Our surprise keynote from Resound Conference 2013. Jesus is our inheritance, and has inheritance for us. An inheritance gained too quickly will not be blessed in the end, so seek the Father and he will release your inheritance at the proper time.

If you’d like to skip the entertaining introductory portion straight to the teaching, move the slider to -1:20:10 .

Technical note: It seems that a noise gate was applied to the audio to help the live sound, please excuse us for the resulting sensation that the talk is over every time we take a breath.

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Tim: Your destiny is this. This is what God said when He created you. He said, “Let us make man in our image and our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth.” This is like a menu of surf and turf. It says, “God blessed them and said to them ‘be fruitful and increase in number.’”

How do you be fruitful? Be intimate.

How do you want to be fruitful for the Lord in your life? How can you do that? Be intimate.

Someone said, “There are lovers and there are workers, and lovers get more done than workers do.”

If you want to be fruitful, be intimate.

He said, “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.” If I asked all of you in this room what your favorite memory is, I bet each one of you would have something about intimacy in it. Something about feeling so close to someone, whether it’s a lover, a parent, a grandparent, and usually it takes place in a special spot. Maybe it’s in the mountains, maybe it’s down at the lake–it’s a special place that feels like a little Eden. A lot of you are thinking about this place right now, it feels good, doesn’t it? It’s ok to go there for a second. If I asked you all what the dreams are of your heart, it would often be to go make a place like that. Why?

It’s imprinted in you to be intimate and to be fruitful, to enjoy the love and the relationship with God and with the people that he gave you. And then to establish that, to take it further. To take that overflowing love and establish places where other people can enjoy it in the earth. That’s what we were created for. Intimacy and then inheritance. And intimacy releases inheritance.

Now, you can be saved and still not live from your love relationship with the Trinity. It’s possible to do that. It’s possible to go and try to get the inheritance first and not worry so much about the intimacy, and that was the lie that our forefathers were tricked with in the Garden, that’s what we bought into–that we could have inheritance without intimacy. We’re in the Garden and the snake comes and he says, “You know, you’re so great, you have so much potential. God doesn’t want you to be like him. You can get this without Him. You can be like Him without Him.” That’s the lie.

When people started building the Tower of Babel, the Lord came and He said, “Oh no, they’re going to be able to accomplish anything. They’re building up this tower of their own kingdom and their own greatness—“

Laurie: They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose top will reach into Heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name.”

Tim: That’s pretty independent thinking. I can be great without Him, watch what I can do, watch what I can build for myself, I can show that I’m alright. I can be righteous on my own. It’s all a matter of trying to get inheritance without intimacy. Why did God strike it down and scatter the people? Do you think He felt threatened by the Tower? Do you think He felt threatened by their greatness? No, that’s the trick of the thing. It’s not our greatness that He’s against, but He knows that when we build something great apart from Him, we are building the size of the wall between us and our lover. And in His mercy, He has to scatter it and break it down, because He is a jealous lover, and He will not yield His glory to idols. In His mercy, He destroys the unworthy things that we hope in the most. Because it is love, because He wants us to move in the way of the Kingdom, which is that intimacy releases inheritance.

Turn your bibles to Luke 15. And while we’re going there, realize how all over the Bible this is. “Be appalled, oh Heavens, be utterly desolate. For my people have committed two sins. They’ve carved out for themselves broken cisterns that can’t hold water. They’ve forsaken the spring.” These are the two things that make Heaven appalled and desolate, because the Lord created the earth, and created you, His sons and daughters, to be fruitful, to be intimate, and to establish the Kingdom. And when we try to establish without intimacy, it makes Heaven–the most amazing, wonderful place you can imagine–appalled and desolate.

Laurie: I mean think of it. Even before the first documented sin, right? When they confirmed their doubt and mistrust by eating a fruit that we were never meant to eat. We were never meant to eat the fruit that puts us on a throne that doesn’t belong to us. We don’t have the shoulders to carry that weight. We don’t have what it takes to judge justly, to build our own thing apart from the Lord. Adam, he knew the sound of the Lord walking in the cool of the day. He was familiar with it. Because they walked all the time. It was a familiar sound to him. What we were made for is to walk with the Lord in the cool of the day, chat, talk, spend time, name some animals, play, toss a coconut around. You know? That’s what we were made for. To be His sons.

And then, out of intimacy we carry his Kingdom, we name the animals, we rule the earth and subdue it out of our intimacy. It’s like my dad–he’s so excited that he has a son because his name carries on, right? It’s a generational thing. And we are made to carry the name of our Father, and to do amazing things. Remember, Jesus says you’re going to do even greater things than these! Nothing will be impossible for you in me. Then, when we ate the fruit in the garden, we said, we’re going to be able to make our own way, make our own judgments about things, right? Go our own path, because God’s holding out on us and all the lies and false narratives of the enemy came in.

What did Jesus say his food was? To do the will and the work of His Father on the earth. That is the food we’re supposed to eat, the food of Christ himself, and Jesus was the greatest model of walking out the Kingdom on the earth in submission to the Father’s mission. Greater things will you do because of me, because you’ve eaten of my food, and my bread, and I bring life.

I think that’s just miraculous. Even in the covenant that he made with Abraham, “I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of you, and kings will come forth from you. I established my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you threw out their generations for an everlasting covenant. For what purpose? To be God to you, and to your descendants after you. I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

That was the covenant: “I will be your God and you will be my people.”

And He even repeats it. In Jeremiah when there’s an echo, a prophetic echo of the new covenant, which says the same thing, “I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I’ve drawn you with loving kindness.” And then skipping ahead a little bit, “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant, which they broke, although I was  a husband to them, although I was there keeping my part of the covenant, being their God. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law within them, and on their heart, I will write it. I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will not teach again, each man, his neighbor, and each man his brother saying ‘Know the Lord!’ for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord. They will all know me.

There’s nothing, nothing that we desire in our deepest, deepest hearts more than to know that God loves us, and He has chosen us as His own inheritance. We are the royal priesthood, set apart for His own pleasure, His own play. To establish his Kingdom on the earth.

Tim: You know what strikes me as Laurie reads those scriptures? This is not a God who is afraid of your greatness. He’s telling you where your greatness is. He’s calling you to it. Just like Laurie was saying earlier: my greatness is in Christ. He’s calling you away from establishing your own kingdom, striving for your own inheritance apart from him. He’s calling you into inheritance, He’s saying, as Jesus said, “You will do greater things than me,” He’s trying to call us into the place where our greatness can be glorious instead of destructive.

He knows we have two choices. You can build your own kingdom and you will be a slave to it. Or you can seek His Kingdom, and He will make you a king in it.

Laurie: Say that again!

Tim: You can build your own kingdom and you will become a slave to it, but if you seek His Kingdom, He will make you a king in it.

Now we’re going to read the Parable of the Lost Son in Luke 15, and I want us to pay attention to the motivations of each of the two sons and the motivations of the father. What are they trying to get? What are they af