Everything that the Spirit of God is expressing
through Paul to men is not only powerfully
pertinent in that expressed moment, but it continues
to reverberate throughout all time and history, and
even to this hour.
It actually might be said that it's more
pungent now, more potent now, more significant now,
at the conclusion of time and history than
it was 2,000 years ago when Paul
spoke it.
But the elements are the same, nothing has
changed, except that it has deepened and is
being brought to a final collision and conclusion.
It's the Greek versus the Hebrew, secular versus
the sacred, the worldly mind versus the spiritual
mind.
And let's see, last week we were on
the 25th verse, well, it begins in verse
24, For the God who made the world
and all things in it, since he is
Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell
in temples made with hands, neither is he
served by human hands, as though he needed
anything, since he himself gives to all life
and breath and all things.
And just to review something of our concluding
remarks last week, this thing about the God
who gives to all, all things, can only
be spoken by someone who really devoutly and
powerfully believes that.
Most of us have not yet come to
that place.
We believe that God gives the good things,
and we're quick to acknowledge and to celebrate
that, but we have not yet come to
a recognition that, as Paul did, that he's
the God who gives all things, not only
the things that are good, but the things
that are painful, the things that are trials
and difficulties and challenges and disappointments.
And it's interesting that in these very days,
even as these words still linger in our
spirit, in our own Sunday service, an Indian
brother got up to celebrate the God who
gives and shared the testimony of how he
needed a pair of boots and how the
thought was barely in his heart when someone
provided it and how he saw God's provision
through that man.
And he was wearing them Sunday night and
just celebrated God, stood in the middle of
our room, in the middle of our service,
and just rejoicing God as the God who
gives.
That same man witnessed the death of his
own newborn son yesterday, the day after the
Sunday service.
And I said to Dana, who was there,
if he will now yet rejoice as much
in the passing of this child as he
did in the receiving of the boots, he
will be in the same place as Paul.
God is waiting for such men to come
up to Mars Hill.
Because we can say that there's the God
who gives all things, but it will not
mean anything.
It will not have a penetration.
It will not be a credible, challenging, and
compelling statement demanding the attention of men to
that God, except that we really believe it
in the sense that we are living it
and has been tempted in our experience.
So therefore, the Paul who says this in
Acts 17 is the same Paul who in
Acts 16 received all things from the God
who gives when he received 39 lashes on
his back, when he received public disgrace, when
he was stripped of his clothing and whipped
in the marketplace and thrown into an inner
dungeon and made his feet fast in the
stocks.
If Paul did not believe that that was
given from God, if he saw that as
some kind of an unhappy circumstance, and where
was God to have allowed it to happen
to his choiceless servants, he would not have
been in the next chapter on Mars Hill
speaking the same thing to Greeks.
I hope you understand me.
God is waiting for men who believe that
they believe that they believe that there is
a God who gives all things.
I was just saying to Dina and Fred
tonight, before we came to the class, how
few believers there are who have yet really
surrendered to the total sovereignty of God.
The evidence of that is in our disappointment
and the way that we express it.
We see that men are at fault, or
circumstances are at fault, or we ourselves are
at fault.
If only we had done this instead of
that, then something might have been changed and
we don't recognize that there's an over reigning
God supreme in the heavens who gives all
things.
It's not an excuse for our indifference or
our neglect, but we need to recognize that
he's the God of all things, not only
the God who gives the new boots, but
the God who is pleased in his own
wisdom to take away a child that is
born, a child that was awaited, a son
long desired, without giving explanation and without giving
reason.
When you can rejoice in the sovereignty of
God in the things that are painful as
well as the things that are pleasant, then
you can stand before secular men and speak
of the God who gives to all life
and breath and all things.
And if he gives life and breath, is
he not also the God who can take
away life and breath?
If he's the God of life, is he
not also the God of death?
And if he's not the God of the
one, is he the God of the other?
And if he's not God of all, is
he God at all?
When God is talking about having a spiritual
mind, this is what he's meaning.
Not that we just give lip service to
certain credo or certain articles of the faith,
but that deep in our total being we
believe and the believing is expressed in our
living.
We live as if we believe these things
of the God who gives all things.
And he made from one blood every nation
of mankind to live on the face of
the earth, having determined their appointed times and
the boundaries of their habitation, that they should
seek God, if perhaps they might grope for
him and find him, though he is not
far from each one of us.
I think we just need to recognize what
is being superbly expressed in a single moment
of time to men whose whole life is
given to hearing or to speaking some new
thing.
The scripture speaks about those who are always
seeking after truth but never coming to the
knowledge of it.
I know these men because I was one.
It's a pose, it's a phony posture that
celebrates and exalts man who thinks and presumes
to be seekers after truth but never comes
to the knowledge of the truth.
But he's always in the process of seeking
and while he's yet seeking he's fornicating and
indulging himself, never coming to the truth, but
always with a self-satisfying posture that at
least he's seeking after the truth and wants
to hear some new thing and to discuss
some new philosophy.
And here comes the Hebrew of the Hebrews,
the man of God, and in one statement,
chow, he nails it.
He ends all discussion and he tells these
philosophers whose ears are always itching for novelty
what is the whole purpose of life and
being, namely, to seek after God if happily
we might be found of Him.
It's remarkably simple but I wonder how many
of us in this room who are hearing
my words tonight believe it.
Do we really believe that the whole purpose
of creation, the whole purpose of the earth
and man on earth is not the establishing
of fortunes or careers or national destinies or
technology or comfort or security or success but
to give mankind an opportunity to seek after
God if happily they might be found of
Him.
Paul has reduced the whole of human existence
to one pursuit only, that the whole purpose
of human life on this planet is for
the purpose of finding God before we enter
into eternity, either Godless or with Him.
You know that that is distinctly the view
of the Middle Ages which is dismissed by
secular historians as the Dark Ages because they
were primitive and simplistic in their view that
they saw this life as a veil of
fears, as hardship and suffering and trial but
it was a preparation for eternity.
That the whole purpose of this life was
establishing a relationship with God that would continue
into eternity.
That view has been dismissed in modern times
and needs to be restored.
Paul believed it and the question I want
to raise is, do we believe it?
And do we live as though we believe
it?
You know why we have not persuaded the
Greeks that are about us?
Because we do not live as if we
believe it.
We do not live as if we think
that the whole purpose of our life is
to seek after God and to find Him
or to make Him known.
That's almost like a secondary consideration.
If we have time, we'll go out knocking
on doors or a night of evangelism or
have a special series of meetings.
We do not live as if we believe
that God has structured the entire universe and
this earth and put mankind on it for
the single purpose that they might find Him.
And therefore our lives contradict our words.
If we do not live as if we
believe something, we need to understand that we
do not really believe it.
We do not really believe it apostolically.
We do not really believe it fully and
for that reason the confrontation is still waiting.
See, Paul is not just an individual in
himself.
He's the thing in himself.
He's apostolic man.
He's the finest of God challenging the finest
of the world.
It's the sacred understanding versus the secular philosophy.
And what Paul represents in himself is a
foreshadowing of a church that shall confront the
modern world in exactly the same way that
they're able to proclaim something because they're also
demonstrating.
They live as if they believe that the
whole purpose of their existence is to encourage
men to seek after God if happily they
might be found of Him.
There's so many other things that can be
said here that will bug modern men.
That God has made of one blood all
nations of men.
Maybe that needs to be deeply impressed on
mankind that is still racist or exclusive.
I know that God has established not only
the bounds of the habitations but even the
distinctions between men even in their appearance that
it serves a purpose in God.
But none of this is haphazard or accidental
or something to be explained by anthropologists.
Paul explains it in one statement.
God has established the bounds of the nations
making of all men from one blood and
has determined their appointed times and the boundaries
of their habitations.
This is so contrary to the free thinking
so called of modern men that God has
established all these things.
God has appointed, God has determined.
It is very restrictive.
It gives no latitude, no sway, no room
for man to do his thing or to
use this planet as if it's a toy
or plaything for his purposes.
God has appointed, God has determined.
There's a fancy word called antinomian or autonomous
antinomian man means self-willing, self-willed and
against law, antinomian.
Man is against law.
He's against God's law.
He's against the restrictions that come from the
law that God gives.
He doesn't want to be hemmed in.
He doesn't want to be restricted.
He doesn't want to hear that God has
appointed the bounds of our habitations.
If men, if modern mankind really believed that
today would there be a conflict in Israel
between Arabs and Jews?
God has appointed the bounds of our habitations,
not man.
It's not going to be determined at conference
tables.
It's not open to negotiation.
It's not something that will suit convenience.
God has appointed that they should seek God
if perhaps they might grope for him and
find him though he is not far from
each one of us.
For in him we live and move and
have our being as even some of your
own poets have said for we also are
his offspring.
What a beautiful statement.
In him we live and move and have
our being.
The question needs to be raised whether that
can be spoken to anyone except by a
person for whom it is true.
In him we move and live and have
our being.
And as I read that again today I
thought of the phrase as even your own
poets have said what I would have liked
to have read was as even we believers
have demonstrated.
In him we move and live and have
our being as even we believers demonstrate.
This isn't a piece of posy.
This isn't a little flourish of words.
It's a tremendous statement of the mystery of
incarnation.
This is utterly supernatural.
It is staggering.
It is unwelcome to the ears of modern
men.
They don't want to hear this.
They don't want to know of such a
possibility because they want to live and move
and have their being in themselves.
They don't want to be bound by their
habitations according to what God has determined or
fixed for the purposes for which he has
appointed them.
And neither do they want to move and
live and have their being in him.
I just want you to understand and I'm
trusting the spirit of God for this that
every single syllable that is coming from Paul's
lips is a calculated offense to the sensibility
and the mindset of modern men who do
not want to be restricted, do not want
to be limited, do not want to have
anything appointed by God and therefore they prefer
to have their monuments to the unknown God
because if a God is unknown so also
can he not require anything.
But the God who Paul represents, him whom
you ignorantly worship, I declare unto you.
And when he declares him, he doesn't just
say there's a living God.
He says this is his nature, this is
his purpose, this is his requirement.
That's a declaration of God that men do
not want to hear.
It's unwelcome.
It's abrasive.
It's not just that it's contrary to their
opinion.
It altogether contradicts the whole foundation of all
of their believing and the whole structure of
their thought and their value system.
In one fell swoop, in the space of
these few statements, Paul contradicts an entire way
of life and makes it invalid.
We need to let that sink in.
This isn't just a little exchange of opinion.
This is a vital confrontation and there's no
room for middle ground.
It's either or.
It's absolute or it's nothing.
Which is so different from the temper and
the way in which modern believers share their
own faith.
They offer it more as an opinion than
they do as a conviction.
And in fact we have a lot of
attitude to prevail in the world by which
the other guy's opinion needs also to be
respected.
For even though we don't agree with it
because we're believers and Christians, it has a
validity that deserves our respect.
Paul would never have gone for that.
That's pluralism.
Many paths to truth.
Paul is making it quite clear there's only
one path.
And if you don't find it, you're going
to be judged and suffer the eternal consequence.
You cannot believe how masterful and how complete
and how total this one statement is.
If Paul and all of his Jewish genius
had sat down and spent months in preparation
for a day in which he would be
confronting the Greeks at Mars Hill, he could
not have done better.
What makes this so awesome is that it
happened without preparation at all.
There was no calculation, no human opportunity.
Paul was brought by other men to Athens
and while he was there, his spirit grieved
within him as he saw the city, holy,
given to water, idolatrous, and therefore disputed he
in the synagogues with the Jews and with
the devout persons in the marketplace daily that
met with him.
Bang, bang, bang.
It was entirely circumstantial, unpremeditated, unprepared.
The message was unprepared, but the messenger was
profoundly prepared.
Instant, instant, in season and out.
Because what Paul was speaking was not a
little brittle theology.
Some views of four spiritual laws were how
to witness.
Everything that came out of him was incarnate
in him.
It was the living word.
Paul did not just proclaim the message of
the gospel, he was the visible demonstration.
He was the word made flesh.
He was an ultimate confrontation and there was
not one Greek that day who heard him
that shall ever be able to stand before
God as excuse that they have not heard
and they have not understood.
Because they not only heard a proclamation, they
saw the demonstration of these very truths.
And they heard them with a penetration and
a power of conviction that can only come
out of the mouth of one who is
steeped in the reality of the things which
he is proclaiming.
That's what makes him an apostle.
And it's with this witness, this apostolic witness,
that the end of the age is waiting.
He says, and when the gospel of the
kingdom shall be proclaimed to all nations, then
shall the end come.
What we see in Acts 17 and Paul
at Mars Hill is a preview of final
events.
What is expressed in one man in Paul
is a symbolic preview of the apostolic church
itself confronting the modern world in a final
and ultimate moment of collision.
That when the world will receive that witness
and will reject it, there will be no
further hope.
Because to reject that witness is to reject
the finest that God could present to man.
The coming of Paul is the coming of
God.
It is God incarnate in the man in
the apostolic church.
And if men refuse that, there is nothing
more God can do in his mercy.
Then shall the end come.
Some scoffed, and they'll eternally rue the fact
that they scoffed.
Some said we'll hear again of this matter,
but they were just phonies.
And some clave unto Paul and believed.
And one of the most melancholy verses in
this entire 17th chapter of the book of
Acts it says, so Paul went out of
their midst.
I'll tell you when I read that, there's
just such a sadness that comes over my
soul.
So Paul went out of their midst.
I'll tell you that for all of the
criticism of the church, for all of the
contempt or disregard in which the church is
held by the world and in our country,
when the church shall go out of its
midst, it will be a very pathetic and
sad thing.
Paul didn't continue to belabor the points.
He didn't have to reiterate.
He didn't have to speak again.
He had spoken fully, bountifully, anointedly.
And when he saw that men scoffed and
that he was being rejected, but some clave
unto him and believed, Paul went out of
their midst.
One confrontation with Paul is everything.
You cannot ask for more and God cannot
give more.
And men will no longer ever be able
to stand before God with excuse because they
have received a complete witness and a complete
man.
There's so much more that can be said
and I'm just looking at some observations that
I would like to make and know that
I'm not going to be doing them any
kind of justice.
But when Paul says that the whole purpose
of life is to seek after God, if
happy that we might be found of Him,
we need to realize that this contradicts the
premises by which the modern world lives its
life and even modern Americans written into our
very constitution.
That the whole purpose for our being is
the pursuit of happiness.
Do you remember that?
Well, that's okay for secular men to say
what else should be their purpose if they're
considering the life in which God is absent.
But we need to understand that that is
totally contradicted by Paul.
That the purpose of men's existence is not
to seek their happiness but to seek God.
If happily they might be found by Him.
We can almost say that the happiness that
is to be found outside of God is
delusion and deception which the world is quick
to provide as substitute.
Unless some man comes in an anointed way
to burst the bubble, to show the fallacy,
to say that that is a wrong presumption,
that that is not the purpose of our
being.
There's another purpose.
That God has established the bounds of our
habitation and given of all men one blood
that they might seek after God if happily
they might find Him.
So if I had a blackboard here I
would put two things.
The secular premise is happiness, yours, men and
the divine or the sacred premise is Him.
To seek after Him or to seek after
oneself.
Can you see how the word of the
Lord is like a sword going into these
Greeks as Paul in these few statements just
cuts right through to the heart of the
matter.
He reveals, he lays bare what is the
whole purpose and pursuit reason for our being.
God is not only the creator and the
Lord of the heaven and earth but He
has established this.
Not that we should have a revelry and
a fun time or establish our careers or
promote our interests or build our civilizations or
do this or that or any other thing.
These are secondary addenda.
The whole purpose of our being is to
seek Him and it's evident that the church
has not succeeded in persuading men and I
suppose Paul was not successful in persuading all
these Greeks but some clave unto Him and
believed.
That's not just a little chance expression that
is rich in all of its meaning.
They clave unto Him and believed.
They didn't subscribe to some abstract gospel.
They didn't sign their name on the dotted
line to a set of abstract precepts.
They clave unto Him and believed.
And I think the point here is that
you cannot separate the man from the message.
If Paul contradicted his message if he said
every right thing that the voice of his
speaking and the spirit in which it was
spoken if there was an absence of real
conviction if he was living a life unto
himself and for himself as most Christians do
and though he spoke the right things they
would have been completely unimpressed and unaffected but
there were those who clave unto Him and
believed.
To believe the man is to believe the
message and to believe the message is to
believe the man for the man is the
message.
He really believes that the purpose of our
existence is to seek Him and the reality
of the conviction even in the tone of
his voice his face, his expression, his eyes
that commanding and compelling thing that breaks the
whole weight and thrust of Greek civilization in
one confrontation rests on to what degree these
things are real in the life of the
man who speaks it.
If he says the right thing but his
life is a secret contradiction because he's really
pursuing his own happiness there'll be no one
to clave and to believe.
We just need to realize how grave and
enormous that is because God has fixed a
day in which He will judge the world
in righteousness through a man whom He has
appointed having furnished proof to all men by
raising him from the dead.
We need at least another night, one more
time just to dwell on this phenomenal statement.
It is absolutely supernatural the resurrection from the
dead.
It does not leave men any options because
it does not speak about the resurrection as
a vagary.
It's not an abstract thing, it's not a
theory.
He's speaking about an actual resurrection with an
actual man whom He has raised from the
dead and this same man will judge all
nations.
It's utterly supernatural and it is utterly specific
and that combination is deadly to the secular
mind.
They do not want to be boxed in
with something as utterly specific as this and
that's why Jesus is a bone in the
throat of the modern world.
It makes God too specific.
It does not leave us any latitude.
We can no longer then construct gods of
our own imagining which men love to do
and the way I've heard rabbis express themselves
and speak of an impersonal power in the
universe.
Well, how convenient can you get?
An impersonal power cannot require anything specific because
He Himself is not specific.
But a specific God who in the form
of a man was raised from the dead
nails it and requires your allegiance to that
man, to that resurrected one who is going
to be the judge.
It doesn't leave you any options in any
house and that's what is galling to modern
men who like to keep the spiritual thing
in the realm of generalities that gives them
plenty of latitude to seek their own pleasure
and do their own thing.
But a specific God forbids it.
It is supernatural, a resurrection from the dead
and not just as an abstract concept but
a particular man whom He has appointed having
furnished proof to all men not just you,
not just the witnesses in Jerusalem but to
all men by raising Him from the dead.
That the very life that comes out of
Paul the boldness, the speaking, the spontaneous thing
that is given on the spot through the
life of God is the very demonstration that
there is a resurrected and ascended King whose
kingship and expression and love and conviction is
pouring now out of this beggarly Hebrew vessel
whom the Greeks despise and see as being
beneath their contempt.
Can you see how God has set the
stage?
The Greeks saw themselves as ultimate mankind.
They saw themselves as the epitome of the
human race.
They were the philosophers, the architects of civilization
of all of the arts.
And that strange band of souls out there
these Hebrews who believe in Yahweh in a
God, a personal God who speaks, who gives
commandments that their allegiance was to Him that
they did not speculate in philosophy but they
obeyed commandments.
This offends the Greek mentality.
And now one of them has even come
all the way to them.
The supreme expression of Greek civilization the Stoics
and the Epicureans and this nothing to look
at guy is speaking things so strange that
they call him a babbler.
And yet there is something powerfully compelling because
the reality of the resurrection is in his
very speaking and in his very demeanor.
If it's not that, there's no proof to
all men.
And I think that this is the issue
at the end of the age I've mentioned
this before, is the issue of resurrection.
There'll be a false church and a true
church.
And I think one of the powerful lines
of demarcation and separation is that one acknowledges
resurrection as a truth and the other lives
in it and demonstrates it.
This writer Harry Blandmeier in the book The
Secularist Heresy writes Surveil of contemporary movements in
religious thought leads one to the conclusion that
in the near future the dominating controversy within
Christendom will be between those who give full
weight to the supernatural reality at the heart
of all Christian dogma, practice and thought and
those who try to convert Christianity into a
naturalistic religion by whittling away the reality and
comprehensiveness of its supernatural basis.
Shall I read that again?
I love the way this guy nails it.
What is he saying?
That at the end of the age there's
going to be two religious bodies and the
profound thing that separates the one from the
other and makes the one the enemy and
the victim of the other is the whole
issue of the supernatural.
The resurrection is eminently the issue of the
supernatural.
Men may squabble about the issue of virgin
birth but they cannot squabble about the issue
of resurrection.
It either is or it is not.
And it was the proof even for the
unbelieving disciples of Jesus who were slow of
heart to believe all that the prophets had
written that even when Jesus appeared to them
in his resurrection body he said and yet
they believed not unto joy.
There's something so profoundly deep in our human
nature that opposes the supernatural that even when
it is demonstrated we said, here, see, touch
my wound, see my body.
I'm not a spirit.
I'm resurrected.
He came in through locked doors.
He ate before them in his resurrection body
and yet they believed not for joy because
they were so stupefied.
Their minds, their whole carnal, secular, worldly thing,
the whole spirit of the world is so
opposed to the supernatural God and has written
it so deeply into our being that we
boggle and stagger over the issue of the
resurrection because it is the essence of the
supernatural.
And even while we profess to believe we
don't really believe.
For us the issue is not whether we
believe technically in the correctness of the dogma
of resurrection but do we believe to the
point where we are living in the power
of it.
Are we willing to stand before men on
Mars Hill not on the basis of our
cleverness or our preparation or our ability but
his life.
The same Paul says in another place, for
we are dead and our life is hid
with God in Christ.
And when his life is revealed our life
shall be revealed also with him unto glory.
You want to know something?
And it's been bothering me for as many
years as I've been a believer and have
first come to understand these things and that
is the painful absence of the glory of
God in the earth.
Many correct believers, moral, nice, giving no offense,
living nicely prescribed lives and models of propriety
but where is the glory?
I'll tell you where the glory is.
It's in the resurrection.
The glory is in the life.
The glory is in the power that comes
when we are dead and hid with Christ
in God until his life is revealed.
And last week I tried to give a
sketch of that.
But my first experiment in walking out in
faith trusting for the resurrection life as a
high school teacher and new in the faith
having read about the resurrection but wondering if
it was still available and do I dare
trust for it.
And if I come to the end of
my own natural life, if I come to
the end of my own resources, if I
forsake my own strength and my own cleverness
and just stand out there with my face
sticking up willing to suffer the peril of
there being no life and watching my students
rise up out of their seats to gang
up on me and get me will his
life come forth?
See the issue of resurrection is not a
little doctrinal luxury if the issue of life
or death will we have a faith that
will trust the operation of that life in
critically desperate moments.
Not our wisdom, not our ability, not even
our past experience.
And the same brother who lost his baby
in a home delivery part of the drama
and the friction of what took place was
a dispute between himself and another brother about
the whole process of that birth.
One seemed himself as spiritual and not wanting
any kind of human ministration in the birth
and the other out of a medical background
wanting to apply his skill and his ability.
And the two men unable to reconcile their
differences until one finally left and in the
course of which the baby was born dead.
I'm not saying that that was a cause
of the death, it might well have been
but I think it would not hurt either
man to see it as that and to
see themselves as culpable and responsible and unable
in a critical moment in the delicate balance
between life and death to find the mind
of God and what he was wanting and
requiring in that specific moment.
Was he wanting the expertise and the knowledge
of a medically trained person?
Was he wanting the faith and the trust
in the absence of human attention as was
expressed in the other brother?
Or was it some third alternative?
The fact of the matter is that because
of their discord and their falling out they
did not obtain the mind of Christ.
Guys, I'll go down on my knees.
I'll plead with you to believe how grave
and how enormously significant this issue is that
I'm now mentioning.
The issue of resurrection is not yet a
tenet of the faith to which we subscribe
as true.
It is the issue of life or death.
Not only for ourselves but for others because
by what wisdom shall Paul speak when he
has a once and for all opportunity at
Monticello?
And what would you have spoken if you
were with me this morning when I called
a Jewish woman in North Carolina the wife
of a professor at the university there, both
Jewish, refugees from Germany who is now dying
of cancer?
What would you say to her having met
her only one previous time when you introduced
her to the issue of the faith and
now two years later what was then a
healthy woman and abounding in her own self
-confidence is broken and despairing having learned from
her doctors that she has an inoperable cancer
and they give her only a limited time
to live?
What would you say to her?
Would you give her nice words of consolation?
Would you stumble and choke and splutter and
try to reiterate the gospel hoping that she'll
hear and believe?
You know what we need to see?
What we need to see is that every
moment is life and death.
Every speaking is fateful.
Every moment of relationship, every opportunity of witness,
any opportunity for service is weighted with eternal
things for which none of us is capable
in ourselves.
Do we really believe the operation of the
resurrection life?
That it's not just a phenomena that took
place 2,000 years ago.
It had its origin there but it continues
now to be available to as many as
believe which means to say as many who
are willing to be dead and hid with
Christ in God until His life is revealed.
You cannot command or exploit or use or
manipulate the resurrection life for your convenience.
It manipulates you.
It's not when you want it.
It's when God is pleased to give it.
And there'll be times when the most glorious
things will come from your mouth.
Statements that you know you're patently incapable of
expressing.
But there'll be other times in the purposes
of God when nothing will come and you'll
just look like the fool.
Weak, powerless and incapable of giving an answer
and just an object for the derision and
reproach of men which you could easily have
said something clever out of your own ability
to get by but you would have missed
a moment for the glory of God.
Paul did not just speak of the resurrection.
He demonstrated it in his speaking.
He was eminently the resurrection man standing before
secular unbelievers who have no notion of this
dimension at all.
And some scoffed but some claimed unto him
and believed.
He was the demonstration of the thing proclaimed.
As I mentioned last week about my one
opportunity along these lines with this Jewish woman
Pearl who some of the fellows have had
opportunity to meet.
Today a precious believer.
Eight years old in the Lord.
What a testimony.
What a witness.
What a spiritual woman.
What a blessing to many.
But eight years ago what a pathetic spectacle
and broken physical specimen of a sophisticated modern
Jewish woman who had thrown her back out
with yoga exercises and was in excruciating pain
for years.
She had gone through surgery and specialist acupuncture
treatments.
She was wearing an electronic sensor device on
her belt to do something in her back
electronically.
Compulsive chain smoker.
Every kind of thing that men can avail
themselves in the world had availed nothing to
alleviate her pain.
She was so desperate eight years ago that
she even allowed a friend to bring her
to speak to me.
She would not so much have touched a
Christian with a ten foot pole and would
have dismissed a man like me as some
kind of paid missionary or something of that
kind.
But she was desperate.
And she came for I don't know what
some comfort and the first words out of
my mouth to her were an insult.
It was like Paul and Marcia.
I perceive that in all things you're too
superstitious.
And I said to her, I perceive that
you are so arrogant and so stubborn in
your self-satisfaction that God had to reduce
you to this in order to bring you
to a place where you might consider him.
You know what she told me later?
Those words toppled her right out of her
chair.
She was absolutely floored.
She was expecting some kind of squishy, pious
platitude, a little word of comfort.
And the first thing she got was a
whack and a kiss because she thought herself
to be a religious Jew.
But the fact of the matter was that
she was arrogant and self-sufficient and had
no knowledge of God and nor was she
seeking him.
A professor, an utterly secular intellectual person whose
Judaism was only a ceremonial and superficial addendum
to her life began with an insult.
And we went on a conversation.
I said, you know, I'm speaking tonight.
Would you like to come to that meeting?
Oh, she said, I'm incapable of sitting.
Fifteen minutes is my limitation.
I can't sit.
I'm in agonizing pain.
I said, may I pray that God will
give you the capacity to sit?
So she said yes.
I think it was the first time she
had ever been prayed for in the name
of Jesus.
I prayed that the Lord would give her
the capacity to sit through an entire meeting
and that she might receive the benefit thereby.
And she came that night.
And I remember that night as one of,
as an evangelical horror.
It was just everything that was wrong was
wrong.
There was a singing group there.
When we all get to heaven, what a
wonderful thing.
With chartreuse covers on the microphone.
I mean, it was the most hokey and
offensive thing.
Like, it's the worst thing that you would
ever want a Jew to come to hear.
And there were people out there.
It was in a high school auditorium and
in the dark cabin.
And I can see the protruding guts of
people having come from big meals and burping
and looking up.
They wanted a little novelty of a Jewish
speaker.
And I was without a message.
In that painful tension of being without a
message while there's a woman sitting in the
front row who was dying.
Knowing that you would never again get it
to such an occasion.
And what should you speak?
And as much as my mind could race,
I was absolutely blank.
I had nothing.
And I can't even tell you.
Yet this night when I spoke, I don't
remember what I spoke.
But when I was called on to speak,
there was such a gasp that went out
of me.
Such a sigh before God.
Such a desperate cry.
Lord, my God.
This night is hopeless.
Everything is opposed to any prospect of communicating
something to this unbelieving, secular, philosophical, intellectual Jewish
woman.
I don't even have a word.
And look at the atmosphere.
So unconducive to anything.
And I don't know what to speak.
And I came to that microphone.
And I opened my mouth, trusting.
I can't tell you what I said.
But this is what I remember.
That she stayed for the entire meeting.
And she was impressed with what was said.
And there was a second meeting like an
hour or so later in the same room.
And in the hallway, sitting on the steps
of the high school hallway, she said to
me, she said, I'm a Jewish woman.
This is contrary to all that I've been
ever given to understand.
I don't understand about virgin birth.
I cannot understand about resurrection.
It is all contrary to my entire Jewish
and philosophical upbringing.
But, she said, I can believe you.
And on the basis of believing me, she
took my hand and she followed me in
a sinner's prayer for salvation.
And she was saved.
I just watched her pass from death unto
life.
And she would not let me leave town
that night until I found the place where
I could baptize her.
That woman today is no longer in pain.
No longer a chain smoker or any kind
of smoker.
A completely transformed life.
A brand plucked from the fire.
A blessing to God's people.
A grace and a witness and a testimony
to the living God.
And a challenge to many.
And a personal blessing to myself and to
my family.
Because though everything was contrary to her total
Jewish upbringing, which is to say, her Greek
upbringing, she claimed unto me and believed.
I can't understand these things, but I believe
you.
And I'll never forget those words.
I've never again heard them.
But it gave me a taste for something
that I don't want to lose.
And I'll tell you what, if we're going
to not lose it and have it and
obtain it and keep it and make it
manifest, it's got to be consciously sought and
believed for.
We have got to become the thing in
ourselves.
We've got to be a demonstration of what
we are proclaiming.
The word has got to be made flesh.
They claimed unto Paul and believed.
So to read this letter's statement again, in
the secularist heresy, remembering his contention that the
word secular itself is heretical, that there should
not be such a distinction, that there's nothing
valid about it, that God intends the whole
of the earth, which is the Lord's, to
be sacred.
He says, And
those who try to convert Christianity into a
naturalistic religion by whittling away the reality and
comprehensiveness of its supernatural basis.
Paul preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.
He preached Christ and Him crucified.
It was the supernatural faith, it was the
basis of all of his dogma, practice and
thought.
He gave full weight to the supernatural reality
at the heart of all Christian dogma, practice
and thought.
Are we giving full weight?
And can we ever give full weight except
we are living on the supernatural basis?
Can we say that for me to live
is Christ?
In Him I move and live and have
my being.
You know what's remarkable about the word being?
It's total.
It includes ministry and everything else as well.
There are so few believers who have attained
to this faith, to this resurrection, to this
reality, to this supernatural basis, which may be
the reason why we do not proclaim it
to men.
We do not preach Christ and Him crucified.
We do not speak of the resurrection or
of the judgment to come, that God has
appointed a day in which He will judge
all men by that one whom He has
raised from the dead.
Those words would be foolish coming out of
our mouths except that there was a corresponding
witness of that supernatural reality as the one
who spoke it.
Maybe we need to take Paul's words to
our own hearts that they're not only addressed
to secular and unbelieving men, but to a
church whose faith is only partial, that we
need to seek after God if happily we
might be found of Him.
Not for our salvation, we've already found Him
for that, nor for our healing, many of
us have already found Him for that, but
for the resurrection life and the power which
few of us have found and which needs
to be found again and again and again
and moment by moment.
It is never a constant fix and automatic
thing, but it is available as frequently as
we're willing to be dead and to be
head with Christ in God.
You pray and give God an opportunity, as
I did in the classroom, to cast my
all on the reality of that supernatural resurrection
and see if God will not do it.
Think of something that you have coming this
week that is really demanding, which perhaps you
could meet by revving yourself up and getting
yourself to your full ability and handling it
on the basis of your wisdom, your natural
ability, your cleverness or your past experience.
Then, knowing that, pull the plug, take the
plug out of that source and come empty,
come unprepared, come trusting, come not looking to
yourself or your ability or what you know
that you're able to do and just come
as a bundle of weakness and foolishness and
trust God for the operation of his resurrection
life.
His words, his manner of speaking, his conviction,
his strength, whatever the situation, and see if
his life will not be revealed unto glory.
Can you imagine when a whole church will
live this way?
Then shall the end come.
This is the proclaiming of the gospel of
the kingdom in the power of the king.
And why will the end come?
Because when the world will reject this witness,
there shall not and there cannot be any
other.
Then will the end come.
Do you realize that if this is true,
we are actually delaying the coming of the
Lord.
We are not hastening the day of his
appearing.
It has to do with such a church
moving in that kind of ability, in that
kind of power.
And it's not waiting for the final moment
of confrontation to express itself.
It's got to begin where we are now,
that we might be brought to that ultimate
place.
Paul was a tested and tried man.
He was the full-orbed believer.
He had served a history and apprenticeship in
God that went from synagogues to the Gentiles,
from the marketplace to the temple.
And when God had been so formed in
him, he brought him to the ultimate place
before these Epicureans and the Stoics.
And so will he bring us also.
Are we in the process of being brought?
Are we presently moving from faith to faith,
from obedience to obedience, trust to trust, more
day by day trusting the life?
Can we say that the God who gives
all things, because we can rejoice for the
new shoes that we got and also the
very next day still rejoice when the baby
for which we waited is born dead and
say, yes, God has given all things.
The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
That will be a true church and a
true witness.
We know that there's been a historic controversy
in Christendom between Calvinism, which believes in the
superb, total sovereignty of God in all things,
the giver of all things, and Arminianism, which
sees the will of man freely expressed as
the pivotal factor in life and in history.
And my own opinion is that far from
being a controversy, both things are true and
strangely in the same time.
It's not an accident that in these very
days, in fact, Monday night, last night's Bible
study in our own fellowship, the Lord quickened
this verse in Acts 2 that sort of
gave me a real insight into this issue
about the total sovereignty of God and yet
what is the place for the responsibility of
man?
How can that be reconciled?
Because we know that God is sovereign.
He's the giver of all things, and yet
what part does man play?
And if there's no place for individual responsibility,
there's no place for anything that can be
called moral, how then can God judge all
men?
What is the basis of judgment if we
have not an individual responsibility in the exercise
of our freedom?
And in Acts 2, in the sermon that
Peter preached on Pentecost, we read these remarkable
words in verse 22 of the second chapter.
You men of Israel, hear these words.
Jesus of Nazareth, the man approved of God
among you by miracles and wonders and signs,
which God did by him in the midst
of you, as you yourselves also know, him,
here's the key verse, verse 23, him being
delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of
God, ye have taken and by wicked hands
have crucified and slain whom God hath raised
up.
That's a remarkable statement that shows both the
absolute sovereignty of God, of one who came
by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God
in a specific moment of time in an
appointed mode of execution.
It came at the very time at the
eve of Passover when the lambs were being
slain in the courtyard by the priests for
the advent of that feast day.
The Lamb of God was himself also being
slain in exactly that hour.
In the first Passover, they were told take
a lamb without spot and blemish on the
tenth day of Nisan, corresponding to April, and
keep it till the fourteenth day.
You have four days to observe there would
be any spot or defect in it because
a blemished lamb cannot be used.
And Jesus lived on the earth three and
a half years, which in divine reckoning any
part constitutes a whole, he was four years.
A day was as a year, so he
could say to those who took him, which
of you can convict me of sin?
I am a lamb without spot and without
blemish.
And at the conclusion of his four years,
so to speak, on the very day of
Passover when the lambs were being slain, the
lamb that was given to take away the
sins of the world was also being slain
by an appointed method of execution that had
to be by crucifixion because as we said
the other night, if he had been hung
or shot or beheaded, the death would have
come in an instant that was determined by
men and not by God.
But it says that he laid down his
life.
No man takes my life, I lay it
down.
And we know that at a certain given
moment on the cross he yielded up the
ghost.
And yet, though all of this was by
the foreknowledge and the determinate counsel of God,
the rest of the statement in the same
verse says, you have taken and by wicked
hands have crucified and slain.
So God's sovereign will was being fulfilled even
by the free will of men who were
wicked in what they did.
Can we understand that?
Something was being performed in God that was
perfectly appointed for that moment.
And yet the men who were the instruments
gave themselves freely to that use out of
their own will and are morally culpable and
responsible before God and therefore called wicked.
So as far as we are concerned in
the earth, we need to see ourselves as
being free in our acts.
Therefore we live always in the tension of
freely submitting ourselves to the will of God
moment by moment.
We are responsible for what we do or
don't do.
Paul said we shall be judged for what
we have done or not done in our
bodies.
And yet at the same time, God's sovereign
will is being performed.
It's a mystery, it's a truth.
Both things are true and at the same
moment and only God can pull it off.
So the sovereignty of God does not absolve
us from individual responsibility.
And yet, our individual life, our efforts, our
failure or our successes, does not in one
way hinder or affect adversely any single point
in the program or the consummate wisdom of
God in anything that has been affected from
before the time that the foundations of the
earth were laid.
Even this night and this speaking and this
question in this moment is exactly in the
sovereign will of God.