John, first chapter, maybe one
of the reasons it's hard to keep hymns
alive is that the body they may kill
doesn't mean much to us anymore, it did
to Martin Luther, and it did to all
his followers.
The body they may, and life does not
will, kill.
Yet once again, I believe there's a spiritual
participation which is beyond the natural, and if
God gives us to understand it in the
spirit, which is what he wants us to
do, cause the, not only the word of
God, but the hymns of God, they were
all inspired, practically all inspired in the beginning.
If we could get back to that and
let God illuminate them, it'd be a new
hymn book besides a new Bible.
Okay, John, chapter 1, verse 1.
In the beginning was the word, and the
word was with God, and the word was
God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him, without him
was not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was
the light of man.
The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness
comprehended it not.
Verse 4.
In him was life, and the life was
the light of man.
There's been a lot written about the gospel,
about the Bible, about John.
The fact that John in his gospel goes
back to the beginning before creation ever was.
But, let me just say tonight, these first
five verses are the history of the world.
The history of the church, and in a
sense the history of each individual believer.
I think I've said before that in Hebrew,
this is not written in Hebrew, but Hebrew
was the language of John and the apostles.
Hebrew was the language of their country, the
language of religion.
And if John were thinking in Hebrew when
he wrote it, the significance is that the
word, word, and the word, reality, are one
and the same.
John points back and he said, Before there
was ever any false thing, before there was
ever any twisting of the truth, before life
had ever been mixed with death, or purity
had ever been mixed with sin, before there
was ever a word of temptation spoken in
this world, before the mind of man, as
the old Jewish interpreters used to say, had
become like the Tower of Babel scattered abroad,
one part of his personality saying one thing,
another part of his personality saying another thing,
incoherence reigning within the kingdom of Babylon, the
kingdom of the enemy, the kingdom of Babylon,
manifest on the earth and all the way
through.
It's almost the last enemy that will be
destroyed, Babylon, in what is it, Revelation chapter
18, 19, Babylon is fallen.
Babylon speaks of confusion, Babylon speaks of every
false thing, every evil thing, every twisted thing,
every hurt thing.
It all goes back to there.
When the enemy somehow was able to take
what God had formed and, as it were,
blow it apart into a million pieces so
that it's all scattered and nobody can put
it back together again.
It's like Humpty Dumpty.
Only God can put it back together again.
But we've got to get back beyond all
of that in our faith.
If we're dealing, and there are a lot
of people dealing all through their lives with
trying to bring God into a fractured universe,
trying to bring him into a, I don't
know how to say this exactly, but a
fractured, you understand what I mean by that?
A scattered abroad, a broken, destroyed lifestyle, and
trying to get God to put it back
together again.
Creation was not that way.
Spiritual creation is not that way.
Once again, as I've said, in all these
months I've never really been able to talk
about the church and the purpose of the
church.
But if we look at the church, the
church is not that.
The church is God taking people out of
that and bringing them into something else.
In the beginning, there was perfection, verse 1.
In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was with God.
The Word was God.
We know from other scriptures God was complete
in himself.
God was perfect in himself.
There was nothing lacking.
But then the existence of perfection brought about
the expression of perfection.
In a creation, God spoke, God formed, God
expressed himself, bringing into formation the universe.
And verse 4 is talking about the process
of the transmission, the transmitting of that which
was in eternity into time.
Now, we're only complete.
We're only balanced.
We're only of any value to the extent
that we can take hold of these eternal
things of God.
But God never gives less than himself, never
comes with less than his fullness.
There's never a day when we come into
the presence of God or come into a
meeting and for some reason we cannot have
all the blessing we'd like because God isn't
ready because he's busy at a conference in
Dallas or somewhere where God is.
It doesn't mean to say that God needs
all the help he can get.
I'm just saying, hope the Lord's there blessing
him.
But it doesn't mean that because he's in
Dallas or New York or China or South
America that he's not with us.
It doesn't mean that if he blessed us
yesterday, he cannot bless us today.
Whenever God comes, once again, he comes with
his fullness.
Going back to what I said at the
beginning, this is the reason why it's so
important and I believe above all else it
needs to be a heart cry, it's a
heart cry that God wants to produce within
us, that there be that sensitivity to realize
who God is and to be able to
come before him as he is and receive
that which he desires to give us.
In the beginning was reality.
Our prayer as we pray, our meditation as
we meditate, our faith, our life must have
its roots in something perfect, something which existed
before, once again, there was ever any imperfect
thing.
As it was in the beginning, it will
be in the end.
We hope to participate of the end, the
heavenly eternal realm, and we can only participate
once again as we get our roots out
of time and into eternity.
In the nature, in the character, in the
person of God.
All things were made by him.
Without him was not anything made that was
made.
I guess I mentioned in passing before how
much frustration there is in the church.
In the lives of Christians, through a lack
of understanding of this, the fact that I
am called to walk, to live, to conduct
myself in the presence of God, a God
who holds all things in his power.
There is no excuse for defeat, for error,
for not knowing, for putting earthly things before
heavenly things.
All things are of God, and as I
come to God, there's a process of enlightenment.
This is a phrase that's been going round
and round in my mind today.
In him was life, this last two or
three days.
In him was life, and the life was
the light of man.
I believe we're in a time in which
God is calling his people back to himself.
Christian theology and Christian preaching, like the pendulum,
always goes from one extreme all the way
across to the other.
We're in a time, and I hope we're
coming out of a time, when there's been
a lot of emphasis upon truth.
There's been a lot of emphasis on what
is right.
There's been a lot of emphasis in what
is correct interpretation.
There's been a lot of concentration in trying
to understand the times, and the reasons, and
the seasons, and so on.
Yet what I want to say tonight, in
synthesis, is this, that there is no light
without life.
And light can never be separated from life.
And light does not bring life, but life
brings light.
Tozer used to say that the mind is
a great instrument given by God, capable of
many things, but it was not given to
man to know God.
God is spirit.
Man must learn in the world of the
spirit.
There's something which permeates, runs all the way
through our Christian service and our Christian lives,
our hymns, our prayers, our preaching, teaching, interpretation.
And it's a tendency to make an end
of the way, and to put the truth,
as it were, above everything else, and to
stress our relationship to truth at the expense
of life.
The worst errors in the church and the
worst errors in my life, your life, is
not when we get out into error, per
se, when we get out into some, what's
the word now, some wrong interpretation, some wrong
doctrine.
The most subtle thing is when we take
truth and apply truth without the spirit of
God.
When we take truth and we try to
make the truth itself productive, I know there's
a sense in all of this which it
is the truth, and yet it's not the
truth without life and it's only through life
that the truth is made valid.
Let me take you back, you don't need
to look at it, to the Old Testament,
when Elijah was the prophet.
The country was in apostasy, the country was
in sin.
Elijah came with the word of the Lord,
came to the presence of the king, had
this word of rebuke, closed the heavens for
three years and six months.
There was no rain upon the face of
the earth.
The land was blighted and blasted by the
drought.
Everything was dying, the people were suffering.
There was a curse from one end of
the land to the other, north, south, east
and west.
There came a time when Elijah, once again
in obedience to the voice of the Lord,
presented himself again before the king, told the
king to call the people.
As the people were called, prepared the altar
of God.
You all know the story.
And there the fire of God fell upon
the altar.
But that wasn't the end of the story.
The end of the story is what scares
me, because it's relatively easy to get the
truth and to get as far as the
first altar of Elijah.
And it's very, very, very hard to get
beyond that.
I think we could maybe mention dozens, maybe
hundreds between all of us, of churches which
are strong in the truth, strong in presenting
that which God says, can get as far
as the first altar.
You know, for Elijah it was a very
easy thing to call down fire from heaven.
Just three or four words, Lord, now, please,
now's the time, I'm ready, they're ready, please
show what's right.
But then there's a second process where Elijah
goes to the top of the mountain.
Mount Carmel is there on the sea coast,
sticking out in a promontory of land.
He looks all around and sees the sea,
as far as he can see.
Tremendous, measureless abundance of water.
And there's not a drop of water in
the whole countryside behind him.
Thousands of square miles of countryside, millions and
millions of acres, not a drop of land.
And the thing that scares me is this,
that whereas with three or four words he
could call down fire from heaven, the process
to getting the water of God was a
lot more involved, a lot more costly.
Symbolically, the story's interesting, he climbs to the
top of the mountain, evidently he wasn't at
the top of the mountain where he made
the altar.
He climbs to the very top, as high
as earth can carry him.
I don't want to get into that, just
say in passing that there are natural demands
that God puts upon our lives, that we
have to have the earthly before our feet
before we can even start talking to God
about sending us the heavenly.
Places of discipline, places of consecration, putting things
right, so on and so forth, many, many,
many things involved there, until all the earth,
so to speak, is underneath our feet, until
we're standing right on the top of it.
But then when he's on the top of
it, he still cannot just raise his face
toward heaven and ask God to send down
the rain.
The Bible says he throws himself on his
face, he puts his head between his knees,
or symbolically puts all his mental, intellectual capacity
beneath the knees, the place of prayer, and
he calls out to God once, and again,
and again, and again, and again, and again,
and one more, again, seven times, okay, somebody
was counting, thank you.
You know, and he sends his servant, now
go see, now when Elijah prayed, the Bible
said he prayed fervently.
So it doesn't mean he prayed, you know,
let's see how long this takes, he would
pray kind of in a reserved, laid-back,
passive manner.
He's praying fervently right from the beginning.
I'm sure the people down there in the
valley are probably hearing his voice.
You know, the fire has come, and they're
probably still hanging around.
Now what's he done?
He's gone up to the top of the
mountain, maybe like Moses he's going to come
back with a revelation from heaven, the tables
of the law, or a new covenant or
something.
I'm sure they probably heard his voice down
there crying out, God, God, I've done it,
and there's still no rain.
The country's defenseless, and there's still no rain.
But the thing I wanted to say about
this is there's a process, there's water out
there, like I said, measureless water.
And yet that water's no good to the
land.
They couldn't go with buckets, they couldn't take
it and pick it up and start watering
the land.
There needed to be a process of the
Spirit of God.
As Elijah prays, the breath of the Spirit,
the breeze of the Spirit starts to blow
over the sea.
There comes a time, the seventh time, after
Elijah's prayer, the servant goes, he looks again,
he comes back and he says to Elijah,
now there's a cloud.
It's interesting, I read something yesterday, today, about
clouds and how much does a cloud weigh.
And it said that a thunderstorm weighs several
million tons, and a cloud can weigh half
a million tons.
You know, we think of it as just
kind of nothing floating in the air.
And yet, it got me thinking, and it
got me, so I grabbed a calculator and
started calculating that if we have two inches
of rain, according to my calculations, which may
or may not be accurate, but anyway, that's
about 200 tons of rain in an acre.
So the amount of rain in a cloud
is tremendous.
And what he does is far more than
what Israel could have done with their buckets.
Because this is not a thunderstorm.
This is clouds that cover the face of
the earth.
These are clouds that come rolling in until
the land is covered from end to end
and all of a sudden they burst.
There's life comes down in the place of
death.
This is the process of the Spirit of
God.
That which God has, that which God holds
in reserve, can never be directly applied to
us without going through the steps which God
has ordained.
He says, in the beginning was the Word,
in Him was life, and life was light.
Not that the Word was light.
The Word must become life.
Just the same as that water in the
sea must become clouds through that process of
evaporation.
The salt must be left behind.
It must be put in a form which
can be applied to man's need.
So also the things of the Spirit of
God must be made life before they can
ever be made light.
Let me say it again.
They must be made life before they can
ever be made light.
And even light without life is only condemnation.
There's no way that I can partake, there's
no way that I can absorb, possess, identify
with it unless God gives life.
We hear a lot about faith.
The Bible says faith cometh through the Word
of God.
We hear a lot about exercising our faith.
I believe there's a degree to which we
have a measure of faith and we put
it to work and God blessed it, but
there's a totally different realm when God speaks
and says, I want to do something.
And I say, Lord, I believe.
Because the faith has come with the Word
of God.
It's a different realm.
One of the great healing evangelists, Dr. Price,
talked about this process, about praying and then
receiving the Word of the Lord and then
it didn't matter what the sickness was, it
didn't matter what the condition was, it didn't
matter how long the time had been, it
didn't matter.
Nothing mattered.
God had spoken.
There was release.
There is release.
God wants us to live in the realm
of the supernatural.
There are so many things we believe with
our minds, so many things we nod our
heads at, so many things...
And once again, it's a very subtle thing.
I say many times to our people in
South America that, you know, it's easy to
mistake our assent, our saying yes, for our
carrying through on a spiritual process.
It's easy to say, in the words of
the hymn that we sang, I surrender all.
And it's another thing to work it out
and to let God take those things away
that He wants to take away.
Never forget years ago, there was a tremendous
time of blessing and I went to a
place in Argentina where the Spirit of God
was moving and I got there and the
Lord gave me a verse of Scripture.
Beautiful.
Except that the verse said something to the
effect that you have come to my holy
mountain and now I will demand my offerings
and the payment of your vows.
You know, and I thought I'd come to
the holy mountain to be blessed.
And God said, you've come to my holy
mountain, now give me.
Well, Lord, aren't you going to give me?
No, you give me.
You know, unless we start to realize who
God is, we're always going to get it
wrong, we're always going to be frustrated.
God can only give us, I believe, in
the measure that we give Him.
He can only enlarge us in the measure
that there's an intense desire.
God can't do anything with passive Christians.
God can't do anything while we're waiting on
Him.
God is where He's always been.
His word is the same as it's always
been.
The invitation is always toward man.
Come.
You won't believe me, but I heard Amy
Stemple McPherson preach on this, on an old
record that we used to have in the
house when I was a kid.
And she preached on, Come unto me, all
ye that labor and are heavy laden.
And talked about the invitation of God, as
she said it, all through the Bible.
From Genesis, as she said it, clear through
to Revelation.
She went into it.
God calling, come in Genesis, come in Exodus,
come in Leviticus, all through the offerings, all
through the prophets, all through the history of
Israel, all through the kings, all through the
captivities, into the New Testament.
Repent, why?
Not, once again, not because of your sins.
Repent, because the kingdom's come.
And the words of Jesus again, come unto
me.
Maybe a little further, it puts it more
clearly over here in John.
John chapter 5.
5, 5.
And then I start at verse 37.
Jesus talking.
He says, To the Father himself, which hath
sent me, hath borne witness of me, ye
have neither heard his voice at any time.
Now he's speaking to the Jews.
He's speaking to those people who were so
full of the word of God, as it's
expressed in the Scripture.
They're full of the word, but they never
heard the voice.
And it's easy to be full of the
word, and it's very, very hard to hear
the voice.
He makes this blanket statement to all of
them.
He said, you've never heard at any time,
not even once.
Never, ever, ever, ever.
Nor have you seen his shape, nor have
you seen the manifestation, any manifestation of God.
He says, ye have not his word abiding
in you, for whom he hath sent him
ye believe not.
In other words, if they knew the voice,
they knew that the same voice was speaking
through Jesus, but they didn't know it.
And I've said before many times, it shocks
me to go to a meeting and hear
somebody expounding the word of God, and if
the atmosphere is right and the people are
in agreement, everybody gets carried along, and they
say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, even when
the guy gets off in his interpretations, even
when he's saying things which are definitely not
right, because we either give ourselves to a
preacher or not.
You know, we're never supposed to do that.
We give ourselves to God as he expressed
himself to a preacher.
But look at the Bereans there in the
book of Acts.
They searched the scriptures to see whether it
was true that which Paul the Apostle spoke,
and they were commended for it.
And Paul says, though I or an angel
from heaven should say any other thing.
In other words, there's a knowledge of God,
a knowledge which these people, in spite of
the word, did not have.
Ye have not his word abiding in you,
then, for whom he has sent him you
believe not.
Search the scriptures, for in them you think
that ye have life.
You think that you have life in the
word.
But he says, they testify of me.
And here's the condemnation, verse 40.
You will not come to me, but you
might have life.
You will not come to me, but you
might have life.
In him was life, and the life was
the life of man.
There's so many voices today, so many maybe
self-anointed, or maybe God-anointed, but people
that have lost the anointing, prophets, teachers, preachers,
yet the church has never been as sick
as it is today.
Now, if that word were the word of
God, it would not be that way.
The word of God is creative when I
hear it.
I don't want to get into Greek interpretation,
but you know, in Greek there are two
words.
One means the word as it's given the
letter.
Another means the spoken word of God, that
which God speaks to your heart.
And I can have this and never hear
the other.
Remember one time we were with my father
in a certain place, and a man came.
He'd gone to church 22 years, a church
with a very, very, very strong emphasis on
Bible exposition and teaching.
And he came and he said, you know,
I've gone to the church for 22 years,
and he said, now I realize that I've
never really known God's salvation.
And I need something which I've heard about,
I thought I possessed, yet I never really
had it.
You know, we can't separate what God has
joined.
We can't change the order.
I know it seems almost too simple to
spend the whole evening talking about this, but
I think there's one thing the Lord wants
to find on the earth is a people
conscious of the life which is in him,
conscious of the fact we must return to
him.
He is the fountain of salvation.
He is the fountain open for sin and
uncleanness.
He is the one who gives life.
You know, a dead man has the same
eyes that you and I have, but he
can't see because there's no life.
If we could just somehow get the emphasis
back where it belongs.
It's not so much a battle between truth
and untruth.
In the worst of cases, the Bible says
the devils believe.
They know better than I know.
They know better than you know.
They know about that world.
They've experienced it.
They know they believe and tremble.
It's not the knowledge that can save us.
Once again, as with the waters, somehow there
must be a moving of the Spirit of
God, and that which exists in a spiritual
potential through a miracle must be transformed and
made life to my soul, made a quickening
influence to my soul.
Spiritually speaking, that which does not give life
gives death.
There's no such thing as a neutral condition.
The Bible is very clear, and there are
dozens and dozens of verses that we could
go into about the natural world and the
spiritual world and the fact that this world
cannot participate of this world and this world
cannot understand this world and that which is
born here must die here and that which
is born here pertains to this world.
There is no mixture, never ever in any
way, shape, or form.
And so, I don't know how other people
are in their intimate relationship with God, but
I know for myself, there comes a time
when all that's external, even all that the
mind knows must be left behind.
I must come before God in spirit, as
though I didn't have a mind, as though
I didn't have a body in a sense.
Come before God and say, God, cause me
to live today.
Lord, somehow give me that life which you
want to give me today.
As I have life, I'll see.
As I see, I'll walk.
But first I must have that life, beyond
everything else.
Light will not cause me to live.
Light may even condemn me.
Notice in the Old Testament, interesting story, David
bringing the ark of God to Jerusalem.
The ark, the tabernacle of Moses, was still
in existence.
And as we read the scripture, we find
that David had a fear of going to
that place.
Have any of you studied the tabernacle of
Moses?
Some of you.
Okay.
The tabernacle of Moses is full of symbolism.
The way to come to God, the narrow
way, the hard way, the demands of God,
the holiness of God, the judgments of God,
the different types of offerings, the different courts,
the different processes, the altar, the labor, the
holy place, the holy of holies, all speaking
of that God which is almost inaccessible.
So we come to the holy of holies
where only one person in the whole nation
can go in one day in the whole
year.
You just have to take my word for
it because we can't go into it tonight.
But when David came, he brought about a
revolution in the worship in Israel.
The Mosaic order, as far as the tabernacle,
passed away.
And David brought the ark, which typifies, represents
the presence of God, brought the ark of
God to the place of his own dwelling,
and he built a simple tent for it
called the tabernacle of David.
And when we get over in the New
Testament, there's that great discussion there in the
book of Acts about the the proselytes, what
he called them now, the Gentiles being converted,
and whether they should keep the law or
not keep the law.
After a lot of discussion, James gets up
and he says that God has promised through
the prophet that in the last days he'll
raise again not the tabernacle of Moses, not
the law, not all that the law represents,
but the tabernacle of David.
And the only thing that there was in
the tabernacle of David as far as I
know, the ark of God and the altar
of God.
And for us, this is what God wants
to bring us into.
There is an altar.
There is a sacrifice, complete, eternal, finished, for
each one of us.
There is a continual relationship with that.
I'm not saying we just go there once.
Maybe we have to go many times, but
there's one simple altar.
And then the presence of God.
What God says he's doing then as the
gospel starts to extend, the apostles are gathered
together to ask how the church is going
to be built.
God makes it clear that what he's building
over the face of the earth throughout all
nations and all generations is the tabernacle of
David.
Building a church which knows the altar of
God, which knows the finished work of the
cross, which knows the cleansing, which knows the
renewal, and a church which knows the presence
of God.
It's a very simple thing.
You know, we hear so much complicated, so
many complicated things nowadays, but it's a very
simple thing.
And yet it'll cost us everything we've got
to be simple.
It costs us a lot more.
It's harder.
It's a lot harder is what I mean
to say.
I'm kind of thinking in Spanish still.
It's a lot harder for us to come
into something simple than it is to something
complicated.
Seeing the human personality is so mixed up.
We delight in complicating things.
And I'm not knocking anybody's interpretation.
I know it serves for certain purposes.
But, you know, somebody hears a message on
the 15 steps into such and such an
experience, and they kind of think, well, where
am I?
I'm in number three.
Well, then if I can get through number
four and number five, and then number six
is going to be real tough because there's
a real demand there.
And then maybe I can get all the
way into the, you know, place of the
promise or the place of power or the
place of communion or whatever, you know.
And I'm not saying it's not good.
Maybe it is good sometimes to explain because
those steps help us understand things.
But basically, it's not through processes like that
that we come to God.
It's not through processes like that that we
learn about God.
I told you before about a missionary in
the north of Argentina.
Very, very simple missionary.
Never even been to Bible school.
Maybe that's an advantage.
But anyway, very simple.
He got converted.
Felt the Lord called him to the mission
field 18 months after his conversion, something like
that.
He was down on the mission field.
He started praying for revival.
Got sick, almost died.
The Lord moved him from one place to
another.
Settled in this totally hostile environment.
Here, this ignorance.
Somebody, I think, used the word uncouth.
This uncouth, backwoods type.
I won't tell you what state he was
from.
He wasn't from Texas.
This backwoods type personality was down there and
he was saying, God, we want a revival
here.
He was in the kind of situation where
everybody just turned their back on him when
they knew he was evangelical.
They wouldn't, I mean, they wouldn't help him.
He'd go out in the country.
He'd get stuck.
He'd be sitting by the roadside.
He was an outcast.
Total outcast.
He prayed.
He's dead now.
Met a man that knew him and he
said, I don't believe in everything you did.
I couldn't go agree with him in everything.
He said, but one thing.
He told me I'm going to get a
word from God and he said he did.
He went and got a word from God
and it produced.
You know, this is what life's all about.
It doesn't matter what we have up here.
It doesn't matter what we, what the organization
is or isn't.
God can work through or without organization.
It doesn't matter.
But there's one thing that he does demand.
That there be within us an intense reaching
out to the truth of God.
That there be a tense reaching out to
say, Lord, teach me.
The life which is in all of this.
Lord, let me not be one of those
as the Jews.
Some of those Jews, I mean, not some
of them, all of them.
Hardly a one of them that wouldn't put
all of us to shame.
As far as their knowledge of the Bible
is concerned.
They didn't do anything else except read, memorize,
meditate, talk among themselves, brilliant minds, tied in
with the tradition and the thinking of the
fathers down through generations.
Now, what does this mean?
What does this mean?
Think of it.
When Jesus was born, they knew exactly, sure,
he's going to be born in such and
such a place.
They could almost tell him the street and
the number.
But not one of them went there.
Those that did go there were people that
didn't even know what it's all about.
Hey, hey, we've seen the stars.
Do you know anything about the star where
the king is going to be born?
Yeah, sure, over there.
You know, and like God said, one of
these days somebody's going to read this and
believe it.
We're all going to be ashamed.
But I think one of these days somebody's
going to hear these things that we've been
saying all our lives.
They're going to say, wait a minute.
This is God.
This is life.
This is power.
This is reality.
They're going to take hold of it and
we're all going to be looking.
A very different thing, the theory than the
practice.
Brother Andrew told about learning English.
He had an English teacher that taught him
for, I think, maybe two or three years.
Then the time came when he had the
opportunity to go to Bible school and he
went over to England.
And just before he left, the lady came
and said, Brother Andrew, I want to tell
you something.
She said, you know, I've studied English, but
I've never actually heard English.
I don't actually know, you know.
Well, you imagine.
I mean, take a book written in German
and try and pronounce it to somebody that
speaks German and see what they think of
it.
Yet it's a lot more incongruous and there's
a lot bigger distance between the natural and
the spiritual than there is between English and
Dutch.
There's one prayer that God will always answer.
It's a prayer that's in the Bible.
The prayer for his quickening.
Lord, quicken me.
Lord, cause me to live beyond my mind,
beyond the written word.
Lord, make that into life for me.
We never had more missionaries around the world.
And yet, as I've said before, we've got
countries that are worse today than they were
a generation ago and worse today than they
were last month.
We need to, as a church, recognize, and
as the Old Testament says, give God no
rest until we possess that which he desires
to give us.
The devil laughs at our reading.
He laughs at our learning.
The angels weep as we think that we
can put it all together in our mind.
In him, no other place under heaven.
In him was and is life.
The life was and the life is the
light of man.
I cannot have any more light than the
measure of his life within me.
And I don't believe I can have any
more life than the measure of my seeking
it before the presence of God.
God does not cast his pearls before swine.
The Bible speaks about hidden treasures.
This is the most important thing.
This is the greatest thing that God could
ever give us.
His own life, that life which will never
die, that life which will never be defeated,
that life which can go anywhere, do anything,
that life which is in itself our own
endowment for everything we need.
The fullness of his life.
The fullness of his spirit upon us.
The spirit of life.
So that wherever we are, whatever we do,
if we had time we could get into
that.
All things were made by him.
He calls us to make.
He calls us to do.
The Bible has a lot to say about
our works.
I think there's a passivity that's so prevalent
that we kind of think, you know, I
can't do anything.
I can't, why can't I?
If I can't, it's because of what I
am, not because of what God is.
If I can't do, it's because of, because
I'm missing God.
God has a task, has a work for
each one to do.
When he left the twelve, he sent them
all, go ye, all, into all the world
and preach the gospel.
He sent them all to, to perform a
work.
There at the end of the Bible, the
dead are judged according to their works.
God is vitally interested in what we do.
What we do comes once again from what
we are, comes once again from the life
within us.
Let's pray.
Lord, thank you tonight for your life.
Thank you, Lord, that it's still as fresh
and abundant and powerful as it ever was.
Lord, ask somehow that the quickening of your
spirit might be upon us, that we might
know the things which the spirit would say
to the churches today, Lord.
We might know those things which are for
our life and for our light.
Lord, that there might not be darkness in
the midst of your people, but there might
be that life which breaks every fetter, every
bondage of death and then flows from within
through each of us to this world around.
Amen.
You know that chorus caused me to come
to that river, oh God.
Love you.