Very much in keeping with what has been
spoken for the four Sundays, the Lord has
not allowed me the luxury of preparation.
I've tried earnestly and even desperately, and have
pleaded with God that he would, on this
one occasion, allow me an outline, at least.
But nothing doing, it's going to be a
makeshift, on the spot, bringing together, not only
a speaking of the principles that have been
enumerated through the week, but a demonstration.
So if I fail, he fails, and the
whole thing goes up in smoke in the
final session.
Let's just bow our heads and pray for
God's glorious success, because it's a matter of
life and death for us all, for the
world.
Precious God, if that sounds bumptious, I pray
that you'll make that real in the speaking
this morning.
Lord, we just look to you now, in
whatever our condition, because it's not in ourselves,
mighty God, but in thee, in your wisdom,
your power, your grace, your love, your knowledge,
your glory.
We ask that it would all come together
now, bring a fit conclusion, and breathe upon
us, Lord God, something of the glory of
the things which have pleased you to express
this week through this piece of clay.
Have your way now in this concluding session.
Give us attentive ears and hearts, with a
disposition to receive and to do what you
shall speak.
We'll thank you and praise you for your
goodness and your mercies in being with us
through this series.
For your namesake now and for your kingdom,
in Jesus' name we pray.
We're going to try to conclude from a
text that was begun last week.
John the 11th chapter, the story of Lazarus.
I mentioned the other night how I cringe
when speakers use the word story in referring
to things that are in the scriptures.
Somehow it just offends my Jewish sensibilities.
It suggests something fictional.
So I believe with all my heart that
Lazarus is more than a story.
It's an actual event, and an event charged
with meaning of such awesome significance that I
think that the Lord has reserved it for
the end of the age.
But before we turn to it this morning,
I just want to try some kind of
a thumbnail summary and review the dualities of
things that have been mentioned since the first
Sunday.
Isn't it interesting that when one is an
atheist, there's always such a welter of things
to bring confusion into life.
There are always so many imponderables.
I think surely one of the factors that
precipitated my moral breakdown as an atheist teacher
was my failure to compute grades for my
students.
As you can see, an earnest Jewish teacher
exercising himself to come up with a fair
grade at the end of the school year,
wrestling with all of the imponderables, trying to
weigh every nuance to give a student a
fair grade, knowing that if you miss it
by a plus or a minus, you're affecting
a life.
And I began to see in that futile
exercise that I was human, all too human,
and that my mortality and my limitations were
a very great weight.
And this was the kind of vexation that
had come into my life with adolescence and
with consciousness.
All of the variables of the world.
What if I take this path?
Well, then what about the path that I
failed to take?
What experience would I have encountered there that
might have been life-changing?
And so the frustration, trying to be in
all places and at all times and read
all books and understand all things and fail
in all things.
But there's a wonderful simplicity that comes into
the soul of a believer when the Spirit
of God has entry.
For some reason, all of the multitudinous things
dissipate and everything becomes reduced to a choice
of one thing or another.
Have you noticed that?
Terrible polarities, radical alternatives, and nothing in between.
If you have not noticed it, let me
assure you that you increasingly shall notice it
because this is eminently a radical age.
It's an age of polarization and there are
some critical forces at work now rapidly bringing
things into two camps.
And we're going to find that the neutral
ground between is going to continue to dissipate
and finally to disappear.
We're going to be spiritual radicals wholly committed
to God.
Men and women of the Spirit walking in
apostolic splendor and glory, which is to say
also experiencing apostolic persecution and suffering we're going
to find ourselves in another camp altogether.
Something that is seemingly religious, respectable, trite, powerless,
inimical and opposed to God, and in some
kind of unsavory union with the political forces
that be.
It's going to be another wedding between Jezebel
and Ahab and we're on a direct course
to the conclusion of the age in which
these two polarities will be the only alternatives
offered to men.
There's a kingdom of this present world and
there's a kingdom of God.
There are two trees in the garden, the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
which to eat from it is to die,
and the tree of life.
There are two men, Adam and Christ, and
we read in the scriptures last week that
in Adam all die, but in Christ all
are made alive.
I want to assure you that that means
that every Adamic act is dead.
Everything that has its origin in flesh, in
man, has no life-giving possibility.
Oh, it might cause a ripple, there might
be a titillation, it might break the monotony
of an hour, it might bring with it
a distraction or an amusement or an entertainment,
but it has no eternal consequence.
It is not out of the life of
God.
Two radical choices of kingdoms of trees of
men, of the thing which is earthly or
the thing which is heavenly, of the thing
which is below or the thing which cometh
down from above.
And last week we mentioned the statement of
Peter, which the whole world would applaud if
it were to be made in our own
generation.
Honors would have been heaped upon such a
one who said, Lord, let it be far
from you.
Why, that statement, I was almost going to
say reeks, abounds in human sentiment, in well
-meaning intention, in altruism, in all the things
that the world applauds and which has every
appearance of good.
How then can we understand Jesus' remark, Get
thee behind me, Satan, for you savor of
the things which feed not of God, but
of men.
The radicalness of the response of Jesus to
the well-meaning statement of a disciple has
really not registered upon our souls.
There are things which have their origin above
and things which have their origin below.
There is a clash of kingdoms, and the
overwhelming pity is this, that many of us
who label ourselves Christians are not living, acting,
and purporting ourselves in the kingdom way.
We still continue to eat from the wrong
tree, still continue to draw from the things
that are Adamic, and we haven't understood the
law of the spirit of life which is
in Christ Jesus.
And maybe this is more than a problem
of misunderstanding.
Maybe it has something to do with the
human heart after all, that we understand what
we want to understand, and there is something
so offensive to the root principle of the
kingdom of God that few have appropriated it.
And here it is, that the life of
God has its origin out of death.
There is a cross which we use to
decorate our churches, which we'll want to hang
around our necks and to plant on our
dashboards with suction cups, but which we're loathe
to know in our experience.
And so far as we shrink from the
measure of death that is implied by the
cross, there simply is no life in us.
In a sense, this morning we're having a
demonstration.
It's death to face a crowd of people
without preparation.
It's death of fear and intimidation and embarrassment
and mortification to consider the failure of stumbling
and choking and sputtering if one has nothing
to lean upon that can bail him through.
It's death to utterly trust yourself into the
hands of God that when His life shall
be revealed, your life shall be revealed with
Him also.
But what if it pleases Him not to
reveal it?
And in the course of these previous Sundays,
I gave you some illustrations out of painful
experiences in my past where it pleased God
before howling, enraged audiences, Jewish, not to reveal
His life and to leave me limp and
anemic, utterly defenseless, without even the virtue of
cleverness to ward off the enormous attack of
my adversaries.
Beside the indignity and the humiliation of that,
not even an explanation for the absence of
the anointing and the Spirit of God.
And to languish in that condition for weeks,
licking one's wounds, listening to the devil persuade
you that you've missed it, that you never
should have left the teaching profession, and who
told you anyway that you were called in
ministry to your own people, and that when
God gave you the most glorious opportunity of
your life at a college in New York
City, 85% Jewish, you were a dismal
and drab failure.
And then unsuspectingly, as God always will, in
that resurrection morn, something breaks forth.
A thin, raspy voice over a phone, a
Jewish woman asking if she could come and
visit you, in that she has some questions
that were raised by the reading of your
book, brought home by her son who was
a student at that college, who told his
mother of the extraordinary experience he had that
day when a Jewish man came to the
college and faced a howling and enraged audience
and set forth his convictions very simply and
faced his accusers without a retort or an
answer.
He had never seen such a demonstration.
With that review and preliminary, can we turn
then to the text of the morning in
John, the 11th chapter, which we began last
week?
Lazarus, who is loved of Jesus, and how
shall we understand, therefore, that when he is
informed that Lazarus is ill, therefore it says
in the 6th verse, even when he heard
that Lazarus was sick, he still stayed two
days longer in the same place where he
was.
How many times have I been tempted to
grab a microphone and to yell halt at
the proceedings that oftentimes follow charismatic or full
gospel affairs, where people think that as a
matter of course and mechanically, there always needs
be an invitation or a lineup for healing,
for prayer, for deliverance, that somehow that that
is to be expected and to be required
and that if a saint is to experience
sickness, that somehow that that is a scandalous
thing that ought to be immediately remedied.
I want to suggest that there might be
sicknesses which are quite allowed of God.
Dealings in the bodies and lives of saints
which we are as quick to seek to
remedy, which God himself is not in a
rush to relieve.
It's the difference between operating from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil and
operating from the tree of life.
If the life of God is not in
the invitation, if the life of God is
not in the prayer, why do we insist
on going through the mechanical motion because we
feel obligated or something is required from us.
Jesus remained two days longer after he heard
that his friend was sick.
He delayed long enough for his friend to
die and it says that he loved Lazarus.
Do you call that love?
And how many of you and how many
in Christendom have been languishing for two days
in unrelieved pain, physical or otherwise, and assumes
that the Lord is wholly oblivious and indifferent
to your circumstance.
Remember what happened when Jesus finally came to
Bethany?
Both sisters rushed to him and said exactly
the same thing.
Lord, if you had been here, my brother
would not have died.
May I say something?
Well, you can have it.
I'll say it anyway.
The most grievous ill that afflicts God's people
is the failure to understand who he is.
How many of us mouth, Lord, Lord, Lord,
if you had been here.
But dear children, if he is Lord, he
is there.
He is the omnipresent God who is wholly
aware of every aspect of your life and
circumstance.
Every hair on your head is numbered.
Why then do you think that he is
somehow absent?
If you had been here, the disciples said
to him, Rabbi, the Jews only recently were
intending and trying to stone you and you're
thinking of going back there again?
Even the disciples misunderstood who he was and
saw him in part only.
And those who use the word Lord fail
to understand the implications of the very word
that they speak.
Jesus said to her, your brother shall rise
again in the 23rd verse.
And Martha replied, I know that he'll rise
again at the resurrection on the last day.
Doesn't that sound like us?
I know that, that, that, that, that, that,
that, that.
I know that, that, that, that, that, that,
that.
I can read off the doctrines of the
faith and the catechisms.
I've read Watchman me.
We know, but we don't know as we
ought to know.
We think that because we say it or
because we give a sense to it, that
we know it.
But dear, dear children, the knowing of the
resurrection life of Christ is going to be
a matter of life and death at the
end of the age.
Not the knowing of the doctrine, the knowing
of the life.
The knowing of the experience, that when you
shall allow yourself the taste of death, that
there shall be a resurrection of His life
out of your mortification and humiliation.
That because He lives, you shall live also.
And that salvation is to believe that Jesus
is Lord and that God has raised Him
from the dead is the only doctrine that
God has allowed to stand for salvation, not
just once, but again and again and again.
There's probably not another doctrine that is so
universally approved and so little truly believed than
the resurrection of Christ.
Do you believe that if you're joined with
Him, in His death and burial, that you
too shall be raised to newness of life?
Will you believe it after you've languished for
three weeks licking your wounds?
Will you believe it in hours and moments
of mortification, disappointment, emptiness?
Will you believe it if you're a Lazarus
and you've wrestled for days with fever and
you're leaving your sheets stained with sweat and
you have to look into the faces of
your sisters who are not succeeding in concealing
their disappointment because the Lord has not come?
And you believe He's going to come any
moment and lay His hand on your fevered
brow and in a moment dismiss that fever
and rebuke it and raise you up out
of the sickbed?
And your life is speeding away by seconds
and He does not come and you perish?
And will you believe it when you're put
in the tomb and find that your consciousness
is not dismissed and the days go by
and you believe that the third day is
resurrection day and you're counting the hours, five,
four, three, two, one to go, and surely
in that last hour on the third day
you're going to hear His voice say, come
forth, and you're down to thirty minutes, twenty,
ten, five, four, three, two, one, and you're
counting the seconds and your heart is bursting
with expectation for the voice of the Lord
that shall say, come forth, and it does
not?
The utter crushing disappointment, the absolute dejection, every
category blown to smithereens of our religious expectancy
and understanding.
Jesus said, where have you laid Him?
And one of the sisters said, but Lord,
He's been four days in the grave, by
now He's spinketh.
How many of us would be content to
remain bound up in our feet, our hands,
and our heads?
We can't go, we can't do, and we
can't speak.
And we're reproached, that stinks, it's past the
third day and into the fourth, and the
Lord has not yet come.
I don't know how to breathe the things
that are in my heart in the short
time that we have and yet to call
this a conclusion, but I believe with all
my heart that every true apostolic minister and
ministry of God that is to be used
of Him at the end of the age
in the bringing forth of His glory must
be submitted into the dust of death, to
be brought forth on a fourth day, only
in the hour of His calling.
Pat, have you experienced something like that?
Something?
What's your program for the Jewish people of
Kansas City?
I don't have one.
Well, what are you doing in New York
if you don't like the, what you call
the cutesy ministries?
Of guys with stars of David on their
back, handing out broadsides and giving street demonstrations.
What's your alternative?
What's your program?
I don't have one.
Why did you leave New Jersey, 25 miles
from two and a half million Jews, and
go up to northern Minnesota where there's not
a Jew for hundreds of miles around?
Because the Lord bade me go.
Well, give me an explanation.
I don't have one.
Dear children, death is obedience unto God without
explanation.
Death is submitting to sickness and the tomb
without explanation.
Death is utter helplessness, bound up in hands
and feet and head, unable to walk and
to go and to speak, though your heart
is bursting to proclaim the truths of God
to a dying world until you hear the
voice of the Lord saying, Lazarus, do you
think of an accident that the name Lazarus
means helpless?
And I'd like to ask you dear Presbyterians,
so much like my dear Jewish people, this
question.
Helplessness is only another name for dying.
We pride ourselves in our accomplishment, in our
expertise, in our prowess, in our ability.
How many of us would be willing to
suffer the humiliation of foolishness and futility and
helplessness, not being able to give answer, not
being able to give explanation, only to wait
bound to hear the one voice that can
release our life, which is to say his
life out of death, Lazarus come forth.
You know that this chapter contains the briefest
verse in all the scriptures, two words, it's
the thirty-fifth verse, it says, Jesus wept.
I don't know about you, but that moves
me to examine, what were the circumstances that
brought my Lord to weep?
Was it some sentimental, chactering thing, some schmaltzy
response to the death of a young man
whom he loved?
Was it the pleading voices of these sisters,
Lord if you had been here, my brother
would not have died?
Was it the entourage of Jewish souls who
followed Jesus to the tomb to watch the
fireworks and the dynamics and to see some
sentimental bash that would take place, anxious for
some diversion that would break the monotony of
their lives?
Jesus wept.
It says in the thirty-third verse, when
Jesus saw her sobbing, and the Jews who
came with her also sobbing, he was deeply
moved in spirit and troubled, he chafed in
spirit and sighed and was disturbed.
Jesus wept.
I suppose he was weeping, if I could
suggest this, because these people professed to be
Jews, professed to love him and called him
Lord, and would have said with Paul to
be absent from the body is to be
present with the Lord, and yet they were
weeping over a physical death.
Can't you just wait to go and to
shock off this mortal coil and to be
in full union with Christ in the spirit
and no more to have the barrier of
the flesh and all the things that are
incumbent upon it standing in the way of
this perfect union?
Aren't you waiting for the day?
Or has it become just a bit groovy
and comfy on this side?
Not quite anxious to hear that trump and
to throw off this mortal coil.
I remember that I had a rare experience
in Minnesota to be invited to a funeral
parlor with the casket open, which is not
done in Jewish practice.
And the reason I was invited is that
it was a 30-year-old woman who
had died of cancer and a glorious saint
known to all as being an exemplary believer.
And her death was so mysterious, no one
could explain why God would be pleased to
remove so bright a light from so gray
an environment.
Her husband was some kind of ordinary piece
of mortality who was not a believer, who
suffered the eccentric wife who was deeply spiritual
and went along with it, though she was
a nuisance and an irritant.
And I think people believe that somehow when
I was going to lean over the coffin
and touch that waxing figure and breathe something
by the inspiration of the spirit, that she
would bat her eyelashes and lift up her
head and come forth.
It somehow never happened.
But I sat in the front pew and
looked on that casket and watched the procession
of people who came up to pay their
respects.
And I don't know whether I'm a peculiar
Jew or what, but I wondered as I
watched one by one of them come up
and heard their banalities and their utterances, just
who was it who was dead and who
was it who was alive?
I think that that woman in her repose,
in her tranquility, the glory of God shining
forth even out of death, that there is
more life to be spoken for her than
the number of lumbering adults that came up
to mumble their pleasantries and left.
I wondered how many times did their clothing
have to go into washing machines?
How many meals did they ingest in 40,
50, and 60 years?
How much air did they breathe and space
did they occupy?
And what did all of their sound and
fury signify in the course of those years?
And what of it besides its mechanical and
biological motion and the sound that lent the
silences can be called life?
I think that God began to speak to
my understanding that very night and to show
me how far removed I was from kingdom
understanding, that life is more than biological activity,
that the only thing that can truly be
called life is that thing which serves the
purposes of his kingdom and is the emanation
and the showing forth of his glory.
And that woman succeeded in doing that in
her death more so than the lumbering numbers
who came up to mutter their respects.
Oh children, Jesus wept and he chafed in
the spirit at their sickening sobbing over the
demise of a young man.
I know that he'll rise again at the
resurrection on the last day.
We know, but we don't know.
Jesus said to her, I am myself the
resurrection and the life.
Whoever believes in and adheres to and trusts
and relies on me, although he may die,
yet he shall live and whoever continues to
live and believe on me shall never actually
die at all.
Do you believe this?
It's almost as if Jesus is speaking that
to us directly in this hour.
Do you believe this?
Do you believe that if the Lord should
call you to a tomb of inactivity, of
something stultifying, where you can't draw from your
own resources, where you're bound up in your
hands and your feet and your head, and
your cleverness is not going to bail you
out, and you have to live with the
terrible silence or the reproach that being four
days in the grave you stink.
Would you be willing?
It says that Lazarus was a friend of
Jesus.
I wonder how many friends of Jesus there
are in our own generation who would be
willing to be deserted in sickness, to be
abandoned in death, to be bound up inactive,
unused, stinking, hid in Christ until his life
shall be revealed, that our life might be
revealed with him.
I wish I could take a kind of
an accounting right now to compute how meaningful,
how sensible these things are that I'm speaking.
Or does it sound somehow religious, sermon-y,
abstract, and somehow unrelated to the reality?
I began by saying five weeks ago, the
only mistake I believe that the Lord made
is not giving me a zipper to zip
down this chest and take out of the
cavity a heart and ring it, because I
know that I'm speaking the utter truth of
God that has eminently to do with the
greatest awesome realities, but so removed from our
true understanding and our experience that they sound
somehow just no more than a biblical dissertation
or a commentary on the eleventh chapter of
John.
Our faith is the resurrection faith, or it's
nothing.
It's interesting that when Lazarus came forth, it
says that in the forty-fifth verse, upon
seeing what Jesus had done, many of the
Jews who had come with Mary believed on
him.
They trusted in him and adhered to him
and relied on him.
A Jewish man who never spoke a word,
never gave a testimony, never preached a sermon,
was the cause of more Jews coming into
the kingdom and the knowledge of Jesus as
Messiah than whole hosts of door-knockers before
and since.
I don't think there's any other explanation for
it, but that there's a glory that comes
forth out of death that stirs men to
eternal commitment that nothing else can produce.
In the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of
John, it says, The group that had been
with Jesus, when he called Lazarus out of
the tomb and raised him from among the
dead, kept telling it to others, bearing witness.
It was for this reason that the crowd
went out to meet him, because they had
heard that he had performed this sign and
proof and miracle.
Then the Pharisees said among themselves, You see
how futile your efforts are, and how you
accomplish nothing?
See, the whole world is running after him.
Jesus said, You shall not see me again
until you shall say, Blessed is he who
cometh in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the
name of the Lord, was what was shouted
the day that Jesus made his triumphal entry
into Jerusalem on the back of the colt
of an ass.
Branches were strewn in the way, and cloaks
laid out before him.
And the great crowds massed, because the word
had gotten around that Lazarus had been raised
from the dead.
You can put me on record as saying
that I don't believe that there shall be
crowds of Jewish men and women saying again,
Hosanna, blessed is he who cometh in the
name of the Lord, until they shall see
again in our generation, the Lazaruses of our
generation, the helpless ones, the friends of Jesus,
coming forth out of death.
And I'll say in the same breath, until
they see it, and until they say it,
the Lord is not returning.
No wonder that but a few verses after,
Jesus said, I assure you most solemnly, and
I tell you that unless a grain of
wheat falls into the earth and dies, it
remains just one grain and never becomes more,
but lives by itself alone.
But if it dies, it produces many others
and yields a rich harvest.
Anyone who loves his life loses it, but
anyone who hates his life in this world
will keep it to life eternal.
Whoever has no love for, no concern for,
no regard for his life here on the
earth, but despises it, preserves his life forever
and ever.
And if anyone would serve me, he must
continue to follow me, to cleave steadfastly to
me and conform wholly to my example in
living, and if need be, in dying.
And wherever I am, there will my servant
be also.
In the first verses of the Gospel of
John, in him was life, and the life
was the light of men.
How many of us have received illumination not
from that life?
How many of us have realized that some
of the most grievous defects in modern-day
Christendom have been the consequence of well-meaning
men who have, by their own efforts, taken
principles of God and manipulated them, even systematizing
them, giving a show of what seems to
be spiritual wisdom, but the end result has
been confusion and mayhem, because only in him
is life, and his life is the life
of men.
He who hath the Son hath life, and
he who hath not the Son hath not
life.
This is the love of God toward us,
that he has given us his only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not
perish, but have everlasting life.
This is the love of God toward us,
that he has given us his Son, that
we should live through him.
Dear children, can I sum it up this
way?
It is quite possible to be an intelligent
and well-meaning religionist who subscribes to all
of the correct doctrines of God, and go
about one's whole life religiously, and not once
ever have touched or experienced or lived by
the life that burst forth out of death
two thousand years ago.
Jesus died for reasons more than the saving
us from our sins.
He died to begin a new kingdom on
a new principle, in a new mode and
a new way, it's called the resurrection life,
and he said, because I live, you shall
live also.
Have you ever heard yourself speaking words that
were not of your making?
Have you ever seen yourself performing deeds that
were not of your choosing?
Have you been a vessel for the expression
of the wisdom of God, or the power
of God, the life of God, coming forth
when you have willingly dismissed by an act
of choice and brought to death what would
have been a substitute measure on your own
part that was human, all too human?
Have you entered into a baptism by which
the waters of death have covered over all
flesh, including your mind, that you might be
raised with him to newness of life again
and again and again, as often as you
believe in this and reckon yourself indeed dead
unto yourself, but alive unto God in Christ?
Or is it that not only we may
have all sins, but most assuredly we have
all fallen short of the glory of God?
We began in the first session by speaking
about two trees in the garden, and the
book that begins with two trees ends also
with a tree.
In the last chapter of the book of
Revelation, the 22nd chapter, he showed me a
pure river of water of life, clear as
crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God
and out of the land.
In the midst of the street of it,
and on either side of the river, was
there the tree of life which bare twelve
manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every
month, and the leaves of the tree were
for the healing of the nations.
And there shall be no more curse, but
the throne of God and of the land
shall be in it, and his servants shall
serve him, not themselves.
How many are guilty of that, that in
the name of Jesus, and in the name
of serving God, also suffering, serving themselves.
But in the pure waters of life that
flow out from under the throne, and by
the tree of life, every act, every word,
every utterance, every impulse has its origin in
God, serves his kingdom purposes only, and sets
forth his glory.
Blessed are they that do his commandments, he
says in the 14th verse of that chapter,
that they may have right to the tree
of life, and may enter in through the
gate unto the city.
The whole scriptures from beginning to end, offer
ever and always only a choice of one
of two things.
Two trees, two kingdoms, two men, Adam or
Christ, two sources above or below, two ways
of flesh or the spirit, two sources of
life, their own or the resurrection, continually faced
with choice.
How many of my Jewish people know that
in the very book of Jeremiah, this theme
is expressed in the 17th chapter, that the
issue is not Judaism versus Christianity, that the
issue is the kingdom of God, or the
kingdom of this present world.
And that last kingdom has its honors, it
has its rewards, it has its things that
are impressive and cultured, intellectual, even religious, but
it has not life.
In the 17th chapter of Jeremiah, in the
5th verse, thus saith the Lord, Cursed be
the man that trusteth in man, and makes
flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from
the Lord.
Word to God that I could just speak
from the rooftop that one scripture for my
Jewish people and an entire modern world that
has adopted a Jewish lifestyle.
How many who are patently ignorant of the
scriptures are found to quote again and again
that which is not to be found in
the scripture, God helps those who help themselves.
That is a lie and is wholly opposed
to the way of God.
More true is it to say that God
helps those who are helpless.
Lazarus, come forth.
This morning at a very early hour, I
was groaning before God and reviewing with Him
the enormous responsibilities that I have to face
in these immediate days, including this concluding session
this morning.
An Israel tour that is going to begin
in a few days, shepherding over 90 souls,
conferences to be conducted in Jerusalem and Tel
Aviv and in Germany, accommodations and arrangements in
organizational matters for which I have no talent
nor ability whatsoever.
Things to be spoken that I haven't had
the leisure yet even to begin to consider.
Responsibilities for lives in Minnesota and lives here
and something to begin going forth to the
Jewish people in this city and possibility of
a weekly television program and any number of
things for which I have to say, Lord,
who is sufficient?
God does not help those who help themselves.
He helps those who recognize their helplessness.
Cursed, says the Lord, is the man that
trusts in man and makes flesh his own
and whose heart departs from the Lord.
For he shall be like the heath in
the desert and shall not see when good
comes but shall inhabit the places in the
wilderness in a salt land and not inhabit
it.
And the very next verse is the other
alternative.
But blessed is the man that trusts in
the Lord and whose hope the Lord is.
Not just on the third day when we
expect resurrection, I know that the resurrection will
come on the last day, but that one
who is willing to suffer the reproach even
unto stinking.
Yea, though he slay me, yet will I
trust him and will not budge nor move
until the Lord himself shall cry.
Not only is that man blessed but he
is the source of blessings for a mankind
that would otherwise perish.
For he shall be as a tree, not
as the tree but if I can presume
upon God, with the tree and in the
tree planted by the waters that spreads out
her roots by the river and shall not
see when heat comes, but her leaves shall
be green and shall not be careful in
the year of drought, neither shall cease from
yielding fruit.
I want to say in a concluding word,
I believe that there is a drought coming.
There is a drought that already is which
is only the first harbinger, the first presentiment
of a drought which God is bringing upon
the earth in enormous measure, physically and spiritually.
Who shall stand in that day?
Who shall be able to comfort the brokenhearted
and open the eyes of the blind and
set the captive free?
But that one who is a tree planted
by the waters whose leaf is evergreen, who
shall not see when heat comes neither shall
be careful in the year of drought neither
shall cease from yielding fruit.
It's the fruit of the resurrection, it's the
fruit of his life which springs forth only
from one place, out of death by whatever
word you call it, humiliation, weakness ineptitude, speechlessness,
silence, mortification embarrassment, if we're willing to suffer
that to be bound up in our hands,
our head and our feet there's going to
be an hour when we'll hear the voice
of him who alone has the right to
command our life and to bring forth from
it the fruits of resurrection.
Because of Lazarus many believed on him How
many friends of Jesus do we have in
the congregation this morning who would say to
the Lord whatever it pleases you to do,
in sickness even unto death I have no
life in myself and I say with Paul,
for me to live is Christ I'm willing
to be dead and dead with Christ in
God until your life is revealed Did you
seal such a covenant with the Lord this
morning?
Because children, that is the way to the
kingdom Will you bow your heads with me?
Precious God If I go by any impression
of my own of what I can pick
up hearing out of my own mouth I
would say that the word that would describe
this session is failure.
It sounds like a bunch of religious gobbledygook
another religious sermonizing another bunch of platitudes and
references to scripture that sounds like just plain
hogwash but I have been faithful and obedient
to give you a mouth to speak and
to bring forth what it pleases you and
which is not to be measured by my
hearing and I ask now precious God that
you'll take careful note of as many friends
of Jesus that are in this room and
that shall subsequently be hearing this tape and
shall be willing to say in this moment
of invitation I am willing to become helpless.
I'm willing to count all things as done
in which I have not only prided myself
but have sought even to serve God my
strength, my wisdom, my cleverness, my eloquence, my
ability, my education my experience, willing to die
to all these things and to be pressed
into a cave and to be bound up
in hands and heads and feet until the
moment that it shall please you to call
me forth if that is a covenant with
which you would seek to enter the kingdom
way this morning will you stand up before
God, will you sit?
Don't stand up like this death is another
word for suffering it's not the convenient cessation
of consciousness you're willing to languish on a
bed in sweaty feet and look at the
faces of your mortified friends because the Lord
has not come, you're willing to suffer things
from him for which he shall give no
explanation, you're willing to be stripped of all
things and to be made a reproach to
the point where you stink precious God in
Jesus name, I ask you to make an
accounting and to seal in heaven by name
every soul that has stood to this invitation
that from this army of resurrection saints there
shall be such a demonstration of the glory
of God that these ears shall hear out
of the mouths of now for whose name
Jesus is only a curse, Hosanna rested is
he who comes in the name of the
Lord, out of the mortification and the humiliation
and the suffering of these lives bring forth
the demonstration of the glory of your kingdom
for the salvation of many at the conclusion
of this age and we'll thank you and
praise you for the opportunity to enter and
to be part with you in the tree
of life, in the kingdom of God, in
Jesus holy name we pray and God's people
said, Amen God bless you.