John chapter 3, this will be number seven
in our series, Seventh Evidence of Eternal Life.
I shall give you, who may not have
them, one through six.
I'm sure there are many people here in
the congregation that will be pleased to do
that.
If you'll ask them, please put a seven
next to the twenty-fourth verse of the
third chapter, and next to the thirteenth verse
of the fourth chapter, and next to the
tenth verse of the fifth chapter.
There are three verses that really are essentially
the same, and we want you to note
them, because they do complement each other and
fulfill the statement.
In chapter three, verse twenty-four, the second
half of the verse was read for us,
And hereby we know that he abideth in
us by the spirit which he hath given
us.
And in chapter four, verse thirteen, Hereby know
we that we dwell in him, and he
in us, because he hath given us of
his spirit.
And verse ten of the fifth chapter, He
that believeth on the Son of God hath
the witness within himself.
I trust you will understand how we're to
use these evidences of eternal life.
The person who comes to us and says,
I'm not sure of my relationship with Christ,
instead of giving them some glib or light
answer, we take them to the Word of
God and ask the Spirit of God to
show them what is in their hearts.
At the very best, we stand at the
outside, we see what their lives may be,
the little we can observe them, and we
hear what they say.
But God looks on the heart.
And therefore, we want you to take them
to the Word.
I mentioned early in the week in this
series that on the fourth of July Sunday
in 1937, at Lesley Presbyterian Church at the
head of Lake Osakis, between Osakis, Minnesota and
Long Prairie, Minnesota, I was candidating as pastor
of this little country Presbyterian church.
My text, of course, being the first time
I'd ever been in that situation, had to
be John 3.16. And I will never
forget when I was sitting down here in
the front pew, and Mrs. Peterson was chairman,
and she got up and she said, well,
you heard him.
Do you want him?
And Mrs. Hughes said, well, it wasn't much
of a sermon, but I liked the way
he prayed.
I guess he's alright.
I say we get him.
So Mrs. Peterson said, well, I guess raise
your hands if you want him.
And I'm sitting right there, you know.
Well, she said, I guess that's most of
the hands.
And nobody said no.
So you'll be with us this summer.
Well, we called him.
Now what are we going to pay him?
And where's he going to stay?
He said, you got, Mrs. Hughes, you got
an extra room there.
Did he stay at your place?
Well, Albert, it'd be alright with you.
Yeah, it'd be alright with me.
Albert agreed.
Laura and Albert took me on for the
summer.
They said, well, now what are we going
to pay him?
How much are you going to charge him,
Laura?
Well, I don't know.
What do you say, Albert?
Well, let them tell us.
And so they said, well, how's five dollars
a week for board and room?
That wasn't too bad, wasn't it?
And they said, well, we're going to, and
they said, I guess we'll give him $15
a week.
That'll take care of his car and so
on.
And Laura, you'll get it when we give
it to him.
He won't owe it to you if he
doesn't get it from us.
Alright?
Well, that was how this young fellow, 18
years old, became pastor of the Lesley Presbyterian
Church.
And I had about the same kind of
a library.
I had Schofield Reference Bible, Cruden's Concordance, and
two volumes of John Wesley sermons.
There were a total of 146 sermons in
the two volumes.
You might think that was a pretty meager
library, but I'll tell you, anybody who starts
out preaching that has John Wesley's two volumes
of sermons has a rich heritage to begin
with.
And I want you to know that that
summer, I got acquainted with that man of
God, and he blessed my heart.
I've never been without those volumes.
They've been a tremendous blessing to me.
And even though I was rigidly schooled in
trying to explain away the Word of God,
Wesley, 250 years earlier, no, it was 200
years then.
That was 50 years ago.
200 years that time had an enormous impact
on my heart and on my life.
And I thank God for the rare privilege
that I had throughout the weeks of that
summer of visiting with that man through this
record of his ministry.
And one of the truths that was driven
home to my heart, as over and over
again John Wesley emphasized it in the sermons
that he preached throughout England, was the witness
of the Spirit to the new birth.
Now the foundation truth for this that's engaging
us today is found in Job, you don't
need to turn, Job the 32nd chapter and
the 8th verse, where we are told that
there is a spirit in man and the
inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding.
There is a spirit in man.
And elsewhere we are told the part of
a man that knows the things of a
man is the spirit of man that is
in him.
If you know you're here and not home
or somewhere else, the part of you that
knows that is your spirit.
Or you could say your soul or your
body but they all enter into it but
still it's the human spirit that knows the
things of a man.
And it is important for us to understand
that one day we're going to leave our
bodies.
We've just heard of a sister who is
with the Lord.
The part of her that thinks and feels
and will is in his presence.
And one day they're going to lean over
me or over you and I trust with
tears and with regret they will say, he's
gone, she's gone.
What do you mean he's gone, she's gone?
There's the familiar body with the scars and
the evidences of weakness.
There it is.
And yet the person is gone.
The person who thinks and feels and wills
and knows, that's the spirit of man that
is in him.
Now this statement is the foundation of our
relationship with God.
We are born of his spirit by his
spirit and it's our spirits that are regenerated.
The day after you were born again your
body was as it had been the day
before.
One day in the future we're going to
receive a body like unto his own body
of glory.
But until that time the part of us
that is made in his image and likeness,
the part of us that's a partaker of
the divine nature is the human spirit.
Now in the word we are told in
Romans chapter 8 verse 16, the spirit itself,
but that's because of the reference of pronouns,
the spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit
that we are the children of God.
And in that great, I consider it the
greatest Christmas passage in the epistles, Galatians chapter
4 verses 4 to 6 we are told
that in the fullness of time God sent
forth his son made of a woman, made
under the law to redeem them that were
under the law that we might receive the
adoption of sons.
And since we are sons God has sent
forth the spirit of his son into our
hearts whereby we cry Abba Father.
He sent forth the spirit of his son
into our hearts whereby we cry Abba Father.
He gave himself for us that he might
redeem us, redeem them that were under the
law and that we might be born into
his family and be adopted as his children.
And so God sends forth, we are told,
the spirit of his son into our hearts
crying Abba Father.
Look at it this way.
We've talked to you last time when I
was with you about the work of the
spirit of God in bringing one out of
death into life.
When God wants to bring someone dead in
their trespasses and sins to himself the first
thing he does is put a sample of
his grace up next to that sinner.
Did you know, I hope you do, that
to someone you're the very best Christian that
they know.
And perhaps if they ever come to Christ
it will be because they knew you.
You're a sample of God's grace living Christ
before them.
That's the first thing you can do for
the unconverted.
The second thing you can do is intercede
for them.
To intercede is to legally represent the sinner
before God.
To be as a court appointed lawyer going
into the presence of the judge on behalf
of his client who's in prison or in
jail.
So you are a heavenly appointed representative of
the sinner.
To go into the presence of God the
Father to represent the sinner before God.
To acknowledge his guilt, to accept the justice
of God's condemnation and then to cry out
to God for mercy.
God gives that sinner the right to go
to hell and he doesn't interfere until either
the sinner or the sinner's representative asks him
to.
But because you are kinsmen of the sinner
your intercession in a sense releases God to
begin to work in the heart of that
one dead in their sins.
So we can intercede for sinners.
And then the third thing we can do
is to witness to sinners.
Give them the word of God and apply
it to their hearts and to their consciences.
Now when we do that then there are
some things that God does.
The first thing he does is to awaken
the sinner.
Awakening is that work of God the Holy
Ghost, the spirit of bondage, again the fear
who shows the sinner the basis of his
bondage and the grounds of his fear and
causes him to become sensitive to his problem
and to his need.
It is a very gracious work of God
awakening the sinner.
You can't do it, I can't do it.
I can fuss with him and argue with
him and jostle him and bump him and
make life miserable for him but I can't
awaken them.
That God does.
And he does it I believe in answered
intercessory prayer.
And then the next thing that the spirit
of God does as the word is applied
is to convict the sinner.
To convict is to cause the sinner to
discover that he is indeed guilty.
He has turned to his own way.
That he is a traitor and an anarchist
and a transgressor and an enemy and deserves
God's wrath.
Conviction, a state of mind wherein the sinner
begins to agree with God about what God
has said concerning him.
And when he the spirit of truth has
come he will convict.
You can't, you can apply the word but
you can't convict the sinner.
And on the basis of the sinner having
been awakened and having been convicted then we
can enforce the truth having to do with
repentance.
That now God commanded all men everywhere to
repent.
And our Lord saying except you repent you'll
perish.
We can explain repentance that it's a change
of intention and purpose from pleasing oneself to
pleasing God.
On the basis then of repentance and only
then the spirit of God releases saving faith
into that repentant sinner's heart.
Wherein he can reach two thousand years into
the past and embrace the son of God
on Calvary dying for him that he might
bring him to God.
And it's more than an exercise of the
intellect it's heart faith that savingly reaches out
to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now look at it this way the spirit
of God brooding over the sinner as we
read in Genesis 1 the spirit of God
brooded over the face of the deep which
was without form and void dead.
And the first thing that God said in
Genesis 1 was like me.
And the first thing God does when he
would awaken the sinner is when he would
deal with the sinner bring him to grace
is like me.
It's the awakening work.
And then as he continues to move bringing
that one to conviction and to repentance and
then to exercise saving faith.
And when the spirit of God who's brooding
the while over that sinner's heart responds to
saving faith it is to join himself to
the human spirit.
And the person is said to be born
of God.
Pardoned yes, forgiven yes, but also made a
partaker of divine life.
He's born again.
Now when that happens what part of him
is affected?
The human spirit.
And if it's God the Holy Ghost that
is bringing life to the human spirit is
it to be wondered therefore that the first
thing that the spirit of God would do
would be to cause this quickened, awakened, forgiven,
regenerated human spirit to be able to say
Abba Father.
Doesn't seem strange or difficult does it?
Doesn't to me.
It seems terribly logical, perfectly clear that if
it's God the Holy Ghost awakening convicting, bringing
to repentance, quickening faith, that saving kind, and
regenerating the first thing he's going to do
is what we read, send forth the spirit
of his son into our hearts whereby we
cry Abba Father.
The witness of the spirit.
Now it's so terribly important for us to
understand therefore that the only one really in
the universe that has the right to tell
a person that they've been brought out of
death into life is God the Holy Spirit.
We can tell sinners how holy God is.
We can tell them how sinful they are.
We can tell them what this holy God
did in love sending his son and his
son did in love dying the just for
the unjust that he might bring us to
God.
We can tell them what they must do.
We can tell them what will happen when
they do what they must do.
But because we stand on the outside, because
we aren't in their hearts, we, they can
tell us they've done it before they've done
it.
Therefore we have to say to that person,
now we're saying, now look, this is what
God did and this is what you must
do.
And when you do what you must do,
this is what God will do.
And when God does what you must have
done, you will know.
And when you know, you tell me.
Don't you see what happens with that?
Oh, maybe it's a bit slower.
Maybe we don't have quite as many decisions.
But when a person knows from God they've
been born of God, we're going to do
something with that statistic that says we have
to have 200 conversions to get one person
going on a year later living effectively and
faithfully for Christ.
Sometimes when you want to read John Bunyan's
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, you'll
discover that he writes that three times, during
a seven year period, he had people come
to him to talk with him about being
born of God.
And three times he made professions of faith.
And three times he discovered that nothing had
happened.
And when he discovered nothing had happened, there
was disillusionment and depression that sent in and
he went back into the world.
Until finally, the Spirit of God worked in
his heart and no man was there.
They'd been there before, led him to premature
profession.
And then God revealed to him that he'd
been brought out of death into life.
And it was because of that experience that
he felt that he had to do something
that was going to enable him to save
others from the experience through which he had
passed.
And for that reason, he wrote Pilgrim's Progress,
that he might endeavor to establish certain of
these principles.
Someone very dear and very near to me
made an indication of a need when I
was pastor in New York City.
I knew I'd been praying for this particular
person.
I'd been very burdened, one knowing that he
demanded reality.
And I was rather surprised when this person
raised a hand at the end of the
service.
And then I did as I frequently did,
said, if you'd like to talk or pray
with us, please go into the Wilson Chapel,
a little room to the side of the
auditorium there at the tabernacle.
I was delayed.
Some people came to talk to me and
I couldn't leave them.
I wanted to get in there.
And when I got into that room, my
associate, a good man who basically understood and
would agree with what I've just said to
you, had gone to this person and had
done as he'd been taught to do years
and years before, had taken this one through
the scripture, elicited a positive response, put words
into the person's mouth, had them pray, and
then said, now tell Pastor Redead what's happened.
And the person looked and said, what do
you mean?
And so he had to say, well, did
you say?
Oh.
And so the person repeated what he'd been
instructed to repeat.
I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know how to handle it.
Because you see, the person was my son.
And three months later, no, actually a year
and three months later, that son told me,
Dad, you know that night, nothing happened.
I can't go on fooling you any longer.
I don't know that there's a God.
I don't know that God is.
I don't know anything.
I only know I tried it twice and
it doesn't work.
Nothing happened.
And I just have to tell you that
I'm not what, I can't go on deceiving
you.
My wife and I have been praying ever
since that God would reveal himself, make clear
to him, bring him out of, to a
real assurance and knowledge.
Oh, you say you're prejudiced because it was
your son.
No, I'm prejudiced because I'm concerned about the
word of God.
Because I believe that God, the Holy Ghost,
never abdicated as the spirit of adoption.
And the only one in the universe that
has the right to tell a person they're
brought out of death into life is God,
the Holy Ghost.
No one else.
I can tell them how holy he is,
I repeat.
I can tell them how sinful they are.
I can tell them what God did.
I can tell them what they must do.
I can tell them what God will do
when they do what they must do.
But I have to stand outside.
They have to tell me when it's done.
Now, I find here that this is not
new.
The message that God gave John Wesley when
he went back to England where everyone in
the country were Christians, their own names were
all on the church rolls.
They'd all been baptized.
Oh, said John Wesley, how imperative it is
for us not to deceive ourselves in this
most important of all questions.
How many vain men have wrested the Scripture
to the great loss of their souls?
How many have mistaken the voice of their
own imagination for the witness of the Spirit
of God?
And thence idly presume they were the children
of God while they were doing the works
of the devil.
All endeavors to bring them into the knowledge
of themselves, they will then account fighting against
God.
And with vehemence and impetuous spirit, they call
contending for the faith.
They set themselves so far above all the
usual methods of conviction that we may well
say that it is impossible.
It's hard to find words, said Wesley, to
explain what the children of God experienced.
But perhaps one might say the testimony of
the Holy Spirit is an inward impression on
the human spirit whereby God directly witnesses to
my spirit that I am a child of
God, that Jesus Christ has loved me and
has given himself for me, that my sins
are brought about and I am reconciled to
God.
Now what was he saying?
He was saying that it's good to have
all of these various things that have made
any contribution in the religious life of the
individual, but that the only one in the
universe that has the right to tell us
that our sins are forgiven, that we're pardoned,
that we're born into God's family, is God
the Holy Ghost.
The believer, the Spirit of God gives a
believer such a testimony of his adoption that
he can no more doubt the reality of
his sonship, that he can doubt the shining
of the sun while he stands in the
full blaze of its warmth and of its
beams.
Because you are sons, God has sent forth
the Spirit of his Son into your hearts
crying, Abba Father.
Do you understand it?
Do you see it?
Do you realize what the Spirit of God
is trying to say to us?
We're living in a day and a time
when evangelism has become so shallow and so
shoddy, when walking and
living is interpreted as being grounds for assuming
that we're pardoned, that we're forgiven.
We've got to come back to reality.
My soul demands reality, sang one of the
songwriters.
We've got to come back to the place
where people meet God.
I ask you, if a person in a
church or in church life has never had
fellowship with God, how can they realize that
fellowship with God has been interrupted or broken?
They can't.
Most people who I've been told and read
from the pen of Dr. Tozer, most people
in Christian activity today do not have fellowship
with God.
They are satisfied and content just to have
fellowship with other people about God.
I ask you, do you have fellowship with
God?
Or are you among that number content to
have fellowship and only to have fellowship with
other people about God?
There was a day, there was a time
in our land when there was great care
and great concern and great burden over this
issue.
I had the good fortune years ago to
acquire for my use, not for my library,
one of the original copies of the diary
of David Brainerd that had been written by
President Edward, the father-in-law of David
Brainerd.
Edward had taken the journal of that young
man, his son-in-law, who had died
of tuberculosis at a very early age, and
had put it into this very large extensive
journal or biography.
The later editions of the book have not
included what I'm about to share with you.
In this particular entry, David Brainerd was working
with the Indians in the western part of
the state of New Jersey.
And he told how on Sunday morning he
had preached in one village to a group
of Indians.
And to his delight, this was in the
Sunday night entry into the journal.
It was in this form, this morning as
I spoke at such and such a place,
I rejoiced that there were, and as I
recall, seven people who testified to faith in
Christ.
Then it said, and I went in the
afternoon to such and such a village, and
there I had so many in attendance and
spoke, and there were three that testified to
faith in Christ.
And that evening in the home in yet
another village, I opened the word, and there
were two who testified to faith in Christ.
He said that I do rejoice at this
fruit after these months of labor.
But the next night, his entry was as
follows, I did not sleep after I awakened
in the middle of the night, for it
was as though God was speaking to me
saying, are you sure that those who testified
to peace were not mistaking the comforts given
to my children as applying to them while
they are still dead in their sins?
Are you a faithful servant?
And so Raynard said, throughout the hours of
the day as I continued to cough and
to spit blood, I went to that first
village and gathered the seven and spoke again
to them, and said he, alas, my worst
fears were realized, for four of the seven
had wrongfully assumed that the comforts of the
children of God applied to them when they
had not yet passed from death to life.
And of the other three there were two,
and of the other two, one.
And then he made this note, oh, to
think how close I came.
I know not the day when my brief
candle of my life may be snuffed out.
Had it been last night, I can imagine
that those that had made false claim upon
the grace of God without having repented might
rise up in the lake of fire and
point me out at the side of my
Lord and curse me as an unskillful and
deceitful servant who had lied to them about
the most important subject in all the world,
their never dying souls.
He said, I have pled with God that
I may go back over all the areas
where I have preached in the recent months
to examine all who have made profession of
faith to see that they have good hope
in the Lamb that was slain.
Such care, such concern, such consideration, such burden,
such understanding.
Why has it been deleted from our day
and time?
Why has the Word lost its grip upon
the minds and hearts of those who love
it?
I am sure as much as did Brainerd
or as much as did Wesley.
Why are we content with less than everything
that the Spirit of God has taught us
about this most important of all subjects?
What have we read here in this Word?
Hereby we know that he abideth in us
by the Spirit which he hath given us.
Hereby we know that we dwell in him
and he in us because he hath given
us of his Spirit.
He that believeth on the Son of God
hath the witness in himself.
The very part of you that knows who
you are and where you are and what
you are knows the reality of your commitment
to please God in everything.
The very part of you that knows you
are here and not elsewhere knows whether or
not your purpose is to please God, that
you love him with your whole heart and
mind and soul and strength.
And it is that same part of you
that knows that the Spirit of God is
speaking to your heart now and assuring you
that you can call Almighty God Abba Father.
How important it is in this connection last
year.
I told of the young woman who worked
with InterVarsity in New York City when I
and my wife had the privilege of serving
the Lord there.
I was at an alumni summer conference from
InterVarsity up in Michigan and when I had
spoken much to this theme, this young lady
said, can I speak?
And she came before the fellow alumni who
had been with her in school and of
her age group and she said, I want
to just share with what Paris has been
telling you.
I grew up, said she, in an atheist
home or at least agnostics.
The only time I ever went to church
was for a funeral or a wedding.
My parents had no respect whatever for God
or for the Bible and that's how I'd
been reared.
I went to Douglas College, the women's branch
of the University of New Jersey at Rutgers.
She said there after a few weeks I
noticed a young woman whose face was so
radiant, who was in all of her personality
so attractive.
I asked the dean of women's students who
she was and asked if when her roommate
left I could be assigned as her roommate.
And that was done because the dean was
a friend of my mother's.
She said I hadn't been a roommate to
that young woman until I learned she had
been a child of God, had been born
of God and the radiance of her life
and testimony won me and I made profession
of faith in Christ.
She said I went to the Bible study,
I went to the prayer meeting.
But friends on the faculty of my father
and of my mother learned of this and
began to argue with me, seek me out,
call me to their home for evenings, telling
me that I was making a great mistake,
wasting my life.
I had far too good a mind to
squander it as an evangelical, as a Christian.
And finally they prevailed and I told my
Bible study group and prayer group that it
was all a mistake, it was all hypnosis,
it was all religious fanaticism and I was
giving it all up.
I wanted to be their friend but I
did not want to be ever bothered about
their prayer meetings or their Bible study anymore.
And she said I went along but I
couldn't forget what I had been in.
One day in the library I was reading
and I came across what is called the
agnostics prayer.
Oh God, if there be a God, save
my soul if I have a soul.
And I thought well that's reasonable, I guess
I'll do that.
So she said I wrote it down on
a piece of paper, I took it to
the room, I knew my roommate was away
in a Bible study prayer group.
And I went in, I locked the door
and I got ready to pray and I
was coaching myself, oh God, if there be
a God, save my soul if I have
a soul.
And so she said I went over to
the bed and I said to Neil, and
then I just said I closed my eyes
and I knew that I and a lot
of people folded their hands so you should
see I knelt, I closed my eyes, I
folded my hands, I was mentally repeating oh
God, if there be a God, save my
soul if I have a soul.
And then she said, I opened my lips
and I said, Dear Heavenly Father.
She said it dawned on me.
I got up, I opened the door, I
ran down the hall where I knew they
were in Bible study, I went in, I
was laughing, I was crying, I threw my
arms around them and I said it's real,
it's real, I am a child of God.
Why?
Because he sent forth the spirit of his,
his spirit into our hearts crying, Dear Heavenly
Father, the witness of the spirit, shall we
pray.
Father of Jesus, O Thou whose loved us
with an everlasting love, and cords of loving
kindness have drawn us through all of the
rebellion of our hearts, the wickedness of our
lives, the deceitfulness of our minds.
To that place where the purpose of our
hearts is to please Thee, where we have
enthroned Jesus Christ, our Son, His Sovereign and
Savior.
To everyone here, to whom Thou hast spoken
in that sweet tones of love, who can
call Almighty God Father.
Might there come such joy, such peace?
Should there be those among us, Father, named
to live and have less than life?
Might they know that?
And might all of us in turn become
faithful witnesses to our day and time and
generation, never usurping the sovereignty and prerogatives of
God the Holy Ghost.
We'll labor together with God and not replacing
those things that only Thou canst do.
Breathe upon us breath of God and let
the students of this school and the members
of this church and all who live and
love and worship here have a witness for
the Lord Jesus Christ here and around the
world that will bring eternal glory and honor
and praise to the Lamb that was slain,
in whose name we ask it.
Amen.