Well, now it's a very special pleasure, as
I'm sure those of you who know me
will know, for me to be back again
in Toronto, where there are so many people
whose friendship I have cherished over many years
and feel wonderfully at home.
So I'm deeply grateful to the Council for
their invitation to come back again this year
and I'm also very grateful for the extent
to which they've made preparations to make me
feel really at home as a Scotsman with
this kind of weather.
I was speaking to my wife this morning
and she couldn't get the car up the
hill to get onto the main road.
The snow was so bad in St. Andrews
and St. Andrews is famed for never having
snow because of course it's got so many
golf courses and you can't play golf terribly
easily in the snow.
But it is a great providence, I'm sure,
that you heard a Scotsman this year when
the snow fell so abundantly.
Perhaps your Council have just overdone it a
little and I am deeply grateful to be
here.
And I do want to say how glad
we all are to see so many of
you who have made your way through the
adverse weather to be present this evening.
In Britain I can tell you that the
first sign of snowflakes, everybody pulls up the
drawbridge and stays at home.
But you Canadians are made of stronger stuff.
Now, I recollect many years ago when I
was just a young theological student.
I was taken to a Bible conference, not
unlike this, in Glasgow in the old St.
Andrews halls, which later were burned to the
ground.
And there was a conference of this kind
that was being held and the speaker was
Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones.
Even at that time something of a legend
in the Christian Church in Britain.
He was there speaking each evening and he
began the first evening.
I had never had the privilege of being
under his ministry before, but I vividly remember
that he began, as I discovered he often
did, by asking the congregation a number of
questions.
If I were to ask you, he said,
what was the very essence of Christian salvation,
I wonder what you would say.
If I were to ask you what God
was doing from all eternity in preparing to
send his Son into the world to redeem
a people, what was he engaged in?
If I were to ask you what Christianity
is all about, how would you respond to
me?
And then of course he answered his own
question, as was his wont.
He made some suggestions, some of you may
say, and some of you may say something
else, and of course you always knew these
were the wrong answers until he came to
his own.
And he said, there is only one acceptable
and biblical answer to all of my questions.
The essence of Christian salvation is to know
God.
What God was doing in sending his Son
from heaven's highest glory, and entering into all
the pain and anguish of being our Saviour,
was making it possible for us to know
God.
And the very essence of Christianity, and everything
that makes it distinctive, is that God's purpose
in every gracious thing he does, is to
bring people to know him.
The great tragedy of the world is crystallized
for us in the words of Jesus in
John 17, O righteous Father, the world has
not known you.
And the essence of eternal life, this is
life eternal in that same great prayer, this
is life eternal, that they might know you,
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
you have sent.
When you turn into the epistles, you discover
that the Apostle Paul, describing the great ambition
of his life, the thing that mastered him
above everything else, was that I may know
him.
When he was praying for the Ephesian believers,
he prayed for that enlightenment that would enable
them to know the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ better.
Over the years, as I have pondered what
Dr. Lloyd-Jones, first, I may say, awakened
me to think about, I have discovered that
it would, in fact, be almost impossible to
exaggerate the significance of this whole issue in
Holy Scripture.
The one condition in which God longs to
see his people is the condition in which
they are growing in the knowledge of God.
Let not the wise man boast in his
wisdom, or the strong man in his strength,
or the rich man in his riches, but
let him who glories glory in this, that
he understands and knows me, that I am
the Lord.
And it is this whole theme of the
knowledge of God that I want us to
be preoccupied with during these three evenings.
And I want us to turn to particular
areas, to three of the dominant themes in
the Bible, in connection with who God is,
his nature and being and character, so that
we may be able to pray for one
another in the words of the Apostle, as
he writes to the Ephesians, I keep asking
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the glorious Father, may give you the spirit
of wisdom and revelation, so that you may
know him better.
We would, of course, have imagined, rightly, that
when the Apostle says that he longs to
know Christ, that he would have known him
already.
And there is no question about that.
He writes as someone whose knowledge of God
is deeper, perhaps, than that of any of
us.
But then you see there are gradations of
knowing someone, aren't there?
You may be asked by somebody, Do you
know so-and-so who is here this
evening?
And you may be able to say, Oh,
yes, I know them intimately, and well, we
have been friends for many, many years.
But there may be other people, and you
would have to say, Well, I know them
in a vague kind of way, with a
sort of distant relationship.
And what we are about in the evenings
of this week is to pray for one
another, that we may know him better.
Now, the three areas that I want to
focus on this evening, tomorrow, and Thursday are
these.
I want us to consider, first of all,
this evening, the theme of the sovereignty of
God, summarized in the New International Version translation
of the beginning of that prayer, which we
read in Acts chapter 4, Sovereign Lord, they
said.
Then tomorrow evening, I want to think with
you from Isaiah chapter 6 about the holiness
of God.
And on Thursday evening, from the same book
of Isaiah, in chapter 53 about the grace
of God.
So, this evening, we turn to that central
theme as the Bible opens up to us
the character and being of God concerning his
sovereignty.
You will know that that prayer, which was
our Scripture reading, is the first prayer recorded
for us in the apostolic church.
It happened that the apostles, Peter and John,
were threatened in a way that brought great
crisis to the early church, that they must
be silenced and speak no more in the
name of Jesus.
So, it was a critical moment in the
church's history.
And when they were released, they gathered together
with the church and they gave themselves to
pray.
And you will notice that their prayer begins
with an affirmation of God's sovereignty.
And it is that that is really the
substance of the whole of the prayer, that
God is King, that He is the sovereign
Lord over the whole universe and that He
presides as the great governor over all the
affairs of men and nations.
It is the doctrine and truth which Francis
Schaeffer used to say answers the question that
grumbles under the skin of every thinking man
or woman.
The question, is there some sovereign hand which
is in control of history, of our lives
as individuals, of the movement of history catching
up nations and peoples in its flow?
Is there some overruling power that controls the
ultimate madness of the world in which we
live?
Now, for these Christian believers, this was something
of paramount importance at this particular moment.
Their very future was threatened.
Many of them undoubtedly experienced the threat to
their lives that so many of them ultimately
found was realized in the early Christian church.
And they were asking, who is in control
of this situation in which we live?
And of course, the whole of the prayer
is really an unpacking of these two words
with which it begins, which the NIV translates
suitably, sovereign Lord.
When they heard this, they raised their voices
together in prayer to God, sovereign Lord, they
said.
Now, of course, that doctrine has not only
some relevance for the early church and for
the church of Jesus Christ in every age
and supremely perhaps for our own generation, when
we see in so many cases the collapse
of leadership in our modern world, east and
west, and we are asking, who is in
control of the world in which we live?
It also has a personal application.
Is it really true that all things work
together for good to those who love God?
Is there a sovereign hand controlling my own
life and my personal history?
And this part of God's Word opens up
to us the answer to these questions.
In fact, you discover if you have your
Bible before you, you will find it very
straightforward to see it here in the passage
in Acts 4, but there are five areas
in which the apostles, as they pray, touch
upon the sovereign rule of God in the
world.
The first in verse 24 is that He
is the sovereign Lord over creation.
Sovereign Lord, they said, You made the heaven
and the earth and the sea and everything
in them.
Secondly, you notice in verse 25, He is
described as the sovereign Lord of revelation.
You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the
mouth of your servant, our Father David.
Thirdly, He is the sovereign Lord of history.
In verses 25 and 26, they are quoting
from Psalm 2, a psalm in which there
is a recollection of a day when the
nations of the earth rose up against the
Lord and against His anointed.
And the psalm describes the folly of sinful
man rising up in rebellion against the Lord.
And the psalm speaks of how God is
the sovereign Lord who will have the last
word in history.
Fourthly, He is described as the sovereign Lord
of redemption.
You notice in verse 27, Indeed Herod and
Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and
the people of Israel in this city to
conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you
anointed.
They did what your power and your will
had decided beforehand should happen.
And finally, they address Him as the sovereign
Lord over the contemporary scene.
Now Lord, consider their threats and enable your
servants to speak your word with great boldness.
And I hope we may look at each
of these a little more closely in the
remainder of our time.
Here is the picture that the New Testament
gives us from the lips of the apostles
as they pray of the sovereign rule of
God over the whole created order.
And they begin by addressing Him as the
sovereign Lord of creation, sovereign Lord, they said.
Verse 24, You made the heaven and the
earth and the sea and everything in them.
Now, the reason they come into the presence
of God, do you notice incidentally that when
they come into God's presence at a moment
of great national and personal crisis for them,
they do not begin to pour out their
need to God.
They do not begin to bring to Him
a kind of shopping list of the needs
of His people.
They begin to address Him and speak to
Him about His own character.
Now, if you go through the Bible and
examine carefully the prayers of men and women
of God in the Bible, you will discover
that's one of the fundamental marks of it.
They are absorbed and taken up with God.
And here the apostles are precisely in that
tradition.
Sovereign Lord, they say, You made the heaven
and the earth and the sea and everything
in them.
Now, they are not addressing God because they
imagine He didn't know that.
They are coming into God's presence and saying
to Him, This is the kind of God
You are.
And they have come to know Him, you
see.
They have come to have this vision and
understanding of the glory and majesty and greatness
of God.
Where did they get it from?
They got it by pondering His mighty works
in creation.
And so they are saying, Here we are
in all our weakness and in all the
crisis of these moments.
But we are coming to You, the Sovereign
Lord of the universe who formed the stars
and made the heavens, who created the mountains
and the sea.
And these very people who are intent upon
silencing us, they owe their breath to You.
They are the creatures of Your hand and
You are the Sovereign Lord of creation.
Now, this is one of the arguments that
in the Bible men and women use as
they come to God.
It is the argument from the greater to
the lesser.
If this is the way God is in
His being, if this is His nature and
character, then why shall we fear mere mortal
men whom God formed and created?
And you discover that argument is used in
two ways in the Bible.
It is used first of all by men
as they pray and speak and plead with
God.
For example, you find that in the prayer
of Jeremiah, in Jeremiah chapter 32, Jeremiah begins
his prayer with exactly the words incidentally that
the apostles are using.
Listen to this.
In Jeremiah 32 verse 17, Our Sovereign Lord,
He says, You have made the heavens and
the earth by Your great power and outstretched
arm.
Nothing is too hard for You.
Now, here is a man, you see, who
has come to know God.
This is the characteristic of Jeremiah.
He is a man who has come to
know God and he comes into His presence
and the very first thing He says is,
You made the heavens and the earth with
Your mighty hand and Your outstretched arm and
nothing is too hard for You.
Do you see what a difference that makes
in prayer?
The thing that really controls our effectiveness in
prayer is not that we have taken a
course in it.
It is that we have come to know
God in all His majestic glory and we
plead with Him as the Creator of the
heavens and the earth.
But not only does this sovereignty of God
in creation appear in the pleadings of men
with God, it appears in the arguments of
God with men.
Have you noticed, for example, in Isaiah chapter
40 how God is actually persuading His people
to trust Him.
Isn't it an extraordinary thing?
The eternal God having to come to us
and persuade us that we would find Him
trustworthy.
And He asks in Isaiah 40, 25, for
example, To whom will you compare Me or
who is My equal, says the Holy One?
Now how then will you know what I
am like?
Listen to this.
Lift your eyes and look to the heavens.
Who created all these?
He who brings the starry host out one
by one and calls them each by name.
Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain,
O Israel, My way is hidden from the
Lord and My cause is disregarded by My
God?
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator
of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary.
Oh, my dear friends, we need to listen
to the rebuke of one of the Puritans
who tells us we have a capacity to
think great thoughts of men and paltry thoughts
of God.
And one of the answers to that is
that evangelical Christians are strong on the doctrine
of redemption but weak on the doctrine of
creation.
And we need to ponder the glories of
the character and being of God who formed
the heavens and the earth that we might
learn to know Him because this is what
He is like.
And the government of the universe rests today
upon these shoulders.
Now, the apostles go on from there.
And they speak to God as the Sovereign
Lord not only of creation but of revelation.
You notice the two verbs which follow the
words Sovereign Lord.
First, Sovereign Lord, they said, you made the
heavens and the earth.
Verse 25, Sovereign Lord, you spoke by the
Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant,
our father David.
Now, do you see what he is saying?
He has pondered this throne of God on
which the Creator of the heavens and the
earth sits.
And he says there is a direct line
from the throne of God to the mouth
of David.
How then do they come into God's presence
to pray?
They come pleading the words that God Himself
has spoken through the mouth of His servant
David.
And the Holy Scriptures which are here to
lead us to know God, they are the
very mouth of God Himself through the lips
of David speaking to us.
Now, my friends, that's what gives Holy Scripture
its authority.
And that's what gives Holy Scripture its power.
That's why when we are teaching and preaching
the weakest and most ordinary of us, which
is all of us, when we are preaching
and teaching Holy Scripture, there is a power
from God here.
Haven't you found it yourself?
When you have been sitting under the ministry
of the Word of God and sometimes we
have said, it's as though somebody has sent
a sledgehammer through my soul.
And it's because there is a direct line
from the throne of God to the mouth
of David.
Sovereign Lord, You spoke.
Now, it is the sovereignty of God exercised
through Holy Scripture that is the most glorious
thing.
It is for these men the most glorious
thing.
Here they are faced with the words of
these people who have said to them, Speak
no more in this name, they said.
And they come to God and say to
Him, Sovereign Lord, You spoke.
And their minds are being formed by the
words of God.
And their hearts are being lifted up in
the knowledge that God has spoken a word
for this time because He is the Sovereign
Lord of Revelation.
That's why for Jesus there were two phrases
which were totally synonymous.
One was Scripture says and the other was
God says.
Now when you lift the Word of God
and begin to read it, that's how you
need to see it.
The Sovereign Lord who recognizes that none of
us could come to know Him unless He
reveals Himself.
He has revealed Himself in Holy Scripture to
us.
And that is why it is so important
to bathe your soul and fill your mind
and enter it into the very fiber of
your being.
Not just because you're keeping up rules to
have a quiet time.
Please God you will do that because we
all need these rules.
But it is because in Holy Scripture the
Sovereign Lord of the Universe speaks.
But you notice from the psalm which they
quote that the Sovereign Lord is not only
the Sovereign Lord of Creation and of Revelation.
He is also the Sovereign Lord of History.
You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the
mouth of your servant our father David and
then there comes from halfway through verse 25
the quotation from Psalm 2.
Now Psalm 2 as you may remember is
a description of a particular period in history
where God has been raising up one of
His servants and the enemies of God set
themselves against Him.
The kings of the earth rose up against
the Lord and against His anointed and they
began to seek to undo the work of
God and to challenge the purpose of God.
That was a very appropriate scripture for them
to be recalling at this particular time of
course was it not?
And that psalm as someone has written bears
witness to a God who is present and
active in world history and who knows how
to make himself respected by those who do
not want to give heed to Him and
who accomplishes His purpose even though men and
women rebel against Him.
Now the psalmist sees this rebellion as a
rebellion against the Lord.
It falls forth from the psalmist the cry
the Lord shall have them in derision.
He who sits in the heaven shall laugh.
Now what it is really saying is if
you are ever doubtful about who has the
ultimate word in history the answer is it
is God.
And that's why we ought to read our
newspaper with the truths that are here in
a passage like this teaching us to tremble
at the times in which we live.
This whole awareness of the sovereignty of God
in history is something that is likewise used
both by men and by God in the
Bible in pleading with each other.
Do you notice how this is used for
example in the way people who are at
prayer in the Bible plead with God they
begin to quote history to Him.
There are masses of these examples for example
in 2 Chronicles chapter 20 King Jehoshaphat finds
the enemy coming upon him and he is
tempted to go of course and number his
own resources but instead of that he comes
into the presence of God and begins to
plead with Him and in 2 Chronicles 20
you discover that what Jehoshaphat is doing he
is pleading with God on the basis of
what God has done in the past.
Lord he says are you not the God
who drove out these people from this land?
Are you not the God who gave it
to your own people?
Are you not the God who gained this
victory and that victory?
He is looking over history you see and
he is saying you have done it in
the past.
Now it is not because they are just
interested in history it is because they are
saying this is the kind of God you
have done doing mighty works overcoming our enemies
and they say do it again Lord in
our generation do it again but you know
you discover God doing exactly the same thing
when he is addressing his people this is
why he introduces himself of course to them
and says I am the God of Abraham
and Isaac and Jacob I am the God
who brought you out of the land of
Egypt and from the house of bondage I
am the God who brought you across the
Red Sea I am the God who did
this and this Now it is not again
that God is giving them lessons in history
but he is saying if I did that
in generations past I have not changed and
I am able to do for you far
more than your imagination can think of.
Now this is why of course you get
so much history in the Bible that is
the point of all the historical records of
the Old Testament they are here for one
purpose and that is to show us what
God is like in his sovereign control over
history Now we need to learn that in
our generation my dear friends we live in
a generation when as Christian people we can
so often be apologetic and fearful we can
so often be negative in our way of
looking at the world and its prospects and
so on and at the church of Jesus
Christ in our day and there are two
ways you see of looking at history one
way, the wrong way is to look back
at history and say oh that we lived
in these great days oh that the great
days were upon us again and the other
is to recognize that we don't live in
the 16th, 17th, 18th or 19th century we
shall soon be living in the 21st and
to say blessed be God the answer to
that question where is the Lord God of
Elijah is not that he is in history
past but that he is here the same
God today and we need to learn it
and say to him sovereign Lord do it
again that's the great value of reading
of God's mighty works in the past it
is that we might take heart and plead
with him for the present knowing that he
is not the great I was but the
great I am he is the sovereign Lord
of creation he is the sovereign Lord of
revelation he is the sovereign Lord of history
and do you notice in verse 27 and
28 he is the sovereign Lord of redemption
now the apostles clearly saw this psalm as
messianic that is it was speaking not just
about an anointed king but about the anointed
king it was speaking of the Lord Jesus
Christ and the great watershed of history of
course came at this moment when God sent
his beloved son into the world and that
not only was the watershed of history it
brought the darkest hour of history when even
the sun was blotted out and the whole
life of these men and women who gathered
around Jesus began to sink into utter despair
and it appeared that history's ultimate nadir had
been reached but the apostles say we have
begun to recognize what was actually happening in
these days notice how they put it in
verse 27 indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met
together with the Gentiles and the people of
Israel in this city to conspire against your
holy servant Jesus whom you anointed now here
are all these great and powerful human figures
Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, the people of
Israel but notice what they say in verse
28 they did what your power and your
will had decided beforehand should happen who was
it then ultimately who was at work in
even the darkest hour of Calvary it was
not these figures who imagined they held such
power and authority it was the sovereign Lord
who was fulfilling all his own purposes mysteriously
through this anguish and agony which his well
beloved son was entering but it was to
do what your power and your will had
decided beforehand should happen you will remember how
Jesus taught Pilate that lesson do you?
when Pilate said to him when Jesus was
unwilling to speak with him do you remember?
he said do not speak to me do
not know who I am for such a
minor and jumped up official as Pilate it
must have been very insulting that he wasn't
being recognized you know you get this kind
of thing today too do not know who
I am he said do you not realize
that I have the power to crucify you
and the power to release you and Jesus
I imagine he almost shook his head and
said you have no power to do anything
unless it were given you by God what
is our Lord Jesus saying?
he is saying I know God whom you
do not know and I know that ultimate
power rests with him and what is happening
here today is happening by his authority by
his sovereign decision and not by yours who
was it asks Octavius Winslow who was it
that delivered up Jesus to be crucified?
not the Jews for envy not Pilate for
weakness not Judas for greed but the Father
for love and so they come
to God and say you were the sovereign
Lord in that darkest moment of the world's
history from which you brought out our redemption
and you are able to bring something glorious
out of this situation in which we now
are you see it was because they had
come to know God in that measure that
they were able to believe as they did
my dear friends faith needs truth to feed
upon faith does not grow in a vacuum
it grows as it feeds on the knowledge
of the glory of the character of God
and so they address him sovereign Lord of
creation sovereign Lord of revelation sovereign Lord of
history sovereign Lord of redemption but above all
he is the sovereign Lord over the contemporary
scene now Lord verse 29 my dear friends
Christian believers Christian apostles people like these who
knew God they are not antiquarians they are
contemporary servants of the living God and they
call upon the riches of all that Holy
Scripture and the revelation of God in it
has brought them to understand and they say
now Lord here they are after all that
they have already brought in prayer to God
here they are at the contemporary situation one
of our problems is that we begin with
the contemporary situation and we have lost the
riches of the knowledge of God which these
men knew now Lord they said consider their
threats and enable your servants to speak your
word with boldness and their prayer was answered
in verse 31 after they prayed the place
where they were meeting was shaken and they
were all filled with the Holy Spirit and
they spoke the word of God boldly but
you see it was because they had evidently
grown in the knowledge of God that they
had such a vision and such a view
of Him and that's probably the greatest need
of the Christian church in our generation that
we might grow to have this same vision
and understanding of the greatness and glory of
our God my favorite Old Testament story
which I am forever urging and encouraging people
to read is the story of the old
prophet Elisha when he is down in the
town of Dothan from which I think the
Dothan in Alabama probably got its name and
the king of Assyria Ben-Hadad has been
finding that all his attempts to smother and
destroy Israel have failed because it seems as
if there are traitors within his own court
and they are telling the enemy the secrets
of where the king is where he is
going to travel how his plans can be
foiled and Ben-Hadad one day comes to
the end of his tether and turns to
his courtiers and says who amongst us is
for Israel and who is for the king
and they say to him my lord nobody
has betrayed you the problem is that the
little prophet of the Israelites Elisha down in
Dothan he appears to know the plans that
my lord makes even in his own bed
chamber and it is he who tells the
Israelites where my lord's armies are to be
defeated Ben-Hadad says send the cavalry and
the infantry and all the army down to
Dothan that we may capture this prophet and
finish him off and out from the palace
there went this great company of the army
of Ben-Hadad if somebody had stopped them
and said to them where is this vast
artillery and cavalry and infantry marching to what
great battle are you going to they would
have said well we are actually going down
to capture the little old prophet Elisha down
in Dothan and down they went and Elisha's
young servant when it came time for the
armies of Assyria to surround them he went
out and looked and as he looked up
he saw the whole of the area was
surrounded by the horses and chariots of Ben
-Hadad and he trembled and ran into Elisha
and said to him my lord the chariots
of the enemy and their horsemen and Elisha
didn't even go out to the door he
said to him don't worry don't worry he
said more are they that be for us
than they that be for them and you
can imagine how the young man went back
out and looked and saw the army and
the horses and chariots and thought to himself
well now that's the problem with some of
these old chaps who remain on and don't
retire they should have put him aside he
is not facing the facts but you know
the truth was it was the old man
who saw the facts and saw the situation
as it was and perhaps a little wearily
he cried to God and said Lord open
the young man's eyes and God opened the
young man's eyes and he saw the valley
was full of the horses and chariots of
Jehovah and the enemy was routed that day
what had he discovered?
he had discovered that the Lord God omnipotent
reigns he had discovered what John the apostle
tells us in chapter 4 of his first
epistle greater is he who is in you
than he who is in the world blessed
be God that we have a God who
sits on the throne this evening and will
not abdicate it let us pray
our great God and our heavenly father how
majestic are your ways in all the earth
how full of glory you are oh open
the eyes of our understanding that we may
come to know you better and to glory
in you and to be transformed in our
lives by you through Jesus Christ exalted to
your right hand as a prince and saviour
and in his name we pray Amen now
we are going to sing together as our
closing hymn number 24 hymn number 24 oh
worship the king all glorious above worship
the king all glorious above oh grateful is
keep you
from falling and to present you faultless before
the presence of his glory with exceeding joy