In the beginning of the first verse of
the sixth chapter of 2 Samuel, again David
gathered together all the chosen men of Israel,
thirty thousand, and David arose and went with
all the people that were with him from
the vale of Judah to bring up from
thence the ark of God, whose name is
called by the name of the Lord of
Hosts, that dwelleth between the cherubim.
And they set the ark of God upon
a new cart, and brought it out of
the house of Abinadab, that was in Gibeah.
And Uzzah and Ahiel, the sons of Abinadab,
drove the new cart.
And they brought it out of the house
of Abinadab, which was at Gibeah, accompanying the
ark of God, and Ahiel went before the
ark.
And David and all the house of Israel
played before the Lord on all manner of
instruments, made of firwood, even on hearths and
psalteries, cymbals, cornets, and cymbals.
And when they came to Nathcon's threshing floor,
Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark
of God and took hold of it, for
the oxen shook it.
And the anger of the Lord was kindled
against Uzzah, and God smote him there for
his error, and there he died by the
ark of God.
And David was displeased, because the Lord had
made a breach upon Uzzah, and he called
the name of the place Perezuzzah to this
day.
And David was afraid of the Lord that
day, and said, How shall the ark of
the Lord come to me?
And so David would not remove the ark
of the Lord unto him into the city
of David.
And David carried it aside unto the house
of Obed-Edom the Gittite.
And the ark of the Lord continued in
the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite three
months, and the Lord blessed Obed-Edom and
all his household.
Now, this is part of a story that
I've read for you, and you're living in
part of a story here in this last
third of the twentieth century.
And there is an analogy that I am
trusting you will make, and to help you
make it, I will make suggestions along the
way.
But let's just bear in mind that the
modern mission era, which we are part of,
can be said to have begun about the
year 1800.
And tonight there are more unevangelized in the
world than there ever have been before.
We have tremendous improvements in communication and transportation,
all of the tools and techniques and methods
that are at our hand.
And yet, strangely enough, on the basis of
what we've done in the last fifty years,
projected into the next fifty years, if you
can have an average increase, we'll find that
in fifty years from hence we'll be many,
many times further behind in our task than
we are today.
And I think that we owe it to
ourselves, in the midst of this Victorious Life,
Deeper Life conference, to ask ourselves how God
wants to do his work, and ask him
to bring us to that place that we're
prepared and ready.
Because, after all, that's the purpose.
He said this morning that every Christian is
either a missionary or a mission field.
The same one who said, Come and rest,
said, Go and preach.
And he breathed on them and said, As
the Father sent me, and that word sent
his mitto, missionary.
As the Father missionaried me, so I missionary
you.
I send you.
And thus it is that we're brought face
to face with the fact that every Christian
is involved in this task.
The provision that was made in the person
of the Holy Spirit, as Peter said, the
promise is to you, to your children, to
them that are far off, even to as
many as the Lord our God shall call.
Every believer has a birthright in Christ to
know the victory through his death and power
through his resurrection and the outpouring of his
Spirit.
We're all in this together.
And one day we're going to stand and
give him a count when we meet him
at the beam at the judgment seat of
Christ.
Well, now David loved the Lord.
He'd been chosen of God to serve him.
He was a man after God's own heart.
And yet here we find that something isn't
going quite right.
The background of the story goes clear back
to Eli in the time when Samuel was
a little boy.
You recall that Eli himself was orthodox, but
his sons were extremely liberal, both in practice
and in attitude and in heart and in
habits.
And the consequence was that there came a
general degeneration in Israel.
The Philistines came upon Israel, and someone got
the bright idea of bringing the ark down
to the battlefield, and so thereby ensure victory
for Israel over the Philistines.
But what actually happened was that the Philistines,
trembling as they did, yet united and came
in and destroyed some 30,000 of the
Israelites and went home rejoicing in the fact
that they'd captured the ark of God.
The only problem was when they got it
home, they didn't know what to do with
it.
They put it in the house of Dagon,
the god of the Philistines, and the next
morning when they came out, Dagon had fallen
flat on his face.
They stood him up and left the ark
there.
The next day when they came in, he'd
fallen again on his face, and his head
had fallen off, and his two hands had
fallen off.
And so then they began to shift the
ark around from city to city among the
Philistines, and every place it went, trouble came.
People were slain, sicknesses, scourge, mice overran the
place.
One area they were afflicted with, general throughout
the entire place, a plague of hemorrhoids, a
terrible visitation from God from one end of
the country of the Philistines to the other,
because they had committed sacrilege against the ark
of God.
Now what is this ark of which I
speak?
We find reference in the instructions that God
gave to Moses.
There in the holiest of all, the inner
room of the holy place, there was to
be but one piece of furniture.
It was the ark of the covenant, made
of acacia wood, covered with gold, the lid
of which was a bar of solid gold.
Upon this bar was the chair of him,
with their outstretched wings, angelic forms, and they
hovered thus, resting upon the corners, the edges
of the mercy seat, and their wings overspreading.
And the presence of God is said to
have dwelt between the wings of the chair
of them.
Now this ark is a picture of Christ,
for in the wood and the gold you
have the perfect illustration of his deity in
the gold and his humanity in the wood.
The wood overlaid by the gold shows that
integral union between the human and the divine
and the person of the Son of God.
God who became flesh and dwelt among us,
God with us, Immanuel.
And here he is pictured in the ark
in the holy place.
Then that bar of gold, picturing God in
his great grace and mercy, be resting upon
the Lord Jesus Christ.
But it was God the Son, the infinitely
holy One, by the vehicle of his humanity,
his body, his human personality, able to enter
into death.
For the mercy seat was the place where
Moses once a year came with blood, sprinkling
the blood on the mercy seat.
This is what the publican in the temple
cried, literally, God be mercy seated to me,
a sinner.
And it was the picture of God between
the wings of the chair of them, looking
at the blood that was sprinkled upon the
plate of gold, resting upon the ark of
wood covered with gold.
And this was the law which our Lord
had perfectly kept.
He gave it, and he's the only one
who kept it.
The lawgiver became the law keeper, that he
might die for the lawbreaker.
There also was a pot of manna, speaking
again of this that came down from heaven,
of the one who was to say, I
am the bread of life.
If any man eat not of me, he
has no life, but if you'll eat my
flesh and drink my blood, then you'll have
my life in you.
And so the mercy seat speaks of Christ.
Christ in the midst of his people, our
wonderful, wonderful Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of
God, God who invaded time and history, and
by his coming, by his life and his
ministry, his death, his burial, his resurrection, opening
for us this new, this living way.
How marvelous it is that when he died,
this enormous curtain in the Herod's temple was
read from the top to the bottom, the
curtain separating the holy place from the holiest
of all, indicating that a new and a
living way had been opened, and through the
person of Christ, to a union with Christ.
Now, this is the ark, picture of Christ
in the midst of his people.
Our ministry is to preach Christ.
This is the good news, that Christ died
for our sins according to the Scripture, and
that he was buried and he was raised
again the third day according to the Scripture.
We send out missionaries, and they carry this
ark, if you please, this testimony of God
invading time in the person of his dear
Son.
This is the message that we carry.
This is the testimony that we bring.
And the ministry at home is again, whether
it be in church or home or school
or office, wherever you go in that sense,
you are a bearer of the good tidings.
Now we are to understand what happened.
Here the ark has been captured by the
Philistines, possessed by them to the point where
they are desperately eager to get rid of
it.
Have you ever had that happen, where God
has given you the desire of your heart
and sent leanness to your soul?
Well, this is what happened to the Philistines.
My, how they wanted that ark.
It reminds me of the man who was
out mountain lion hunting, and he climbed a
tree after the wounded mountain lion.
And he yelled down to his friend, Harry,
come on up and help me hold him.
And then there was a scuffle and a
scream, and a few moments later he said,
no, no, come up and help me let
go of him.
And this is what the Philistines were concerned
about.
They wanted help in letting go of the
ark, because they had more than they bargained
for.
Well, they went ahead and called the priest
of Dagon and said, how will we move
this?
And the priest said, well, be careful of
one thing, don't send it back without an
offering.
So they made little golden mice, and then
they made little forms of an ulcer, and
made that out of gold, because there had
been this affliction throughout the coast of the
Philistines.
And they put these in a coffer.
Then they made a new cart that had
never carried a load.
And they thought, well, we're going to make
this really hard.
We'll not only make a new cart that's
never carried a load, but to see whether
this is God that's judged us, we'll take
two milk cows that have never been taught
to pull a cart.
And not only that, we'll get two milk
cows that have calves, and won't want to
leave them.
And we'll take these wild milk cows and
put them in the yoke, and we'll shut
their calves up and leave their calves off
and tie them up.
And then we'll just stand back and see
what this God can do.
And there are two roads to Beth Shemesh.
There's a shortcut, a highway, and then there's
the other road.
And if they take the road that's smooth
and a little bit longer, but it's the
highway, it's the road that goes without so
much danger, then we'll know that God did
it.
Well, that's sort of a fixing thing, isn't
it?
And this is exactly what they did.
Wild milk cows that have never been taught
to pull, calves led, blacking and bleeding away
and tied to a tree or locked up,
and then they just stand back and say,
oh, let's see what's going to happen.
And what happened was that the cows went
on as though they'd been trained for years,
didn't hesitate a moment, took the road that
would lead them to Beth Shemesh with the
least danger to the cargo, to the ark,
and the five lords of the Philistines went
along in the brush at the side and
watched these oxen without any direction carry the
cart with the ark, gently and carefully picking
out the place so that it wouldn't be
spilled, and bringing it and then seeing the
people of Beth Shemesh look at it and
come and take it.
And the lords of the Philistines went home
and said, we're well rid of that, because
that was certainly God.
The people, the ark stopped by a large
rock, and so they queued the carts for
fuel and slaughtered the two oxen as an
offering, and there the ark stayed for some
time.
David has come as king now, he's in
Jerusalem, he's reigning, but it's very lonely there
without the presence of Christ, without the glory
of Christ manifest, illustrated in the ark.
And so David's desire is to bring the
ark back, because this is, after all, the
whole heart and center of Israel's worship.
It's the place where God dwells.
Now, David knew the Lord, he'd already written
the twenty-third Psalm, he'd already had great
dealings with God, he'd walked a good way
with Him, he'd gone through all these years
of persecution by Saul.
Many of the Psalms have already been written,
and he's there.
He should be taught in the things of
the Lord.
He's the one that says, thy law is
my meditation day and night.
He ought to know the Word.
But he went down to bring back the
ark.
And can you see him when he comes
into the house of the man who's caring
for it, and he says, how did it
get here?
Oh, they said the Philistines made a new
card.
Well, that sounds very good to anybody who
has a new card around here, that we
will do the same thing.
This is the thing.
David thought that he could do the thing
the way the Philistines had done it.
Now, the Philistines speak of the world.
They always speak of the world in the
types of Scripture.
And the world performed a service in respect
to God that he honored because of their
ignorance and because they weren't in covenant relationship
with him.
But here's what happened.
When David, who was in covenant relationship with
him, was in blood covenant with him, who
had the Word, tried to do the work
of God the way that the Philistines had
done it, God wouldn't honor it.
And this, I say, is the tragedy of
the twentieth century.
I'm afraid we've been trying to do so
much of the work of God in the
way of the Philistines, instead of coming back
and finding out how it's done.
Well, the ark was placed on the new
card.
Oxen were brought.
They didn't go as far as the Philistines
did.
They got well-trained oxen.
And they started to take the ark back
to Jerusalem.
But it says, And the oxen shook it,
and Uzzah reached out his hand to steady
the ark.
Isn't it amazing when God was working even
with the ignorant Philistines, he got the ark
safely there without anyone touching it?
But here, because God's people were doing a
good thing in the wrong way, it wasn't
possible.
And the consequence?
Well, the consequence was that Uzzah died.
And it says that David was displeased with
the Lord, and David feared the Lord that
day, and so they just put the ark
in a house nearby and shut it off,
and David went back to Jerusalem.
But he didn't go back in joy.
He didn't go back in pleasure.
He went back in grief, because this meant
that he was going to have a lonely
job as the king of Israel without the
presence of God, and the glory of God,
and the blessing of God.
Well, the consequence?
Apparently, we have no record of it, but
apparently David did the thing then that he
should have done earlier, and he called for
the Word.
He called for the Scripture.
He went to the book to find out
the manner and way that God wanted to
move the ark.
It was in Exodus, the twenty-fifth chapter,
that he discovered that Kohath of the children
of Levi had been assigned, the sons of
Kohath, to the task of carrying the ark.
Now, we could trace down Kohath and discover
why they were given this particular high honor,
but Kohath was chosen.
His name there, his sons, were the ones
that were to carry the ark.
Moses would go in and bail the ark
and put over it the fine, fine linen,
and the scarlet, and the purple, and then
the badger skin, so that it was all
covered.
Then the sons of Kohath would come in,
and here is the wonder of it.
On the ark there were two rings, rings
of gold, or covered with gold, in which
two staves went.
And these staves would be put through the
rings, and then the ark would be lifted
and carried on the shoulders of the sons
of Kohath.
But an interesting, and a strange, and a
wonderful thing, it said that these sons should
be thirty, and not yet fifty.
Isn't it strange that there should come a
time when one would be standing before the
Sanhedrin, and they should look at him and
say, well he's not yet fifty, and we
know that he was over thirty.
Isn't it interesting that the one who's pictured
in the ark should himself take two staves,
and those two staves be laid one the
other to form a cross, and he then
should carry that cross and drag it through
the streets of Jerusalem up to the hill
of Calvary, Golgotha.
And isn't it marvelous that those two staves
should suspend and uplift and present the one
who's pictured by the ark, the Lord Jesus
Christ.
And so it is, there hanging upon a
tree, this one whose God come in the
flesh, the acacia wood of his humanity, the
gold of his deity, perfectly, gloriously joined, inseparably
united, and that acacia, the humanity, gives him
the vehicle by which he can get under
the law, and then under the sentence of
the law, and then to death.
That he could break the power of death,
and lead captive him who had the power
of death, and pay the full penalty of
sin.
Now do you see why God couldn't allow
David to break the type?
He couldn't allow David to spoil the picture.
Philistines, they don't understand.
They have no part in these things.
Let them make a new card.
It's all right for the Philistines, but it'll
never do for the people of God, because
God's told them how to do it.
I come to Minneapolis, my heart is always
filled with joy and grief.
I lived here.
I was thinking today that it was down
at South St. Paul, Red Rock Camp Meeting,
Southside of the Cudahy Packing Company.
There were a group of people that gathered
and gathered for nearly a hundred years.
Grave creatures were there that year that God,
in sweet, mysterious grace, saved a boy.
John L.
Brasher of the Logan told me he's a
hundred years old this week, and shortly.
Joseph Owens, Paul Reeves, my, the glory of
God was there, but they moved.
Red Rock, for all impact purposes, has disappeared.
I think of Medicine Lake Bible Conference, how
the prongs came from all over the state,
and I'm told that nothing is there.
Oh, how easy it is.
For yesteryear, the way it was done, then
somehow to have it disappear.
We try to do the work other than
God's prescribed, other than the way He's planned.
How quickly the candlestick is removed.
How soon the heart seems to vanish.
God is so sensitive, He's so concerned, He's
so determined that your life and your ministry
and your work shall be the way He's
established, the way He's planned.
And so here we see David, back in
Jerusalem, searching the Scripture, and there he finds
that God said through Moses that the ark
is to be born unto sons of Levi,
on their shoulders, men thirty, not yet fifty.
And back again he returns, now this time
to do God's work in God's way.
Can you understand now why he danced before
the presence of the Lord?
For it wasn't just that the ark was
coming back.
It wasn't just that the presence of God
would now be there in the seat of
His reign and His authority as King.
It wasn't just that.
It was that the pressure and the power
and the influence of those years when he'd
been hiding among the Philistines, when he'd been
influenced by them, when he'd been under the
pressure of them, had been broken.
And he'd been released from all these things,
and he'd been now brought into that tender,
loving tyranny of the Word of God, where
God could bless.
Oh, how important it is for us to
understand it.
How significant it is that you should realize
in your ministry, for you have a ministry,
you're part of this, that God is exceedingly
jealous of the glory of His Son.
And He's determined that if you are to
bear the vessel of the Lord, first that
you should be clean.
Be clean that bear the vessels of the
Lord.
He specified Kohath, because Kohath had not been
involved in the rebellion.
He'd been clean from all of that which
had transpired, never lifted his voice against God,
had not been among the number that had
bowed down before the golden calf.
And so he says to us, be clean
that bear the vessels of the Lord.
And how important it is, therefore, that we
should deal with anything and everything the Spirit
of God shows us.
Because this is holy work, this work of
witnessing for Christ and interceding for the lost,
and exercising the weapons of our warfare, spiritual,
not carnal, for the releasing of men from
the snares of sin.
And so he says, be clean.
That's the reason why He's so jealous.
Because your task is the task of uplifting
His Son, this One who came by way
of the Incarnation, joined Himself perfectly to humanity,
became the Ark, the Mercy Seat.
When you come to this task, you come
clean, clean through His precious blood, clean through
a conscience void of offense toward God and
toward men, clean through the mirror of the
Word as you've gazed upon it and invited
the Spirit of God, clean through a heart
that's been cleansed of all purpose save to
glorify Him.
But it's not only a heart that's been
cleansed through the blood, but we find that
these two staves are there, these two rods
of wood that form a cross.
And He's determined that all that share in
the ministry of calling His Son should know
the cross.
The Apostle speaks of this in Romans 6
.6, you hear him say, knowing this, that
our old man is crucified with Christ.
This is axiomatic.
This is part of the testimony.
This is the association that was made.
The Gospels preach in this light in Paul's
day to everyone, Jesus Christ died for you,
but since He died for you, He died
as you, and since He died as you,
you died with Him.
There were two people on that cross.
Christ was on the front of it, dying
for you, and you, in God's eyes, as
it were, were on the back of it,
dying with Him.
Understand this, knowing this?
Reckon yourself, therefore, from this day on, as
long as you live, to be crucified with
Christ.
See yourself there, with all ambition and personal
pride and hope and everything that could come
in that would any wise intervene in His
lovely purpose.
You bear the ark on two cross staves,
two rods of wood, and therefore you only
are ready to come to this work of
witness that have first come to the cross.
But how simple that would be, if all
that was needed was a knowing.
He said also, reckon yourself to be dead.
And speaking of Himself, He said, I'm always
being delivered unto death.
Oh, you can take that as meaning that
He was constantly being threatened with persecution and
martyrdom.
True.
But I think something else was happening.
I think the Apostle is using this expression
in this way, day after day, experiences, circumstances,
events transpired, which are to me like God's
little wheelbarrow.
Oh, in this case, think of the Judaizers
that followed Him wherever He went, and He'd
go into a place to preach, and they'd
open a meeting right across, and theirs was,
Paul isn't an apostle.
I don't know what the thorn in the
flesh was.
Some people think it was sickness.
Personally, from the use of the thorn in
the Old Testament, I would assume that the
thorn were people that followed Him wherever He
went, made life miserable for Him.
Whether that's the case or not, at any
rate, this was His experience.
And I think He's saying, He's always being
delivered unto death.
In other words, there's always somebody right over
there, right here, right behind Him, that's determined
to kill Him.
To keep Him in place.
And so He goes somewhere to minister, and
there they are.
They came in on the next plane, if
you please.
Or the same plane riding in the tourist
section.
There they were.
As soon as He got out there, they're,
that's Paul!
Don't believe him!
He's no apostle.
He doesn't have credentials.
Paul says He's always being delivered unto death.
Always a little wheelbarrow behind Him, and somebody's
pushing Him.
Well, now, He's got one or two things
to do.
He can get up there and fight, or
else He can say, well, thank you, Lord.
Must have been the push was permitted of
you, and the wheelbarrow was arranged by you,
so okay.
And they just sort of wheel Him right
back to the cross.
He's always being delivered to death.
And these experiences, which might have caused resentment
and antagonism and vindication and all the rest,
no.
Paul says, I die daily.
So the cross was a grand tenet of
theology.
It was a truth that He used in
the moment of temptation.
It was His way of meeting the frustrations
and pressures that He couldn't control.
But you'd certainly think that this man who
was so marvelously filled with the Spirit and
had the gifts of the Spirit in such
abundance that all of them could be said
to have been exercised by Him, would have
come to a place where he'd have outgrown
this truth, wouldn't you?
Now, writing to the church at Galatia, he
said, I am crucified with Christ.
I'm still bearing the ark.
I'm still witnessing for Christ.
I'm still seeking to exalt Him, God who
became flesh and dwelt among us.
And there's only one way.
I am crucified with Christ.
Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me.
The only way to bear the ark is
on the two staves, the way God's ordained.
And so he said, I am.
That present perfect passive verb is, I have
been in the past, but the effect of
it continues until the present.
Well, that's about midway in his ministry.
But Paul, aren't you ever going to get
out of this cross?
Life?
Certainly there'll come a time when it'll be
a mystery, won't it?
You'll go on to another level, another plane.
But writing that prison epistle to the church
at Philippi, he said, that I may know
Him.
Oh, Paul, you've known Him since the Damascus
road event.
Oh, Paul, you've known Him all these years.
Why use you such terms as this, that
I may know Him?
And then we hear him say, neither as
though I were already perfect, nor that I've
already attained, but I press toward the mark
of the prize.
What is it?
The mark of the prize is to be
found at that day, hearing him say, you
finished the course, you fought a good fight,
you kept the faith as a crown of
righteousness, you carried the ark the way God
intended.
But if you do that, then go back,
that I may know Him in the fellowship
of His suffering, in the power of His
resurrection, being made conformable unto His death.
In just the time you feel that, boy,
this death life, oh, I know that, now
what's new?
God's going to show you new areas in
your personality, in your experience, in your relationship,
where the cross hasn't reached yet.
And you're going to be as Paul was,
aged, venerable, bowed with the care of years,
face lined and back seamed with scars from
where he's been beaten with rods.
And we listen to this man as he
dictates, and it's written for him because his
hands are shackled and chained to soldiers at
his side, that I may know Him, being
made conformable unto His death.
Pastor Avery, in that most valuable book, Three
Aspects of the Cross, dwells upon the continuing
aspect.
Oh, how wisely we see that, and how
well that comes to clarify this, that it
is to be viewed by you that as
long as this ark of testimony of the
incarnate Christ, God come in the flesh to
live, to die, to rise again, to save
sinners, the only way this message can be
carried.
It is on the cross stage.
This is how it was intended.
And there comes a time when we feel,
well, I've passed that point, now where's my
new car?
And sometimes God lets us take our new
car, but it isn't long until we find
that touching it to steady it.
For on our hearts are bowed low before
Him.
Oh, to see, to understand, to recognize that
God will never let His people do His
work the way the world does.
And you will find that when denominations and
groups that once had a testimony, and once
had a ministry, and once had life, begin
to look around and say, well, this, the
Philistines here are doing it, and the Philistines
there are, and it seems to work, and
it gets the job done, and the first
thing you know, you can hear the hammering
in the offices as they're making new carts,
and as they're bringing the oxen to pull
it.
But dear friend, you just look a little
while and you'll search in vain for the
candlestick.
It'll be removed.
God is so jealous of His side.
He said the only way the ark can
be carried is stays on the shoulders of
men thirty, not yet fifty.
Those that have come to, in a sense,
maturity, but the maturity is not that maturity
of age of years alone, but the maturity
of insight and understanding.
As we saw, I write unto you, little
children, your sins are forgiven you.
I write unto you, young men, you've overcome
the wicked one.
I write unto you, fathers, that you know
Him who is from the beginning.
I'm sure many of you tonight will look
back and see the new carts that you
devised.
You'll see the times when you sat to
steady the ark and imitate the Philistines in
one way or another.
But oh, tonight the Spirit of God is
calling us right back to that place that
He brought David.
And we sit with the word and we
say, Lord, how do you want to do
your work?
And we hear this one brilliant that he
was, oh, so brilliant, as a logician, spellbinding
orator, eloquent philosopher.
And he said, I came among you determined
to know nothing except Jesus Christ and Him
crucified.
I did not come to you in the
excellency of men's speech, lest your faith should
stand in the wisdom of men.
Here is a man that's learned that there's
only one way to carry the ark of
God.
Have you learned it?
Have you learned that the only way up
is down, the only way to live is
to die, the only way that wheat can
bring forth is to fall into the ground
and die?
So yes, I've learned that.
But you know, we have to learn it
so often.
David knew it.
David knew better.
David had read the Scripture.
David had just been caught up with the
activity and with his association from the Philistines
when he'd lived among them for so many
months.
And the things that were important to God
had seemingly lost their importance to him.
And because nothing had happened, he didn't think
God cared.
But God does care.
He's so jealous of this ark, this testimony
of his son.
And if you're going to have a witness
for him, then you'll have to hear him
say, abide in me.
Abide in me, crucified with me to have
victory over yourself.
Abide in me, buried with me to have
victory over the world.
Abide in me, seated with me to have
victory over principalities and powers.
And I will abide in you.
Ah, here are the two cross sticks.
You abide in me, and I'll abide in
you.
And you'll bring forth much fruit.
But oh, this is so costly.
Lord, you mean to say as long as
I live, I've got to stay here on
the back of the cross?
And I never can initiate, and I never
can develop, and I never can plan, and
I've just got to stay here?
And I won't be able to say anything's
my own, my time, my life, my talent?
You really mean that I've got to abide,
live, dwell in you, crucified?
That's what I mean.
Lord, why can't we get this dying business
over with?
This isn't so nice, this abiding here.
Let's get this thing through.
Oh, I know how you feel about it,
dear child.
But you see, the only way the ark
can be carried is on two staves.
You abide in me, crucified with me, and
I'll abide in you.
And you'll bring forth much fruit.
My Father will be glorified.
There isn't any other.
This is the way God wants to do
his work.
Shall we bow together in prayer?