My dear friends, I hope my voice will
not be too unpleasant for you to listen
to.
Confessedly, yes, I am in real difficulties.
To put it as euphoniously as possible, the
mucous membranes of my laryngeal organs are not
functioning felicitously.
And my throat feels like a red lane
full of cinders and gravel.
Have you ever had that experience?
I hope you have, so that you can
sympathize enough.
It isn't hurting me at all, and if
it just gives out, well, the chairman will
take over.
And I can't grumble, friends, because since my
precious wife and I commenced our now 18
years of unbroken travel and preaching, I've never
had, in any part of the world, I've
never had a cold, never had a sore
throat before, and in all the 7,000
engagements, I've never missed a meeting.
So I'm, as we say in bonnie Scotland,
I'm nay grumbling.
It's just that it may be a little
bit unpleasant for you to listen to.
And I have a shock for you right
at the beginning.
The message that I want to bring to
you this morning is based upon no less
than five texts.
So perhaps I had better put your trusting
minds in a state of composure by assuring
you that my having five texts is not
in the least wise indicative that my peroration
will be five times the appropriate duration.
No, it simply means that I'm bringing to
you this morning a five-fold New Testament
study, a study which I am persuaded can
be of simply incalculable profit to all of
us if we have ears to hear and
hearts to receive.
So, now for my five texts.
Have you brought your Bible?
All right, text number one is in the
Gospel according to John, chapter 14.
John, chapter 14, and verse 16.
Our Savior says, And I will pray the
Father, and he shall give you another comforter,
that he may abide with you forever.
My second text is in that same chapter,
verse 26.
There's more in the verse than that, but
I call a special attention to that.
He shall teach you.
And now text number three is in John
15, verses 26 and 27, right at the
end of chapter 15.
Our Master says, But when the Comforter is
come, whom I will send unto you from
the Father, the Spirit of truth which proceedeth
from the Father, he shall bear witness of
me, and ye also shall bear witness.
Same word in the Greek.
He shall testify of me, and ye also
shall testify, because ye have been with me
from the beginning.
And now text number four is in John,
chapter 16, verses 7 and 8.
Jesus says, Nevertheless, I tell you the truth.
Fancy our Lord Jesus ever needing to prefix
a guarantee of truthfulness to anything that he
said.
He who is the eternal truth become incarnate.
But of course the disciples were so disturbed,
and nonplussed, and downcast by his apprising them
that soon he must be leaving them, that
our Lord felt obliged to pacify and strengthen
their minds.
So he says, Nevertheless, I tell you the
truth.
It is expedient for you that I go
away, for if I go not away, the
Comforter will not come to you.
But if I depart, I will send him
unto you.
And when he is come, that is to
you, when he is come, he will reprove
you.
Oh no, he doesn't say he will reprove
you.
When he is come, that is to you,
he will by implication through you convict the
world of sin, and of righteousness, and of
judgment.
Now dear fellow believers, before I turn you
to my fifth and final text, let me
at this point insert three explanatory comments about
the preceding four.
Comment number one.
All of us will have perceived that these
four texts are closely associated by reason of
the fact that they each treat of the
same subject.
That mysterious, wonderful, infinite, divine being whom we
call the Holy Spirit.
Comment number two.
These four verses are the more closely interlocked
inasmuch as they each refer to the Holy
Spirit by that peculiarly beautiful designation the Comforter.
And comment number three, though possibly this may
be superfluous for some of you, I think
some of you are doing Greek, aren't you?
Keep on with it, you'll never regret doing
Greek.
Well, comment number three.
Our English word Comforter in these four texts
represents the compound Greek word parakletos.
The prepositionary prefix para means alongside of, just
as it does in our well-known English
word parallel.
And kletos, the body of the word, comes
from the Greek verb kleo, transliterated into English
k-l-e-o, which means I call.
And the combined meaning of parakletos, which we
now Englishize into paraklete, is one who is
called alongside.
To be my heidekong, my strengthener, my standby,
my advisor and sympathizer and guardian and guide,
and a great deal more.
It is one of the most eloquent terms
in the whole Greek vocabulary, the paraklete.
And blessed be his dear name, he is
mine.
And if you are a blood-washed born
-again Christian believer, this heaven-sent wonderful paraklete
is yours.
And now for my fifth and final text.
It does not come in the according to
John.
Nonetheless, it does flow to us from the
pen of that same apostle.
It comes in the first epistle of John,
to which kindly turn.
The first epistle of John and the second
chapter.
Wait a minute, friends.
Is it trying to you to listen to
this foghorn of mine this morning?
Oh you're surviving, are you?
All right, there's worse to come, so.
I told you.
Now the first epistle of John, chapter 2
and verse 1.
Have you got it?
My little children, says the now aged apostle,
conscious alike of his spiritual and natural seniority.
My little children, these things I am writing
unto you, that ye do not sin, that
is, that ye do not knowingly, much less
willingly, and least of all willfully, or continually,
sin.
These things I write unto you, that ye
do not sin.
But, now here's the dread contingency.
But, if any man sin, notice he doesn't
say of any saint, or of any Christian
sin, this is a delicate diplomatic reminder that
even the saintliest among the sanctified are still
very human.
If any man sin, well what?
Does that immediately disrupt the believer's union with
God's dear son?
Thank God, no.
There is a prior anticipation of it, and
a wonderful provision against it.
If any man sin, we have an advocate
with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
And the latent link between that verse, and
the four which we have already consulted, is
in that word, advocate.
Because in the Greek, it is that meaningful
word, paraclete, again.
If any man sin, we have a paraclete
with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
Well now, dear fellow travelers to the heavenly
Zion, those are my five basal texts.
And now, with blending prayerfulness and eagerness, let
me begin to build upon them the superstructure
of my message to you this morning.
We Christian believers are the only people on
this earth who have found the secret of
true joy.
We are.
We never make that claim with stupid bravado,
or mere enthusiastic superficiality.
We are in dead earnestness when we humbly
make the claim, we are the only people
who have found the secret of true joy.
We don't deny for a minute that the
God-forgetting worldling has a certain kind of
happiness, a happiness of the flesh, as he
plunges into his godless and sometimes voluptuous round
of carnal pleasures.
Oh, there's a certain kind of happiness in
it all, and we don't begrudge the worldling
his happiness.
But do I need to say to anybody
here this morning, there's a world of difference
between mere happiness and true joy.
Happiness, as the etymology of the word indicates,
is purely circumstantial.
When happenings happen to happen happily, you have
a happiness, and when happenings happen to happen
unhappily, you have unhappiness.
But happiness is neither more nor less than
happen-ness.
It is purely circumstantial, whereas in magnificent contradistinction,
real joy is altogether independent of exteriorities.
Joy is a deep, wonderful well of satisfaction
down in the soul of its possessor.
Now we Christians haven't just found happiness, in
fact some of us, in terms of the
flesh and the earthly circumstances, have a pretty
rough time of it.
But we found joy, and we can sing
that dear old Sankey stanza, I found a
joy in sorrow, a secret balm for pain,
a beautiful tomorrow of sunshine after rain, I
found a branch of healing near every bitter
spring, and a gracious promise stealing over every
broken string.
My dear brother, my dear sister, isn't that
the joy we have found in Jesus?
I found the joy no tongue can tell,
how its waves of glory roll, it is
like a deep, o'erflowing well, springing up
within the soul.
Oh friends, please look happy.
Please look as though you've got that joy.
Some of you look indescribably grim.
Is it my voice after all?
Yes, we found the true joy.
Ah, but wait, as in all such cases,
there are two sides to the coin.
And if we Christians have found the elixir
of true joy, it is also true that
we are up against problems and difficulties about
which unconverted people know nothing.
The way of salvation, by which I mean
the eternal salvation of the soul from the
damnation of Gehenna on the other side of
the grave, the salvation of the soul is
free and easy and immediately receivable.
Simply because at utterly immeasurable cost to himself,
God has made it so.
The way of salvation is easy.
And if there should be one unconverted man
or woman, youth or girl here this morning,
oh let me peel out that tender bell
from the belfry of the gospel.
I say the way of salvation for your
soul is easy.
Listen, he that believeth on the Son of
God shall never perish, but hath everlasting life.
Oh, ten thousand hallelujahs for that.
But if the way of salvation is easy,
the living of the Christian life is hard.
It isn't a picnic.
It's a fight.
It's a holy war against the world and
the flesh and the devil.
I've never found the Christian life easy, have
you?
Mind you, it's grand.
I wouldn't be out of this fight for
anything.
But the Christian life isn't easy.
Now, I have a persuasion in my mind
that if sometime when you're in a pensive
mood, you sit down and deliberately encounter those
difficulties that we are all up against as
Christian believers, I have an idea that you
like me will find they all seem to
resolve themselves into five comprehensive categories.
They all associate under five headings.
And the remarkable thing is that those five
big difficulties that we are all up against
as Christians, they are anticipated and wonderfully matched
by these five paraplete passages.
Don't you think that begins to sound interesting?
Well, I know what somebody's saying.
Come on, Mr. Preacher, hurry up, tell us
what the five difficulties are and how the...
No, I shan't hurry up.
Well, I have learned this.
Maybe some of you preachers have found it
too.
When I'm preaching an evangelistic sermon, I never
like to go, I seldom if ever go
beyond 30 minutes.
I think many an evangelistic sermon fails because
of its longevity.
In preaching the gospel, get at it, speak
quickly, get the case over, and then press
for an immediate verdict.
But when you're talking to Christian believers about
the deeper things of the word, the faster
you speak, the less gets in.
So I will not hurry.
I'll have you out in good time.
What would you say is the first big
difficulty that we are all up against as
Christian believers?
When I say it, some of you will
say, mm-hmm.
Eh, but I don't think I would have
put that first.
And you'll no sooner have said that before
you'll say, ah, but on second thought that's
it.
Well it sounds strange.
It is the difficulty of our unwantedness.
Yes.
Let me explain, if explaining is needed.
We Christian believers are in the aggregate a
great company of millions and millions spread around
the five continents of the globe.
But in any one given area, we are
always a minority.
And we have the problems of the minority.
And those problems are acuter than the problems
of other minorities, because they are spiritual problems
that this spiritually dead world doesn't understand.
You see, the fact is, most of us
find we are respected as persons, but resented
as Christians.
Yes, we are respected as persons.
They want us as neighbors, because we are
clean, and we are tidy, and we are
friendly, and we are peaceable, and we are
constructively helpful to our neighbors.
Oh, they want us as neighbors, and they
want us as employees, because we are punctual.
We are men and women of integrity.
We don't work for our wages with our
eye on the clock.
We are upright and conscientious.
Yes, they respect us as persons, and they
want us as employees.
They want us as business associates.
They can trust us when they are absent.
They know that we are honest, that we
don't steal, that we don't lie.
Yes, they respect us as persons, but they
don't, uh, they don't want us as friends.
They resent us as Christians.
Now that brings upon us the problem of
loneliness.
That was my first big social problem after
my own conversion, when I was 16.
Somehow it was like autumn, when the leaves
fall from the trees.
All my pals of both sexes somehow fell
away.
And on Saturday nights, I'd sit there with
my Bible like a pelican in the wilderness,
or a partridge on the mountains.
And, uh, more than once, I found myself
asking, Sid, is this what it's meant to
be?
Is this the Christian life?
Now, uh, loneliness can be a weary, worrying,
wearing experience.
Have you ever noticed a way back in
Genesis, before ever the ugly shadow of man's
first sin fell across the pristine loveliness of
that primal paradise, there was an earlier shadow?
We read, and God beheld all that he
had made, and behold, it was very good.
But scarcely have you read that before you
find this.
And God said, it is not good.
Oh, so already there's a shadow.
And what was the shadow?
You don't need me to tell you.
It is not good for the man to
be alone.
The first shadow that ever flitted across a
human pathway was the shadow of loneliness.
And do I need to remind you, the
Apostle Paul tells us that that first Adam
was a tupos, or type, of our dear
Savior as the second Adam, the new representative
of the race.
And in this immortal Gospel of John, from
which four of our texts are taken, I
find Jesus, the second Adam, saying, I am
alone.
Of course, he could always go on to
add, as indeed he did, yet not alone,
the Father is with me.
But let me remind you, there came an
agonizing finale on Golgotha, when amid that midday
darkness, from that pinion sufferer on that Roman
cross, there came in quivering syllables this awful
requiem, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Oh, Jesus knew what it was to be
betrayed by a Judas, and denied by a
Peter, and deserted by the Twelve, and disbelieved
on by his family, and repudiated by his
townspeople, and rejected by his countrymen, and crucified
by the world, and even forsaken of the
Father.
There never has been a loneliness such as
Jesus plunged into inwardly, as he hung on
that awful, awful cross.
And why did our adorable Master endure the
nameless dread of that infinite loneliness on the
cross?
He has told us why.
It is so that his blood-purchased people
should never be lonely again.
And he has said, when I get back
to heaven, this is the first thing I'll
do.
I will pray the Father, and he shall
give you another paraclete.
Now in the Greek, there are two words
for another.
One is the Greek word heteros.
We get our word heterodox from it.
It means another of a different kind.
That's not the word that Jesus uses.
He uses a word that means another of
similar or identical nature.
I will pray the Father, and he shall
give you another paraclete who's so like me,
and so one with me, that in having
him, you will have me.
Not circumscribed and limited in a physical body,
but I'll come to be not only with
you, but by the paraclete, I'll come to
be within you.
Another paraclete that he may be with you
and within you forever.
Unlike myself, who now corporeally and visibly must
withdraw from you, he will be within you
day after day, all through the years, right
on to the end, this other wonderful paraclete.
I don't want to use exaggerative wording, but
when this wonderful truth of the heaven-sent,
ever abiding, indwelling, never departing paraclete, first flashed
upon my youthful mind about two years after
my conversion, it was almost like an addendum
conversion.
And from then until now, I've never been
lonely.
I've often been alone.
And I wonder if some of you will
grasp the grim meaning of this.
I've sometimes been most alone in a certain
kind of minister's meeting.
The holy brethren can freeze you, if you'll
let them.
Oh, I've had to stand alone for my
evangelical faith in the Bible.
I know what it is to stand up
for the Bible and to be booed down
in the denominational assembly.
And I've also found you can be far
more alone in a city and its crowds
than in the Sahara Desert or the Sin
Desert of India.
Haven't you found the same?
But I bear my loving and grateful testimony
this morning, all through these 50 years, I've
never had a lonely moment.
There are always the two of us, he
and I, always with me and better still
within me.
I want to challenge you, dear Christian, are
you making the most of this wonderful paraclete?
Do you talk to him from morning till
night?
Do you listen to him from morning till
night?
And if sleep forsakes your troubled eyelids, as
it did mine at three o'clock this
morning, and you can't sleep, amid the curtains
of the nocturnal darkness, do you talk to
him then?
Do you listen to him then?
You see the Holy Spirit, oh I'm sure
I need, is this too simple?
Never mind.
The Holy Spirit is just as personal as
the Father and the Son.
He is co-equally divine as the Father
and the Son.
Eternally uncreated, eternally uncreated, the wonderful Holy Spirit.
And keep listening, the Holy Spirit loves you
and me just as much as Jesus loves
us, and just as much as the Heavenly
Father loves us.
And even at the risk of your thinking
my theology is somewhat peculiar, the Holy Spirit
not only loves you, he likes you.
He does, I can easily prove it.
How do you show whether you like people
or dislike them?
Why the people whom you like, and for
whom you have a fond affinity, you seek
the pleasure of their company whenever you can
have it.
But people for whom you have a natural
aversion, you avoid their company as often as
you courteously can.
Now the Holy Spirit comes to be with
you and within you from January 1st to
December 31st, from first thing on Sunday morning
to the last thing on Saturday night.
With every new day your first waking thought,
he's there until you put your head on
the pillow at night to go to sleep.
And he knows us through and through and
through.
He never misunderstands, he's the absolute psychologist and
the inerrant psychiatrist.
And when our nearest and dearest friends and
relatives are misunderstanding and blaming us because they
can only see the outward, he never misunderstands,
he's within us, he sees us interiorly, he
knows the first and the last, the outward
and the inward, the best and the worst,
and he keeps loving us and living with
us and sharing with us and living within
us and comforting us.
Oh friends this is a wonderful provision isn't
it?
Just let me have a cough.
We're getting through.
All right that's that.
What would you say is the second big
difficulty we are all up against as Christian
believers?
I almost feel like saying the clock, but
that isn't the point.
First of all, unwantedness.
And the second thing I put down is,
fancy saying this at TBI, it is the
difficulty of our unlearnedness.
I didn't say your, I said our.
This is something that we are all in
together, the problem of our unlearnedness.
Now let's always keep this gratefully in mind
that from apostolic times and sub-apostolic times,
right on through the centuries to the present
time, there have always been outstanding scholars, men
of science and of profound erudition, who have
been enthusiastic Christian believers.
And as it was in the beginning, so
it is today.
Some of the finest scholars on earth in
our 20th century, and some of the greatest
scientists in the scientific field, they are avowed
and enthusiastic evangelical believers.
Thank God for that.
But of course in the very nature of
the case, they must be the minority.
And most of us here this morning, probably
all of us, belong to the comparatively underprivileged
majority, intellectually speaking.
And one of our dire problems is this
problem of unlearnedness.
I see a wonderful admixture this morning of
younger and older and middle-aged, and I
wouldn't be surprised if among each category, age
-wise, there are those who are saying, oh
well now you're touching my problem, Mr. Preacher.
You see, I've never been to seminary.
I've never done Greek, much less have I
grappled with Hebrew.
I never even did Latin, and I only
had a smattering of French.
And the only English I speak is the
North American.
You see, I've never gone through great, compendious
volumes of religious evidences and Christian apologetics.
I've never waded through copious tomes of systematic
divinity.
I don't even know my Bible, as I
should.
What can I do?
I want to serve my royal master, but
I think back again and again, thwarted and
dismayed by lack of intellectual apparatus.
Well, friends, I'm thinking
just as cautiously as I'm speaking deliberately when
I say, if you have a string of
academic degrees stretching from here to Calgary, you
are not ready for Christian service unless you
know the Pentecostal tuition of the heavenly paraclete.
On the other hand, even though we may
never have the privilege of going to famous
institutions of human learning, if we know the
supernatural tuition of the Holy Spirit, we are
members of the aristocracy of heaven, and God
is waiting and longing to use us.
I'm still thinking carefully as well as speaking
enthusiastically when I add, friends, there is no
seminary on earth to be compared with that
seminary which is at the pierced feet of
the risen Christ, where the student body is
a consecrated, loving, praying Christian, where the curriculum
is the open Bible, and where the chief
tutor is the heavenly paraclete, the Holy Ghost.
That's the greatest seminary on earth, and we
can all go to it without money and
price if we will.
Are you giving the Holy Spirit time?
Now, on a finely sensitive point like this,
I wouldn't for the world be taken up
wrongly.
I know how easily a public speaker can
be misunderstood, so let me make this, as
they say, categorically lucid.
Hmm.
When I talk about this teaching ministry of
the Holy Spirit, I do not mean to
suggest, I'm not within a million miles of
suggesting, that the Holy Spirit designs to make
us Christian believers a kind of society of
walking religious encyclopedias, able to answer every question,
and silence every critic, and plumb every prophecy,
and disentangle every enigma, and solve every problem.
No, I don't mean that.
But I do mean that if you and
I, whoever we are, and how however old
or young we may be, if you and
I, with daily regularity, will browse in these
pages with our minds gladly under the direction
of the Holy Spirit, then gradually, but ever
more rapidly and cumulatively, the Holy Spirit will
give to you and me a comprehensive grasp
on biblical revelation.
Also, he will give us a more than
merely human insight into the deepest and most
precious spiritual truths of the Bible.
He will make the Bible come alive.
He will make its teachings lucid to the
mind, and sanctifying in the heart, and powerful
in the character.
And he will give to you and me
a proficiency in communicating the truths of the
Bible to the unconverted all around us.
I mean that, and not one whit less.
Maybe this is a point where one illustration
might save a multiplicity of further words.
A way back in those grim and yet
glorious days of the Scottish Covenanters, early one
beautiful sunny summer Sunday morning, a Scottish lassie
left her home in a highland village and
was wending her way down the winding main
street to go out to some sequestered vale
among the Scottish hills where the Covenanters had
appointed to meet, for the breaking of the
sacramental bread, and the partaking of the memorial
wine, and the opening up of the covenant
scriptures.
She hadn't gone far, however, before she heard
the sound of horses hooves, and swinging round
a bend in the road, there suddenly came
to view a party of the dreaded Claverhouse
Dragoons, led on by a young officer, who
seeing this damsel out at a suspiciously early
hour of the Sabbath morning, pulled up his
steed and his men, and he said, how
now?
Whither be ye going at this early hour
of the Sabbath morn?
Well, what was she to say?
What would you have said?
If she had said she was going to
a meeting of the Covenanters, she would have
been hauled to the saddle, carried off to
jail, and who knows, probably put to death.
On the other hand, if she had lied,
or barracked, she would have seared her conscience,
and dishonored her master.
Well, I'll tell you what happened.
I'm not saying she would have put it
in this phraseology, but this is the quintessence
of it.
There was a swift telegrammatic SOS to the
paratlete, and in the words of Holy Writ,
before she called, he answered, and while she
was yet speaking, he heard.
So that that dear girl, with perfect composure,
found herself almost involuntarily replying, Oh, sir, I'm
on my way to our father's house.
Our elder brother died, sir, some long while
ago now, but his will and testament is
to be read this morning, sir, and I
go to hear it read, for I have
a vital part in it.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put
it to you, it was the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and
all in agreement say aye.
Yes.
Do I need to remind you, this verse
is still in the Bible.
These words fell and still fall from the
lips of our dear Savior.
It shall be given you in that hour
what ye shall say, for it is not
just you who speak, but the Spirit of
my Father which is in you.
I've sometimes said to ministers, that promise was
for martyrs rather than pastors.
I don't think we ministers have to wait
each time till we get to the pulpit
and trust the Holy Spirit to give us
the inspiration on the spur of the minute.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
But I believe that in our study of
the Word, and in our meeting of life's
exigencies, the Holy Spirit, the paraclete, is meant
to be our mouth, our matter, and our
wisdom.
He shall teach you.
Dear brother, sister, how much do you know
about this teaching ministry of the Spirit?
Well, I see it's nine and seven-eighths
of a minute to eleven.
Hmm, we'll just have to gallop through the
next.
I'm sorry in a way, I've taken too
long.
Put it down to my sore throat, it's
not working as quickly as normally.
Very briefly, because I don't want to have
to take this theme up again tomorrow.
First of all, unwantedness, and then unlearningness, and
then next, I put this down as the
third big problem that we are all up
against.
The problem of our unfittedness.
You know, one of the saddest things I
encounter as I move in and out the
churches is Christian believers, usually middle-aged people,
who come to me and they say, Well,
you know, I'm not engaging in Christian service
like I once did.
You see, I used to have a Sunday
school class, but I never saw one boy
or girl converted.
I used to give out tracts, I never
saw one person won for Christ through any
tract that I gave.
I used to try and bear witness to
the neighbors, but I just had to give
up.
I don't seem to have the necessary qualification.
My most carefully prepared arguments are just torn
to shreds in a minute.
Even my most urgent pleadings are made a
matter of scorn.
And I've come away wringing my hands and
saying with the disconsolate prophet Isaiah, Who hath
believed our report, and to whom is the
arm of Jehovah revealed?
And I've just had to face up to
it.
I don't have the necessary gift.
So I've, I've dropped out.
Is there any remedy for that malady?
Yes, there is.
Though I'm afraid that many of us can
know the remedy for the malady and still
choose the malady in preference to the remedy.
But here it is at the end of
chapter 15 and the third of those paraclete
verses.
But when the paraclete is come, whom I
will send unto you from the Father, the
Spirit of truth, he's called that here because
he's coming to bear witness to the truth,
the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the
Father, he shall testify of me, and ye
also.
Now whether we know it or not, most
of us persist in, in inverting the order.
We put the ye before the he, instead
of leaving the he before the ye.
Have you never had an experience like this?
You go into your prayer room someday for
your time of prayer, and when you've gone
through the list of items that you've dotted
down in your little prayer book or card,
you look up to heaven and say, Dear
Master, I will not be in bondage to
the clock, but I pray thee that thou
wilt impress upon my waiting mind those persons
or concerns for whom or for which thou
wouldest have me pray.
Sometimes gradually, but if your experience is anything
like mine, more often unexpectedly, sometimes very suddenly.
The Lord will bring some person or some
matter with unmistakable pressure to the mind, and
you know at once, Oh yes, I must
pray about that.
For illustration's sake, we'll say it's some unconverted
man, and the group of you have been
besieging him for some time, trying to win
him for Christ, but the more you've tried,
the more apathetic or obstinate he seems to
have become, until you've begun to think, Oh,
it seems as though even God can't crack
that nut, and you wonder what you can
do.
But now in your prayer time, that man
is suddenly brought forcibly to your mind, and
you find yourself saying, Oh yes, I must
pray for him, and pray you do.
The whole of your being becomes concentrated in
one urgent pleading that that dupe of Satan
might be set free.
And you know sometimes after that kind of
praying, there's a certain latitude you feel that
virtue has gone out of you.
But always there's the God-given inward pledge
that prayer has prevailed, and so it has.
Either you or one of the group will
meet that man some days afterwards, but now
when you carry the water of life in
the golden chalice of the gospel, instead of
seeing it dash to the ground, you find
the Holy Spirit has preceded you and created
soul first in the man.
And now when you take the life-giving
draught, there's the first, and the man stoops
down and drinks and lives.
Now you know at the beginning of the
Christian era, that's how the great victories of
the early church were won.
It was the Holy Spirit in control directing
the service of the rank and file of
Christian believers.
And my dear brother, my dear sister, there
are few things more sacredly thrilling than this
kind of service in which it's the Holy
Spirit first and you following.
I mustn't expatiate further.
What would you say is the four big
difficulty we are all up against?
First unwantedness, then unlearnedness, then unfittedness, and now
I've put down our unequalness over against the
challenge of the present-day world.
How are we going to break through the
encrusted opposition of this metallic 20th century with
its commercialization and its urbanization and its industrialization
and its television-ization and all its collectivism?
How are we going to break through it
for Christ?
Well, we've all sorts of quacks in the
church, each with a supposed remedy, but this
is the one provision our Lord has made
right through the age.
It's in the fourth of these paraclete verses,
John 16 verse 7 again.
Nevertheless, I tell you the truth, it is
expedient for you that I go away, for
if I go not away, the paraclete will
not come to you.
But if I depart, I will send him
to you, and when he is come to
you, he will through you convict the world
of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.
Why, Mr. Chairman and friends, when you pause
and reflect on it, that's how the whole
dramatic story of organized Christianity on this planet
began.
Christ went up, the spirit came down, and
the spirit-anointed Jesus men went out.
Think of it.
Twelve men, twelve unlettered men, twelve men without
any academic degrees, twelve men without any collegiate
learning, twelve men without any monetary resources, twelve
men without any social prestige, twelve men without
any state backing, twelve men without any of
those supposedly necessary accoutrements to any kind of
global conquest, and these twelve seemingly unlikely men,
they went out to preach the new religion
of one who, in the estimate of his
own countrymen, was a blaspheming false messiah, and
who in the eyes of the world outside
the little pale of Judea was a publicly
disgraced and executed felon.
And these twelve Jesus men and their little
band of compeyers, they went out against all
the imperial might of Rome, and against all
the myriad-minded sophistries of the intellectual Greek,
and against all the stiff-necked bigotedness of
the old-time Jew.
Their task seemed ludicrously impossible, and yet only
four decades passed, and there was a hue
and a cry rang round, these men that
have turned the world upside down, her come
hither.
How did they do it?
This is how they did it, when he
is come to you.
Oh, you fellows and girls here this morning,
I can sympathetically understand.
You're sitting there and you're thinking, well, that
sounds magnificent, but it's a long way removed
from me.
No, it isn't.
This dear, patient, persevering Holy Spirit, he knows
your problems at PBI, he knows the studies
you have to do, but if you can
learn early to put him first, and to
become a regular praying disciple, the Holy Spirit
will fill you, and you needn't beg, and
pray, and claim.
No, before any claiming of him, he's, he's
claiming you.
Let him get you, and don't get excited,
and don't think it's complicated, just let him
get you.
He never leaves a surrendered vessel empty, and
don't think you have to have some volcanic
eruption of ecstatic emotion.
The Holy Spirit, when he fills us, far
more often registers his indwelling and his infilling
through the intellect and the reason.
I mustn't say more about that this morning,
and I'm over time now.
A final word.
Have I kept you too long?
Say no.
All right.
What would you say is the fifth of
these big difficulties?
Have you got them?
These five un's.
Unwantedness, unlearnedness, unfittedness, unequalness, and the last one
is perhaps the most persistent and discouraging of
them all.
It's the problem of our unworthiness.
If I may be permitted quickly to tear
out a page from my own spiritual history.
I was converted when I was 16, and
three months later I started preaching.
And I've been preaching ever since.
And you know about three years ago, I
found a packet of my first sermons.
And when I look through them, they were
so wise and weird and wonderful.
I had a quiet secret cremation.
Feeling very glad that the eyes of the
world had not seen them.
But God was gracious and he blessed my
ministry.
We had souls saved, and saints, men and
women old enough to be my parents, they
very kindly testified of blessing.
And suddenly I changed.
And when people came and invited me to
preach, I politely declined, not telling them why,
but knowing inwardly very well.
I began to feel such a hypocrite.
I don't mean a purpose, a purposing hypocrite.
No, I felt so helplessly unworthy to represent
such a Savior, I felt I couldn't represent
him in public.
And then I learned a secret.
And it was this.
Forgive the colloquialism, I'm sure that our Lord
Jesus will forgive it.
I learned this secret.
If you and I are head over heels
in love with him, and if we're truly
washed in the blood of God's Lamb and
born of the Holy Spirit, even our unworthiness
does not preclude us from serving the King.
Listen to the fifth of these paraplete verses.
First Epistle of John.
My little children, these things I am writing
to you that ye do not sin.
But if any man sin, well now there's
my unworthiness in its darkest, deepest, blackest, ugliest
guise.
Sin.
And now over against that this.
If any man sin, we have a paraclete
with the Father, Jesus Christ the resurrected.
No.
Jesus Christ the ascended.
No.
Jesus Christ the glorified.
No.
Do you see with what preciseness John selects
his contrastive adjective here?
If any man sin, we have a paraclete
with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
And over against all my dark disqualification and
default is his perfect, meritorious, substitutionary righteousness on
my behalf.
And the heavenly Father sees me in his
beloved son.
And in the words of Ephesians chapter 1
verse 7, I become accepted in the beloved.
Oh please say hallelujah there.
Yes.
Well we're through.
Oh Mr. Chairman, what can I say?
I'm here in utter confusion, wishing I could
go on another hour.
God bless you and may all this, this,
this precious truth may become more and more
precious and more and more real to us
as we travel onward to the heavenly Zion.
Thank you.