If you turn please to three scriptures this
evening, Matthew 22 is the first, then Matthew
16, and then John 12.
I want you to see as we endeavor
to sort of braid the truth together, or
like a cable we twist and wind it
together to make a chain of truth, a
table of truth for your heart to rest
on.
Matthew chapter 22, and our text is found
in verses 36 to 40.
This is the key text, the anchor text
for our evening services together.
Master which is the great commandment in the
law?
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, with
all thy soul, with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
The second is like unto it, Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets.
We have seen in the nights past the
nature of the great commandment to love God
with all of our hearts, with all of
our souls, our emotions, and our minds, our
intellect.
That this is the equivalent of repentance toward
God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.
The evidence and the proof that we do
love God, this in this fashion, is that
we love our neighbors as ourselves.
I remind you of the definition of love,
that love is the committal of the will
to the principle of seeking the blessedness and
joy and happiness and satisfaction of God in
relation to our love for him or of
others and ourselves in proper respect for that
love for God.
Now to Matthew chapter 16.
Last evening we heard our Lord Jesus say
from John 14, He that heareth my words
and doeth them, he it is that loveth
me.
If you love me, you will keep my
commandment.
Now tonight I want you to listen as
the Lord Jesus speaks to Peter here beginning
with the 24th verse of Matthew 16.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any,
any man will come after me, let him
deny himself and take up his cross and
follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose
it, then whosoever will lose his life for
my sake shall find it.
For what is a man profited if he
shall gain the whole world and lose his
own soul?
Or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?
Now will you turn please to John chapter
12.
And I'd like to begin reading with the
23rd verse.
John 12 verse 23.
And Jesus answered them saying, The hour is
come that the Son of Man should be
glorified.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone.
But if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.
He that loveth his life shall lose it.
And he that hateth his life in this
world shall keep it unto life eternal.
If any man serve me, let him follow
me.
And where I am, there shall also my
servant be.
If any man serve me, him will my
Father honor.
I would like to speak to you tonight
on the theme of the great commitment.
Not so much the commitment that we make
to the Lord Jesus Christ, though that certainly
is involved.
But I'd rather have in mind the commitment
that the Lord Jesus Christ is making to
us.
You recall after his resurrection, our Lord said
to his assembled disciples, Go into all the
world and preach the gospel to every creature.
And we have it elsewhere.
Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
have commanded you.
And lo, I am with you always, even
unto the end of the age.
The commitment to which I refer is the
commitment that the Lord Jesus Christ makes of
himself to you.
Now we've seen several things, and these ought
to be borne in mind by us as
we approach the study tonight and the message
tonight.
First, that the essence of sin, the very
nature of sin, is a committal of the
will to the principle of pleasing ourselves.
You did this at the age of accountability.
You followed every bent and inclination of your
heart and nature, and so you did make
this the choice and the operating principle of
your life.
I will do what I want to do.
Like others, we turn to our own way.
And this is, I say, sin.
This deciding how to rule our lives, how
to be happy, how to satisfy our appetites.
And the Lord Jesus Christ has told us
that except we repent, we perish.
To repent is to change our mind and
purpose from pleasing ourself to pleasing God.
And this we have made synonymous with loving
God.
For whom you love, you seek to please.
Last evening we saw that the words of
the Lord Jesus Christ are very specific and
very definite.
He that heareth my words, and doeth them,
he it is that loves me.
And his words were, if any man hate
not his father, mother, husband, wife, brethren, sister,
jay, and his own life also, he can't
be my disciple.
If he doesn't take up his cross and
come follow me, he can't be my disciple.
If he doesn't forsake all that he hath,
he can't be my disciple.
So I'm assuming, for the purpose of our
study tonight, that you have met him on
these terms.
That you have heard his words, you have
accepted his words, and you are doing his
words.
Because that's the evidence that you love him.
If you love him, you will hear his
words.
If you love him, you will keep his
commandments.
If you don't hear his words, then you
have the inference that you can draw, that
it is you don't love him.
If you do not keep his commandments, all
protests of your experience to the contrary, he
said the evidence is that you don't love
him.
It's a very simple, open-shut sort of
a thing.
If you love him, you will keep his
commandments.
If you don't keep his commandments, you don't
love him.
Now, isn't that simple?
He said it, I didn't.
I didn't put it together.
I'm only, uh, I'm only giving it to
you the way he gave it to us,
because that's the way he intended we should
have it.
Now, we hear a great deal from missionaries,
which I delight to include myself as one,
talking about a call, call to the mission
field, call to be a foreign missionary.
And I know precisely what my fellow colleagues
and I myself have meant by such an
expression in the, in, that I've used in
years past.
I, I don't use it particularly anymore, because
as I've searched the scripture, I have failed
to find that the Bible teaches a specific
call to the mission field.
Now you, you're going to, you're going to
break and run, I know, and you're going
to think it's heresy, but it's not really.
The call is to follow Christ.
Come, follow me, is what the word of
God teaches.
And if you are a Christian tonight, then
you have had the only call that I
find set forth in the Bible.
That is the call to the person of
the Son of God.
A call to him, to follow him.
Now, have you received that call?
Or have you, for better still, have you
responded to that call?
You have received it, certainly.
But have you consciously and deliberately, professing child
of God, recognized that when you received Jesus
Christ as your Lord and Savior, you had,
you responded to his call.
The call was to follow him.
And that meant that whatever he wanted you
to do from that time on, you had
made a commitment to do.
Now that's implicit in our definition of a
one of Christ.
A follower of Christ is a person who
is a follower of Christ.
Now that doesn't sound too odd, does it?
If you are one of Jesus, now Christian
comes from the Armenian word, christian, one of
Christ, or follower of Christ.
And if you are, then you are a
person who has said to Jesus Christ, Lord,
what do you want me to do?
And you have had the only call that
the Bible teaches.
Now while we're clearing the ground and getting
a couple of misconceptions out of the way,
let me really give you a difficult one.
You've heard from me and perhaps from many
others, sermons on that commandment, go into all
the world and preach the gospel to every
creature.
But I was studying this and trying to
execute it in the Greek sometime ago, and
was rather astounded to find out that there's
only one imperative in that verse, not two.
It sounds like go is one imperative and
preach is the second.
But when you read it in the language
in which it came to us, in the
text we have, this is the way it
comes out.
As you are going into all the world,
there's no commandment to go.
As you are going into all the world,
preach!
That's the commandment.
You say, but you've just broken, you've broken
the whole chain of mission.
Why, if you take that commandment out to
go, well let me ask you, how well
are we doing today with it?
Huh?
I understand there's quite a need for missionaries
today, and we've been reading it go.
Maybe we'd better go back and find out
what he said.
Literally he said, come, not go, come follow
me.
Follow, that's the commandment.
Come, that's the invitation.
But when you come, the commandment is to
follow.
So is it difficult for us then?
As you are following Christ into all the
world, now the commandment, preach the gospel to
every creature.
What does it mean?
Simply this, that everyone who names the name
of Jesus Christ, has by his receiving of
the Son of God on biblical terms, already
told the Lord Jesus that he will follow
him.
My life is in your hands to do
what you would have me to do.
I bring to you all I am and
all I have.
I give to you my life, I give
to you my talent, I give to you
my money, everything I have Lord Jesus belongs
to you.
And I am committed to follow you as
long as I live.
Now this doesn't seem to break the chain
of missions, does it?
But what it does, it saves you from
being a spectator.
It takes you out of the bleachers and
puts you right down on the field.
And it makes you a direct participant with
the Lord Jesus, in getting the gospel out
to the ends of the earth.
This is the thing that we're intending you
to see tonight, that as you have received
the Son of God, as he is presented
to you, Prince and Savior, Lord and Christ,
you have committed yourself by very definition to
follow him as long as you live.
Not only to follow him, but to obey
his words, to render to him all that
you possess, to allow him to dictate in
all the decisions of your life as precisely
and exactly as though you were nailed to
a cross and had no choice of your
own.
And his lordship transcends all other relationships, so
you cannot plead that these are going to
take precedence over what is to be his
will.
Well that's pretty complete it seems to me.
That gets you into the harness with him,
into the yoke if you please, with him.
Come unto me all ye that labor and
are heavy laden, take my yoke upon you
and learn of me.
And if you're a Christian, you're already yoked
with the Son of God, because you have
committed yourself to follow him.
Well you say, I haven't been doing that.
That means one of two things.
You didn't understand the implications of being born
again, or you're not born again.
There's not a third alternative that I can
find.
And if you hear it tonight and you
say, well that's what I intended, then you
can make pretty sure that you aren't born
again.
Because he said, my sheep hear my voice,
and they follow me.
They follow me because they're my sheep.
And consequently, if you are the sheep of
his fold, if you have been born into
his family, if you have partaken of his
life, if you've been begotten from above, then
you do hear his voice.
And you follow him.
Because this was how he distinguished his sheep
from those of the world.
Now let's follow for a moment the implications
of it.
What does it mean?
As you commit yourself to him, that's the
beginning, then you are to follow him.
Now how are you to distinguish his leading?
What's the manner by which you are to
discover his will?
Well there are several ways.
First the word of God.
The Lord Jesus Christ is never going to
ask you to do anything, ask me to
do anything, contrary to his word.
So when there is something before us, the
first question we have to ask is, is
this according to the word of God?
Because we know full well that however much
you want to pay your missionary pledge, he
has not given you permission to go out
and rob a store to get the money
to pay your pledge.
Because he said thou shalt not steal.
Therefore there is just no question about it.
You have to be absolutely honest in your
dealings.
Is it according to the word of God?
That's the first test for guidance.
He never leads us contrary to his word.
Secondly, is it in accord with the desire
of my heart?
Now that's a strange thing to put at
that point, isn't it?
But I believe that if you love the
Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart and
mind and soul, if you truly are committed
to please him in everything, then God is
going to incline you to want the things
that he wants you to want.
And your state of consciousness is extremely important
in relation to finding and doing the will
of God.
What do you want to do?
I often say to people that come asking
for counsel in this matter of finding the
will of God for their life, if you
had a clean piece of paper with no
lines on it and you could write down
on that paper anything that you, the thing
you really want to do, you don't need
to have about permission to do it, it's
right.
You don't need to worry about having the
means and the funds and the resources to
do it, they're provided for my illustration.
What would you write down on that paper?
In other words, according to your present state
of consciousness, what do you really want to
do with your life?
What do you want to do?
Because I think that if you love God,
if your purpose is to please God, invariably
I would say, and that of course implies
exceptions because exceptions only prove the rule, invariably
the Lord will have caused you to want
the thing that he wants from you.
If you're thoughtful, if you're approaching the scripture
realistically, if you're actually aware of your abilities
and what you can do and the limitations
of your ability, what you can't do.
I've never wanted to be a singer.
I love to hear people sing, but I've
never wanted to be because I was told
very early in my life by my own
ears and by friends who had much keener
ears than mine that I couldn't sing.
And so it just seemed to be a
fallacy for me to really want to turn
out to be a caruso when I was
never made to be a, you know, I
was never made to be a canary.
I'm much more of the crow family than
I am of the canary.
So I have no intense desire to be
a soloist.
Our brother Stutzman has been standing near me
during the song service and he's delighted about
that decision on my part because I just
know that I don't have that equipment.
But I'm not going to just go have
a nervous breakdown because I can't sing.
Maybe there's one or two other things that
by his grace and help I might be
able to do, so I'm just going to
let the rest go.
But I do believe that when God has
wants you to do something, he inclines your
heart.
Watch your state of consciousness very carefully and
very closely.
The next thing is, what do you have
opportunity to do?
What opportunities are presented to you?
You ought to be sensitive to them, because
very often the Spirit of God is guiding
the pastor, guiding the elders of the church,
guiding someone else, and they're coming to you
and saying, would you teach this class?
Well I've not taught a class.
Well really I think you could.
Would you be willing to teach it?
Well do you want to teach it?
Certainly it's according to the will of God.
Are you prepared to listen to what others
might ask of you?
And what others might suggest that you have
talents to do?
I think this is a pretty good evidence
of how the Lord would have you follow
him in respect to your service for him.
Then of course there's something else.
As you hear of opportunity and you hear
of need and you have information come to
you, very frequently God will use that information
and involve you in it.
I suppose that information is always the raw
material out of which guidance is made.
No one really felt led of the Lord
to go to the interior of New Guinea
until they found out New Guinea had an
interior and someone was there and there were
people there.
Then they began to realize that the information
laid the burden upon their heart.
I remember years ago when I was a
student at the University of Minnesota.
There were a group of young men there
at the university that had a tremendous burden
for Tibet and Afghanistan and Nepal.
And these young men, with the information that
had come to them of the need of
those unevangelized areas, committed themselves to serve Christ
there on the basis of the information.
They responded.
That burden found a lodgment in their heart
and they did something about it.
It's interesting to know that Dr. Simpson learned
about Tibet and he became tremendously burdened for
it.
In fact, record has it that on one
occasion one of the secretaries at the headquarters
in the tabernacle in New York went by
Dr. Simpson's office and saw him.
He didn't know the door was open.
He thought that it was closed securely and
he'd have been embarrassed had he known it.
But there he was clasping the globe to
his heart with his finger resting on Tibet
and the tears streaming down his cheeks as
he cried out to God for that land.
And the amazing thing, when the missionaries finally
got to Tibet, they found that every one
of them were of the same age and
they had been born the year that Dr.
Simpson started to pray for Tibet.
It took a generation.
They didn't know that.
They weren't aware of it.
But when the facts came out, they found
that God had to bring into life a
generation of men.
Tom Moseley was one of them and others
with him who responded to the Spirit of
God in those days in that way, as
Dr. Simpson had become concerned and become burdened.
So it could very well be that God
has brought you into a partnership with others
that have labored and intercessory travail, so you
should become sensitive to the leading of the
Lord.
Then there's another factor in this matter of
following Christ.
After all, he isn't here visibly as he
was with his disciples.
How are you going to follow him today?
Well, I've suggested several means, but there is
one more.
I recall back in 1955, I had come
into the Christian Missionary Alliance, was engaged in
Bible conference ministry, and I had three opportunities
for service that came to me within a
matter of six or eight weeks.
One of them was for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Four Missions Fellowship.
David Adeny had left to go to Hong
Kong and Stacey Woods very kindly asked me
if I'd consider the responsibility.
That was one.
A second, Hal Street had just recently been
named Director of Evangelical Literature Overseas, and he
asked me if I'd become his associate and
assistant in that new ministry.
And I had one or two other things
that came about the same time.
And I must confess that at that time
I was a little fellow, a little bruised
and injured, and my ego was greatly nourished
and supported by the fact that at least
three or four people wanted me.
And so I kept them and I sort
of juggled them back and forth, you know,
oh Lord, it's a marvelous thing to go
to somebody and say, you know, please pray
with me.
I have three opportunities and I just don't
know which one to take.
And so you can milk a little more
ego nourishment out of it.
And I guess I'll have to be honest
with you and say I probably did.
Finally came a time when something had to
happen.
I called R.R. Brown.
I was on my way to California and
I said, Dr. Brown, here's a preacher that
needs a pastor.
Can I stop by and see you?
Well, he was going to be in the
office.
Cost me $35 extra to route by way
of Omaha.
I took the airport limousine into the hotel,
walked a block down to the church, went
into the study.
And he came in in his characteristic way.
He said, well, what are you doing here?
And I said, well, I came to have
you help me decide which of these three
things I'll do.
And I outlined them to him.
He said, well, I want to tell you
right out.
I won't do it.
Well, I said, thanks.
And take me to lunch.
He said, I already eaten.
That's where I came when you came in.
Well, I said, pat me on the back
and wish me God's speed.
Then do something.
I come a long way to see you.
He said, sit down.
He said, you know Colossians 317?
I said, give me the first word.
He said, you don't know it.
You don't know the first word.
You don't know any of the rest of
them.
You can't.
He said, now turn to it.
And I turned to it and I read
Colossians 317.
Let the peace of God rule in your
hearts and minds through Jesus Christ.
Let the peace of God.
And then he told me he'd been out
to see Curtis LeMay at the strategic air
command base.
And somebody out there had talked to him
about guided missiles just coming in.
And he said, you know, we used to
have direct guidance on these things and it
didn't work because they'd get out of kilter.
So he said, now we died.
And all I know is what Dr. Brown
told me.
And he did it in five minutes.
So if you're a missile specialist, forgive me
for presuming on your territory and sent me
straight afterwards, but it's an illustration.
That's all.
I'm not trying to pretend to be a
scientist because I'm not.
And he said, what they have now is
negative feedback guidance.
In other words, they sort of visualize a
tunnel through the sky and they start the
missile up the mouth of that tunnel.
And as long as it stays in that
tunnel, nothing happens.
It just goes.
But when it gets to where the edge
of the tunnel would be, it gets the
negative feedback and it corrects.
Goes too low, it corrects up.
Goes to the left, corrects in.
And he said, then when it gets right
near the target, then they pinpoint it.
But on the way over, as long as
it's in the tunnel, it's going all right.
This is the end of side one.
Please stop the machine at this point and
turn the cassette over.