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.
Father, I confess that I am just a
poor sinner that you have saved and that
I need your grace and that we all
need your grace this morning in order to
obtain your blessing.
Oh God, we simply cast ourselves upon your
mercy.
Only your spirit can open our eyes.
Only Christ can change our hearts.
Only you, only your word can nourish our
souls and we look to you.
Realizing our need, not knowing what needs we
may have in the days to come, not
knowing how one day we may have to
answer perhaps our jailers or our torturers, not
knowing how we shall be able to endure
some of the things we may be called
upon to suffer.
Today we need the abundance of your grace.
We need the teaching of your Holy Spirit.
We pray that this morning you will keep
us from anything which is contrary to your
Holy Word and that your Holy Spirit may
write in our hearts the very truth of
Christ.
Father, give us our daily bread.
Give us the spiritual strength that we need
for today and for the days to come.
And we pray that as you gave Elijah
the bread which enabled him to walk for
forty days and nights to Horeb, the Mount
of God, where he met you face to
face, so we pray that this meat that
we receive from you this morning may enable
us to walk in the strength of God
to the very Mount of God in these
days to come.
We pray that you will grant each of
us a really deep, overwhelming personal revelation and
experience of yourself.
Father, we know that nothing else is worth
living for except this and the communicating of
it to the lost world in which we
live.
We ask these things in the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Look with me, if you will, at the
first epistle to the Corinthians and chapter 3,
the first verse.
The whole epistle to the Corinthians is a
very sad epistle.
I feel that Paul wrote all these words
with a broken heart.
He was writing to a church that had
really failed to grow up.
They were still carnal, they were still babes
in Christ.
He says, I, brethren, couldn't address you as
spiritual men, but as men of the flesh,
carnal men, as babes in Christ.
I fed you with milk, not solid food,
for you were not ready for it, and
even now, even yet, you are not ready
for it, for you are still of the
flesh, while there is jealousy and strife among
you.
For one says, I belong to Paul, and
another, I belong to Apollos.
And aren't you merely acting as men?
I'm quite sure that if there's any spirit
of strife or emulation or sectarianism, denominationalism, doctrinal
conflict among us this morning as we study
this subject, we can classify ourselves immediately as
a bunch of carnal Christians.
And this was what broke Paul's heart after
pouring out so much of his life for
these churches.
We sense in nearly all the letters he
wrote a very deep pathos as he laboured
in prayer, suffered in prison for these people
in order to bring them to the full
stature of Christ until Christ should be formed
in them.
Paul makes it quite clear that there are
two kinds of Christian, spiritual and carnal.
We are not called upon to judge our
brother and decide whether he is carnal or
spiritual, but we have to judge ourselves constantly
and see whether we are walking spiritually or
carnally.
There is one other passage I want to
read in Hebrews 5, at the end of
Hebrews 5, in verse 11.
After the unknown writer of this epistle to
the Hebrews has got right into his subject
of Christ, he says in verse 11 about
this, We have much to say which is
hard to explain, since you have become dull
of hearing.
For though by this time you ought to
be teachers, you need someone to teach you
again the first principles of God's word.
You need milk and not solid food.
For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled
in the word of righteousness, for he is
a child.
But solid food is for the mature, the
grown-ups, for those who have their faculties
trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.
Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrines of
Christ and go on to maturity, not laying
again a foundation of repentance from dead works
and faith towards God, with instructions about ablutions,
laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead
and eternal judgment.
And this we will do if God permits.
I think that many of us ought to
be teachers, and many of us are still
babies having to receive our daily ration of
food from somebody else, and worse still, having
to have it in bottle form.
There is nothing more pathetic than a Christian
who should be mature, who is still feeding
on his bottle.
I can't help feeling that in most of
our western churches, the average Christian who comes
to church Sunday by Sunday is just coming
for his weekly bottle.
It's so pathetic and so sad when so
many of these people could be real teachers
of the word, real preachers, real soul winners,
even begetting their own little churches in their
own houses, as we find in the New
Testament times, Paul writing to one epistle after
another says, greet the church that is in
thy house, greet the church that is in
their house, the church that is in the
house of so and so salutes you.
Where are those churches today?
Well, may God enable us to create a
whole new kind of Christianity in the days
to come.
I believe our year with OM will be
valuable training for that.
Now, there are four commandments in the Bible
concerning the Holy Spirit, and only four.
In all my life I have never found
another one.
A vast amount of teaching, but only four
commandments.
And I believe that if we can understand
these four commandments, and with God's help obey
them, we can really expect the Spirit of
God to fulfill the purpose of God in
our life.
I shan't have time to go into this,
except very superficially this morning.
I want to look at the first commandment
first, then I want to deal with the
sevenfold progressive work of the Spirit, which is
the logical sequence, and then, if I have
time, I want to deal with the three
other commandments at the end of our session.
The first commandment I find in Ephesians 5
.18. Be filled with the Spirit.
The fullness of the Spirit is not a
spiritual luxury reserved for certain Christians, but it
is something which is an obligation on all
believers.
We are all commanded to be filled with
the Spirit, and if we are not filled
with the Spirit, we are sinning.
We have been used to such a poor
kind of Christianity for a generation or two
now, that we have come to consider the
fullness of the Spirit as something quite exceptional,
something which isn't within the reach of all
Christians.
But the New Testament makes it abundantly clear
that this is the normal Christian life, and
anything else is abnormal.
I want to look at this verse with
you for a few moments, and I will
just add that here we have what I
believe is the seventh initial act of the
Spirit of God when he saves us.
Nearly always when we are saved, when we
do find Christ, we are filled with the
Spirit.
Perhaps not to the nth degree, but I
think most of us, looking back to the
day or the night when we found the
Lord, we remember that time as a time
of glory and blessing, joy and deliverance.
We found the Lord.
We had a whole new light in our
soul.
We had a wonderful witness of the Spirit
of God in our hearts.
We were filled with love.
We were filled with joy.
Most of us found it necessary to witness
to other people.
We couldn't keep it for ourselves.
And nearly all of us found a real
victory over many sins in our life which
had beset us up till that time.
For most of us it was a wonderful
experience.
According to the New Testament, this experience should
be merely the beginning of a continuous developing
experience in our life.
We are not meant to lose that first
love, that first glory.
It is meant to develop.
The next day it is meant to develop
further.
The third day it is meant to be
even more developed.
And it's meant to continue thus until the
time when we lay down this earthly body
ready to meet our Lord face to face
in the world to come.
But we've been used to a kind of
Christianity that is lived on a low spiritual
level.
We've been more or less told that because
we're in the flesh and we're in this
world we're all very imperfect and we've just
got to jog along crawling on hands and
knees most of the time with just a
little uplift sometimes and hearing occasionally of some
men and women who seem to be living
altogether in another dimension and we look upon
them as supermen, superwomen until one day we
realize, perhaps through studying the Bible or meeting
someone who has discovered the truth of these
things that we're just living right out of
the will of God.
We begin to seek God.
We begin to seek a completely new experience
of God.
Sometimes it takes us a long time to
get there.
Sometimes God will test us out for months
or even years before he will give us
again what we lost at our conversion.
But other times God will meet us much
more rapidly.
To some of us it comes like the
springing of the dawn or like the slow
budding of all the spring flowers and trees.
To others of us it comes like a
clap of thunder and a flash of lightning
that seems to split the universe in half.
God manifests himself to each one of us
in a way that is always unique and
this is why we must not make the
mistake of copying certain men of God, copying
other people's experiences.
The only one whom we can copy is
Christ.
We can take the example of the apostles,
of the men and women of God down
through history as a stimulus to us and
as illustrations of many aspects of the experience
of God.
But we do not model our life on
these men and women.
We model our life on Christ and we
realize that God has given us each a
unique personality and he wants to reveal himself
to each one of us in a unique
way.
God doesn't make men on a mass-produced
production line.
Each one of us has a precious, unique
conception that God has had, something which is
meant to reflect Christ in a way totally
different from anybody else.
This is what makes the richness and the
marvelous variety of the true Church of Christ.
In glory, in heaven, all the transformed personalities
of all the people of God, of all
history, will be there as a multiple reflection
in innumerable facets of light of the glory
that is Christ.
But if we haven't been used to living
on this level, when it comes to us
it does very often seem like a second
conversion or something else.
And this is why some people call it
by one name and some people call it
by another.
But the apostle Paul, in three days from
meeting Jesus Christ, once he was fully committed
to him on that third day and received
the Spirit of God, he just went straight
up.
He didn't go up and down and jog
along for several years.
His life was just a straight upward path
to glory.
He certainly had a few failures, just a
few ups and downs here and there, but
in the whole his life was just one
straight upward trend.
This is the normal Christian life.
This is what we are meant to be.
But if we've been living on a low
level with little ups and downs for several
years and then suddenly we realize what God
has for us, we suddenly zoom up and
we're astonished at the experience.
But really we should be going right up
from the day of our new birth.
There are, generally speaking, two conceptions of this
wonderful fullness of the Spirit of God.
And these two conceptions are really based on
two different conceptions of what the human soul
is.
Some people seem to think that the human
soul is like a bottle, a champagne bottle,
and if only God can fill it up,
well, that's it, we've got it.
And if we like, we can cork it
up, we can put it in our cellar,
or we can drink it if we like,
and we can put the label on it
and we say, I had it in 1954
or 1908.
And there it is, and you can't do
any more about it.
You've got it, but that's the end of
it.
But all too often when we have thought
that we've been able to get God to
fill our soul, to fill our bottle, and
we've duly labeled it and perhaps corked it
up, we find when we come to drink
it and to use it that somehow there
isn't anything there.
In fact, our human soul is not like
a bottle.
A bottle has an opening only one end,
upward.
But the human soul is like a riverbed,
or like a pipe, or like an electric
wire.
It's open both ends.
It can only be full as a current
is passing through it.
A riverbed can only be full of water
as it receives from the mountain the pure
snows melted down into water, and as it
gives it all out down into the plain
below or into the sea.
The only way that we can be filled
with the Spirit of God is if God
is continuously causing the Spirit of God to
pass through us, if we are receiving the
Spirit of God all the time and passing
him out, giving him out all the time
around us.
Don't you think it's almost sacrilegious to suppose
that you can have God and contain him
within a bottle like a human soul and
reckon that you've got him, really got him,
got it all?
Who can contain God?
Even the universe can't contain God.
I know from my experience that I can
only be full of God, full of the
Spirit of God, if at both ends, Godward
and manward, everything is unblocked and the Spirit
of God can just go right through me.
If I cease to receive, if I neglect
my quiet times, or if my conscience isn't
right with God or I'm disobedient, or if
I am not giving something out to my
fellow men all the time, if I'm not
living for others, it's all gone.
There's a wonderful example of this in the
Holy Land itself, in Palestine, the Land of
Israel.
There are two great lakes in Israel, the
Lake of Galilee and the Dead Sea.
And this really is a wonderful parable of
the truth that we've just been talking about.
The Lake of Galilee is living and fresh,
full of fish, and around its shores there
is or can be an abundant life.
The Lake of Galilee receives its water direct
from the snows of Hermon, without any other
intermediary.
And it gives out all the water that
it receives into the lower Jordan Valley.
The Dead Sea receives exactly the same water,
but it doesn't get it direct from the
mountain, it gets it from the Lake of
Galilee.
And instead of giving out what it receives,
it keeps all of it.
But because it is on such a low
level below the sea, the water itself evaporates
and all that is left is the bitterness
and the deadness.
And I feel that this is a picture
of the two kinds of Christian.
The spiritual Christian is the man who is
at the foot of the Mount of God,
and is receiving all the time from God's
eternal snows, the water of life, the Spirit
of God.
And he is full of pure living water,
but he is giving out everything that he
receives.
He is living it out at the same
time.
He is receiving and giving without ceasing.
The carnal Christian is the man who is
not closely in contact with God, and he
gets his spiritual life from other people, from
his church, or from a team leader, or
from some man or woman.
He comes like a baby just to suck
the bottle.
And he is not giving anything at all.
And the result is that the water itself,
the Holy Spirit, just evaporates, because he is
on such a low level.
And all that is left is just the
bitterness, the deadness, the salt.
Now Paul says, Be filled with the Spirit.
There are one or two things I'd like
to see in this verse with you.
He says, Don't get drunk with wine.
Don't get drunk with anything which leaves a
hangover.
We don't need any kind of artificial stimulus
in order to do the work of God.
The Church of God today is relying on
all sorts of things, organization, administration, propaganda, technique,
money, all kinds of things, instead of relying
on the Spirit of God.
And all these things leave a horrible spiritual
hangover.
Alcohol, drugs, all these things give you a
momentary kick, and you think you're there, you
think you're really doing the job.
But when the effect is all over, you
just find that you're on a lower level
than ever before.
Well, Paul says we are to repudiate anything
which is an artificial stimulant for our spiritual
life.
And we are to seek what comes from
God alone, the Spirit of God.
But there is an analogy between drunkenness and
the fullness of the Spirit.
A man who is drunk has an incredible
nerve.
He'll knock off any policeman's helmet for him
without being asked.
And he is often so happy that he'll
walk down the middle of the street singing
at the top of his voice.
Well, the Christian needs a stimulant.
He needs a stimulant that does give him
an incredible nerve, a supernatural courage.
You can't be a real Christian in this
world without supernatural courage.
But you also need a supernatural joy.
Otherwise, we just can't take it.
Well, when we are filled with the Spirit
of God, we do have a supernatural courage,
and we do have a supernatural joy.
The fullness of the Spirit is a sort
of divine drunkenness, a spiritual intoxication with the
sheer wine of God, the sheer wine of
heaven.
But it doesn't leave any nasty hangover.
Now, the other thing I want to point
out in this verse is the Greek tense,
being filled with the Spirit.
There are two ways of giving an order
in Greek.
There is the simple imperative tense, and there
is the continuous or progressive imperative tense.
Supposing you say to me, Ralph, clap your
hands, and you use the simple tense.
Well, I just clap my hands.
I've obeyed you.
But if you say, Ralph, clap your hands,
and you use the continuous form, then I've
got to keep on clapping my hands.
Well, now, the Apostle Paul uses the continuous
form of the imperative tense here.
He is not saying, get filled with the
Spirit once for all, a once-for-all
act that you can label and bottle up.
But he is saying, you've got to keep
getting filled with the Spirit all the time.
It's a continuous, progressive act of God.
Just as you're giving out all the time
with love, good works, witness, evangelism, in the
same way you're receiving all the time through
prayer and the Word and fellowship.
And we have to keep getting filled with
the Spirit all the time, moment by moment.
And of course, if in one minute's time
I commit a sin, that immediately blocks the
action of the Spirit of God.
If I sin and do not immediately get
that thing put right, then the Spirit of
God ceases to fill me.
I'm just left to my own devices.
But if I confess that sin and get
it right, instantly the Spirit of God is
prepared to come in again, because the blood
of Christ has already dealt with the question
of that sin at the cross.
I want to mention a little bit more
about that later on.
So, having seen the picture that the Apostle
Paul, that the Bible gives us of the
fullness of the Spirit, I now want to
go on to what I call the seven
progressive acts of the Spirit of God, which
are simply the result of the fullness.
When we are filled with the Spirit of
God, what can we expect?
What does the New Testament actually teach us?
Well, I have found a multitude of things,
but I think they can all be grouped
under these seven headings.
The first is the witness of the Spirit.
In Romans 8, we read that the Spirit
bears witness with our spirit that we are
children of God.
This is Romans 8 and...
Can anybody see the verse?
Sixteen, thank you, brother.
Yes, the Spirit Himself bears witness with our
spirit that we are children of God.
The moment I believe in Christ and the
Spirit of God saves me, in that moment
He says to me, you are a child
of God, your sins are forgiven.
I know it because the Bible says it,
I know it because the blood of Christ
was shed for me, but I know it
also because the Spirit of God just writes
this into my heart.
He says to me, it's done.
People say to me, how do you know?
I just say, I can't explain it, but
I just do know.
I know why it is, I know because
of the Word of God, because of the
blood of Christ, but also the Spirit of
God just tells me I am a child
of God.
I know it, I look up into the
face of my Father and I see Him
now.
God is real to me.
But the Spirit of God doesn't only witness
to us, He also witnesses through us.
And in John 15, at the end of
John 15, Christ promised that the Spirit of
God would do this in His believers, in
His disciples.
John 15, verses 26 and 27, He says,
So when we witness to what we know
of Christ to other people, the Spirit of
God also backs up our witness, if we
are filled with the Spirit of God.
But if we are not filled and we
are just trying to witness in our own
strength, our witness doesn't cut ice at all.
But if we are filled with the Spirit
of God, it isn't just Ralph Shallis or
Tom Dick or Harry witnessing.
There are two of us witnessing.
The Spirit of God is witnessing at the
same time as I am witnessing.
And He can get behind the barriers and
the prejudices and the arguments of the man
I'm witnessing to.
And even if He may contest my own
witness, the Spirit of God can be just
putting His finger on that man's conscience.
And this is what convicts man.
So the witness of the Spirit is twofold.
First of all, to me and then through
me.
If I'm filled with the Spirit, the witness
is very strong.
The knowledge and the glory and the joy
of being a child of God becomes every
day more marvelous.
And also the ability and the joy to
witness for Christ around us becomes more and
more effective each day.
The second thing, which there's no chronological sequence
in this, and perhaps not even a logical
sequence.
All these things happen at the same time,
I believe, or should do.
The second thing is the fruit of the
Spirit, which we see in Galatians 5 and
verse 22.
Paul says the fruit of the Spirit is
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
self-control.
Nine words.
I once heard a man say that these
nine words are the shortest biography of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
It's the summary of the character of Jesus.
If I'm filled with the Spirit of God,
he produces in me the character of Christ.
This is the flower of the tree of
life.
And in the heart of the flower, as
the summer brings it to maturity, is formed
the fruit, which in its turn contains the
seed.
And as the autumn comes, the seed is
liberated and reproduces the life of the tree
right and left.
And the ability to lead other souls to
Christ comes from spiritual maturity when the character
of Christ has been perfected in us, wrought
out in us.
And much of this can only be wrought
out through real suffering.
So if I am filled with the Spirit
of God, I am filled with love.
This is the first part of the fruit
of the Spirit.
And of course, Paul says that love is
the fulfilling of the law.
He who has loved his neighbor has fulfilled
the whole law.
If I love God with all my heart,
I shall spontaneously keep the commandments that concern
him.
I shan't want to do anything else.
And if I love my neighbor as myself,
I shan't want to do him any harm.
I shall only want to do him good
and, if necessary, give my life for him.
If I am filled with this God, I
shall also love my brother as Christ has
loved me.
It sounds a totally impossible kind of phenomenon,
but it is a fact.
I know as I've come to OM conferences
and met OM teams year after year, as
well as many, many other Christians, as I
look into the faces of many of the
people that I know, some of whom I've
only spoken to for a minute or two,
I just know that I love them.
I wouldn't dare to say as Christ has
loved me or as the Father has loved
the Son, but I know that it's that
kind of love.
And if only all of us can be
filled with the Spirit and remain filled with
the Spirit, that love is developed to the
most intense degree.
It's a love of utter purity but of
consuming power.
And it is this love which convinces the
other people.
Christ said to his disciples, you remember, it's
by this that all men will know that
you're my disciples.
How is it that men recognize the authenticity
of our witness?
It isn't because I've...
How do men recognize the authenticity of our
witness?
It isn't because we have so much power
or we're so strict on doctrine or because
we have this or that or the other.
They recognize it because we are full of
the love of God.
This is what convinces people.
And if I stand up here and I
haven't got the real love of God in
my heart for each one of you, then
you can be absolutely certain I am not
filled with the Spirit.
Even if I preach with power and convince
you and convict you and bring you on
your knees weeping, I am not filled with
the Spirit.
It's something else doing all that.
I don't mean that the Spirit-filled Christian
who is full of the love of God
isn't also full of power.
I don't mean that at all.
But the power of God is not always
manifested in thunder and fire and blood.
It's also manifested in the springing of a
little flower and in the conception of a
little child, in the birth of a soul,
in the radiance of the dawn.
The third thing which I believe is a
manifestation of the Spirit of God when we
are filled, we'll see in 2 Corinthians 13,
14, the last verse of 2 Corinthians.
I'm only able to give you just one
or two verses for each feature.
I only wish that I had a whole
hour to develop each aspect of the subject.
But I'm just trying to give you, as
I said the other day, a skeleton work
on which to build your own doctrine of
the Spirit, but your own study of the
Bible, teaching on this subject.
I just hope that these things will help
you to get things a bit clarified.
I don't expect you to believe what I
say.
I don't even want you to believe what
I say.
I want you to believe what God says
in his Word.
I don't mind if you reject everything that
I say, so long as you really become
a deep student of the Word of God
and discover what God himself says and put
it into practice.
That's my only objective here among you, and
to give you a desire to know God
face to face and therefore to read your
Bible in order to obtain such a knowledge
of God.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the
love of God and the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit be with you all.
Like so many wonderful verses in the Bible,
this is quoted and quoted and quoted Sunday
after Sunday, day after day, all over the
world, without peoples ever realizing what it means.
The grace of Christ.
I think that what characterizes great Christ most
of all is grace.
You can sum up the whole personality and
life and work of Jesus Christ in this
word grace, which means the beauty of God
and the generosity of God.
And what characterizes God more than anything else
is love, and what characterizes the Spirit of
God more than anything else, I believe, is
fellowship.
That is sharing.
Because he exists in order to share God
with men, in order to share Christ with
the Father, in order to share Christ out
among us, in order to express Christ and
share out with every conscious being in the
universe the thought of God which is Christ.
The word fellowship or communion simply means sharing
in Greek, having the things in common.
And the Spirit of God brings us into
fellowship with the Father so that we share
Jesus Christ, we share everything that is precious
to God, we share the sum total of
all that God is, all that he loves,
all that he seeks ever to do and
to fulfill, and that he calls his Son.
We share this with God the Father.
It's terrific.
Well, then when we begin to share Christ
with one another, when the Spirit of God
is able to draw us into this same
fellowship that exists with the Father, well, you
can truly say that God is on earth.
You can truly say we're beginning to live
in heaven, even here on earth.
And this is what brings people into the
kingdom.
This is how the teams get soul saved.
When people come into contact with a group
of people who are living in this way,
they know this is the truth.
When my wife and I were in North
Africa years ago as missionaries, I knew some
missionaries, dear faithful men and women, who had
been in that country for 40 or 50
years, some of them had not even seen
a single convert.
And yet, in five years, we had so
many converts that we asked God to stop
converting people because we didn't know what to
do.
We were absolutely worn out with having to
cope with all the fruit that was coming.
It was very difficult to get the first
two or three converts.
But once God had made those, and he
welded them with me and with my wife
into such a spiritual unity, such fellowship, that
Jesus Christ was always there wherever we were.
If we met in the street or in
a bus or anywhere else or in a
cafe, he was there.
Prayer was as natural as breathing.
Jesus Christ was just one of us.
And the people who came into contact with
this little group just knew that this was
the truth.
We were terribly persecuted.
Each year the little nucleus grew.
And each year it was persecuted and a
lot of the people were driven away.
All the chaff was sifted out from the
wheat.
Then the next year there would be another
harvest.
Finally, there was an absolute explosion which lasted
for quite a long time, people being saved
all the time, nothing seemed able to stop
it.
What was it that saved these people?
Simply the presence of Jesus Christ in the
middle of the whole gang.
If any two of them met anywhere in
the street or anywhere, as they shook hands,
it's just like an electric spark, the presence
of Christ was there.
And it was impossible for any two of
us to meet anywhere, even for a second,
or even just shaking hands in the street,
without praying to Jesus Christ.
He was so real.
And this is how quite a few young
Muslims got converted.
I've even seen a Muslim, he's in Paris
today, he's a fine Christian.
He was quite young when he was converted.
He was converted from scratch in two or
three hours.
I've never known any other Muslim converted like
that.
And what converted him, it was just the
presence of Jesus Christ.
And other Muslims we saw just come into
the kingdom of God, and atheists, and Jews.
I remember one prayer meeting when there were
about 30 of us.
We didn't call it a prayer meeting, we
didn't call any meeting a prayer meeting or
anything else.
We just came together and we did whatever
God wanted us to do.
And whatever we did, well, we just had
the presence of Christ there.
But I remember after about 20 minutes or
half an hour praying, there must have been
several hundreds of little prayers that just went
up to God.
The praying was simple, just a word or
a sentence, nothing more.
Everybody praying one after the other, like flames
going up onto the altar.
Lord, please bless us.
Lord, save so and so.
Lord, you're marvellous.
Well, there were only two unconverted people in
that meeting.
They were both young fellows, Jews, and they
were both saved in that prayer meeting.
This sort of thing was typical of the
kind of way that God worked.
And I believe that if we can only
recover and keep the true conception of the
Church, because this is Christ's conception of the
Church, a living cell that can just reproduce
itself ad infinitum.
If only we can recover and keep this
kind of conception over these next few years,
I believe we could see a divine action
of God's Spirit go around the world like
a flame of fire.
And it wouldn't be something just ephemeral.
It wouldn't be built on illusory experiences.
Not if these people are taught to study
their Bibles and to pray and to witness
and sacrifice as we endeavour to teach our
own converts.
So the fellowship of the Spirit is on
two levels, the vertical plane and the horizontal
plane, with God and with one another.
If you like, you can think of it
as the plus life or the crucified life,
to help you to remember.
Then the next thing is the intercession of
the Spirit.
In Romans, chapter 8, we read that the
Spirit of God himself intercedes with us with
groanings that cannot be uttered.
And Christ calls him the other advocate.
I prefer that translation to the word comforter
or counsellor.
The word in Greek means several things.
But in 1 John 1, 2, Christ is
called our advocate.
If any man sins, we have an advocate
with the Father.
It's the same word, parakletos, in Greek.
And Christ said before he died, I will
pray to the Father to send you another
advocate.
So we have two advocates.
We have one here on earth, the Spirit
of God, in us, with us.
And in heaven, at the right hand of
God, we have another one.
The Spirit of God is, so to speak,
my solicitor.
Christ is my barrister.
If anything goes wrong down here, I just
place my case in the hands of my
solicitor.
He sends a telephone call up to heaven,
and my barrister just pleads my case in
front of the Father.
And the accuser, on the other side, who
accuses the brethren night and day, has his
mouth shut when Jesus Christ reminds him that
his blood was shed for my sin.
And Satan has no right to interfere with
the Spirit of God's work in my heart.
So the Spirit of God prays for us.
But he doesn't only pray for us.
He prays through us.
And in Jude, we have a short verse
which speaks of praying in the Holy Ghost.
This Bible isn't marked in my normal way,
and I can't find the verse.
Can someone tell me the verse?
Oh, verse 20.
Pray in the Holy Spirit.
It's the Holy Spirit who was in Christ,
who prayed through Christ when he was on
earth, too.
It's the Spirit of God himself who prays
through us.
Read the life of praying Hyde, and see
the way the Spirit of God got hold
of that man.
When God can find a man whom he
can use to pray, he'll just squeeze him
like a lemon.
And that's what happened to Hyde.
Each year the pressure was greater.
There came a time when Hyde had to
take hold of God for an average of
one soul a day.
And he got 400 souls saved that year.
The next year, God put on the pressure
and told him to pray for two souls
a day.
And he got about 800 souls saved that
year.
This was in what is now Pakistan, North
India at that time.
And then God stepped it up and made
him get three souls a day.
And then the last year, four souls a
day.
After that, he died, worn out.
But what a legacy he's left for the
church and for the world.
Then the fifth thing is the teaching of
the Spirit.
In the first epistle of John, the Spirit
of God is called the anointing.
And we read that he teaches us in
verse...
This is just one verse I'm quoting.
Verse 27, you don't need anyone to teach
you as his anointing teaches you about everything
and is true.
And is no lie.
Just as it has taught you, abide in
him.
That doesn't mean that we have no need
of doctors, teachers, and pastors, prophets in the
church.
God does teach us through all these means.
But ultimately, it is God himself who teaches
us.
And I believe that as young men and
women, your greatest need, the greatest need that
you have...
...is to give God enough time alone, now
while you are young...
...for God to teach you direct, before men
can clutter up your thinking too much with
their interpretations.
When I was a young man, I thought
quite seriously of going to a Bible school.
And I'm sure it would have been a
great blessing for me.
This was long before I became a missionary.
I didn't become a missionary until I was
nearly 40.
I earned my living the ordinary way until
I was 37.
But when I was a young man, God
said, no, first of all, listen to me
alone.
That's when I had to take my Bible
and God said, read it right through each
year.
All the men that God has ever used
in history seem to have read their whole
Bibles once a year at least.
I felt this was the minimum I could
offer God.
God said to me, if you want to
know me, give me time.
Give me at least a tenth of your
time.
It isn't good enough to give me a
tenth of your money.
Your money isn't very valuable.
If you lose ten pounds a day, you
can get another ten pounds.
But if you lose ten minutes a day,
it's gone forever.
God said to me, give me a tenth
of your time.
I'll make it up for you in eternity.
I don't know how many times over.
Put it in the bank of heaven.
I said to the Lord, I don't know
how I could possibly get two and a
half hours a day, which is roughly what
it amounts to.
But God said, just choose.
What do you want?
What's your objective?
Are you going to be content with just
a very mediocre idea of what I am,
a dim vision seeing me through an obscure
glass remotely, just sort of jogging along up
and down, or do you want to see
me face to face?
Do you really want to live in the
intimacy of my presence?
Do you want to be smitten down with
the fire of my presence day and night?
And in the end I said, Lord, anything.
Anything.
So long as you reveal yourself to me.
And I gave God a tenth of my
time.
And from that time until now, that covenant
between God and me has remained.
I'll just mention this in passing, that my
greatest enemy is the Church of Christ.
My greatest enemy is the Church of Christ.
When I was earning my living, even during
the war years, even in the army, in
the deserts, in the ruined cities of Europe,
I was able to get all my time
with God.
But it's the Christians today who prevent me
from getting that time.
I have to fight for it.
The fight of faith today is far harder
than before, because most Christians do not have
this habit.
And yet they want me to be with
them.
They want me to help them.
They call me all over the place, all
over France, all over Europe, and even beyond
if I have time to go.
But they don't give me enough time to
be alone with God each day.
Usually I refuse to have breakfast with anybody,
because it's the only way I can be
sure of starting the day with God, if
I've been up late the night before.
But God said to me, Your body needs
three meals a day, and so does your
soul.
Daniel found it was necessary.
David found it was necessary.
And so I began to get the habit,
when I was a young man, of meeting
God in the morning, before anybody else could
put any other kind of rubbish into my
mind.
I found it was easy to get the
manna before the sun had melted it.
And that early time with God, even though
it often wasn't very long, if I had
to work late at night, at least it
was a precious time, and God made sure
that I would get the rest of the
time with Him each day.
And I used to say, Lord, whatever you
do, keep your date with me in the
middle of the day, keep your date with
me at night, and keep your date with
me in the morning.
At first it was rather a struggle to
get through to God each time.
But after a while, after a few months,
I found that God had begun to take
me seriously.
He tested me.
He tested me for several months before He
really began to speak to me.
But then He began to speak, and the
light of God began to come through like,
I just can't describe it, like as if
there was a great dawn breaking over the
whole universe.
And I began to see the face of
Christ with the sum total of all the
beauty and wisdom and intelligence and power, purity
and righteousness of God concentrated in that marvellous
human personality of Jesus.
And I've said this several times before, I
don't like saying it.
I feel it's not a thing that you
should say in public at all.
But I just don't know any other way
to describe it, and I know that this
has been a help to some people.
God revealed Himself to me, and there came
a point where I simply fell in love
with God.
I don't know whether you know what I
mean.
You may just think I'm a fool.
But I can tell you that it's worth
a whole lifetime of suffering in order to
have just one instant of such a revelation
of God.
And when you have known God, even dimly,
even remotely like that, you don't want anything
else.
You don't want anything that's second best.
I must press on quickly.
Just let's remember what Christ said in John
16.
Christ said that the Spirit of God would
come with one objective, to reveal Christ.
He said, He will take the things of
mine and reveal them to you.
John 16.
The Spirit of God really has only one
thing He wants to teach us.
He wants to reveal Christ.
Because as we see Christ, Christ becomes the
lens, or the telescope if you like, or
I don't know how you like to think
of Him, through which we see God.
All the spectrum of God's white light is
broken up in the person of Christ into
the most marvellous colours of every possible aspect
of divine truth.
And of course, if you want the Spirit
of God to reveal Christ to you, you've
got to read this book.
If you go to university and you sit
at the feet of a certain well-known
professor and you study some subject, and he
has written a master textbook on the subject,
and he does all his lecturing based on
his textbook.
If you don't read and study that textbook,
the professor will never be able to teach
you what he's really got in his mind.
And in fact, he won't.
He won't treat you as a serious pupil.
He'll probably say, you'd better go and study
something else.
The Spirit of God is the professor of
God in the university of God.
And he's written his master textbook.
And if you really want him to teach
you, get to know this book inside out.
I myself was taught by God to read
the two testaments together day by day, beginning
at Matthew and Genesis, and just reading it
straight through continuously each year.
And each year I was able to follow
the development of God's thought.
It was wonderful.
After going through the Bible several times, I
really began to feel I was beginning to
understand God's thinking process.
Now, after about 40 years of reading the
Bible through each year, I realize I've hardly
even begun to understand what it's all about.
But each year it becomes more and more
marvelous, more and more deep and profitable.
I must be very quick now.
The sixth thing is the guidance of the
Spirit.
When Israel came out of Egypt, the first
thing that happened to them was that they
received the cloud.
They received the presence of the Spirit of
God.
And that cloud guided them all the way
into Canaan.
But they had to keep mighty close to
the cloud, and they had to watch it,
and they had to obey its movements.
They had to be ready to pack up
their tents in the middle of the night,
two o'clock in the morning.
If the cloud decided to go, they had
to move.
They had to be totally mobile.
On the other hand, if the cloud stayed
for two years somewhere, they just had to
wait.
And we've got to learn to wait upon
the presence of God.
God won't fail to guide us if we
remain close to the cloud.
There's much more I would like to say
about guidance, but I can't now.
In Romans 8, Paul says that it's the
sons of God who are led by the
Spirit of God.
And then, finally, the gifts of the Spirit.
And my time has really gone, and I
haven't even got to the other three commandments.
I would like to say several things about
the gifts of the Spirit, but there really
isn't time for anything now.
But will you just look briefly at 1
Corinthians 12, where Paul gives his basic teaching
on this subject.
Remember that the Epistle to the Corinthians was
written to a carnal church, full of confusion
and troubles.
And Paul deals just with one problem after
another in this church.
Divisions, immorality, problems about marriage, disorder at the
Lord's Supper, problems about food offered to idols,
problems about the role of a woman in
the church, and then problems about spiritual gifts
in chapters 12, 13, and 14, and finally,
even problems about the doctrine of the resurrection.
They certainly were in a bad way at
Corinth.
And in chapter 12, Paul deals with this
question of spiritual gifts.
In Corinth, they got it all out of
focus, and Paul is just trying to bring
them back to spiritual realities.
He says, now look, the church is the
body of Christ.
Whoever saw a body with just one enormous
hand, or one huge tongue, or just one
great ear, the body is a marvelous thing
of beauty and utility that God has invented.
God is the architect of the body.
He thought of the body.
He created the body.
He gave the body its members.
He decided how many eyes, ears, hands, fingers,
lungs, hearts the body should have, and where
they should be placed, and how they should
function.
And Paul says in this chapter that God
has put us all in the body as
he wants us, each one with his own
function, like a marvelous teamwork, so that working
together, God, the head, which is Christ, the
brain, can coordinate everything in order to fulfill
the work of God.
And Paul says quite plainly, you haven't all
got the same spiritual gift.
We're not all apostles.
We're not all prophets.
We're not all evangelists.
We don't all work miracles.
We don't all have tongues or anything else.
He says, we've got to find out from
God what our function is in the body
of Christ.
What does God really want us to do?
And there are several key verses in this
chapter.
I'd just like to mention that you might
note them.
In verse 4 he says there are varieties
of gifts, but the same spirit.
And in verse 7 he says, to each
is given the manifestation of the spirit for
the common good, not for your personal satisfaction.
If God gives me a spiritual gift, it
isn't so that I can sort of feel
good about it, or so that it does
me good necessarily.
Mind you, it will do me good.
But it's for the common good.
It's for you.
It's not for me.
It's for the church.
It's for the evangelization of the world.
It's so that Christ can use me in
order to bring men to himself, in order
to revive the church, in order to build
up the church, in order to get the
world evangelized, in order to alleviate all misery
and suffering in this world.
That's what my spiritual gift is for.
And then in verse 11, after a certain
list of gifts, Paul gives us four lists
of gifts which are all different, and which
are certainly not exhaustive.
I know many, many spiritual gifts which aren't
mentioned by Paul.
What about that woman who wrote the hymn
Just As I Am, through whom perhaps hundreds
of thousands of people have been saved?
Paul didn't mention that gift in his list.
There are many gifts.
But anyway, Paul says, verse 11, All these
are inspired by one and the same Spirit
who apportions to each one individually as he
wills.
It's the Spirit of God who decides what
our function is in the body of Christ.
We haven't any right to dictate to God.
I can't say to God, You've got to
make me an apostle, or you've got to
make me a worker of miracles.
I can say to the Lord, Please give
me the best possible.
And this is what Paul says at the
end of the chapter.
He says, verse 31, Earnestly desire the best
gifts.
This is the only commandment that we have
about gifts.
We've got to desire spiritual gifts, but we've
got to desire especially the best gifts.
So ask God to give you the best
he can give you, the thing which will
get the most people saved, the most people
sanctified, the most people blessed and helped.
If God only gives you something relatively minor,
well accept it with gratitude, but ask him
for the most he's prepared to give you.
And then, in verse 13, Paul says, By
one Spirit we were all baptized into one
body.
All of us, past tense, baptized into one
body.
And then, in verses 14 onwards, he speaks
of the different members of the body and
shows how each of them is necessary and
useful.
And he says, in verse 25, It's so
that there may be no discord in the
body, but that the members may have the
same care for one another.
And then, in verse 27, he says, You
are the body of Christ and individually members
of it.
And God has appointed in the church.
So God decides what we do in the
church.
First, apostles.
Second, prophets.
Third, teachers.
Then, then, then, then.
So there's a definite gradation in the importance
of gifts.
It would be wonderful if we could all
be apostles.
If we can't be that, at least we
might be prophets or evangelists.
But God gives us each what we are
able to do.
What he estimates is valid for us.
But there are some things that are more
important than others.
And I consider that in Ephesians 4, the
five gifts that are mentioned there are the
five absolutely indispensable gifts for the church.
Apostle, that is missionary.
Prophet, that is the man who's always bringing
the church back to God and back to
the word of God.
Evangelist, that's the man who gets people converted
and evangelized, not necessarily on a platform.
And then, teachers, men who have the real
gift for giving us the whole word of
God integrally and without any axe to grind.
And fifthly, pastors, shepherds, who are able to
look after all the souls and visit them
and care for them and find out their
problems and troubles and get them really right
with the Lord.
Well, any other gifts that God can give
his church on top of those, hallelujah, thank
God for it.
May God just load us all with spiritual
gifts.
But those five gifts are indispensable if the
work of God is to go forward.
Now, I'm just going to spend a moment
on those other three commandments.
I can't, I'm afraid I just can't stop
like that.
I've just got another two or three minutes
maybe that I can take.
The other three commandments are these, and I
must leave you really to sort them out
with God.
In Ephesians 4.30, we are told, Grieve
not the Spirit of God.
Isaiah tells us that Israel grieved the Spirit
of God in the desert, and the Spirit
of God turned around and became their enemy.
Israel grieved the Spirit of God because they
just went on disobeying and refused to acknowledge
their sin.
And there came a time when the Spirit
of God just ceased to bless them anymore.
Well now, I believe that what grieves the
Spirit of God is sin, but not merely
sin, but retaining that sin unconfessed and not
put right.
So what we must do is watch our
conscience.
I believe that in these last three commandments
I'm giving you, there are the three basic
principles of the Christian life.
They are the three conditions for the fullness
of the Spirit of God.
The first one, this one concerning grieving the
Spirit, concerns our conscience.
We've got to keep our conscience right with
God and men, as Paul says in Acts
23.24. He says, I've lived in all
good conscience before God and men until this
day.
He didn't mean he hadn't sinned, but he'd
always kept his conscience right.
Well now, you watch your conscience every morning
when you get up, every night when you
go to bed, and all day long.
And be ready to confess all your sin
instantly to God.
1 John 1.9 tells us that if
we confess our sins to our Heavenly Father,
He forgives.
And just as we took our forgiveness from
God as judge, the day we were born
again by faith, so God wants you to
take His fatherly forgiveness by faith every time
you confess your sin and just believe that
you're forgiven.
And that takes away the barrier, and again
the Spirit of God can fill you and
bless you.
Then the next commandment is 1 Thessalonians 5
.19, quench not the Spirit.
To quench means to resist.
When the flame wants to come up, you
cover it and you push it down again.
It's disobeying.
Just as the first commandment concerns our conscience,
this one concerns our will.
There are two obstacles to faith, an evil
conscience and an evil will.
And these are the two things that we've
got to examine every day, all the day,
and let the Word of God examine these
two things and correct us the whole time.
We have to examine ourselves each day to
see whether really we are obedient, whether we
really are prepared to obey God and do
anything and everything that God tells us instantly.
In that position, God can bless us.
This is when the Spirit of God takes
over and comes in.
And if these two obstacles are taken away,
we are then in a position to fulfill
the last commandment concerning the Holy Spirit, which
is in Galatians 5.16, walk by the
Spirit.
And this again is the continuous tense.
Keep walking by the Spirit.
Why walk?
Because in Paul's day, the only way of
getting from Ephesus to Smyrna or A to
B was to walk or to sit on
something that walked.
You could only go a step at a
time.
There was no other means of locomotion.
And the only way in the kingdom of,
in the spiritual realm that we can go
forward is by going a step at a
time.
If you don't take the first step now,
if you don't do what God's telling you
to do now, He won't be able to
tell you what to do next.
You've got to obey God now.
Even if you can't see what happens afterwards,
do what God tells you now and go
forward.
It may be quite impossible, like Israel at
the Red Sea.
And God said, go forward.
Israel at Jordan, go forward.
Christ to the man with the withered arm,
lift it up.
Before it was healed, lift it up by
faith.
And it was healed.
The obedience of faith.
The paralyzed man, get up.
Not I'll heal you first and then you
get up.
Get up.
The obedience of faith.
And so you see, this last one, this
last commandment can be summed up in the
word faith.
And everything can be summed up in faith.
Faith in Jesus Christ.
And to believe in Christ means that we
go forward obeying Him in faith and we
rely on the Spirit of God to take
us through.
We realize that all the power, energy, intelligence,
wisdom of God, all that even the universe
can't contain, is here at our disposal, ready
to be poured through us and used through
us for doing the will of God.
I do not believe that we can have
the fullness of the Holy Spirit just for
our own satisfaction.
I believe it is only given to us
for doing the will of God.
But when we do the will of God,
we are not only satisfied, but we are
filled with the joy of heaven and the
peace of Christ.
Let us pray.
Father, I know that the human instrument through
which your Spirit has wished to speak to
us this morning is so imperfect, so ignorant,
so sinful by nature.
That I realize that many things must have
come through quite distorted.
And I ask your forgiveness for anything that
has not been according to the mind of
Jesus Christ.
But we do pray together that everything that
is true, the real true content of your
Word may be burnt into our souls and
may become a part of the fiber of
our being.
We pray that you will think through our
brains and act through our hands and that
you will speak through our mouths.
Oh God, we want to give ourselves to
you afresh so that you may take us
and use us.
Lord, this precious gift of the fullness of
the Spirit, we realize it is a holy
obligation which we dare not, must not refuse.
But we pray also that you will keep
us from the enemy's incredibly subtle attempts to
disguise himself as the Spirit of God, to
disguise himself as an apostle of Christ, an
angel of light.
God, keep us at the foot of the
cross, keep us at the feet of Christ,
and keep us faithful to your Word.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.