

You don’t find anywhere where the Bible says the Old Testament believer was the temple of the Holy Spirit. He that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than John the Baptist, who Jesus said was the greatest of the Old Testament prophets. He that is least. see, we have not appreciated what God has done for us in Christ. But now, I don’t want to get too far afield of that right this moment, because what I’m really getting at here is that the unseen father is the ultimate authority in the universe. You notice how Jesus submits to the Father? Well, in this portion in John 14, let me read it again to you now. “In my Father’s house are many abiding places; if it were not, so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself.” Now, “I will come again there” sounds like, because even the translators sometimes have difficulty with Jesus, you know. And sometimes they don’t translate things accurately because they don’t understand what Jesus is saying. What Jesus said in the literal Greek here, it’s a present tense, he said, If I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming and receiving you to myself. It’s a present tense, I am coming right now. He stood there, and he looked Peter right in the face, and he said, if I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming and receiving you to myself. Whoa! What do you mean, you’re coming? It’s not a future. It’s a present. I am coming.

Now his name is I am. You know, he’s always coming to those who are receiving. Now I’m not doing away with the second coming, I believe in the Second Coming. But this just isn’t talking about it. Plenty of other verses that verify the reality of the Second Coming. We don’t need this to prove he’s coming again. So don’t feel like you’re being robbed of some precious truth. You’re not. You’re being given a precious truth. Okay? I am coming and receiving you to Myself that where I am you may be also. Where’s he going? To the Father’s right hand. Where are we raised up and seated? At the Father’s right hand in Christ. You see? Now notice he goes on, and he says, “And where I go you know, and the way you know. Huh? “Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how can we know the way?’ Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the reality, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.”

So what’s he talking about? Coming to the Father. In my Father’s house are many abiding places, I go up to prepare a place for you. And I’m the way for you to come to that place prepared for you into the knowledge of my father. What difference does this make? Aren’t we supposed to worship Jesus? You bet. But if you do a study on prayer, you’ll find an amazing thing. The Bible never tells us to pray to Jesus. Whenever you make a request of God, it’s to the Father, in the name of the Son. Whatever you ask in my name, my father will give you. Giving thanks unto the Father through Christ Jesus. Giving thanks for all things unto the Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I mean, check it out, you’ll find that every time it tells us to request, we are to request of the Father in the name of the son or to come to the Father through the son or to offer praise to the Father through the son. I’m not saying we shouldn’t worship the Lord, we should, the Lord Jesus. But when you pray, when you request, when you ask, you are to ask the Father, in the name of the son. Why? Because you need to know that the Father loves you. In fact, Jesus said in this portion of Scripture, the Father loves you because you have believed that I came forth from the Father. Believing in the son draws the Father’s love. Honoring the son draws the Father’s love. But the son wants to reveal the Father. We looked at the scriptures that say this last week, that that we come to Jesus, He reveals the Father to us.

Let me just tell you how the life of faith works. You come to Jesus, He reveals the Father to you, and then you begin to try out the promises of God with the Father and the Son and the Spirit operating in harmony with you. And then you prove the Word of God and your experience. Because if you doubt the Father’s love, you’ll doubt his willingness to keep his promises. Jesus came as a revelation of the Father. He said, If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. But in the hearts and minds of many believers today, there’s a mixture in their thinking. They think of the Father one way and they think of the Son another. They think “Jesus died for me, but he’s just to protect me from the wrath of the father because he really you know, if he had his way, hmm.”

Well, I want to read to you, I mentioned last week that the Protestant Reformation is rooted in the revelation of the Father’s heart. I want to read a quote to you, this is the quote, this is the revelation that started the Protestant Reformation. This is what happened to Martin Luther that caused him to shake the Western world with the truth of justification by faith. And justification by faith was not what it is today for Martin Luther. Today in Protestant theology, justification by faith is a forensic or legal thing that happened in the courtrooms of heaven, that does not change who and what we are, nor give us righteousness. Do you realize? That’s the accepted doctrine of justification by faith. Now, I’m going to read to you what Martin Luther said when he got the revelation of justification by faith. And you see if it sounds well, you see if it sounds like he said. “You know, I was meditating in the scripture, and lo and behold, I found that God had changed my status in heaven. And I was so thrilled I jumped up and down.” No.

Let me read to you what he actually said, about Romans 1:17. “This passage of Paul became to me a gate of heaven. If you have a true faith, that Christ is your savior, then at once you have a gracious God. For faith leads you in and opens up God’s heart and will, that you should see pure grace and overflowing love. This it is to behold God in faith, that you should look upon his fatherly friendly heart in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness. He who sees God as angry, does not see him rightly, but looks only on a curtain as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face.”

What did justification mean to Martin Luther? It meant that God’s heart is a benevolent heart of a father and he’s for me. Justification by faith, man, there’s no condemnation, I can come to God as though I’d never sinned. It means the end of the nagging sense of unworthiness that plagues so many. Martin Luther was a Catholic monk, and he was plagued by a constant sense of guilt. He confessed his sins, and then remembered when he’d forget and be devastated. And he was tormented. He was living in torment of guilt and shame before God. When God opened this up to him, it broke the power of that stronghold of guilt, shame and condemnation, and he saw himself standing in the presence of a gracious Father completely accepted.

Now, he needed that, in order to face all that he was going to have to face. He had to have a walk with God, that would stabilize and establish him in God’s love and grace, so that no matter what rose against him, he would not be moved or shaken, because he knew God was for him. And if God was for him who could be against him? See? Now I want to say to you, you need to be established in the grace of God. You need to know that no matter who’s against the church, or who argues with you, or who fusses or fights with you, that God is for you, therefore, none can be against you. You need that. You need to have a walk with God in faith. I need that. We all need that. The church needs that. It’s time to throw off the grave clothes of unbelief. It’s time to believe that God is who He says He is. God will do what he says he will do. And God has the abilities that he says he has. But along with that, we must believe that we are who God says we are. We have what God says we have and we can do what God says we can do. And you will not ever believe those things unless you believe God is for you.

If you doubt God is for you, you’ll never be bold in your faith. You’ll never boldly claim the promises of God. You’ll always kind of go, “Well, I wonder if it’s okay. I wonder if he really wants to do this for me.” It’ll be a lot of tradition, it’ll help you think that way. The only problem is the Bible says, a double minded man or woman is unstable in all their ways. Don’t let that person think they’ll receive anything from God. Now, we are going to have to make our choice between staying among the double minded or pressing on to know the Lord in such a way that we believe if anybody’s going to get it, it’s me. I don’t care if a thousand fall at my side, I’ll get it. Why? Because I’m better than anybody? Not in the least. Actually, it’s because I know I’m no better than anybody, and I found out that he accepts everybody.

Some people still think they ought to get better. I gave up trying to get better. I’m accepting His righteousness. I’m accepting his grace. See. But some people are in that gray fog between grace and works trying to not quite sure how to rest in God, not sure if they let go for just a minute, God might squish them or something. They’re not going to get it because they’re not doing enough. And you’re just caught up somewhere between grace and works and they never received from God.

But you see everything God did for us in Christ, he did because he chose to. And if the Bible says He freely gave His Son to us, if He gave His Son to us, will he not also with Him, freely give us all things? “Well, brother, you’re making it too easy.” No, it isn’t easy. Believe me, it may sound easy. But when you start to possess it, when you make up your mind to walk in it all hell shows up on your front door to say, “You ain’t going this way.” And that’s why so many people draw back when they see these things. They start out with great enthusiasm. They hit a brick wall and say “What happened.” Well, the Bible says, when the sower sows the Word, Satan comes immediately to steal the word that sown.

In order to go forward in God, you’ve got to recognize you’re always going to face a new battle for every truth you possess. If you don’t understand that, you’ll say “What happened? I thought I heard from God and all of a sudden it got worse.” You just fulfilled Mark chapter four. The sower sowed the word. You began to act on the word. Satan came immediately with persecution and affliction that arose because of the word to steal the word from you. If you don’t understand that principle, you’ll always say, “Well, gosh, I thought I heard from God, but it got worse. I don’t understand. Maybe it wasn’t God.” Yeah, it was God, you just got into warfare.

But you see, as long as you’re a good complacent Christian who never causes any problems, and never tries to possess the promises of God, you can have relative peace in your defeated, stepped on life. It’s when you make up your mind that the Word of God is true that God is for you. And you’re no longer going to put up with the devil’s encroachments on your life, robbing, stealing and killing from you. And you quit listening to him tell you it’s God. And you begin to stand up against that stuff, you encounter warfare at a new level, like somebody said, new levels, new devils.

But the thing about it is, you can’t run, you can’t hide. See. “Well I don’t want to be around this kind of stuff, because it brings me into warfare.” I’m sorry, you’re marked. If you’ve ever heard it, you’re marked. You know, who the most miserable Christians are on earth? Those who have heard the truth about their authority in Christ and have walked away from it.Because the devil has to destroy them, in order to keep them from walking in what they’ve heard.
You say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better not to hear?” No, because you will never do the will of God unless you rise up in the authority of Christ. You see, sons and daughters of God do the will of their father, and you can’t do the will of your Father without the authority and anointing of Christ. And you can’t enter into that without facing and overcoming the devil.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Why? To defeat the devil. But you see, we have for so long been led by the Spirit into the wilderness to remain in the wilderness that we’ve made doctrines out of being led into the wilderness and staying there. You’ve only been led into the wilderness to overcome. “Well, God’s teaching me a lesson.” Well, the only lesson he has, “It is written devil get out of here.” That’s the lesson you need to learn. That’s the short way out of the wilderness. Learn the scriptures that defeat the devil and use them against him. “Well, what if it’s a prolonged battle?” It will be. I mean, face the music.

You know, nobody said, no, maybe somebody did say to you, you know, “Get saved and all your problems will be solved.” That’s the dumbest thing to tell anybody. What we ought to do is put up posters on the wall that says Jesus wants you for war. And let God put into us the kind of backbone that’s not afraid to serve God and walk with God in the face of whatever arises against. We’ve got to rise above the mediocre Christianity of the day. We’ve got to rise above it. We’ve got to become men and women of faith, men and women of God, men and women of Christ-like character and dedication, who are committed to doing the will of God no matter what the price or cost. You say “Well, I’m not called to full time ministry.” Who told you that? “Well, I’m in the business world.” You’re in full time ministry to make money for God. “Well I’m home watching my kids.” Well, you’re in full time ministry to raise up another generation for God. Everything’s full time ministry. And everything is an opportunity to take dominion in the name of the Lord.