Good morning.
Amen.
By the way, I would like a few
more questions for tonight, questions that are relevant
to the ministry of the week, and put
them in the question box on the first
floor in Fitzwater Hall.
I hope you'll come this evening prepared to
give a brief word of testimony concerning what
God has done for you.
We'll have a time of question and answer
and a time of testimony to his goodness
and his blessing in our hearts in these
days.
Now let us bow before him in prayer.
Dear Lord, our hearts are hungry for thee
today.
I hunger and I thirst, Jesus, my manna
be, ye living waters burst out of the
rock for me.
Each one of us urgently, desperately need thyself
in all thy saving fullness in our lives.
O Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh
on me.
Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh.
We've been thinking, of course, this week, as
you know, about the communication of our faith.
And we've considered this subject under four different
headings so far.
We thought about the relationship which must be
restored, the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ
in our lives.
We thought about a responsibility which must be
realized.
I have set thee to be a light,
a reflector of light in the world, an
area in which if we move in it,
we're beyond competition.
Then we thought about the revival which must
be recovered, that there should be upon us
all the marks of the cross.
It's not another Pentecost we need, it's another
Calvary.
Revival isn't going through Chicago, beating a big
drum, it's getting back to the cross with
a big song.
Unless God brings us there, we haven't got
much to offer.
And the Lord has been wanting to do
that with us all in these days, bring
us right back to the cross.
Then we thought about the requirements which must
be recognized, that the terms of this task,
if we're to fulfill it, are costlier than
we think.
This is not a picnic, not fun and
games, it's total warfare.
I don't want to tread on thin ice
or get into deep water, unnecessarily, though I'll
be departing tomorrow, so perhaps it's all right.
But I do want to say that I
get very concerned about the way in which
some young people are presented with the Gospel
in these days, as if it's all fun
and games.
Anything's all right, as long as you end
up with devotions.
You can do anything.
Flip it up, and have cakes, and have
a great time, and fun and games, and
thrilling business, and present to young people that
the Gospel is a great life, wonderful, thrill,
and happy life, and everything's fine, if you
only follow Jesus.
And it's not presented as total warfare.
And I believe that young people need to
be presented with, from the very start, that
they're engaging in total warfare.
If they come to Christ, life's going to
be a battle, it's a thrill and a
victory, but it's a fight all the way
through.
The Christian is not someone, of course, who
goes through life with a long faith and
a big Bible and looks miserable.
He knows the joy of the Lord is
his strength.
But he's not, on the other hand, a
frothy individual who just superficially touches every situation
with a light touch.
There's something about him that speaks of the
obligation and the solemnity and the seriousness of
the task in which he's engaged.
The terms are costlier than we think.
Heaven has dawned upon his soul, and he's
in the grip of a living God, and
his life has been transformed.
But then when we've said all that, where
are we right now?
Well, I want to speak to you from
the final message this morning, and the final
angle upon our theme, upon the resources which
must be received.
The resources which must be received.
I have much upon my heart.
I don't know just how I'm going to
get through what I want to say to
you this morning, and I'm trusting that the
Lord may put it through clearly, and with
authority, and yet with love and grace, and
it may mean something to you.
Because when all is said and done, we're
shut up to a miracle.
And the Lord spoke of it when he
said, ye shall receive power.
After that the Holy Spirit has come upon
you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me
in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and unto the uttermost
parts of the earth.
There is no substitute in the life of
a Christian for the Holy Spirit.
There's no substitute in the life of a
church for the Holy Spirit.
God's method is always miracle.
Not new methods he wants, not new strategy,
not new ideas, but new men.
Men who are prepared to be small enough
for God to use.
Men whom God has reduced to a minimum
that he might do through them his maximum.
He moves in the realm of miracle.
From beginning to end, the Christian life is
a miracle.
The Christian church is a miracle.
And it's engaged in the operation of miracles,
of carrying out miracles in the power of
the Holy Spirit.
There is no substitute for the Christian or
for the church, for the Holy Ghost.
Now Satan knows that.
The greatest enemy of the devil is not
the Christian.
That's only incidental.
The greatest enemy of Satan on earth is
the Holy Spirit.
Because he is resident in the Christian life,
your life and mine become the focal point
of battle.
Battle which never ends until our dying day,
when we reach glory.
I used to pray when I was younger,
Lord don't let me ever get involved in
a situation in which the devil is not
interested.
I've stopped praying like that now because it's
been answered for me more abundantly than I
expected.
But if you are really in business for
God, Satan is in business with your life.
And every movement of advance and every movement
of the Spirit of God in you is
accompanied by a counter-attack from the enemy.
When you are in the Christian church, you're
in a moving concern which is facing battle
all the time.
Therefore it is typical of Satan that he
has the whole of us, many of us
and most of us, confused about our adoption
of the Holy Spirit.
There are some strange manifestations of the Holy
Spirit abroad today.
Panic theology, I call it.
But Christian people, when they're facing a situation,
have found themselves with inadequate resources.
They haven't got what it takes to get
to a country on the mission field which
has been for centuries in the grip of
Satan.
And they either withdraw for another higher education
or they press in for an experience of
the Holy Spirit which has no foundation in
Scripture.
One of the greatest and most divisive things
that the church has known for a long
time is what is known as the charismatic
movement, where people have entered into an experience
of speaking in tongues.
Well, I haven't spoken in tongues.
It takes all the grace of God to
make me speak right with the one tongue
I have got.
But if this was really the answer to
the church's need today, then it would be
the major theme in every one of Paul's
letters.
I don't dispute the fact that there may
be such a thing as the gift of
tongues.
I think it would be very hard for
us to prove as evangelicals that this gift
was withdrawn after Pentecost.
But I would press upon you the fact
that it is the last in order of
the gifts.
It is a minor and not a major
gift.
It is only referred to in one letter
of the Bible, the Epistle to the Corinthians,
only in two chapters, and then always with
a view to dampening it down.
I repeat, that if this was really the
answer to the church's need, the thing that
we need most of all, then it would
be the major theme in the New Testament.
But I find it is only a very
minor theme.
I spoke to a missionary in Africa recently,
a missionary leader, who professed to have received
this gift.
And I spoke to him for hours with
my open Bible, and we talked about it
together and prayed about it, and he finished
the conversation this way.
Well, he said, I don't care what the
Bible says.
I've got an experience, and you can't argue
me out of it.
Now, when a man talks like that, it's
highly dangerous.
You can't have all the gifts of the
Spirit, but you can have all the graces
of the Spirit.
And the major theme of the New Testament
in relation to God the Holy Spirit is
not gifts, but grace, character.
Galatians 5.22 gives us the fruit of
the Spirit in a Christian life.
And this is the major theme.
Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Spirit has come upon you, and ye shall
be witnesses unto me.
Of course, in our fear of becoming extreme
or fanatical, we've exchanged the false fire of
fanaticism for the no fire of orthodoxy.
We find ourselves absolutely helpless to meet the
challenge of these days.
John Wesley used to know that which our
hearts hunger for.
When his brother Charles Wesley wrote, Jesus thine
all victorious love shed in my soul abroad,
then shall my heart no longer rove rooted
and fixed in God.
Oh, that in me the sacred fire might
now begin to glow.
Burn up the dross of base desire and
make the mountains flow.
Oh, thou who at Pentecost didst fall, do
thou my sins consume.
Come, Holy Ghost, on thee I call.
Spirit of burning, come.
That kind of thing we don't pray about
because we're afraid of it, but that's what
we need.
I was in Ethiopia just recently at a
mission station, S.I.M. station, and stayed
there for about a week.
And I stayed with a couple who came
from this country who were the missionary builders
for the S.I.M., and they just
celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
And the husband had bought his wife the
most extraordinary and unusual twenty-fifth wedding anniversary
I've ever heard of.
You know what it was?
He bought her a present.
You know what it was?
A bathroom.
I don't think, I hope there wasn't a
sting in the tail of that, but of
that gift.
But he bought her a bathroom.
And when I went to the house and
saw it, my word, you never, it was
lovely.
There was all the green tiling and beautiful
bath, beautiful equipment, lovely chromium-plated taps, and
I thought, well, bless their hearts, they deserve
it.
And I was very thankful for this because
I had been for ten days in a
very remote area, and this bathroom would meet
my need, which was urgent at the time.
And so I looked at it with a
great joy, not only for his wife's sake,
but for mine.
And so I repaired to my room and
prepared for my bath, and went in with
great excitement and great anticipation.
And I got ready for it, and I
turned on the tap, and nothing happened.
No water.
So I had to dress again and went
to see him, and I said, say, what's
the idea here?
You've got all this lovely bathroom, but I
can't get any water.
Oh, he said, I forgot to tell you
that the local council haven't turned it on
yet.
It'll be six months before we have any
water.
So my, I thought, that's done it.
My need is not met, at least in
that way.
You see, what a wonderful bathroom, but no
water.
Every bit of equipment, but no water.
Everything except the water, the one thing that
really matters.
Now I believe today that that's our trouble.
In the Church we've got everything except the
water of life.
The water that I shall give you shall
be in you a fountain springing up into
everlasting life.
The Lord Jesus just wants to do that
to each one of us today.
The fountain of life, the source of life,
the strength of life, the victory in all
our hearts.
And we have everything except the land.
Oh, we've got the doctrine right, we've got
the orthodoxy right, we can talk about the
Holy Spirit, we know the theory, but oh,
how urgently we need the life.
And Lord, the promise is, ye shall receive
power.
After that, the Holy Spirit is come upon
you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me.
Well now, let me just look with you
in the Word what this really means, what's
it all about.
Turn with me, will you, to the epistle,
to the Ephesians, for a moment, and the
fifth chapter, and there we read Paul speaking
to the Ephesian church, in verse 17, Wherefore,
be ye not unwise, but understanding what the
will of the Lord is.
And be not drunk with wine wherein is
excess, but be being filled with the Spirit.
That's present continuous tense, be being filled with
the Spirit.
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your
heart for the Lord.
Giving thanks always for all things unto God
and the Father in the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear
of God.
What a happy verse that is, isn't it?
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your
heart to the Lord.
So obviously, the Christian life is expected to
be a life that's joyful and a rejoicing
life.
And Paul says, if you want this kind
of life, the secret of it is you
must know what it means to be continually
being filled up with the Holy Spirit, and
then you'll learn to give thanks always to
God for all things.
No, that's tough.
Fancy being able—can you give thanks to God
for everything?
Very difficult.
Thanks to God for all things?
I remember Dr. Paul Rees was at the
English Keswick Convention a few years ago, and
he told a story about a man who
was in Birmingham, Alabama.
And that's a good effort.
And he was sitting in a Greyhound bus
at the bus station, temperature over a hundred,
humidity very high, heat terrific.
And he was waiting in the bus.
Christian man suddenly into that bus there entered
a very large lady who sat beside him
and oozed over his section of the seat.
And in a moment or two, five children
came and joined her and sat on her
lap.
And this little fellow was squeezed right over
into one corner.
And oh, he got so frustrated.
The heat was terrific.
I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
And the man was thoroughly frustrated.
And suddenly he remembered that in his quiet
time that morning, he had this very verse,
giving thanks always for all things unto God.
And he said, Oh Lord, what on earth
can I be thankful for in this?
And then suddenly he said, I know.
Thank the Lord this woman is not my
wife.
No, that's not me.
That's Paul Rees.
Blame him for that.
But seriously, seriously, oh you know, when a
life is really filled up with all the
Spirit of God, you begin to know that
there are no mistakes in the love of
God.
He never makes a mistake.
There's nothing that happens to a man filled
with the Spirit by accident.
It's all permitted by our Heavenly Father.
All things work together for good to them
that love him.
Nothing happens by accident, though it's very tough
to take, yet we can praise him for
it.
Ah, but then the answer, the secret of
it all, is that we must know what
it means to be filled, be being filled
with the Spirit.
That's a command.
You see, it's possible to be indwelt by
the Spirit, but not to be filled with
the Spirit.
Every Christian has the Holy Spirit.
You can't be born again except you have
the Holy Spirit.
There are many verses of Scripture which make
that perfectly clear.
For instance, Romans 8, 9, if any man
have not the Spirit of Christ, he is
none of his.
It was the Holy Spirit who convinced you
of sin because you believe not on Jesus.
Your conscience tells you it's wrong to tell
a lie, but it's only the Holy Spirit
who convinces you that it's sin not to
believe on Christ.
John 16, 8.
He convinced us of sin because we believe
not on Jesus.
It was he who led us to accept
Christ.
The Spirit that quickeneth the flesh profiteth nothing,
John 6, 63.
And at that moment we were sealed with
the Spirit, Ephesians 1, 13.
And indwelt by the Spirit, your body is
the temple of the Holy Ghost, and you
were baptized by the Spirit into the family
of God, 1 Corinthians 12, 13.
All these things took place at the moment
of your conversion.
It is impossible to be a Christian without
having the Holy Spirit, and therefore without potentially
entering into the realm of miracle.
But listen, it's possible to be a believer
and not have the Holy Spirit.
May I repeat that?
It's possible to be a believer and not
have the Holy Spirit.
My friend Major Ian Thomas, whom many of
you know, preached at Moody Church one Sunday
night and really rocked the congregation.
His text was, Unsaved Believers.
That's quite a subject.
People who have everything in their heads and
nothing in their hearts.
People who can be correct in doctrine and
sign every possible correct fundamentalist doctrine, and yet
it's all in their head and not in
their heart.
Oh yes, I can believe my Bible from
cover to cover and yet have no indwelling
Christ.
It's all up there instead of down here.
But if you're a Christian, if you've been
born again, if Christ has really come into
your heart and you've yielded your life to
him, you have the Holy Spirit.
But it's possible to be a Christian and
not to be filled with the Spirit.
So you have verses such as these, Walk
in the Spirit, Galatians 5.16, Quench not
the Spirit, 1 Thessalonians 5.19, Breathe not
the Spirit, Be filled with the Spirit, Ephesians
5.18. You see, may I put it
this way?
You may have the Holy Spirit, but he
may not have you.
Salvation is like getting a book with two
volumes.
You go to the bookstore and you ask
for Dr. Lloyd-Jones' book on the Sermon
on the Mount, a book which ought to
be in every preacher's library, which ought to
be in every student's library too.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones on the Sermon on the
Mount, a tremendous book.
And you go there and get the book,
and you take one volume and come away
with it, and you leave the other volume
behind.
And suddenly, when you're coming back out of
the bookstore, you realize you've forgotten it, and
you go back and you ask for it,
and the person in the bookstore gladly gives
it to you.
You've paid for it, it's all yours, and
you go back with two volumes.
Well, salvation is like that.
You have one volume, The Death of Christ
for forgiveness of your sins.
You have another volume, The Life of Christ,
the risen life of our Lord, indwelling you
by his Spirit for victory day by day
over sin, so that you haven't to struggle
and fight for it.
But you take both volumes.
You take by faith Jesus to forgive you.
You take by faith the Holy Spirit to
deliver you.
And you have two volumes of full salvation.
Is this a second blessing?
Do I believe in a second blessing?
Yes, I do, because I believe in a
third, and a fourth, and a fifth.
And any day without a blessing would be
a miserable day.
Oh yes, there are millions of blessings in
the Christian life, but the fullness of the
Spirit is an experience beyond the new birth.
There is no such thing as a continuous
fullness of the Spirit.
It's a continuous appropriation of a continuous supply
from Jesus Christ himself.
When I trust him, he fills me.
The moment I begin to believe, at that
moment I begin to receive.
And as long as I keep on believing,
praise the Lord, I keep on receiving.
So as I believe, I receive.
As I go on day by day believing
in him, I receive more of him.
It's a crisis, a crisis into which I
hope hundreds of you have entered this week,
when your lives have been totally abandoned to
the Lord Jesus Christ.
The trouble is that so many of us
go through that again and again.
We come forward to every altar call, every
invitation.
We give our lives always to Jesus, and
our sincerity is beyond dispute.
With all our hearts we mean business and
we surrender to the Lord, but we only
take that one step.
We don't take the other, of appropriating faith.
There's a great friend of mine who's familiar
to many of you, and he has two
children, two girls.
One of them is much older than the
other.
The other is a postscript.
And one Monday morning he was sitting in
his study, thinking about his sermon the previous
day, and sometimes preachers have Monday morning feelings,
and feeling it had been all so hopeless.
His ministry had been ineffective.
And downstairs, he suddenly heard his wife say
to the two children, run upstairs and tell
daddy breakfast ready.
So they did so, and the big one,
having longer legs, got up first and dashed
into the room, and sat down on her
daddy's knee, and put her arms around his
neck, and said daddy breakfast ready.
And a minute or two later, a postscript
came along, and stood at the door, coughing
and panting, and looked inside, and surveyed the
situation.
And then suddenly big sister said something rather
catty to little sister.
You don't need to come any further, she
said.
I've got all the rest of daddy.
And daddy saw that little sister with her
lip beginning to quiver, and a tear going
down her face.
So he said, now darling, come on, right
here.
And he out a spare knee, and held
out a spare arm, and little postscript came
running in, and jumped on the knee, and
he put his arm right round her.
And she looked across at big sister, who
was only 18 inches away, and said to
her, in not a very Christian spirit, she
said to her, you may have all the
rest of daddy, but daddy's got all the
rest of me.
Now that's what it means to be filled
with the Spirit.
The moment when you have all there is
of Jesus, and you have all there is
of him, at the moment you're born again.
You don't receive him on the installment plan,
you have a full salvation within you, resident
in you, at the moment of your new
birth.
But the question is, has he all there
is of you?
And the moment he has all there is
of you, that's the crisis of identification with
Christ, when the Spirit fills what you have
emptied.
For God can only fill what you are
empty.
Now let's just pause a minute in the
midst of our message this morning, and ask
ourselves quietly in God's presence, have I entered
into that crisis?
Have I really, really been willing for God
this week to empty me of everything that
is contrary to his will, or am I
still fighting a battle about something?
He wants to fill you so that he
might use you.
He wants to fill you so that you
might understand what the will of the Lord
is.
He wants to fill you so that in
everything you can give thanks.
He wants to fill you so that you
will have grace adequate for every situation.
He wants to fill you so that your
life may more and more increase in the
likeness of Christ.
Everything depends upon this transaction.
Have you yielded to it?
Have you asked?
And maybe it needs that you should go
to your room on your own, and you
should get out a little bit of paper,
and write down on it what the Bible
says the Holy Spirit is.
The Bible says that the Holy Spirit is
the spirit of truth.
He's the spirit, the spirit of love, the
spirit of grace, the spirit of faith, and
so on.
Am I acting a lie?
Am I committing in my life something contrary
to that?
Am I lacking in love and critical and
unkind?
I need to go away alone with God
and examine my life about these things, and
write what's wrong, and tell the Lord I'm
willing to be emptied.
I know a place in Northern Ireland, it's
called Ballymena.
And some years ago there a Protestant lady
was having a series of cottage meetings in
her house every Wednesday night.
And next door there lived a Roman Catholic,
one of the few in that city.
And she invited her to come in, and
this lady said, I'm sorry I can't, not
allowed to.
But the next morning she asked her, did
you have a good meeting?
Oh, she said, great meeting.
How many did you have?
27, and my little cottage was full.
Will you come next week?
No, can't, not allowed to.
Next week went by, and the next meeting,
and then she asked her friend, how many
did you have last night?
Oh, she said 51, my house was full.
And she thought, well that's funny.
Will you come next week?
No, can't, not allowed to.
So the next week's meeting was held, and
when it was over the same conversation occurred.
How many did you have last night?
62, and my house was full.
Well, that was too much for an Irish
Roman Catholic, so she said to her friend,
listen, you told me your house was full
when 27, and the next week you'd have
51, and then you're 62.
How do you do it?
The thing's impossible.
Oh no, she said, didn't you hear us?
What do you mean, didn't I hear you?
Well, she said, we just emptied all the
furniture out of the barn, and made room
for more people.
Say, God isn't going to fill you with
the Holy Spirit unless he knows that you
mean business.
You prepare to empty out of your life
the books that take the place of the
Bible?
Spend more time reading the novel with the
shade of the doubtful in it, if you
prefer that to the Word of God.
God has to empty you of that.
Has to empty you of your lack of
control of the television knob.
He wants a life to show to him
that they mean absolute business.
Then he filled.
The first condition of fullness is emptiness, and
that means complete, absolute disillusioned in myself.
I'm ready for God to enter my life
to fill it.
And you notice here in this chapter in
Ephesians that the fullness of the Spirit is
not for missionaries, not for preachers only.
Oh no, it's for everything.
It's for husband and wife, parent and child,
employer and employee.
The Christian life, as it's rightly understood, touches
every social relationship and has immense implications.
And the greatest factor in evangelism is the
Christian family and the Christian home, and the
outreach from that home.
And all of us need to be filled
with the Spirit.
There's a right and wrong way of doing
everything, every kind of Christian work.
And above all, you need the fullness of
the Spirit to make you like the Lord
Jesus.
This is not, this is not some emotional
experience for a few people.
It's absolute necessity to meet the demands of
the day in which you live.
It's a necessity for your life, right now.
Be being filled with the Spirit.
I think perhaps the greatest necessity of all
is that by being filled with the Spirit
you learn to be able to stand against
every storm.
Some time ago my wife and myself and
family were traveling over from Southampton to New
York.
We were going by boat.
It was more popular than by air those
days.
And we were traveling in—if you don't mind
me saying so, and excuse me mentioning it—what
is the world's largest liner, the Queen Elizabeth.
And we were two days out at sea
when we noticed that the captain of the
Queen was looking through his glasses at a
cloud of smoke coming along behind.
And it was getting larger, this cloud of
smoke.
And word went round the passengers of the
Queen Elizabeth that for the first time in
her history the world's largest liner was being
overtaken at sea by the world's fastest liner,
the United States.
Yes, you usually enjoy that bit of the
story better.
And about four hours later the United States
passed us.
Unnecessarily near, I thought, but as she went
by, as she went by, we were told
afterwards that the commander of the United States
sent a message to the commander of the
Queen, which said, you look very beautiful, but
you're very slow.
The reply wasn't published.
About eight weeks later, when I was returning
to Britain, I was sitting in the chief
engineer's cabin on the Queen Elizabeth, and he
was a Christian man.
And he said, you know, just two weeks
ago, coming out from New York, the same
thing happened on our return voyage as happened
on your outward trip.
And he said, the United States overtook us.
And he sent us a telegram, which read,
sorry to pass you, but he said the
old man, referring to the commander, was ready
for him.
And he said, sent a reply, which read,
that's perfectly okay, but it does not meet
for the royal lady to travel in fast
company.
I thought that was quite a good answer.
He said to me, look, would you like
to come and see the engines of this
boat?
Oh, I said, I'd love to.
Took me downstairs to the boiler room.
There were four steam compressed boilers.
One of them wasn't operating.
It hadn't been used since the days of
the war.
If they used it, they would use fifteen
hundred tons of oil a day.
And Cunard, he said, believe in economy these
days.
And he was operating on three boilers, had
been for years at nine hundred tons of
oil a day.
But he said, there's something else I want
you to see.
He took me right down to the very
skin of the ship, way, way below surface.
And we walked out into a narrow gangway.
On either side of us, there were two
enormous propeller shafts.
Huge shafts, four hundred and fifty feet long,
one hundred and fifty yards of solid steel.
And they were going round at what seemed
to me a tremendous pace.
And we went right to the skin of
the boat, right to the back of it.
And we saw the place where those four
shafts went out into the ocean.
And I heard the thrash of four giant
propellers driving that floating atel across the Atlantic.
Eighty-two thousand tons of it.
It was tremendous.
And I went back to his cabin, and
just for the sake of conversation, I said
to him, my, that was wonderful.
I wouldn't have missed it for anything.
But I said, you know, those propellers must
be going at a tremendous speed.
And he laughed at me.
He said, you're no engineer, are you?
I said, no.
What do you mean?
He said, if you were, you would know
that I could get those propellers going so
fast that they would make a hole in
the water, and the ship would slow down
and ultimately stop.
He said, I have forty-eight engineers on
board the ship, and they're constantly calculating the
ratio between revolutions per minute in the engine
room and steadiness at the point of drive.
I've never forgotten that.
Because something has been built into my heart
that tells me that God wants from me
not speed, but steadiness.
Not a flash of enthusiasm, but steadiness in
the storm.
And he said to me, you know, we've
been going across this pond for about twenty
-five years, and he said we'll do it
for many more.
We've been through it when we've been threatened
with torpedoes, and we've been bombed in wartime.
And he said we've been through it in
hurricanes and gales, in rough seas and tempests,
in fog, sometimes in smooth weather, in clear
sky.
And he said we've been doing it for
twenty-five years, and we've never been late.
Mind you, he said we're behind schedule sometimes,
but he said we catch it up, because
we've discovered the secret of steadiness at the
point of drive.
And I need God's fullness in my heart
to keep steady in the storm.
Oh, not an emotional experience.
Not something that makes me go around shouting
hallelujah.
Not something that's merely emotional, but something that
when everything's hitting, and the storm is on,
and the pressures are on, when normally I
would press the panic button, and try and
get out of it, I can stand by
the grace of God.
Now that's what God wants for you.
He wants to send out to this school
a thousand students who have learned the secret
of steadiness.
Because if you haven't learned it in six
months on the mission field, you'll be a
casualty.
Well, I just want to talk for the
remainder of my time about how this may
happen in my life.
I hope I've shown you the need.
You ever read from Oswald Chambers, an author
who needs to be taken in small doses
frequently?
He says this, some people think that Christians
are expected to do exceptional things in unusual
circumstances, whereas the truth is that a Christian
is expected to be an exceptional person in
ordinary circumstances.
No halo to that, right down to earth.
Nothing, nothing just thrilling about it.
But someone whose reactions and whose behavior in
ordinary circumstances is exceptional and marks him out
as a man in whose life God has
worked a miracle.
There's an authentic stamp of reality about him,
something about him that can't be explained on
the basis of education, on the basis of
understanding.
He's a miracle.
Because when the heat is on, and the
pressure's on, and the tragedy has happened, and
the things have happened in his life that
have simply taken the rug from under him
and everything absolutely has collapsed all around him,
he's standing.
One of the greatest authors of our day
is C.S. Lewis.
You remember his book, Screwtape Letters?
That allegory of the description of satanic warfare
upon the Saints?
One paragraph reads like this, Don't be deluded,
Wormwood, writes Screwtape to his nephew, who is
responsible for carrying out the tactics of hell
against the church on earth.
Don't be deluded, Wormwood.
Our cause—listen to every word of this—our cause
is never in greater danger when a human
being, no longer desiring to do the enemy's
will—that is, the will of God—no longer desiring
to do the enemy's will, looks around him
upon a universe from which every sign of
the enemy's existence has disappeared, and asks, Oh
God, why have I been forsaken?
And yet, keeps on obeying, steadfast in the
storm.
And before long in your life, my dear
friend, God will give you an experience of
darkness when all sign of truth has gone
from your ministry.
He'll put you through an experience, often, in
which there's no longer any sense of God's
presence, no sense of fruit from service, and
you're left absolutely in the dark.
What do you do then, unless you know
God's Spirit telling you, moment by moment, you
collapse?
Because, you see, God's purpose for all of
us in life is enlargement through pressure, and
what do I mean by that?
Put three men in a burning, fiery furnace—that's
pressure.
They meet in the furnace, one like unto
the Son of God—that's enlargement.
And God's purpose is enlargement, until our character
is conformed to the likeness of Christ, to
make us like him.
And he puts us through any pressure in
order to fulfill that end.
When the heat is on, the pressure is
there.
And I find myself in burning, fiery furnace
with three others, two others—that's a bit close
fellowship.
And I panic and withdraw, but if I
stand in it and meet one like unto
the Son of God.
I believe there are hundreds of you going
through new pressures here at school, pressures in
your life, pressures that are almost too much
to carry.
You feel it's about snapping point.
Listen, he will not suffer you to be
tested beyond that you're able to bear, but
he will with the temptation provide a way
of escape so that you can run away.
No, so that you are able to bear
it.
He knows when to take the pressure off.
If you just follow me, here in imagination
you see an engineer, and he's testing a
machine under pressure, a new machine, a valuable
machine.
And he's applying all sorts of tests, and
it has upon it a safety gauge.
And he finds the pressure going up and
up, and suddenly it goes beyond the safety
point, and immediately he releases a safety valve,
and allows the pressure to escape.
You see, the safety valve, the release, is
not for the man, but for the machine,
in case it's been damaged.
And when the pressure is on, it's not
that he will allow you to get out
of it, but he knows the moment when
to take the heat off.
If he's trained a Christian to stand in
any test, he knows when to remove the
pressure.
But a Christian can only stand if he's
filled with all the fullness of God.
Let me then ask you again, how's this
going to happen?
Well, I'm quoting now from Hudson Taylor, a
great founder of the OMF, I prayed, I
fasted, I agonized, I strove, I made resolutions,
I read my Bible more diligently, I sought
more and more for retirement and meditation, all
without effect.
The blessing didn't come that way.
I sought his fullness for long and earnestly,
I cried to God for it.
At last I found it was because there
was no room in my heart for him.
That was spoken by a man who'd been
a missionary in China for years and would
return to the home base and reckoned he
was a complete failure, and found that after
years on the mission field, there's no room
for God.
I look back upon my ministry, I'm so
glad I'm in a position now when I'm
never candidating for a pastorate, and everything is
in retrospect.
And I look back upon times when my
ministry has been absolutely a complete failure.
I've tried method after method, idea after idea.
I've seen prayer meetings which have been as
dead as a doornail.
I've turned the chairs round, put them the
other way round, asked people to get into
groups, and a thing's a thing, there's nothing,
nothing happened, it's been dead.
Method after method, I've tried together to see
the power of God work, but there's one
method has never failed.
And I'm sure ashamed that I haven't tried
it more.
It's when I've been absolutely on my face
before God, shot up to a miracle, and
then God has worked.
God brought you there, flat on your face
before him, where you've made room for him
to work a miracle.
And then I noticed the second condition of
fullness in my life, is faith to accept
what God has promised.
You remember the wonderful language of John chapter
7 and verse 7, 37?
If any man thirst, let him come unto
me and drink.
He that believeth on me, out of his
inner man shall flow, not a trickle, not
a drop, not a river, but rivers of
living water.
He that believeth on me, what's it mean
to believe this?
If any man thirst, let him come, let
him drink.
For any who thirsteth for God, well, that's
desire.
If any man thirst, let him come, that's
surrender.
Let him drink, that's faith that lays hold
of what God has promised.
He that believeth, out of his inner man
shall flow, rivers of living water.
That's God's promise to your thirsty heart today,
how he can fill you with his Spirit.
And let me say this, that's just the
beginning.
Because, you see, a maintained fullness depends upon
a maintained obedience.
Faith is the way in, obedience is the
way to maintain.
Every step of faith and obedience enlarges my
capacity for Christ.
Every step of disobedience shrivels it up.
And I can lose the fullness of the
Spirit.
I can end my life in Romans 7,
in all the carnality of spiritual failure.
I can enter into life and victory and
power and joy and know the thrill of
it in my own experience.
And then, because I've yielded to a tremendous
counter-attack from hell, I can end my
day on the shelf, unusable, out of God's
service, because Satan has tripped me up.
And, friend, it's not how you begin life
that matters, it's how you end it.
Have you asked the Lord to fill you?
Have you believed that he does do what
you ask him?
If your earthly parents give you good gifts,
how much more shall your Heavenly Father give
the Holy Spirit to them that ask?
Let us pray.
Just a moment's quiet prayer.
Jesus, fill now with thy Spirit hearts that
full surrender know, that the streams of living
water from our inner man may flow.
Oh dear Lord, today, just now, may we
know the joy of thy incoming life in
all the fullness, in all the sufficiency, so
that all through the future we know that
it is no longer our effort, our struggle,
but his power, his fullness in us, adequate
for every need.
Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Spirit has come upon you.
Come now, dear Lord, and fill our empty,
needy, poor, sinful hearts, and may we stand
in all the joy of an indwelling Christ
to serve thee in his power, the grace
of the Lord Jesus, the love of God,
the fullness of the Spirit, the hours, now
and until he come, and then forevermore.
Amen.