I suggested to you on Wednesday morning that
the subject of our morning study, Visions of
God, is taken from Ezekiel, Chapter 1, and
Verse 1, and the evening studies of the
Revelation of Jesus Christ is taken from Revelation,
Chapter 1, and Verse 1.
Some of you, I know, will have thought
when I said that, well, he could have
got them both out of just one verse,
and that is 2 Corinthians, Chapter 12, and
Verse 1, and Paul says, it is not
expedient for me, doubtless to glory, I will
come to visions and revelations of the Lord.
So, we have the two things in 2
Corinthians, Chapter 12, and Verse 1, as well
as individually in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation, Chapter
1.
Let me suggest to you this morning that
the matter of God revealing Himself to different
individuals is most interesting and instructive to us.
In the Old Testament, as well as in
the New, the manner and means in which
He did it is instructive, sometimes by His
spoken words, sometimes by the visible presence of
an angel, some by the physical sight of
God Himself, and I may quote you some
verses in corroboration and confirmation of that.
And then, another thing that is interesting to
notice, and that is the category into which
the individuals fall who receive such visions from
God.
You may have a king, a prophet, a
priest, a shepherd, you may have a woman
in distress, you may have a woman in
her home looking after the regular duties of
life, you may have someone very grieved and
grievously treated, you may have a young man,
you may have a boy, you may have
an old person.
And this kaleidoscope, this compilation of individuals in
their different characters and walks of life, encourages
us greatly when we consider that God is
pleased to reveal Himself not only in these
various ways and manners, but to these various
individuals.
There is no exclusivism in the revelations of
God to His people.
In fact, I hope we may have time
to look at some of these just to
prove that to you.
Now, one of the most interesting recipients of
visions of God that we have, particularly in
the Old Testament, I want to ask you
to turn with me this morning and consider
some of the details of the life of
Abraham.
Let's look at Genesis chapter 12, please.
Genesis chapter 12.
Five times in the life of Abraham, the
word is used that the Lord appeared unto
him, and several times it is said the
Lord spoke to him.
So, as I've suggested to you already, God
reveals Himself sometimes by the spoken word, and
He has revealed Himself by a personal presentation.
Human eyes have looked upon the God of
Israel, the God of Eternity, the El Shaddai,
the All-Sufficient and Almighty God.
That's a marvelous thing to consider, and I
know you are thinking, as was stated on
Lord's morning, that God said to Moses on
one occasion that, No man can see, nor
must see, my face, and live.
Then Paul writes to Timothy and says he
is the only Potentate, the King of Kings,
Lord of Lords, whom no man has seen
nor can see.
Because these appear to be absolute statements that
admit of no consideration or variance, for that
reason I have quoted to you some of
the scriptures already wherein it is said that
they saw God.
And such unexpected persons as Aaron, Nadab, and
Abihu, for example, the Seventy Elders of Israel,
Exodus chapter 24, they went up into the
mountain as called by God, for God sent
Moses down from one of the occasions in
which he had been up in the mountain,
and he said, Go down and bring up
your brother Aaron, and bring up his two
sons, Nadab and Abihu.
Now, that's interesting, because Nadab and Abihu were
to be slain, as you remember later on,
because they offered strange fire before the Lord.
But the future must not mortgage the present,
so what God knows we will be or
will do is not necessarily going to restrict
or hinder what he wants to do and
will do today.
Moreover, let me reverse that to you now.
What we are or what we may do
today does not necessarily mortgage the future, because
God is pleased so often to reverse what
we have done or what we are on
a certain day or in a certain circumstance
regarding the future.
Whoever would have thought that Nadab and Abihu,
who were to be slain from before the
Lord because of offering strange fire, would actually
be mentioned by God to come up into
the mountain?
And who would have thought that God would
say to Moses, Go down and get your
brother Aaron, and bring him up into the
mountain?
And then, if you read farther on in
that passage, you'll read it, and it says,
They saw the God of Israel.
Twice over it says, They saw the God
of Israel, and that describes the pavement that
was under his feet and what his presence
looked like.
These are some of the intriguing things that
we discover in the scriptures of truth when
God accommodates himself to our frailty, to our
humanity.
Who would have chosen Aaron to be the
high priest of Israel, to be invested with
the royal robes, and to go into the
presence of God after he made a golden
calf?
Yet, that's exactly what God did.
So, I may suggest to you that our
falls, and our faults, and our failures of
today do not necessarily mean that God will
not use us, nor call us tomorrow.
Nor may we assume that because there is
tragedy ahead somewhere, and a stumbling down the
road, God will not use us today.
He will not mortgage the present because of
the future that he knows so well.
I recall being in Argentina on one occasion
for a visit there, and I was having
some meetings in the city of Buenos Aires,
and then was able, with the able guide
of Daniel de Cesari, to go on a
trip into the interior for about a month.
And when I was in a home of
one of the brethren in Buenos Aires, he
told me about his life, how he and
his wife had agreed to sell a house
that they had, and to rent another smaller
place, and put the money into supplying books
for their workers there.
And he had a partner who had a
farm, and sold the farm, and rented an
apartment, and took the money to add to
the first contribution between the two of them.
They were going to fund a book store
for their younger preachers.
And he said to me one morning, he
said, Don David, we have a problem here
between the two of us.
And I said, what is that?
He said, well, we have just received a
large shipment of books from Europe, and after
we ordered them and received them, we heard
that the author has had a, well, what
we call a moral fall.
I think that's a misused term.
If we are talking about a sexual fall,
we should say sexual fall, and not a
moral fall, because I've heard it said so
many times that Peter, when he denied the
Lord, did not have a moral fall.
Well, he did have a moral fall.
Dishonesty is morality abuse.
Morality takes in more than sexuality.
So, a man who is defeatable, a man
who lies, a man who denies, has a
moral fall just as much as the other
one does.
So, he said to me, we've just learned
since this big shipment of books came in
that this man has had a moral fall.
Now, he said, my partner believes we should
not give them out to the workers, that
we should not read these books now because
of the scandal that has arisen due to
the author's conduct.
And he said, I think we should give
them away, and that the younger folks should
profit by them.
Now, what say ye?
You know, that's how you get into a
rock and a hard place, and I generally
can get out of those by saying nothing
and listening a little longer, and then I
get the answer given to me anyway, because
oftentimes when they ask you a question, it
isn't that you want the answer, they want
to give you the answer.
But on this occasion, I didn't get out
of it.
And he said, now, we want to know
what we're going to do with these books,
and we'd like your opinion.
Well, I said, I suppose if you're not
going to use them, then you'll have to
at least throw out some of the Psalms
of David.
You won't be able to read 32nd Psalm,
you won't be able to read the 51st
Psalm, you won't be able to read some
of the subsequent Psalms which David wrote after
he had his fall.
So I didn't say more than that, and
I said, just cut them out of your
book and don't use them any longer.
So he turned to his partner who was
there, and he said, are we prepared to
do that?
And he said, no, we're not prepared to
do that.
I guess we'll give the books out.
Certainly God does not do as we would
do.
He does not condemn us flat out.
He does not put a mortgage on anything
we may do after we have had an
experience like that.
And so some of these individuals, particularly, I
was thinking of Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, go
up into the mountains and says they saw
the God of Israel.
And then it says they did eat and
drink, and on them he laid not his
hands.
So with such practices in mind, we are
encouraged to look back at some of the
instances in which God has appeared to those
perhaps to whom we would not have conceded
that they were competent to receive a vision
from God.
Genesis chapter 12, we have two appearings of
the Lord to Abram.
The first verse starts as you can see,
the Lord had said unto Abram.
Now, that in itself does not appear to
have been a vision of God, but when
you go to Stephen's defense in Acts chapter
7, you remember how Stephen starts off his
defense before the Sanhedrin.
He says, the God of glory appeared unto
our father Abraham when he was yet in
Mesopotamia and Ur of the Chaldees.
So hidden under this opening statement of chapter
12 is a vision, a vision of God.
The God of glory appeared unto our father
Abram when he was in Mesopotamia in Ur
of the Chaldees.
Now, some of these statements of scripture are
left for our consideration, and sometimes I think
to our imagination.
Why is he called the God of glory
when he appears to a man who's living
in an idolatrous land, a land of pagan
unbelief?
He is called the God of glory.
He appeared.
Now, it does not say in which fashion
he appeared.
It does not say how he appeared.
It does not say why he appeared.
Why did he choose Abram?
How did God reveal himself?
How did he make himself seen?
The word is to see.
Now, let me pause a minute here, and
let me suggest to you that this business
of seeing in connection with God sometimes is
directly visible, something visible by the human eye.
At other times, to see means to perceive
by the spirit, by the mind.
Sometimes it will be in an open area
in the daylight by someone who comes to
the individual who is material, and then there
are other times when it happened in a
trance.
You remember, Balaam said, these things says he
who fell into a trance having his eyes
opened.
Or how about Peter on the housetop?
In Acts chapter 10, he went up to
the housetop to pray because he was hungry.
It's not always a full answer to an
empty stomach, you understand, but you can try
it at times, and maybe it's easier with
an empty stomach to fall into a trance.
I don't know, but I get some of
my worst dreams when mine is full.
However, he goes up on the house, and
he's praying while he's waiting for the preparation
of the meal, and it says he fell
into a trance and saw the sheep set
down from heaven.
Now, that was a perception while he was
in a trance, so that is not a
palpable, visible, material thing that he saw, but
he perceived it in the vision of his
spirit.
But as I suggested to you on Sunday
morning when the disciples were in the Mount
of the Lord and the Mount of Transfiguration,
they saw the Master.
They saw him transfigured.
He was still the same Lord.
He was still the same Jesus of Nazareth,
and he was going down the mountain.
He said, tell the vision to no man.
So it was a vision, you see, but
it was a vision that was palpable, that
was tangible, that was material.
They could handle him.
They could listen to him speak.
Now, when we put all the aggregate of
this into one box and look at it,
and all these instances, all these different people
that I have mentioned to you already, and
all these various categories of life, it is
amazing to see how God is pleased to
present himself in these various ways to these
various individuals under these various circumstances.
So here's a man living in Ur of
the Chaldees, a very modern, up-to-date
city, if you can go by Professor Urquhart,
who tells us of a telephone system they
had in Ur in the days of Abram,
who tells us of a sanitary and water
system operating in Ur of the Chaldees in
the days of Abram.
Some of the discoveries of the archaeologists are
very remarkable and turn our concept around that
we've had of these olden times.
Nevertheless, he's in an idolatrous country, he's in
a pagan land, and the God of Glory
doesn't say the God of Israel yet, but
the God of Glory appears to him, and
he says, get thee out.
Now, you may draw your own conclusions as
to why and how God did that.
I always ask myself questions like that when
I read a statement like this, and I
say, now, why Abram?
Why did God do this?
Did he do it because of what he
said later on in chapter 18 of Genesis?
I know this man, and I know what
he will do, and I know his character,
and I know that he will judge his
children after him.
I know he will keep the commandments of
the Lord, and because I know who this
man is, I will reveal myself to him.
Five times over, at least, God presented himself
in what is called an appearance to Abraham,
and this is the first time he's called
the God of Glory.
Those are very unsuggested words.
These are very intriguing words to me.
They're inspiring words to me.
We may live in the darkest era of
this century.
It certainly looks like it, doesn't it?
We may live in very difficult circumstances.
We may have an idolatrous world all around
us who are either worshiping themselves or what
they can see and acquire, and is it
so?
Is God so covered?
Is he hidden that he can't reveal himself
to us today?
That's when it was that the God of
Glory appeared to our father Abraham, and he
sent him out, and, as you know, they
left the Ur of the Chaldeans and went
up to Charon in the north, and then
after Terah died, Abraham moved south with Lot
and his servants, and he comes down into
the land.
Now, after he's come through the land, we
come down to verse 7 of chapter 12,
and it says again, The Lord appeared unto
Abraham and said unto thy seed, Will I
give this land?
And there builded he an altar unto the
Lord who appeared unto him.
The result, the fruit of these revelations, these
visions of God, are also most instructive.
The first time we read of God appearing
to Abraham after he left Ur of the
Chaldeans, not when he was in Charon or
Haran, but after when he came down into
the land of Canaan, then the Lord appears
to him and makes to him a promise
regarding the land.
He makes subsequent promises regarding the same country,
the same land, the same inheritance, the same
possession in the following chapters, and he enlarges
them as he does this, and I think
there's a principle here as well.
God reveals himself to us today.
He does it in his own way, at
his own time, and for his own reasons.
There must have been sovereignty involved in the
choice of Abraham when he was in Ur
of the Chaldeans.
It reminds me of Exodus chapter 19, when
God brought Israel out of the land of
Egypt and brought them to Mount Sinai, to
Horeb, and he gathered them together at the
foot of the mountain, and he says to
Moses, now tell this people that if they
will obey the voice of the Lord they
shall be to me a peculiar treasure and
a holy nation.
Tell them that I have chosen them to
be this on this base.
Deuteronomy 7 adds something to this.
Moses said later on in Deuteronomy 7, he
said the Lord didn't choose you because you
were many, for you were few.
You were insignificant.
You didn't have a glorious past.
You didn't have something that you could look
back on.
Some of us are very proud of our
past, aren't we?
Someone was asking me yesterday, I think it
was, about some of my ancestors, and I
like to think that my grandfather on my
father's side was one of the first brethren
who met in assemblies in London, England in
the last century, and some of our family
friends, or cousins rather, have decided to look
up the family history and build a tree,
you know how it is, and then send
you the crest and all that, and I
said to my mother one day, I said,
we know a lot about my father's family,
of our father's family, but we don't know
anything about your family.
She said, I suggest you don't bother, and
I said, well, I think it'd be interesting
to know.
We know so many.
My father's family, there were 17 children and
14 of them lived, and they're scattered across
the world from Malaysia to Australia to Africa
to England and United States here and other
places, and I said, we know a lot
about father's family, but I'd like to know
something about your family.
She said, just leave it alone.
If you go back too far, you'll just
find a lot of thieves and rogues, so
leave it alone.
So I left it alone.
What else could I do?
He said, I didn't choose you as a
nation because you were mighty, because you had
a glorious past, because you were the least
of all the nations when I chose you,
and the reason I chose you, says God,
and the reason why you will be a
peculiar treasure unto me is because all the
earth is mine.
And as we say in Spanish, this is
the sum and substance of it.
This is the reason for it.
This is the heart of it.
It's sovereign, selective grace, and they could not
claim to anything else.
I've chosen you, I'm going to make you
a peculiar treasure, I'm going to make you
a kingdom of priests if you obey my
voice, because all the earth is mine.
And he will have mercy on whom he
will have mercy, and he will choose whom
he will he choose.
What is the clay going to say to
the potter when the potter's design is to
make it as he wills?
So I look at Abram and I say,
God chose him, the God of glory appeared
to him.
I look at myself, I look at others,
and I say, but why was I chosen
in Christ from before the foundation of the
world?
Why did God put his hand upon me?
For I know of no reason he should
have done this on the basis of what
we would call competency or personal ability.
But that love which is causeless is selective,
we may glory in the grace of it.
So he appears unto Abram in verse 7
of chapter 12, and he said that he
had promised to give him the land into
which he had come.
Now, let's look further over to chapter 13.
Chapter 13, you recall, I'm just going to
briefly make a summary of some of these
chapters as we move through them.
It's the first mention of the word brethren
in the Bible, by the way, and you
know what happened?
Well, there was strife amongst them.
That's right, that's what it says.
That's what it says.
The herdsmen of Lot and the herdsmen of
Abram were striving together and quarreling together, and
Abram said to Lot, let us not have
strife amongst us because we be brethren.
Yes, not straight about that.
So, Abram said, now you take the choice.
You go where you will, and I'll go
wherever you don't.
So he gave Lot the choice, as you
know, and Lot looked down to the well
-watered plain of Jordan, and he said, it
looks like the garden of the Lord as
thou comest into Egypt.
Now, isn't that a strange combination of things?
It looks like the garden of the Lord,
it looks like the paradise of God, and
it looks like the same, the land as
you come into Egypt.
Now, what distorted vision would make a man
compare the paradise of God with the land
of Egypt?
Only a man whose mind is centered strictly
and specifically on material things.
The world never can look to us comparable
with the paradise of God, can it?
The land of Jordan, the vale of Jordan,
and then, of course, the comment is made
that the sinners of Sodom were exceedingly wicked
before the Lord.
It never could be compared, could it, with
the garden of the Lord, with the paradise
of God.
And yet, sometimes our hearts actually want to
settle down in this valley of Jordan because
it is so comfortable.
In our traveling around Latin America, Central America,
and South America, particularly in the last 25
years or 30 years, I'm always impressed when
I leave these countries, and particularly Cuba as
it is today, which we've been visiting recently,
to discover how many things a Christian doesn't
need to be happy, and how he can
or she can be happy and joyous in
the Lord with nothing of the things that
we consider make us happy or comfortable.
And they don't measure the sacrifice they have
to make to go to a conference.
They'll travel in a train for anywhere from
23 to 30 hours, and get off the
end of the train, and get on a
cattle truck, and hitch rides, and so forth,
to go a way down to an assembly
at the foot of the mountains in the
eastern part of the country for a conference.
And they're joyous, they're exulting, they're exuberant about
their Christian faith now.
And yet, they're living under very stringent circumstances.
They're still rationed, they still get one pair
of shoes a year, providing the store where
they're allowed to buy them on the day
in which they're allowed to buy them has
their size.
And if it doesn't, you can come back
next year.
Or you can take whatever size they have
and try and trade with somebody else who
has your size.
And the ladies get one dress a year,
and the men get one pair of pants
and shirt a year, and they get so
many pounds of sugar a month, and four
ounces of meat a week, and so many
beans, and so on.
That kind of thing is still there, still
existent.
And if you use up all your soap,
you can buy a bar on the black
market for $12 a bar of soap.
Prices are exorbitant.
We have a little girl, I shouldn't take
a lot of time telling you stories, but
we have a little girl living in our
home, which was, and as an assembly family
living in 16 years of age, and she
said to me, I asked her what she
was doing, what she was going to do,
and she said, well, I've tried to get
a job seven times, and each time I
fail.
And I said, how come?
She said, well, the last question always on
the form that I have to fill out
is, do you believe in God?
And I always put yes, and I throw
it out.
So she says, that's happened to me seven
times.
I said, well, why don't you leave it
blank?
She said, I can't believe it blank, but
it asks me if I believe in God.
So I say, yes.
I said, well, what are you going to
do now?
She said, well, I'm taking in children from
farm countries around, country around, and they're looking
after children, and I'm getting a little money
that way.
She had on a pair of sneakers, running
shoes, as we call them down here, these
cannabis shoes, you know, and I said, those
are nice shoes you've got, red and white,
they were.
She said, do you know how much I
paid for those?
And I said, no, she said, I paid
$180 for them.
You can buy them in the tourist hotel
where we go and make our purchases with
American dollars.
You can buy them for $5.95. And
the very same shoes, exactly.
And on the black market, this is what
she has to pay.
Now, in spite of that fact, she is
one of the most excited and inspired and
driven Christians that we have.
She goes and lines up for three days
in order to get reserved seats.
You have to reserve them, there's only one
way you can go, to travel on a
bus to go down to the Havana area
for as many as you want to go
for a conference.
And she would just stand there hour by
hour by hour for three days to get
these tickets so that some of them can
go down to attend a conference.
There are so many things that a Christian
doesn't need to be happy, especially to be
happy in the Lord.
Lot says, I'll have that.
And so he chooses the plane of Jordan
and he goes this way.
And Abram says, you take the right hand,
I'll go to the left.
You take the left hand, I'll go to
the right.
And I leave the decision with you.
And in the ultimate, it's left with God.
Lot makes his choice.
He goes his way.
Abraham then takes what is left.
And what happens?
Well, you know what happens.
It says here in verse 14, the Lord
said unto Abram after the lot was separated
from him, lift up now thine eyes and
look from the place where thou art northward
and southward and eastward and westward for all
the land which thou seest to thee will
I give it unto thy seed forever.
And I will make thy seed as the
dust of the earth, so that if a
man can number the dust of the earth,
then shall thy seed also be numbered.
Arise, walk through the land in the length
of it and in the breadth of it,
for I will give it unto thee.
And Abram removed his tent and came and
dwelt in the place of the plane of
Mamre.
Now, some translation of this word, Mamre, is
from the vision.
From the vision.
God gives him a vision.
He gives him a twofold vision.
He gives him a vision of himself, and
he gives him a vision of the land.
And the vision is you have left the
choice with me.
You did not choose the best for yourself.
You left it for Lot to take what
he wanted.
You left the choice with me.
I will give you what my choice is
for you.
And he gave him the vision of the
land.
Do we experience or appreciate a vision of
the land that God has given to us?
The possession which is ours in Christ, and
the material things drop off from us until
we look full into the face and person
of our glorious Lord, which we are doing
in the evening, Lord willing, and we see
something of the great inheritance that God has
given to us.
Let us walk through the land, the length
and the breadth of it, to the north
and to the south of it.
And he says, I will give it to
you.
Reminds us of Joshua later on, doesn't it?
Moses' servant and his follower.
So that's the vision.
Mamre means from the vision God is going
to reward him for leaving the choice with
him.
Chapter 14, you have the battle.
Now, that's a future battle.
That's a prophetic battle, I should say, of
the days that are coming when the Melchizedek,
the King of Salem, and the priest of
the Most High God comes out in verse
18 to meet Abram coming from the slaughter
of the kings.
I suggest to you, if you're interested, you
want to know something about how our Lord
is going to appear to Israel in the
Melchizedek, in the character of being the Melchizedek
High Priest, you look at this battle here,
because there's another battle going to take place
shortly in the land of Israel.
Consequent upon that battle, and the outcome of
that battle, Israel is going to discover who
the Melchizedek High Priest really is.
So this is prophetic.
And Melchizedek goes out to meet Abram, and
he blesses him, as you have in verse
19.
And then the King of Sodom comes out
and makes his offer to him, and Abram
refuses anything from the hands of the King
of Sodom, because he knows the possessor of
heaven and earth.
He will not take us from a thread,
he says in verse 23, chapter 14, even
to a shoelace.
Now, consequent upon that, we have in chapter
15 another vision of God to Abraham.
After these things, now that embraces the battle,
the meeting with Melchizedek, the High Priest, or
the Priest of the Most High God, that's
a millennial title, and then the meeting of
the temptation with the King of Sodom.
After these three things, then what happens?
The word of the Lord came unto Abram
in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram, I
am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.
The spoils of the victory were not Abram's.
The spoils of the victory for Abram was
God.
He was to be his exceeding great reward.
He would take nothing from the King of
Sodom.
He would take everything from the Most High
God, the possessor of heaven and earth.
Why should we live in poverty?
Why should we live in spiritual destitution?
Why should we be down and discouraged, and
why should we feel we have nothing and
are nothing?
When the Lord is the portion of his
people, he will be our shield, shield from
the temptations of the King of Sodom, and
our exceeding great reward when we lose nothing
by choosing him.
So that's the vision in part of chapter
15.
Then, as a result of that, we have
the promise of an heir, and that comes
in verse 4.
This will be God's subject with Abraham from
now on.
He's going to talk about the seed.
He's going to talk about the heir.
He said that he would, in verse 5,
he brought him forth abroad and said, Look
now toward heaven, and tell the stars.
Oh, I recall noticing over in verse 16
of chapter 13, it was the dust of
the earth.
His seed was going to be as the
dust of the earth.
Now God says, Look toward heaven, or the
heavens, and tell the stars, if thou be
able to number them.
That's the contrast between the dust of the
earth and the stars of heaven.
And he said unto him, So shall thy
seed be.
And then we have this famous statement repeated
in the New Testament.
He believed in the Lord, or in Jehovah,
and he counted it to him for righteousness.
Now, God goes back to say, It was
I in verse 7 that brought thee out
of Ur of the Chaldees.
And I who brought thee out of Ur
of the Chaldees now, not only will I
give you this land, but I will give
this land to your seed, to your posterity
forever and forever.
Later on we have two expressions, I think
it's in chapter 17, an everlasting possession and
an everlasting covenant.
My brethren, let us realize that what we
have to invest in today is what we
shall enjoy forever, and that is Christ.
In him are hidden all the treasures of
wisdom and knowledge.
The fullness of the Godhead is in him
bodily.
He has brought us out of idolatry, and
he has given us himself as our exceeding
great reward, as our possession, an eternal possession.
I sometimes say mostly to the young folks,
I could say it to the older young
folks I guess too, that I am convinced,
through personal experience and otherwise, that every Christian
has the birthright of having a personal covenant
relationship with God.
Now, I hope I will be able to
consider with you some of these cases of
some of the women and the circumstances under
which they came into a covenant relationship with
God.
And I believe that the Lord deals with
us not in the aggregate but in the
individuality of our persons and our life.
And God has an interest in being to
us a very personal, individual God, and revealing
to us his covenant, his plans, his purpose
for us now, individually.
We'll see that later on in others, men
as well as women, but I think for
today we should understand that.
Sometimes I believe that we diffuse our concept
of what we have in Christ by spreading
it out over the whole body of Christ,
and lose the individual relationship and character of
what we have in Christ.
I am thy shield and thy exceeding great
reward.
I may apologize to you modern folks, but
I'd still like to be a thy person,
a thy and a thee.
The thees and the thous, you know how
I like it over the you?
You see, you can't do this in Spanish.
You can't say you as we say it
in English and mean singular and plural at
the same time.
You can't do that.
I like it because it singles us out
individually.
And some people have trouble with the thees
and the thous, but I guess I was
raised in the thees and the thous, and
so the thees and the thous are part
of my makeup, and I can't change that.
Not that I necessarily want to.
But I like the Ten Commandments because it
says thou, thou, thou, thou, thou, and you
can't pass that on in the aggregate to
anybody.
You can't give that to the whole nation.
You can't give that to a whole congregation.
You can't give it to an assembly.
You can't give it to a family.
It's thou shall.
Individual.
God nails us individually, doesn't he?
I had a Jew came to see me
a little while back, and he landed at
my house with a big Bible under his
arm.
He said, my four sons gave me this
for Christmas, and I don't understand it.
And I said, I know what's the problem.
He's not going to understand the thees and
the thous.
It was a King James Version, you know,
and he said, I don't understand it, and
I was told that you could explain this
to me.
And I said, well, tell me what is
the problem.
What is it you don't understand?
He says, I don't understand the spakes and
the spokes.
That is a little bit of a development
on the thees and the thous.
God is to us our individual possession and
reward.
So we pray.
We pray.
May it please thee, our Father, to bless
our consideration of thyself and our glorious Lord,
the one who has come to us individually
and personally, who is our own.
May thy blessing rest upon thy people in
all our activities today we ask as we
commend us to thee in his name.
Amen.