anchored to ethernity：path of the inner life

§ Foreword
I chose this title “Anchored to Eternity” from Hebrews 6:19 in the Bible: “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.”

After the fall of mankind, God drove the first ancestors out of the Garden of Eden, preventing them from getting close to the Tree of Life and from God’s presence. Later, he asked Moses to build the tabernacle and reserved the Holy of Holies in it as a place for people to meet God. However, God asked Moses to make a veil to cover the Holy of Holies so that no one except the high priest could enter alone once a year to bring the blood of sacrifices to atone for sins on the Day of Atonement. This is so human beings wandering in the world would have a desire and a pursuit in their hearts to return to God and seek His face.

Then, the Son of God came. He was the essence of the sin offering and went to the cross to atone for man’s sins. The three gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record that when the Lord Jesus completed redemption on the cross and died, the veil in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. From then on, the way to the Holiest of All was opened. It can also be said that people were now able to return to the Tree of Life, come before God, and get close to God.

Now we have a great hope. Not only can we draw close to God, but we can also abide in Him and have a foretaste of what heaven will be like. To put it another way, our life in this world is like a boat sailing on the sea. Now we can find a harbor where our souls can rest and anchor in God, so that our lives can be connected with God, strong and secure, leading to eternity.

§ 1. Being Immersed in the Word of God

She said: “When we go out to eat dinner, after the main course, the waiter puts a small spoon on the table, and you know a delicious dessert is coming next. I just want to let people who are paying final respects to me to know that, although I lay there, leaving behind the body of this world, the best is yet to come.”
— Chicken Soup for the Soul

A person who is immersed with the Holy Spirit will also be filled with the Word of God; a person who is saturated with the Word of God will also be saturated with the Holy Spirit. If you want to pursue a life saturated with the Lord, you must pursue a life immersed in God’s word.
— Daniel Tsao


In the church I pastor, at the beginning of each year, I follow the Lord’s guidance and give the congregation a passage of scripture and a theme so that everyone can meditate, learn, and pursue more in the coming year. We don’t necessarily set a goal as in how many members to increase per year. Our goal, instead, is for everyone to press on diligently in order to make their lives more rooted in God and in the way of God’s grace.

The theme I gave to the congregation one year was “Being Immersed in the Holy Spirit.” Although the Bible does not directly say “be immersed with the Holy Spirit”, I think there is a verse that has this meaning, which is John 3:34: “For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him.”

There is no limit to the Holy Spirit given by God to Jesus, and what Jesus possesses is also available to us who follow Him. Paul said: “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power” (Col. 2:9-10).

The physical body we have in this world today is not only to contain our current soul, but also to contain the richness of God, so that when we are still alive on earth, we can come to a place where the richness of God is exactly like that in Christ, tangibly living in us. That means that one day, when this body fails, we will have a solid and rich body inside, which is immortal and glorious.

Therefore, Paul said that physical exercise has little benefit, because the flesh will eventually decay. One day when the flesh is destroyed, your “inner man” may be very weak, and you will regret it forever. Paul often prayed for God’s children that their “inner man” or “inward man” might be strengthened and be renewed day by day (Eph. 3:16 and 2 Cor. 4:16).

◆The Best Is Yet to Come

At the beginning of that year, I told the congregation something, which I’ll also share with you here:
“Many things have happened in the past year, whether it is a major event that the world has witnessed or an important event that has deeply touched your personal life; but as I reflect on the past year, I’m always reminded of the bright moments. Things that inspired sweet love or brought laughter and joy. It has been a year filled with God’s presence and grace. I believe that in the years to come, we will also be filled with God’s grace and glory.”

As I open my weekly calendar, I can see God’s wonderful work in many aspects in the past year, and it inspired a lot of sweet love. There were so many things that brought laughter and joy.

I hope you are like me. The truth is, if you focus more on God, you will also find that many wonderful things will happen, and that your year will be one full of God's presence and grace. However if you are still reminded of failures, setbacks or difficult things, I would sincerely urge you to put the past year along with all its failures, setbacks and disappointments in it gently aside; If there was something successful and you felt very proud about in the past year, I also suggest that you put it down and not dwell on the past. There will be better things ahead.

I love the saying “The best is yet to come”. We should believe this, even when facing death.

Chicken Soup for the Soul has a very touching story. There is an old sister in the church. Her face always shines brightly. Anyone she meets finds her very pleasant and she has a great sense of humor. Due to her old age, attending meetings became increasingly difficult for her. The pastor paid her a regular visit. The two of them told some jokes and were having a great time. Then the old lady said, “Pastor, the doctor just told me that I only have three weeks left to live.” The pastor immediately put away his cheerful expression, but the old lady was still very happy and began to talk to the pastor about how she wanted the funeral to be held and how it should be done. She said:

“Pastor, I have a special request. When the time comes, and people are paying their final respects, you have to do me a favor. Remember to ask them to let me hold a Bible in one hand, and hold a small spoon in the other.”

The pastor thought, “Why a little spoon?”

She said: “When we go out to eat dinner, after the main course, the waiter puts a small spoon on the table, and you know a delicious dessert is coming next. I just want to let people who are paying final respects to me to know that, although I lay there, leaving behind the body of this world, the best is yet to come.”

I hope we can all think this way.

◆Immerse Yourself in the Lord

Let us gently put down all the failures and setbacks in the past, as well as all the successes and things we’re proud of, so as not to add to the burden on the already heavily yoked shoulders in the coming year, or you will say: “I cannot bear this burden.” That is your mistake, not God’s, because the Lord said very clearly: “Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”

There is a story in Greek and Roman mythology: Hercules, the demigod hero, was asked to clean up an old stable in three days. When he saw the stable, he knew it was no easy task since the stable was filled with very thick and hardened dirt accumulated over the years. It took him half a day to clean only a small area.

So he stopped to think about it, then got up, walked outside, and started digging a trench to divert water from the nearby stream to the stable. He rested the next day, and when he went to clean on the third day, he found that the hardened dirt that had accumulated for many years had become soft and easy to clean. He completed a difficult task in three days.

If there are some things in your heart, life, or even in your family, workplace, or studies that are like that old stable and you don’t know where to start to change them, please come and soak in the presence of God. When you begin to thank and praise God and are willing to open your heart and say, “Jesus Christ is in me, the hope of glory,” you can begin to immerse yourself in God.

Looking forward to the year ahead, we will be saturated with those sweet things, God’s love, God’s infinite joy, God’s rest, and God’s Spirit, immersed into our hearts, immersed to the point of being truly marinated, which means no matter where you cut it, the taste is there. Just like when the Lord Himself encountered such terrible things on the cross, what came out of Him was something sweet, because He was one saturated with the Holy Spirit, and God gave Him the Holy Spirit without limit.
I know that many things will happen in the next year. Many people predict that the economy will be even more depressed, that the United States or Europe may collapse, etc.; there are also some things that we can almost be sure will happen, such as earthquakes, wars and other natural, or man-made, disasters, as well as things that we cannot predict now but will happen. We can predict that in the next year when we open the newspapers, turn on the TV, and read news online, we will definitely see these things; but you can learn to look in another direction.

Many years ago, God spoke through the prophets saying:
“For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, And gross darkness the people: But the Lord shall arise upon thee, And his glory shall be seen upon thee” (Is. 60:2).

The Lord Jesus did not say that when He comes, He would immediately remove all the darkness and make the whole world better. God said that the world will still be the same, but His glory will shine on you and appear on you. As the British writer Charles Dickens said at the beginning of his book A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way...”

Darkness and light go hand in hand, and one day they will reach perfection, allowing God to be righteous when he judges and righteous when he rewards.

You need to decide which way to look, which side to stand on, and God makes it clear that He wants us to look to Him, to turn our eyes away from other things and to focus on Him. Let us all pray and say, “Lord, please come and saturate me!” We believe that there must be a more abundant year ahead, and we can pursue being saturated with God and the Holy Spirit.

◆Examples of Being Immersed in the Holy Spirit

When Paul was being transferred to Rome, a centurion took him, along with other prisoners and some soldiers onto a ship. There were many risks in sailing in the Mediterranean in those days. Paul was not a fisherman or a sailor, nor a professional who sailed out to sea, but he spoke out what he had received from the Lord and advised them to stay in one place for the winter; but the owner of the ship, the helmsman, and the centurion didn’t listen to him. And as a result they made the wrong decision, and encountered a hurricane on the way that frightened even the best sailors.
However, Paul did not get angry and complain because of this, nor did he suffer any loss. In the end, Paul, who was saturated with the Holy Spirit, heard the voice of God again and saved the lives of 276 people on the entire ship, and probably also led them to know God. Because the Lord said to him: “All those who are in the same boat with you have been given to you by God.” The world may not quickly notice a person who is saturated with the Holy Spirit, but eventually he will become a person with far-reaching influence. That is the law by which God governs this world.

There is another example in the Bible—Daniel. He became a captive of Babylon in a dilapidated environment when Israel was facing the crisis of national annihilation. That was his environment and those were his encounters. But being a person saturated with the Spirit of God, led him to an event that changed his life and the lives of many others.

Daniel was a man who was saturated with God’s wisdom, sweetness, love, joy and peace. God could even speak to him in his dreams. Later, he became the one who influenced the king and eventually turned the entire current situation around. He also became a strong backing for those Israelite and Jews who have returned to Israel.
There are also many such people in the history of the church. For example, in the 5th century there was a man named Benedict of Nursia. He originally had a good family and a good environment, but he was drawn by God and longed to know God more. He established a monastery and spent a lot of time reading the Bible and praying before God.

His words, writings, and life are still being recited today for more than 1,500 years. Many people practice the path and teachings he led. There are many precious things in the 72 monastic rules he wrote. The most important thing is to teach people to read God’s Word, be immersed in God’s Word, immerse them in prayer, and immerse them in God’s presence.

◆Being Immersed in the Word of God

It is already an amazing grace for mankind to be favored by God. As John Newton’s poem said, it is “amazing grace.” So wouldn’t it be overboard to say that we need to be saturated with the Holy Spirit? But when God sent His Son into the world, He gave the Holy Spirit without measure to the incarnate Jesus Christ (John 3:34). From then on, all mankind has this hope, because the incarnate Jesus Christ is our example. What He inherited, we can also inherit, and we can endlessly receive and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And John 3:34 says: “For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God.” God gave Him the Holy Spirit without measure to enable Him to speak the words of God.

A person who is saturated with the Holy Spirit will also be filled with the words of God; a person who is saturated with the words of God will also be saturated with the Holy Spirit. If you want to pursue being saturated with the Lord, you must pursue immersing yourself in God’s words.

Some people who were committed to the church in the Middle Ages often learned to read from reading the Bible, so the language of the Bible was deeply imprinted in their earliest memories of life, and all their expressions (including speaking and writing) were inseparable from the Word of God.

I came to Christ when I was 18 years old. Before that, I was a nerd and didn’t care about anything except schoolwork. I was good at studying so I got into a good university and studied an ideal major, but I didn’t think much about life. The first time I read a book that spoke into my life was the Bible. At that time, I was like a blank piece of paper. Whatever I read in the Bible or heard from sermons, were engraved in my life. The Lord also arranged for me to be surrounded by people who loved reading the Bible. I spent a lot of time reading the Bible. God’s words have entered my life so much that everything I think, speak, and do cannot be separated from God’s words. Just like those monks in the Middle Ages.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a famous monk in the Middle Ages, for forty years spent more than half of his waking time in reading, singing and meditating on the Bible. He said:
“The Bible becomes a fountain of life, flowing out rivers of living water, making people rejoice in the Lord; through the Holy Spirit flowing in people, Christ is conceived in people, through which spiritual people taste the passion of the bride for the bridegroom.”

When a person is so immersed in God’s words, so filled in his heart, God’s words will enter his mind, emotions, conscience, imagination, and intuition. Whether you are conscious or subconscious, you will be filled with God’s words, that is, even your dreams will be infiltrated in them.

§ Foreword
I chose this title “Anchored to Eternity” from Hebrews 6:19 in the Bible: “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.”

After the fall of mankind, God drove the first ancestors out of the Garden of Eden, preventing them from getting close to the Tree of Life and from God’s presence. Later, he asked Moses to build the tabernacle and reserved the Holy of Holies in it as a place for people to meet God. However,...

Author’s Preface

When I was young, I preached an eight-sermon series at church called “The Path of the Inner Life”. Over the years, people have told me from time to time that they have been helped by the messages in this series, and some people still recommend it to others today.

In 2011, Pastor Aina Zheng from Good TV wanted me to go to Sunday School On Air to record a few episodes on the practice of getting closer to God. I recalled and updated the series “The Path of the Inner Life”, added a few related messages, and gave it a new overall title: “Anchored to Eternity.”

After preaching it on Good TV’s Sunday School On Air, I also preached this series of messages on Sunday at my own church (Taipei Shilin Zion Church) the following year. I usually take the sermons I have preached in my own church and preach them on Good TV, but this time it was reversed.

A few years ago, we started thinking about compiling this series into a book. I selected twelve of the twenty messages in this series and put them in this book. I hope this book can help people who are eager to seek God to find the way to pursue God and get closer to Him.

Special thanks to Sister Li-Ping Hsing（邢立平） for transcribing the audio of the sermon into text, Sister Chiao-Hui Huang（黃巧慧） and Sister Chen-Yu Lu（盧珍予） for editing the manuscript, Sister Yi-Chien Lin（林宜倩）for the art design, and many brothers and sisters for their help in proofreading. I would like to express my gratitude here.

Daniel Lizhong Tsao
曹力中
Pastor of Shihlin Zion Church
April 2019

Author’s Preface

When I was young, I preached an eight-sermon series at church called “The Path of the Inner Life”. Over the years, people have told me from time to time that they have been helped by the messages in this series, and some people still recommend it to others today.

In 2011, Pastor Aina Zheng from Good TV wanted me to go to Sunday School On Air to record a few episodes on the practice of getting closer to God. I recalled and updated the series “The Path of the Inner Life”, a...

Preface
Author’s Preface
Foreword
1. Being Immersed in the Word of God
2. Being Immersed by the Holy Spirit
3. Entering the Inner Chamber
4. Praise—A Holy Habit
5. Contemplation and Soaring: The Practice and Lifestyle of Waiting on God
6. Obey God’s Commands
7. Be Still
8. The Chariot of God
9. Girded with Humility
10. Return to Rest
11. Light Burden
12. Ministry in the Holiest of All

Preface
Author’s Preface
Foreword
1. Being Immersed in the Word of God
2. Being Immersed by the Holy Spirit
3. Entering the Inner Chamber
4. Praise—A Holy Habit
5. Contemplation and Soaring: The Practice and Lifestyle of Waiting on God
6. Obey God’s Commands
7. Be Still
8. The Chariot of God
9. Girded with Humility
10. Return to Rest
11. Light Burden
12. Ministry in the Holiest of All