Now will you please open your Bibles with
me this evening to the 2nd book of
Samuel and the 5th chapter.
At our time I would read most of
this chapter to you, but to save time
I must just ask you please to have
your Bible open at this portion of Scripture.
The 2nd book of Samuel and the 5th
chapter.
This chapter records for us some of the
events which took place in David's life immediately
following his coronation day.
And in Old Testament picture form it records
exactly the same events which take place in
the life of a child of God when
the Lord Jesus Christ has had a coronation
day in our hearts.
I do trust that as I speak to
you this evening in each one of your
lives the Lord has stepped onto his rightful
place and that he is undisputed King.
Maybe only yesterday, last evening in this tent,
he stepped upon the throne of your heart
and you were able for the first time
in your life to say, it is no
longer I but Christ.
Oh blessed happy day when the Lord Jesus
takes his rightful place and he is undisputed
Lord.
But this is only the gateway into life.
It is of course the essential gateway.
It is the only gateway into blessing.
It is the only step into fullness that
is ours in Jesus Christ.
But it is only the gateway.
Does Keswick teach let go and let God?
No it doesn't.
Because the New Testament doesn't teach that.
At least that is only part of the
teaching.
And the act of submission in totality to
the sovereignty of Jesus Christ is but the
beginning of a new regime in your heart
where no longer the puppet king of self
is upon the throne, but the great king
of kings and the Lord of lords has
stepped in to take control.
If that revolutionary change takes place in a
man's life, surely then there ought to be
some evidences of it.
And there certainly are.
And that which I wish to consider with
you for a few moments this evening in
the opening message of this, the closing service
of the convention, is what happens when Jesus
is king?
Looking at our text for a moment, what
happens when David was king?
In the first place, the sovereignty of David
was immediately confirmed.
And it was confirmed in two ways.
If you look for a moment at the
seventh verse of this fifth chapter of 2
Samuel, you will see that it tells us
that David took the stronghold of Zion.
You, I am sure, most of you, know
the history of the people of God in
the land of Canaan well enough to remember
that the city of Jerusalem was always a
thorn in the flesh.
In spite of the fact that the whole
land had been given to them, they were
never, until David was king, able to possess
it all.
And the most strategic city from which God's
appointed king was to reign was, alas, a
city in which the enemy was deeply entrenched.
The Jebusites were far too much for the
children of Israel, and they could not cast
them out.
The fifteenth chapter of Joshua and the sixty
-third verse, the first chapter of Judges and
the eighth verse tells us this, that they
could not cast out the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
And at this particular time, we discover that
the Benjaminites had settled down in Jerusalem on
the basis of a peaceful coexistence with the
enemy.
This could not possibly be allowed to continue,
and so when David becomes king of all
Israel, we are told, he took the stronghold
of Zion.
That which had battled them through their whole
history became amazingly easy when David was king.
And one of the first evidences of the
enthronement of Jesus Christ in our lives will
be that deeply entrenched habits of evil will
be put under subjection, and under the feet
of our risen Lord, inhabiting the temple of
the Holy Spirit, your body and mine.
That which has defied our best efforts, that
which has caused us many a heartache and
many a tear, many a sense of remorse
and defeat and frustration, that which has often
made us almost give up the fight altogether,
how wonderful, when Jesus is king it is
put under his feet, and he comes into
our lives to establish his kingdom and to
celebrate it by giving us the first taste
of deliverance and victory over the power of
inbred sin.
Have you ever noticed in your New Testament
how the Lord Jesus delights to deal with
long-standing complaints?
Oh, how many instances there are of men
and women in the word of God who
for years had been bound by infirmity and
sin and were crippled and helpless and hopeless
till the risen Lord came.
I think of just one instance, that's all
we have time to recollect, in the Acts
of the Apostles when Peter and John came
together to the temple to worship, and there
they found at the gate of the temple
a man lame from his birth over forty
years, absolutely helpless and absolutely unable to do
a thing about it.
But Peter looked at him and said, silver
and gold have I none.
The church boasted in its bankruptcy in those
days.
Silver and gold have I none, but such
as I have, give I thee in the
name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up
and walk.
And immediately the man leaped to his feet
and was praising God, delivered in the power
of a risen Christ.
And I want to say to you in
the name of the Lord Jesus, and may
it bring comfort and encouragement to some heart
here this evening, there is no habit that
has gone so deep that the power of
the blood of Jesus can go deeper.
And there is no entrenchment of sin that
has gone so far that the power of
a risen Lord by his Holy Spirit can
go further.
And the first mark of the sovereignty of
Christ in the life, that is, that the
habits of years which have baffled all our
efforts and all our struggles, and have brought
us in shame and confession of failure time
and time again, to the throne in contrition
and in repentance, the power of them is
broken when he is upon the throne.
And furthermore, the sovereignty of David was not
only confirmed in that way, but it was
also confirmed because we read in the tenth
verse, reading the marginal rendering of this verse,
that David went going and growing.
I love that.
In other words, the sovereignty of David was
expressed in an ever-increasing area of the
kingdom.
And what is true in David's life is
true in the life of the Christians.
Jesus Christ upon the throne, as I said
a few moments ago, is but the initial
step to a lifetime in which you will
discover that his sovereignty is an ever-growing
and ever-extending and ever more blessed experience.
Do you remember that when the angel announced
to the Virgin Mary the birth of our
blessed Lord, she said to her, The Lord
shall give unto him the throne of his
father David.
He shall rule over Jacob forever, and of
his kingdom there shall be no end.
And what is true prophetically, my dear friend,
is true experimentally.
Of the kingdom of Jesus Christ in your
life there is no end.
It is impossible to be a Christian unless
Jesus Christ is your Lord.
If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus
as Lord, and believe in thine heart that
God hath raised him from the dead, thou
shalt be saved, Romans 10.9. You cannot
be a Christian unless he is crowned as
Lord in your life.
But the initial coronation day of the Lord
Jesus is immediately followed by a succession of
increasing and expanding coronations when he becomes Lord
over an ever-increasing area of your personality.
I would bear humble testimony to the fact
that when the Lord Jesus came into my
life at that moment, up to the limit
of my understanding, he was Lord of all
I had and all I possessed.
But I did not know then what would
be involved in surrender to his sovereignty and
how thankful I am that I didn't.
I do not always like the sovereignty of
Jesus Christ.
After the last I have disputed it, and
every time I have disputed it, that act
of resistance to his sovereignty has been followed
by weeks and months of spiritual stagnation and
failure when, though I did not lose my
relationship with my wonderful Lord, I lost something
almost as wonderful, the sense of his presence
and the reality of his fellowship, and I
live for weeks and months.
Alas, sometimes, possibly even for over a year
in darkness, because I had raised again myself
and said no at one point to the
sovereignty of my Lord, and at any point
in life you can resist his sovereignty, and
at that moment God puts you on the
shelf, you are useless to him.
Or you can carry on preaching sermons, teaching
a Sunday school class, using the same shibboleth
and singing the same hymns, but the unction
has gone, and the utterance has gone, and
the liberty of the Holy Ghost has gone,
and reality has gone.
The Lord is in your heart, but you
have transistence.
But I would always also bear testimony to
this, that every step in my life of
faith and obedience has immediately been marked by
a new demand made by my sovereign Lord
for his sovereignty to be displayed in another
area of my life.
A mark of the sovereignty of Christ in
a man's life is that deeply entrenched habits
are overthrown at last, and there's freedom, glorious
freedom.
And another mark of his sovereignty is that
every step of faith and obedience is followed
by the increasing demands of our risen Christ,
that he may occupy a new area of
your personality.
Listen friends, do you find yourself putting the
label spin somewhere in your life tonight where
you didn't put it five years ago?
Do you find the Holy Spirit gently but
firmly and lovingly putting his finger upon something
today and this week and saying, Now listen,
you've been a Christian too long to have
that, that's got to stop.
Never thought about it five years ago.
But as you've sought to go on and
grow up, the Lord Jesus has lovingly and
gently and firmly led you on to an
increasing experience of his sovereignty and of his
kingdom.
There is no end.
His sovereignty is confirmed.
Is it being confirmed in your heart?
Is there someone here who in the last
24 hours has had the first taste of
deliverance from sin?
If there is, I tell you, you can
hardly sit quiet tonight and you just love
to stand up and say hallelujah.
Just rejoicing.
Oh, rejoicing in liberty, freedom under the sovereignty
of the Savior.
Are you finding that's an increasing, expanding experience?
Praise the Lord.
You're in apostolic success.
May I say a second thing quickly?
The sovereignty of David was not only confirmed,
but listen, the sovereignty of David was immediately
challenged.
Will you please notice in the 17th verse
of this chapter that the Philistines gathered themselves
all together and they all came up to
attack him and, and they spread themselves in
the valley of Rephaim.
And you will find that verse 22 says
exactly the same thing.
Once again, the Philistines came up and spread
themselves in the valley of Rephaim.
They hadn't been unduly concerned as long as
David was satisfied to be king over Judah.
But now he was king over the whole
kingdom and this concerned the enemy greatly.
And so they set up an immediate counterattack
and they persisted in it.
And may I say that immediately Jesus Christ
is Lord.
That act of submission is followed by a
massive counterattack from the powers of darkness.
And will you notice how pointed was this
attack?
They spread themselves.
Isn't that typical of the devil?
How I hate it when he spreads himself
all over the place.
And they spread themselves in the valley of
Rephaim.
Where is that?
That's around Jerusalem.
Ah, Christian, will you mark this very carefully?
They spread themselves upon a focal point where
for years they had been penitents, though they
had no business to be penitents.
They had been in occupation and defied all
attempts of the people of God to throw
them out.
But once they'd been thrown out from there,
there's an immediate counterattack to get back into
occupation.
I want to be careful not to be
misunderstood on this point, but to say this
very quickly.
I don't think it concerns the enemy unduly
when a Christian signs a doctrinal statement to
join a church in which he said, I
no longer smoke and I no longer drink
and I no longer play cards and I
no longer gamble.
Oh, don't misunderstand me.
I do not advocate any of those things,
and think it would be a great pity
if you do.
But the travesty of a definition of worldliness
and sin, which enables a man to say,
because I do not do these things, therefore
I am now a consecrated Christian, is so
utterly, completely superficial.
But when a child of God begins to
understand the meaning of the words of the
Lord Jesus when he said, It is not
from without, but from within, that there comes
from a man blasphemy and adultery and fornication
and uncleanness and deceit and lasciviousness and lying
words.
And when a man really gets concerned about
the state of his own heart, and he
begins to cry with the language of Charles
Wesley, Oh, that in me the sacred fire
might now begin to glow, burn up the
dross of base desire and make the mountains
grow.
Oh, thou who at Pentecost did fall, do
thou my spirit my sins consume.
Oh, Holy Ghost, on thee I call, Spirit
of burning calm.
And when a man gets desperate, and he
can never go on as he's been living,
and he cries out to God with all
the hunger of his soul, Lord Jesus, set
me free, cleanse my heart from secret sin,
at that point the devil launches everything in.
Satan counterattacks pointedly, and he counterattacks persistently.
He will never admit defeat.
And, my friend, if you have crowned Jesus
Christ as Lord, let me tell you, you
are in for a life of constant battle
and warfare.
The devil didn't have to bother about you
before too much.
But if you are concerned never to agree
for a peaceful existence with the enemy on
any point in your life, if you're concerned
that the Lord, to use the language of
the book, might create in you a clean
heart and renew a right spirit within you,
might give you a blessed experience of deliverance
by the power of the indwelling Christ, then
I say to you that such life is
a menace to the powers of darkness, and
the church desperately needs in this twentieth century
men who have so submitted to the Lord
that they have a testimony of deliverance from
sin.
The sovereignty of Christ is counterattacked on every
point persistently and relentlessly.
But one other word, the sovereignty of Christ
is communicated.
What am I to do in the midst
of the battle?
How am I to face an enemy who
is too powerful for me?
How am I to deal with him in
all his besetting temptation upon my life?
And may I just say a word that
may help somebody.
I hope you understand that temptation is not
sin.
The Lord Jesus was tempted in every point,
I think we are, yet without sin.
And may I go a step further in
definition and say that sinful thoughts are not
sin either.
Have you ever heard people say in conversation
with each other, you know the other day
this thought passed through my mind.
That's wonderful, just let it pass right through.
That's what it is.
Satan has no other way of attacking except
by eye gate and ear gate and eye
and thought and mind.
And as he flings his poison into the
heart of a child of God, and he'll
do it consistently and continuously and persistently.
What am I to do about this?
Oh, let me tell you this with such
a glow and thrill in my soul.
The sovereignty of Jesus Christ is communicated.
How?
Look at the story again.
It was communicated in the first place by
prayer.
David inquired of the Lord, verse 23 and
verse 18.
On both occasions of which this chapter gives
us the record of the attack of the
enemy, David, as he faced the enemy, he
got straight onto his knees and said, Now
Lord, it's up to you.
My friend, it's just as well he did
so on both occasions.
For do you notice that the divine strategy
for victory in the first instance was totally
different to the strategy in the next?
In the first instance it was go and
attack him.
In the second instance it was sit still
and wait.
And if David had followed the strategy of
yesterday in the battle of today, he would
have missed all divine resources, and he would
have been humiliated and defeated.
What do I do in the face of
the enemy's counterattack?
When Jesus Christ is in the Lord, I
get on my knees.
Or if I'm not in a place where
I can do that, I lift up my
heart and say, Now Lord, it's up to
you.
I have no might and I have no
power, and I know not what to do,
but my eyes are upon thee.
I look up to him.
And in that moment, in that moment, I
discover, I discover that the victory of yesterday
has not put into me any strength for
today.
I discover as I go on in life
that the flesh is totally corrupt.
I discover that the flesh profiteth nothing.
And I begin to understand the language of
the Apostle Paul who said, In me that
is in my flesh dwelleth no good thing.
That's not the language of a backslider.
That's the language of a man illuminated by
the Holy Spirit, who's discovered, who's discovered that
God expects nothing from him but total failure,
and he can never be any different.
I've been along the road thirty years as
a Christian now, and every experience of the
grace of God and the cleansing power of
the blood of Jesus has only made me
understand more deeply than ever before the corruption
of my own heart.
Basically, Alan Redcar has no difference from what
he was when he was saved, probably a
lot worse by nature, potentially worse.
But I know this, that the fight is
not mine, but it's God's, and therefore every
moment of every time of testing, first, first
he communicates power through prayer.
Watch and pray, lest thou enter into temptation.
You'll always be faced with it, but there's
no need to run your head into it.
Watch and pray, inquire of the Lord, for
his sovereignty will be communicated.
And listen, it is communicated in answer to
prayer always.
Sometimes it is communicated by the word that
says, But more often it is as communicated
by the word that says, What's that sound
of a going?
Surely it's what happened one day to a
hundred and twenty disciples in an upper room
as they had waited and prayed for ten
days.
Suddenly there was this sound as if a
rushing mighty wind.
And God, by the Holy Spirit, came down
upon them and empowered them and set them
out to blaze a trail for him.
That's how God communicates to my poor heart
and needy heart, constantly, his sovereignty.
He communicates that sovereignty in the person and
in the power of his Holy Spirit in
answer to the man whose acknowledge is bankruptly
and who has submitted to the Lord arbitrarily
and who waits upon him for the outpouring
of his Spirit.
But let me say this.
We do not move away from the Lord
Jesus through the Holy Spirit.
Oh no.
He said to his disciples, The Spirit of
truth shall come to you.
He shall dwell in you.
I will come to you.
I am in my Father.
Ye in me and I in you.
And the sovereignty of Jesus Christ is communicated
to the poor, beaten, bankrupt, defeated heart and
yet the heart that has turned in simplicity
and utter sincerity to the Lord.
That sovereignty is communicated by the imparting of
the life of the risen, victorious Christ into
my heart and into my soul.
I do not go on away from Christ
to the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Spirit points in my heart upward
to the throne and from that throne there
is communicated the victorious resurrection life of our
precious Lord.
Oh, my beloved friend, let me say this
to you.
That you are no match for the counter
-attacks of the enemy.
I've been on the road long enough to
know that the devil is far too cute
and far too clever and far too powerful
for me.
But oh, hallelujah, the devil's no match for
my Lord Jesus.
He's no match for the Holy Spirit.
And in my heart today and in your
heart, if there's submission to Christ, then there
is throne life, sovereign life.
The life of the throne in heaven has
been sent back to you to enable you
to live.
Oh, the enabling that you will ever need
in every situation is in the power of
God the Holy Spirit.
As I chose tonight, listen, is there a
sound of a going?
Oh, has there been a sound of a
going this week?
The spirit of conviction been abroad?
You've trembled under the sound of the word,
under the sense of conviction of your failure
and defeat?
Has the message of sin just broken and
penetrated and battered into your soul?
Until you've trembled on it, has there been
that deep sense of conviction?
And has there been the indication that there's
a balm in Gilead?
Have you begun to see the answer that
you need in the Holy Spirit?
Is he moving upon you today in conviction?
Has this message been something more than theory
to you?
Has it been life?
Has it been victory?
Has it been power?
Then listen, what does the Bible say?
Disturb yourself.
And I'll hear the sound of a going.
Disturb yourself.
I don't want to say this to be
dramatic, but I want to say it because
I believe it with all my soul.
The next thirty-five minutes may well be
the most crucial minutes in all your life.
Disturb yourself, beloved.
Only thirty-five more minutes of this convention.
What are you going to do about the
tremendous potential of a life of victory?
Are you going to discard it because you
don't understand it?
Or are you going to listen to God's
servants as he speaks to it and just
drink in all that the Lord Jesus has
for you in the enabling grace and power
of his Holy Spirit?
And disturb yourself.
Oh, that Jesus may fill now every heart
who full surrender knows that through that heart
there may come the life-giving rhythm, the
power of a risen Christ in his Holy
Spirit.