Author: Billy Conrad

October 23

Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. — James 1:4

Scripture reading: Matthew 27:27–54

Is it possible for patience to make us “perfect and complete”? Certainly, it is possible. Who was speaking in this verse? It was the breath of the Spirit; it was also the hidden man of the heart who had a heart like his Brother. This was James, the Lord‘s brother, who was speaking. He spoke very much like his Brother. When we read these wonderful words, we might very likely be encountering a true kindred spirit with Christ.

James had to learn patience. It was not an easy thing for him to understand how his Brother could be the Son of God and be in the same family as he, Judas, and the other brothers. (See Matthew 13:55.) It was not an easy thing for him, and he had to learn to be patient to see how it worked out.

There are many things in your life that you cannot understand, but be patient. When the hand of God is upon something, it may grind very slowly, but it will form the finest thing possible if you dare to wait until it is completed. Do not kick until you have gone through the process—and when you are dead enough to yourself, you will never kick at all. It is a death we die so that we might be alive unto God. It is only by the deaths we die that we are able to be still before God.

Jesus said, “The cross? I can endure the cross. The shame? I can despise it.” (See Hebrews 12:2.) He withstood the bitter language spoken to Him at the cross: “If You are the Christ, come down, and we will believe.” (See Matthew 27:40, 42.) They struck Him, but He “did not revile in return” (1 Pet. 2:23). He is the picture for us.

You cannot tell what God has in mind for you. As you are still before God—pliable in His hands—He will be working out a greater vessel than you could ever imagine in all your life.

Thought for today: Jesus knew that when He came to the end of the Cross, He would forever save all those who would believe.

October 22

Count it all joy. — James 1:2

Scripture reading: Job 2:1–10

The verse does not mean ―Count a bit of it as joy‖ but “count it all joy.” It doesn‘t matter from what source the trial comes, whether it is your business or your home or what. “Count it all joy.” Why? Because “we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).

That is a great Scripture. It means that you have a special position. God is electrifying the very position that you hold so that the Devil will see that you have a godly character, and God can say about you what he said about Job. (See Job 1:8.)

Recall the scene. God asked, “Satan, what is your opinion about Job?” Then the Lord went on and said, “Don‘t you think he is wonderful? Don‘t you think he is the most excellent man in all the earth?”

Satan replied, “Yes, but You know, You are keeping him.”

Praise the Lord! I am glad the Devil has to tell the truth. And don‘t you know that God can keep you, also?

“If You touch everything he has,” the Devil said, “he will curse You to Your face.”

God answered, “You can touch all he has, but you cannot touch him.” (See Job 1:8–12.)

The Scripture says that Jesus was dead but is alive again and has power over death and hell. To this, the Scripture adds a big “Amen” (Rev. 1:18). The Devil cannot take your life unless the Lord allows it. “You cannot touch Job‘s life,” God told Satan. (See Job 2:6.)

Satan thought he could destroy Job, and you know the calamity that befell this righteous man. But Job said, “Naked I came from my mother‟s womb, and naked shall I return there.…Blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). Oh, it is lovely! The Lord can give us that kind of language. It is not the language of the head. This is divine language; this is heart acquaintance.

I want you to know that we can have heart acquaintance. I learned a long time ago that libraries often create swelled heads, but nothing except the Library, the Bible, can make swelled hearts. You are to have swelled hearts because out of the heart full of the fragrance of the love of God, the living life of the Lord flows.

You must cease to be. That is a difficult thing—for both you and me—but it is no trouble at all when you are in the hands of the Potter. You are only wrong when you are kicking. You are all right when you are still and He is forming you afresh. So let Him form you afresh today into a new vessel so that you will stand the stress.

Thought for today: It is far more to speak out of the abundance of your heart than the abundance of your head.

October 21

That the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, — 1 Peter 1:7

Scripture reading: 1 Peter 1

Some of you wonder what is up when you are not healed in a moment. God never breaks His promise. The trial of your faith is “much more precious than gold.”

God wants to destroy the power of the Devil. He wants to move you so that in the face of hardships, you will praise the Lord. “Count it all joy” (James 1:2). You have to take a leap today; you have to leap into the promises. You have to believe that God never fails you; you have to believe it is impossible for God to break His word. He is “from everlasting to everlasting” (Psalm 90:2).

Forever and ever, not for a day,
He keepeth His promise forever;
To all who believe,
To all who obey,
He keepeth His promise forever.

There is no variableness with God, no “shadow of turning” (James 1:17). He is the same. He manifests His divine glory.

Jesus said to Mary and Martha, “If you would believe you would see the glory of God” (John 11:40). We must understand that there will be times of testing, but they are only to make us more like the Master. He was “in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrew 4:15). He endured all things. He is our example.

Oh, that God would place us in an earnest, intent position in which flesh and blood have to yield to the Spirit of God! We will go forward; we will not be moved by our feelings.

Suppose that a man who is prayed for today receives a blessing, but tomorrow he begins murmuring because he does not feel exactly as he wants to feel. What is he doing? He is replacing the Word of God with his feelings. What a disgrace! Let God have His perfect work.

Thought for today: God has you on this earth for the purpose of bringing out His character in you.

October 20

Count it all joy when you fall into various trials. — James 1:2

Scripture reading: 1 Timothy 6

Let the Spirit cover you so that you may be intensely earnest about the deep things of God. You should be so aligned with the Spirit that your will, your mind, and your heart are centered in God so that He may lift you into the pavilion of splendor where you hear His voice—lift you to the place where the breath of the Almighty can send you to pray and send you to preach, the Spirit of the Lord being upon you.

You are at God‘s banquet, a banquet at which you are never separated from Him and He multiplies spiritual blessings and fruit in your life. It is a banquet where you have to increase with all increasing, where God has for you riches beyond all things—not fleshly things, not carnal things, but spiritual manifestations, gifts, fruits of the Spirit, and beautiful beatitudes, the blessing of God always being upon you. (See 2 Corinthians 9:10–11.)

Are you ready to enter into this glorious place where you no longer live for yourself? God will take over your life and send you out to win thousands of people to Christ, so that they also may enter into eternal grace.

No person is ever able to talk about victory over temptation unless he goes through it. All the victories are won in battles.

Tens of thousands of people in Europe, America, and in other parts of the world wear badges to show they have been in battle, and they rejoice in it. They would be ashamed to wear such badges if they had not been in battle. The battle is what gives them the right to wear the badge.

It is those who have been tried to the utmost who can come out and tell you a story about it. It was only James and Peter and Paul, those who were in the front lines of the battle, who told us how we have to rejoice in our trials because wonderful blessings will come out of them. It is in the trials that we are made.

Thought for today: It is those who have been in the fight who can tell about the victories.

October 19

Where there is no vision, the people perish. — Proverbs 29:18 KJV

Scripture reading: Acts 26:1–29

We must see the face of the Lord and understand His workings. There are things that God says to me that I know must take place. It does not matter what people say. I have been face-to-face with some of the most trying moments of men‘s lives, times when it made all the difference if I kept the vision and held fast to what God had said. A man must have immovable faith, and the voice of God must mean more to him than what he sees, feels, or what people say. He must have an originality born in heaven, transmitted or expressed in some way. We must bring heaven to earth.

At the end of Ephesians 3 are words that no human could ever think or write on his own. This passage is so mighty, so of God when it speaks about His being able to do all things “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” (v. 20). The mighty God of revelation! The Holy Spirit gave these words of grandeur to stir our hearts, to move our affections, to transform us altogether. God has never put anything up on a pole where you cannot reach it. He has brought His plan down to man, and if we are prepared, oh, what there is for us! I feel sometimes that we have just as much as we can digest. Yet such divine nuggets of precious truth are held before our hearts that it makes us understand that there are yet heights and depths and lengths and breadths of the knowledge of God stored up for us. (See Ephesians 3:17–19.) We might truly say,

My heavenly bank, my heavenly bank,
The house of God‘s treasure and store.
I have plenty in here; I‘m a real millionaire.

Thought for today: It is wonderful to never be poverty-stricken anymore, to have an inward knowledge of God‘s riches that are stored up, nugget upon nugget—weights of glory, expressions of the invisible Christ to be seen by men.

October 18

His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue. — 2 Peter 1:3

Scripture reading: 2 Peter 1:2–17

On the Day of Pentecost, it was necessary that the disciples received not only the fire but also the rushing wind, the personality of the Spirit in the wind. (See Acts 2:1–4.) The manifestation of the glory is in the wind, or breath, of God.

The inward man receives the Holy Spirit instantly with great joy and blessedness. He cannot express it. Then the power of the Spirit, this breath of God, takes of the things of Jesus (see John 16:14–15) and sends forth as a river the utterances of the Spirit. Again, when the body is filled with joy, sometimes so inexpressible, the canvas of the mind has great power to move the operation of the tongue to bring out the very depths of the inward heart‘s power, love, and joy to us. By the same process, the Spirit, which is the breath of God, brings forth the manifestation of the glory.

Let us look at a few passages in the Bible that pertain to the glory. The first is Psalm 16:9: “Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices.” Something has made the rejoicing bring forth the glory. It was because the psalmist‘s heart was glad.

The second one is Psalm 108:1: “O God, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and give praise, even with my glory.” You see, when the body is filled with the power of God, then the only thing that can express the glory is the tongue. Glory is presence, and the presence always comes by the tongue, which brings forth the revelations of God. God first brings His power into us. Then He gives us verbal expressions by the same Spirit, the outward manifestation of what is within us. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34).

Virtue has to be transmitted, and glory has to be expressed. Therefore, The Holy Spirit understands everything Christ has in the glory and brings through the heart of man God‘s latest thought. The world‘s needs, our manifestations, revivals, and all conditions are first settled in heaven, then worked out on the
earth. We must be in touch with God Almighty in order to bring out on the face of the earth all the things that God has in the heavens. This is an ideal for us, and may God help us not to forsake the reality of holy communion with Him, of entering into private prayer so that publicly He may manifest His glory.

Thought for today: By filling us with the Holy Spirit, God has brought into us this glory so that out of us may come forth the glory.

October 17

His lord said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.” — Matthew 25:21

Scripture reading: Matthew 25:14–30

Christ, who is the express image of God (Hebrews 1:3), has come to our human weaknesses in order to change them and us into a divine likeness so that, by the power of His might, we may not only overcome but also rejoice in the fact that we are more than overcomers. God wants you to be “more than conquerors” (Romans 8:37). The baptism of the Spirit has come for nothing less than to possess the whole of our lives. It sets up Jesus as King, and nothing can stand in His holy presence when He is made King. Everything will wither before Him. The inheritance of the Spirit is given to every man “for the profit of all” (1 Corinthians 12:7). Praise the Lord! In the order of the Holy Spirit, we have to “come short in no gift” (1 Corinthians 1:7).

This same Jesus has come for one purpose: that He might be made so manifest in us that the world will see Him. We must be burning and shining lights to reflect such a holy Jesus. We cannot do it with cold, indifferent experiences, and we never will. My dear wife used to say to our daughter, “Alice, what kind of a meeting have you had?” Alice would say, “Ask Father. He always has a good time!” His servants are to be flames. Jesus is life, and the Holy Spirit is the breath. He breathes through us the life of the Son of God, and we give it to others, and it gives life everywhere.

You should have been with me in Ceylon! I was having meetings in a Wesleyan chapel. The people there said, “You know, four days are not much to give us.” “No,” I said, “but it is a good share.” They said, “What are we going to do? We are not touching the people here at all.” I said, “Can you have a meeting early in the morning, at eight o‘clock?” They said they would, so I said, “We will tell all the mothers who want their babies to be healed and all the old people over seventy to come. Then after that, I will hope to give an address to the people to make them ready for the Holy Spirit.”

Oh, it would have done you all good to see four hundred mothers there with their babies! It was fine! And then to see one hundred and fifty old black people, with their white hair, coming to be healed. I believe that you need to have something more than smoke to touch people; you need to be a burning light for that. His ministers must be flames of fire. There were thousands gathered outside the chapel to hear the Word of God. There were about three thousand people crying for mercy at the same time. I tell you, it was a sight.

After that, attendance at the meetings rose to such an extent that every night, five to six thousand people gathered there after I had preached in a temperature of 110 degrees. Then I had to minister to these people. But I tell you, a flame of fire can do anything. Things change in the fire. This is Pentecost. But what moved me more than anything else was this (and I say this carefully and with a broken spirit because I would not like to mislead anybody): there were hundreds who tried to touch me because they were so impressed with the power of God that was present. And they testified everywhere that with a touch, they were healed. It was not the power of Wigglesworth. It was because they had the same faith that was with those at Jerusalem who believed that Peter‘s shadow would heal them. (See Acts 5:14–15.)

What do you want? Is anything too hard for God? God can meet you now. God sees inwardly. He knows all about you. Nothing is hidden from Him, and He can satisfy the soul and give you a spring of eternal blessing that will carry you right through.

Thought for today: You can receive something in three minutes that you can carry with you into glory.