In the background on this recording, you may
be able to hear other voices and this
is because there were people present from several
nations and their friends were giving simultaneous translation
to them because of language problems.
Now God and Father, we dare not rely
on human brains or human feelings or human
willpower to discover Christ, to know you, to
discern your will, to learn the truth, or
to live according to your mind.
We depend utterly upon Jesus Christ.
We have only one argument that his blood
was shed for us.
We have only one resource, which is the
Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He alone can teach us, guide us, protect
us, and use us, bless us.
And, O Heavenly Father, we ask you, for
Christ's sake, that it may be your Holy
Spirit himself who shall teach us and control
every thought.
We know that the enemy of Christ is
the enemy of the Spirit of God, and
he does and will do everything within his
power until he is finally bound and cast
into the pit to destroy, to confuse, to
annul the work of the Spirit of God.
But we resist Satan in the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
We claim the power of that blessed name
of Jesus, the Lord Jesus, and we rely,
blessed Father, upon the intercession of Christ at
this time.
We pray that you will bind every evil
force, that you will silence every tongue raised
against the truth of your word, and that
your Spirit may lead us into all truth.
We ask this for Christ's sake.
Amen.
When I was first asked to deal with
this subject, my first reaction was one of
pleasure and joy.
I thought, how marvelous to deal with this
subject, which is so vitally important.
My second feelings, especially since coming to England
the day before yesterday, and discovering just a
little bit about the incredibly complicated spiritual situation
back here in England, and the renewed confusion
and controversies and conflict around this marvelous subject,
made me feel that there was almost any
subject I would rather deal with than this
one.
There are three great subjects in the Bible
which Satan hates.
He doesn't want to have them taught.
He doesn't want us to face up to
them at all.
I might say there are four such subjects.
The first one is the true doctrine of
salvation by faith, justification by faith.
But the three other subjects, which are a
matter of great controversy and have been for
a long time now, are the subject of
the Holy Spirit, and without understanding this subject
properly, we can never live the Christian life
properly.
It's in the interests of Satan to keep
us either ignorant or confused, or off on
a false track on this subject.
He works as hard as he can to
keep this subject out of the pulpits and
out of our thinking, but if he can't
do that, then he brings in any kind
of confusion he can.
The second subject is the subject of the
Lord's return, and now as the Lord's return
is so near, there's no doubt whatever about
that, it seems that Satan is drawing a
veil of blindness across the church, the church's
heart, so that it is a subject that
is hardly ever dealt with.
You hardly ever hear it preached upon now,
partly because of all the controversies, partly because
of the confusion, but mainly because Satan just
doesn't want it dealt with.
He wants us all completely ignorant of what's
happening in the world today and what is
going to happen in the days to come.
And the third subject, which Satan hates so
much, is the subject of the true church
of Jesus Christ, because he knows that if
only we can recover Christ's real idea of
what the church is, the whole world could
be turned upside down, literally.
And so, dealing with this subject of the
Holy Spirit, I can only do it with
great humility and a certain amount of trembling,
but realising that God's truth is crystal clear,
and it has to be spoken, it has
to be preached.
Wherever I go, I always expect to be
thrown out, whether it's in the street or
a church or anywhere else.
Just as the old prophets were warned, all
the other prophets are speaking peace and saying
nice things.
Well, you do the same.
But the true prophets of God had to
answer, Whatever the Lord says to me, I
will say.
And most of them got thrown out.
And I feel that on a subject like
this, all I can do is be utterly
faithful and speak what I believe is the
truth as God has revealed it to me.
I want also to say that I came
to no conclusions whatever about this subject or
any other Bible subject until I had read
through the Bible many, many, many times from
beginning to end.
It wasn't until I had read through the
Bible about twelve times that I dared to
come to any positive conclusions about any doctrines
of the Bible.
It was finally the clear statement of Scripture
here and there in its pages which forced
me to certain conclusions.
And even now I keep a completely open
mind every time I start the Bible again
each year for God to correct me.
The most dangerous thing that can ever happen
to a Christian is to have a closed
mind.
The man who knows it all is the
man that God can't teach anymore.
The book of Proverbs is full of statements
about being corrected.
The book of Proverbs tells us that the
man who will no longer be corrected, he's
a fool.
And I pray that God may correct me
day by day, minute by minute.
I pray that he may teach me anything
that I need to know.
And if we are not prepared at all
times to let God change all our ideas
out of recognition, if we are wrong, then
we're in a hopeless case.
And the trouble with nearly all spiritual movements
is that they begin with a rediscovery of
some biblical truth which usually was lost, which
they idolize and which becomes a cause of
division in the Church of Christ, and finally
creates a new sect and eventually spiritual pride
and finally develops spiritual pride and finally a
closed mind.
And then the Spirit of God just pulls
right out of the whole movement, the whole
Church, and he works in the street.
He works anywhere he can.
The classical example, of course, is the great
Roman Catholic Church herself.
Now, to understand Scripture, there are three basic
principles of interpretation.
I do not believe we can expect the
Spirit of God to lead us into all
truth unless we pay particular attention to these
three principles.
Before I mention them, I just want to
say this.
God created man in his image, with a
personality, with human reason, with will, feelings.
And God gave man the gift of speech,
which is what distinguishes him essentially from the
animal on the human level.
And the Bible tells us that in the
beginning was the Word and that God created
all things by the Word, by the Logos,
and the Word of God himself or itself
became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
And therefore it is the Word by which
God reveals himself, by which he creates the
universe, by which he saves us, by which
he reveals truth to us.
And the Spirit of God, revealing God to
us, revealing Christ to us, uses the Word.
And the Spirit of God had this book,
the Bible, written, inspired it and guaranteed the
accuracy of the very Word of Scripture, so
that we might have, in clear human language,
in an indisputable form, in a way that
we can really grasp, we can have the
true mind of God.
Therefore, we should pay particular attention to what
the Spirit of God says about himself in
the Word of God.
Now, Christ said in his last prayer before
Gethsemane, he prayed that God would sanctify us
by his truth, and he added, Thy Word
is truth.
Now, the Bible is the only source of
truth that we have.
I know we have the truth that comes
to us through nature, through science, but that
is unintelligible on the spiritual level unless it
is interpreted by the Bible itself.
That is why most of the greatest thinkers
and wise men and scientists don't know God.
They can't know God unless they have the
Bible.
Now, these are the three principles for interpreting
the Bible.
First of all, we must take only the
Bible.
If you say, yes, but Luther says this,
and Calvin says that, or somebody else says
this, or that, or the other, or St.
Augustine, or the Pope, or Derby, you are
adding to Scripture.
What God said through some of those men
was true, and very valuable, and very precious,
and there's no point in throwing it in
the dustbin.
But we cannot base our doctrine on Derby,
or Augustine, or Origen, or anybody else.
We can only base our doctrine on the
Word of God.
If the Word of God isn't enough, we
might just as well put it in the
dustbin.
The Word of God is enough by itself,
and this is the most precious truth that
the Reformers recovered for us, and that the
beginning of the Brethren movement brought back to
us.
But every time this truth just disappears and
gets cluttered up under a lot of human
reasonings and traditions.
So we must take only the Bible.
We must therefore come to the Bible with
a completely clear and open mind, saying, Lord,
I put all my other ideas on one
side, now you just teach me direct, you
speak to me direct, it's you that I
want to hear.
I cannot tell you what a blessing it
was to me when I was a young
fellow of about 22, 23, when after four
or five years of Christian life, without making
any real spiritual progress at all, God told
me to start reading my Bible right through
each year.
This revolutionized my whole life, and gave me
a vision of God such as it's impossible
to describe.
But reading my Bible, I realized very soon
that it was fatal to come to it
with preconceived ideas.
And so I deliberately put on one side
all the things that people had told me
about God, about Christ, about the Bible, all
my ideas and my prejudices, and I said,
Lord, take my soul like virgin soil or
like a clean sheet of paper, and you
just write on it, you just plant in
it what you want, it's you that I
want to hear.
And I do thank God that in those
days I didn't, as I sometimes thought of
doing, go to a Bible school or theological
college, I'm not against these things, but I
thank God that long before anything like that
could happen in my life, God spoke to
me direct.
God gave me an open vision of himself,
and he spoke his own word right through
the whole fiber of my soul, year after
year, so that I had my knowledge of
God direct from himself, and I got my
knowledge of the Bible direct from God.
Many years afterwards, when I'd been through the
Bible ten or twelve times, and after the
war, when I was free to have access
to other books, I started reading right and
left and examining the conclusions of many other
people, and I've done so ever since.
But I have never stopped giving the Bible
the first place in my life, every single
day.
And nothing can possibly replace this direct, open
vision of God into your own soul through
meeting him without any kind of human intermediary,
only Christ.
Well, if you miss that at the beginning
of your life, you'll probably never get it.
And I thank God he gave it to
me before I was too old, and before
people could force my thinking into some particular
mode, which was perhaps good or bad.
But everything we get through men is distorted.
Even through the best of men, there's always
a certain element of distortion.
We never get the whole, pure truth through
any human being.
We can only get it through Christ himself.
And while it's very valuable to receive the
things that God does give us, and women
of God, yet we must make a clear
distinction between all that and what comes to
us from God direct.
Nothing can replace the direct, face-to-face
revelation of God to our own soul.
Because God is love, and God wants to
deal with us direct.
If you're in love with a girl, you're
not going to be satisfied by passing all
your love letters back and forwards between me
or somebody else, so that you don't actually
speak to the girl, you don't see her,
you don't touch her.
When you love, when you're in love, there's
only one thing that matters.
You want to be face-to-face with
the person that you love.
And God wants to bring us into that
sort of relationship with himself.
And you can't get that unless you meet
God face-to-face, and unless you take
his word alone, and let God just speak
to you, smite you to the ground, break
his heaven open, and just write with a
finger of fire on your very heart the
words that he wants to say to you.
And the words are most of all, that
I love you, and I want to pour
my love through you to a broken, lost
world.
The second principle of interpretation is that we
must take the whole Bible.
And very few people do this.
They dib and dob around, or they just
take a verse out of its context, one
verse, just as the Roman Catholics have taken
one verse out of Matthew 16, You are
Peter, and on this rock I will build
my church, and they've built the whole papal
system on that verse.
If you take that verse away from them,
they've got no scriptural foundation whatever left for
their whole structure.
And if you put that verse back in
its context, likewise their whole structure just falls
to pieces.
They just take one verse out of its
context and build a vast medieval papal system
upon it.
And it's extremely dangerous just to base doctrine
on certain passages of the Bible.
You've got to take everything that God says.
Christ said, man does not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceeds out
of the mouth of God.
Now until you have studied your Bible through
and through and through, I don't believe you're
in any position to come to any clear,
concise, conclusive doctrine about the Holy Spirit, or
anything else.
I know God gives us direct, intuitive revelations.
I know he speaks to us.
You don't need to read your Bible through
twenty times in order to be saved.
After five minutes of hearing of Christ crucified
for your sins and risen again, you can
be saved.
I know that.
But if you start becoming a Bible teacher
and laying down the law five minutes after
you're saved about the whole theology of salvation,
you'll find yourself in serious difficulties.
Therefore, the only way to deal with a
subject like this is simply to go steadily
through the whole Scriptures, year by year, classifying
your discoveries.
I find it's most useful to do what
I did.
I had a notebook of classified references, and
as I went through the Bible the third,
fourth and fifth times, I became very interested
in what the Bible said about quite a
number of things.
About the call of the man of God,
about the prayer of faith, about the inspiration
of Scripture itself, and many other things.
Each year, God added to my list of
subjects that gripped me.
In the end, I found a notebook or
two just wasn't enough.
I had to have a loose-leaf notebook
system like this.
I would have one notebook for one subject,
another notebook for another subject.
As I learned more and more things, I'd
push them down on a bit of paper,
I'd punch some holes in, and then I'd
slip it into my notebooks in the right
place.
Year by year, as I went on steadily
reading my Bible each day, God began to
build up a really clear, cohesive idea in
my mind of what God himself thinks about
many subjects.
This was fantastic, and it did two things
for me.
First of all, it clarified my own thinking.
It gave me a clear idea of what
God says about different things.
And secondly, I discovered, to my astonishment, after
three or four years, that I'd got a
terrific fund of material for preaching.
I wasn't a preacher at that time.
I wasn't interested in preaching.
But from the day when God said to
me, You can't keep this for yourself.
And God told me to get the whole
village together in that little Alpine canton where
I lived in Switzerland, to get the whole
village together and to tell them what God
had given me in the two or three
years previous.
From that time, I discovered I was a
preacher, and I found I had a job
to do.
But I was amazed to find what an
abundance there was in my heart, and it
was out of the abundance of my heart
that my mouth spoke.
But if you haven't got that abundance, if
you haven't got the whole word of God
written into all the fibre and texture of
your thoughts, if you haven't reached the point
where God is actually thinking through your brain
all the time with his thoughts, well, the
devil can very easily hook you up on
all kinds of little side issues and confuse
your thinking about many important subjects.
Now, the third way, the third principle for
interpreting the Bible is that we must interpret
the Bible by itself, by the Bible.
We must interpret Scripture by Scripture, not by
Calvin, not by me, not by brother so
-and-so.
If God can't explain his own word, well,
who can understand it?
The great error of most of the Roman
Catholics is that they say that you can't
understand the Bible, you've got to have it
interpreted for you by the church, by the
priest, by the theologian, by the Vatican and
so forth.
Whereas actually, the Bible does interpret itself.
Now, to understand any one particular doctrine in
the Bible, therefore you need to get together
all the passages that speak about it, and
then you have to look and find which
is the clearest passage, or the clearest passages,
where there is no possible doubt about the
meaning of the thing, or where you have
clear statements in black and white of what
the thing is all about.
And then you take these clear passages as
the key to understand all the others.
If you don't do that, you can fall
into any heresy that the devil wants to
bring you into.
As Jehovah's Witnesses, they find one or two
obscure verses in the book of Ecclesiastes, which
says that the dead don't know anything anymore,
and they build all their doctrine of the
annihilation of the soul at death on those
two or three odd little verses in the
Old Testament, which are ambiguous to say the
least, and which are taken out of their
context again, without reference to the drift of
the whole book of Ecclesiastes.
And when you put under their noses Luke
chapter 16, where Christ gives us the picture
of the poor man in Abraham's bosom and
the rich man in Hades tortured with the
flame, and you say, well, what about that?
Christ taught that there was not an afterlife,
but an after-existence, and that you're either
in bliss or you're in torment.
They say, oh, Christ was just taking up
the doctrine of the Pharisees and making fun
of them and turning it back on themselves.
Well, if that's the way we're going to
interpret the Bible, as I say, I would
put mine straight in the dustbin.
If that's all the Bible, we can get
out of the Bible.
It's hopeless.
This is what Catholics do, this is what
Mormons do, this is what all the great
false cults do with the Bible, this is
what Spiritists do with the Bible.
And so, friends, in our understanding of the
doctrine of the Spirit of God himself who
wrote this book, we need to search for
the passages that are unmistakably clear and take
them as the clue for understanding all the
rest.
Now, I've taken up about half of my
time this morning with these introductory remarks, but
I think they're necessary.
I just want to say one or two
more introductory remarks.
This time in which we are living is
a critical time.
The church of my generation, as you know,
at any rate in Britain, went bankrupt a
long time ago, spiritually bankrupt.
It's been living no longer on capital but
on credit.
And I'm surprised that the whole thing hasn't
folded up long ago.
I'm surprised that we're not all behind barbed
wire.
I think that if God hadn't done things
like OM, long ago we'd all have been
behind barbed wire, or else the other side
of the barbed wire, accusing the brethren.
I believe that at this time God is
working in a new way.
He's working very little within the established orders,
within the structured churches, as we say in
French.
God is working anywhere, in the street, in
homes, in houses.
He's working here.
He's doing things which a few years ago
would have seemed quite out of all context
to the average Christian.
The Spirit of God isn't bound.
And when we try to put him in
a cardboard box and label him up, we
find that he isn't there anymore.
There's nothing there.
And the Spirit of God has his own
way of working.
And I believe that at the present time
God is working.
The Spirit of God is doing something new
in the world.
He's determined to get the world evangelized.
This is what Christ died for.
This is Christ's whole objective.
He came to seek and to save that
which was lost.
And if the church is seeking and saving
what is lost, if the church hasn't this
number one objective, she has just lost her
main reason for existence and she's really on
the way out.
But I believe there's an enormous danger facing
all you people.
When I was young, there was still quite
a lot of godly Bible teaching in the
churches and assemblies that I knew.
Nowadays that is nearly all gone.
What can you expect from an elder or
a minister who's been looking at the television
ten times as much as he's been reading
his Bible all the week?
There's a spiritual dearth today.
And yet the Spirit of God is raising
up multitudes of young people like you all
over the place and in country after country
around the world.
You're not getting the foundation teaching that my
generation got when I was young.
You're not getting it in the churches.
Where can you get it from?
Now I am convinced that all this great
wave of energy that the Spirit of God
is raising up, it's a marvellous thing.
But if there isn't the full impact of
the whole truth of God's Word, you can
be absolutely certain that Satan will do everything
he can in order to bring in some
sort of deviation and confusion so that in
the end all that just fizzles out.
But in ten years, in fifteen years from
now, if we're still this side of the
barbed wire, I wonder how many of us
will be going on with the Lord.
The pressures today are terrific.
The worst pressure of all comes from that
little idiot box, as they call it, the
TV set in nearly everybody's house.
That's where the biggest pressure comes from.
And Satan is just brainwashing us all, brainwashing
the church, day and night, conditioning our thinking,
so that when Big Brother finally comes on
and takes over to save the world situation,
everybody will just have their eyes glued to
his face, just as Hitler led the whole
German nation up the Garden Path by the
end of its nose, simply with the radio.
And I believe that the only thing that
can give us clear thinking and a solid
basis for our faith is a really profound
knowledge of the Bible.
If you don't get this now, in these
next few years, I don't think you'll ever
be able to stand the pressures from within
and without.
You won't be able to discern between true
and false.
You'll get hooked up and you'll probably find
yourself on the wrong side.
You know, I had six years of war.
I didn't want that.
I didn't want to be in an army.
I didn't want to see all the filthy
and horrible things that I had to see.
But God taught me a lot of things
through that, and he taught me most of
all what human nature really is.
You know, when you've got a bayonet stuck
in your back, and you've got a bayonet
in your hand, and you're told to stick
yours in the belly of the man in
front of you, if not, you'll get the
other bayonet in your back, what do you
do?
When you're told that if you don't torture
a man to get information out of him,
you're going to be tortured yourself, what do
you do?
When you're told that if you don't obey
what the state's telling you to do, your
mother's going to disappear, or your wife's going
to disappear, or your child's going to disappear,
what do you do?
When that kind of pressure comes on, where
will our faith be?
I believe that Jesus Christ can save us
in any situation.
He may not save us from death or
martyrdom or suffering, but I believe he can
save us spiritually in any situation that can
possibly exist on this earth.
If he can't do that, he certainly can't
save us from hell.
I believe in Christ for everything.
To believe in Christ means that I commit
myself to him totally, body, soul and spirit,
for all eternity, and I trust him in
every possible situation.
And of course, if I can't trust him
for little questions, things like money and marriage
now, how do you think I'm ever going
to trust him to save me from hell
or to save me from any other situation?
We have to trust him for everything, and
this is faith.
Well, I would like to deal with the
subject in a sort of skeleton form.
It's impossible for me to give you in
three sessions a really adequate teaching on the
Holy Spirit.
To be precise, I would need 19-hour
sessions to give you just the basic teaching.
But all I can do is give you
a sort of framework.
I can give you a summary of what
the Lord has shown me over many, many
years of Bible study and experience, and much
of this, if not all of it, has
been lived out in actual experience as a
missionary and in many other circumstances of life.
I'm not just putting across a mere theory
that I've got out of books or out
of a Bible school.
There are things that I've got from God
himself and which I've had to live out
in my life.
I know that I'm only just a mere
beginner and a very poor sort of Christian,
but I just hope that these things will
form a basis for your thinking.
And I don't want you to believe my
conclusions.
What I want is that you should go
to God and go to the Word of
God for yourself and get your conclusions from
God himself.
That's what I want.
But if the things I say can help
you and save you several years of searching
on certain points, well then, I just thank
God for it.
I would like to deal with this subject
under three main headings, three main sections.
First of all, the initial work of the
Spirit of God.
It's sevenfold—the sevenfold initial work of the Spirit
of God in salvation.
I'll give you the headings for those seven
things in a minute.
And secondly, the sevenfold progressive or continuous work
of the Holy Spirit after salvation, or in
sanctification, if you like.
And finally, if there's time on the last
morning, I would like to deal with the
four commandments concerning the Holy Spirit.
There are only four, which includes the three
conditions for being filled with the Spirit of
God.
Now, the seven initial operations of the Spirit
of God, what he does to save us.
The first one is the one that leads
up to salvation.
The next five all happen simultaneously at salvation.
And the seventh one normally happens also at
salvation, but can be lost and may have
to be recovered again.
Let us look at the first one.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 16, it's
the convicting work of the Spirit of God,
but I prefer the word convincing because convict
has come to have a peculiar meaning in
English.
Convicting means convicting someone of sin or of
a crime, whereas the Greek word is simply
to convince.
The convincing work of the Spirit of God.
In verse 8, we read, When he, that
is, the Spirit of God, comes, he will
convince the world.
We can't convince the world.
It's the Spirit of God that convinces.
Now notice that he convinces the world of
three things.
I think I must have read the Bible
through thirty times before I even began to
understand this verse.
He convinced the world of sin and righteousness
and judgment.
And then Christ explains in the next two
verses.
Of sin, because they do not believe in
me.
Of righteousness, because I go to my Father
and you see me no more.
Of judgment, because the ruler of this world
is judged.
Well, usually when we talk about conviction, as
I say, we mean conviction of sin.
But in our preaching, in our evangelizing, our
main concern is not so much to convince
a chap of the sin of adultery or
murder or blasphemy or dishonesty.
In his heart he knows these things are
sin.
And the primary work of the Spirit of
God isn't so much to convince a man
of sins.
It's to convince him of one particular sin.
It's of sin because they do not believe
in me.
It's to convince the man of the sin
of unbelief in Christ.
Now to the man in the street, that
isn't a sin at all.
If you stopped a man in the street
outside here in Birmingham and said, what do
you consider is the greatest possible sin?
He'd probably laugh, but he might say, oh
well, murder or something else like that.
You say, no, the greatest possible sin is
not to believe in Jesus Christ.
Well, he'd just laugh in your face.
And yet this is the damning sin, this
is the only sin that Christ couldn't die
for on the cross.
It is basically the unforgivable sin, the blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit.
And it is only the Spirit of God
which can bring a man to a realization
of his supreme condemnation and sin in not
believing in Christ.
And of course, the man can only come
to such a conviction, to such a state
of being convinced, if he knows enough about
Jesus Christ.
And therefore, in our presentation of the Gospel,
the most important thing is the presentation all
the time of Jesus Christ.
In evangelizing the Muslims, the Catholics, people who've
never had the New Testament in their hands,
I always feel that the supremely important thing
is to get them to read or to
listen to the story and words of Jesus
Christ.
Get a portrait of Jesus Christ created in
their minds by the Spirit of God.
It's this that brings the final conviction.
They're convinced of the truth of it and
they're convinced of the error of rejecting it.
Until people have some idea of Christ, some
portrait of Christ in their mind, their position
is nebulous, they're neither for nor against.
But once this portrait is created by the
Spirit of God in their mind, once they
know who Jesus Christ is, they have to
take a position for or against.
Then the second thing that the Spirit of
God convinces of, this is all a part
of the first operation, the convincing work of
the Spirit, is righteousness because I go to
my Father.
What does that mean?
Well, the Ascension was simply the culmination of
the Resurrection.
And it is only as we believe that
Jesus Christ is alive, risen today, that we
can ever be saved.
Nobody can be saved by a dead Christ,
nobody can be saved by a false Christ.
But the Resurrection was simply the sequence of
the cross, of the death of Christ.
In other words, the Spirit of God convinces
men of the atoning death of Christ and
of the real fact of His Resurrection, the
fact that Christ is at the right hand
of God now.
We can't convince people of this, but the
Spirit of God does, and He uses above
all the words of Scripture to do these
things.
And finally, He convinces the man of judgment
because the ruler of this world is judged.
In chapter 12, just before going to the
cross, Christ said in verse 23, The hour
has come, and a little further down, in
verse 31, He said, Now is the judgment
of this world.
Now shall the ruler of this world be
cast out.
So speaking of His crucifixion, He spoke of
it as the judgment of the world and
the judgment of Satan.
From the moment that Satan had the Son
of God put on the cross, Satan's doom
was finally sealed.
There was no possible hope that Satan may
ever find any loophole in order to obtain
the grace of God.
Satan sealed his own doom forever when he
crucified Jesus Christ.
And, of course, Satan used the world to
do it.
And the world itself is guilty of the
murder of Jesus Christ.
It's true, our hands didn't actually put Him
on the cross, but if we'd been there
in those circumstances, if we'd been the Roman
soldiers, we should have put Him on the
cross, we should have crowned Him with thorns.
If we'd been in the praetorium when they
mocked Him, we would almost certainly have spat
upon Him and tortured Him.
If we had been in the Sanhedrin, almost
certainly we would have been among those who
condemned Him to death.
And the whole world is implicated in the
murder of Jesus Christ.
God considers the whole world under condemnation because
the world is under the control of the
God of this world, who is Satan.
He is the prince of this world.
Therefore, the Spirit of God convincing a man
of the truth of the sin of rejecting
Christ and of the truth that Christ is
now alive after His atoning death, He now
brings me to a point of decision.
I've got to dissociate myself from this world
system and its God.
I've got to take a stand against the
whole system.
I've got to identify myself with Jesus Christ.
And this means identifying myself with Jesus who
was crucified by this world.
I accept to be crucified with Christ, if
necessary, literally.
And now I'm at the crossroads.
I've got to choose.
And there God leaves us utterly free.
The Spirit of God brings a man to
this point where he's fully enlightened, he's tasted
of the Word of God, and he's made
a partaker of the Spirit of God in
a certain sense, and now God says, now
are you going through or are you...
And if the man says yes, that's all
he can do.
That's all he can do about being saved.
But if he says yes to Jesus Christ...
I do accept, I do want to be
identified with Christ.
God says, OK, I identify you with Him.
And in that moment we're identified with Jesus
Christ, we're saved.
But if I say no, I believe I've
committed the unpardonable sin.
I believe this is Hebrew 6.
The man who knows all about it and
who in cold blood says, no, I don't
want Jesus Christ.
Well then God says, OK, that's your choice,
I respect your choice.
And the Spirit of God just leaves you
alone forever and ever.
That is what has happened not only to
individuals but to spiritual movements.
It happened to the generation that put Jesus
Christ on the cross.
Christ said in Matthew 12, that will never
be forgiven.
And indeed it wasn't forgiven.
Forty years later, by the time that generation
had lived its time out, Jerusalem was destroyed
and most of the Jews were dead and
the rest were just carted all around the
world as prisoners.
So you see, the convicting work of the
Spirit of God brings us to the point
of faith.
Faith or unbelief.
And faith is when I just take hold
of Christ.
Now, when I identify myself with Christ and
God identifies me with Him, the Spirit of
God acts.
Up till now, He's been acting in what
I call a prenatal stage.
I think all of us are baffled by
the way so many people seem to be
saved, seem to be going on with the
Lord and really understand and are even quite
active sometimes in Christian service and then one
day they just go right back and they
lose all interest and you can never speak
to them again of Jesus Christ.
Well, I think those people are people like
those in Hebrews 6 who have been enlightened
but they were never born again.
They never had that catastrophic experience that Jesus
Christ calls the new birth.
The new birth is something colossal.
It makes you a child of God.
It brings the Spirit of God to live
inside you and your whole heart is regenerate.
You have the law of God written into
your heart and God has wiped out all
your sins.
What could you have more marvellous than that,
except the development of it to the greatest
possible degree?
So when I believe in Christ, the Spirit
of God acts and He does five things
in me simultaneously.
I haven't time to deal with those this
morning.
I'll have to try and work a good
deal into the next session.
But I can just deal with these briefly.
I can tell you what these five things
are.
I'm going to astonish many of you and
some of you will not agree with me.
I have no doubt.
Well, just let me say this.
If you don't agree with me on all
questions of biblical terminology or if I don't
agree with you, that is no reason why
we shouldn't love one another.
God is so great, so marvellous, so complex
that there isn't one of us that can
grasp the full meaning of what God is.
Each of us has only just a little
fragmentary knowledge of God.
Even the greatest men of God, even Paul,
after years and years of suffering and founding
churches, when he wrote to the Philippians after
three years in prison, he said, I still
don't reckon that I've got it.
I'm just pressing on for the prize of
the high calling of God so that I
may know Christ.
And attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Paul meant in this life, live in this
life, as if he were already raised again
from the dead.
Paul said, I haven't got there yet.
I could even now be a castaway after
all that I've done.
I'm saved.
I know I'm saved.
I know I shall rise again from the
dead and be in the kingdom of God,
but I don't know whether I'm really going
to get a reward there, whether I'm going
to get a really good job in that
kingdom or whether I'll just be pushing a
broomstick around.
And, well, I
think perhaps I'll have to stop altogether.
I see there are just two minutes.
But what I was saying was, we are
not meant to quarrel over Bible doctrines.
Let us just bear this in mind.
Christ said that just after he had instituted
the Last Supper, the new covenant in the
Last Supper, after he'd washed his disciples' feet
and he'd given them the cup and he
said, this is the New Testament in my
blood, he said, now I'm giving you a
new commandment, a new law.
Christ said in Matthew 5, I haven't come
to abolish the law, to destroy the law,
but to fulfil it.
And yet Christ came with a new law
which accompanied the new commandment, which accompanied the
new covenant.
What is the new law?
Christ said, this is it, that you, my
disciples, that you should love one another as
I have loved you.
Well, now, the next morning, on the cross,
the disciples could see how much Jesus Christ
loved them.
And Jesus said, this is how all men
will know that you are my disciples, if
you have love one to another, if you
love each other as I have loved you.
Now, in John 15, Christ says that, as
the Father has loved me, even so have
I loved you.
If you can imagine all the love that
could possibly exist in the universe, synthesised together
and multiplied by infinity, we still wouldn't have
any real conception of what the love of
the Father is for his Son, in the
person of God.
And yet Christ said, as the Father has
loved me, so have I loved you.
And the only way Christ could express that
love was in his crucifixion the next day.
And Christ said, this is the mark of
discipleship, this is the mark of the Christian,
that you Christians love each other as I
have loved you, and as the Father has
loved me.
Well, now, this is the most important thing
in the whole New Testament, after conversion.
It's the most important commandment.
And in John 15, Christ says, this is
my commandment, that you love one another as
I have loved you.
So Christ calls it the new commandment, the
new law that accompanies the new covenant, and
he calls it my commandment.
And that very same evening, with the tears
probably streaming down his face, he said to
his disciples, if you love me, keep my
commandments, but especially this one.
So, friends, if as a result of these
three days of study on the Holy Spirit
we go around squabbling and criticizing and accusing
each other and splitting up into factions and
sections, let us just say to ourselves, we
haven't even begun to understand the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit wants to unite us in
the love of Christ.
He wants to unite the body of Christ,
not chop it up into little pieces.
He doesn't want to split it in two,
from top to bottom.
The Spirit of God doesn't divide the body
of Christ.
He builds it up, he unites it.
And the true teaching of the Holy Spirit
is meant to unite us all together.
We may not all be able to agree
on all points of terminology.
It's impossible to find two Christians who are
completely agreed mentally on all points of doctrine.
If we had to have everybody in complete
agreement on all points of doctrine, well, you'd
have as many different churches as there are
different people in this room.
Each one of us would be a little
church all on his own.
And in every church we have to learn
to give and take a good deal.
In every team, apostolic team, we have to
learn to give and take a good deal.
There are many things we can't explain, there
are many things that we can't understand.
We've got to be patient and we have
to learn from one another.
But above all we have to learn from
the Word of God.
And in conclusion I just want to say
this.
I'm sorry I haven't been able to get
deeper into the subject itself, but Christ only
left his church two ceremonies.
All other religions have lots of ceremonies and
symbols.
Christ left us only two symbols, the breaking
of bread and baptism.
And these two symbols were meant to unite
his disciples in his person in an indissoluble
unity and Christian fellowship.
But Satan has used these two things all
down through the last 2,000 years to
split the church up into factions and to
denigrate the name of Jesus Christ.
If the breaking of bread or baptism in
my mind are a cause of division in
the church of Christ or divide me from
my brother or my sister, then I am
a carnal Christian.
I'm not a Christian filled with the Spirit
of God because the Spirit of God teaches
me to love my brother and esteem him
better than myself.
And this is the only way that we
can come to an understanding of the Spirit
of God which will enable us to work
together with his real power and blessing.
Father, we commit to you the study we
have made this morning, these introductory remarks, and
we pray that as we get into the
matter more deeply in the next two days
that you will give us a heart of
true spiritual understanding and love and compassion and
discernment and that you will give us a
great respect for one another and that above
all things we may grasp the essential things
and that instead of simply getting hold of
a doctrine or an experience we may have
Christ himself.
We ask it in his name.
Amen.