And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep.
And he said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I have seen, and behold, a lampstand all of gold, with its bowl upon the top of it, and its seven lamps thereon; there are seven pipes to each of the lamps, which are upon the top thereof;
And two olive trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.
And I answered and spake to the angel that talked with me, saying, What are these, my lord?
Then the angel that talked with me answered and said unto me, Knowest thou not what these are? And I said, No, my lord.
Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain; and he shall bring forth the top stone with shoutings of Grace, grace, unto it.
Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts hath sent me unto you.
For who hath despised the day of small things? For these seven shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel; these are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth.
And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
And I saw another strong angel coming down out of heaven, arrayed with a cloud; and the rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.
And he had in his hand a little book open; and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left upon the earth;
And he cried with a great voice, as a lion roareth; and when he cried, the seven thunders uttered their voices.
And when the seven thunders uttered their voices, I was about to write; and I heard a voice from heaven saying, Seal up the things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.
And the angel that I saw standing upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his right hand to heaven,
And sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever, Who created the heaven, and the things that are therein, and the earth, and the things that are therein, and the sea, and the things that are therein, that there shall be delay no longer:
But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, then is finished the mystery of God, according to the good tidings which He declared to His servants the prophets.
Shall we bow together in prayer? I feel I have a burden this evening, a particular one to do with fellowship, but which will need all the Lord’s grace, I think, to discharge. We shall need all the Lord’s grace for you to really hear what He says.
So shall we, really all of us, unite together in taking hold of the Lord and standing in that anointing which is ours in the Lord Jesus Christ, made available to us by the Spirit of God for this time? Let us really bow together.
O Father, we come to Thee as Thy children, whom Thou hast redeemed through the precious blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank Thee, as we have already thanked Thee, for all that Thou art to us.
And Lord, now as we come, we pray that, as we turn to Thy Word, Thou wilt make it living and active. Thou wilt, Lord, make it to be something that is, as it were, a ministry of life from Thy throne to all of us.
O Lord, Thou knowest this burden I have. I believe it is from Thee, Lord. Help me to discharge it. Open a door of utterance to speak this mystery of Christ.
And, Lord, give us ears to hear by Thy Spirit what Thou art saying. Quieten the children, Lord, and every other noise, or anything else that would be used by the enemy to somehow make it difficult for Thee to get through to us.
Lord, we hold this time before Thee. We thank Thee there is an anointing for it. We thank Thee there is made a provision of grace for it. Lord, we would exploit that grace. We would take hold of it, Lord, for speaker and hearer alike.
We commit ourselves to Thee in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
There is one other little phrase in Deuteronomy 8. It is found in verse 2:
And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee these forty years in the wilderness, that He might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thy heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments, or not.
I would just like to underline that little word: “Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee.” Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee.
We have been talking about fellowship, and we have been talking about the principles of fellowship. We have been talking together about the meaning of true fellowship—something of its true meaning.
We discovered that fellowship is not just something that is surface or superficial. It is, in its deepest and most substantial sense, the sharing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful, through whom ye were called into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
That does not mean, of course, that the Lord Jesus has lost His unique position. He is still God the Son. But we, joined to Him, have become the new man. In this marvellous sense, we have been brought into a union with God in and through our Lord Jesus Christ, and into a union with one another.
We have come into an eternal relationship with God and an eternal relationship with one another in Him.
We spoke the other morning or evening—I cannot remember—on the principle of unity. Really, what I want to say this evening is an expansion and extension of that principle of unity: not a regulation, but a principle.
It is something which is cause and effect. If we obey that principle of unity, then there are certain consequences, certain results. We spoke, of course, about the oneness of all God’s people here on earth—our oneness with believers where we live, and so on.
What I want to speak about this evening is not so easy to put into a word or two, but it is what I call the principle of continuity. The principle of continuity is very rarely recognised or understood by the people of God.
It seems to me that ignorance of this principle is the undoing of many real and genuine movements of the Spirit of God. God starts to do something very real amongst His people, but because those dear believers—because we believers—do not understand that we are essentially and organically bound up with all that has been done before, we make some terrible mistakes. There are some tragedies.
Because the Lord says, “Remember not the former things,” in one connection—“I will do a new thing”—and because all of us love to be in something that is new, we forget that there are times when God says to us, “Thou shalt remember all the way that the Lord thy God hath led thee.”
Now, of course, we do not recite the creed together. But there is a phrase in the creed, the earliest of all the creeds that Christians recite, and it is this: “I believe in the communion of saints.”
What does that mean? It means simply this: we are not only one with all who are in Christ on this earth now, but we are one in Christ with all that God has brought into Him from time immemorial.
Now, is that not wonderful? That means all the saints who are gathered into the presence of the Lord—we are organically one with them. God has been only doing one thing.
The history of the church is not a whole series of little things that God has been doing: doing a little thing here, doing a little thing there. This century He does something and it breaks down; then He does something in another century and it breaks down; then He starts again somewhere else and it breaks down, with no relationship to the rest.
What God has been doing is an essential entity. It is something which began at the cross, whose dynamic was Pentecost, and God has never stopped working that work to this very day.
Every single one—whatever their colour, whatever their race, whatever their nationality, whatever part of the globe they happen to live in—if they have been saved by the grace of God at any time in history, as well as those who are alive now, all those who have been brought into Christ, we are one body. There is only one church.
It is a vital principle. As I have already said, it is because of ignorance of this principle that many moves of the Spirit of God have been undone, and finally nullified and destroyed. We have not understood this principle of continuity.
I do hope that I am able, by the grace of God, to put over quite clearly what I mean. You see, so often I find that where the Lord has really started to show something to His people—especially younger people—and we are bowled over by what we see, we tend to get the idea that everything else has failed but us.
You know that kind of attitude: everything else has failed. The Methodists failed; the Quakers failed; the Puritans failed; the Moravians failed; the Brethren failed; the Pentecostals have failed miserably. Everyone has failed but us.
“We have seen. We have seen. We are a new thing. We are the new thing of God.” We put a little circle around ourselves and get very superior about it. We feel that everything else in the history of the church has failed but us.
This is an invitation for God to leave us to the enemy’s work. For once we do this, we uncover ourselves in the most terrible way.
Just as on a personal level, the Lord Jesus said to Peter:
Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat:
But I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not.
Peter uncovered himself by making a claim from his own fleshly life: “I will die with You, Lord, if I have to, but I will never deny You.” In that moment, he uncovered himself.
In the same way, corporately, we often get into this trap where we think we are succeeding where everything else has failed in the history of the church. We are, as it were, the unique work of God.
I sometimes get letters from people who tell me that nothing has happened in that particular part of the world for a century or more. Then they say, “Now something tremendous has happened.” I wait for them to collapse, because I have never known anyone make such a claim without, within a year or two, being completely bowled over and destroyed.
Our problem is that sometimes we think we have no link with anything that has gone before—nothing at all. We think we have nothing really to learn from what has gone before, and that we have no organic link with it.
If we do learn from it, we only learn from it as a kind of historical object lesson. We do not understand that they are part of us, and that we are part of them. All that God has done down through the ages is an essential unity.
Where were the early Methodists? In Christ. Where were the early Quakers? In Christ. Where were the Puritans? In Christ. Where were the Reformers? In Christ. Where were the early Brethren? In Christ. And so are we.
You understand? It is something that binds us together.
Ignorance of this principle often leads to a rejection of all the values of the past, as if what God is doing in our generation has to be unique in the sense that it draws nothing at all from the values and heritage of the past.
You know, I feel sorry sometimes when we do not sing some of the old hymns that represent the values of what God has done in the history of the church. I know some of them are antiques, and some are best left. But there are some which represent the choicest and most wonderful values that God wrought in His people in that day and age.
They belong to us. It is not just that we are singing something antique; we are expressing something that we have come into by the grace of God. It cost the Lord and His people everything to recover those truths which are now household words with us.
Again, another one of the problems is innovation. Have you noticed how often one of the things the enemy tries to do in new moves of God is to bring innovations in—things that have never, at any time, been amongst the people of God from the day of Pentecost until today?
Sometimes they are weird things. Sometimes they are things sort of hooked onto some obscure passage of the Word of God, twisted and explained, and somehow you have an innovation which sweeps through everything.
We find it again and again and again, as if somehow we have to find something novel, something that has never been done before, something unique, something which seems a unique work of God. But, my dear friend, that is not what God is doing.
There is a sense in which every single thing we come into has already been in the church. There is nothing new under the sun in this matter.
People sometimes think that speaking in tongues is somehow a new thing. My dear friend, they are ignorant of church history. People tell me it died with the early church. When did it die with the early church?
The Montanists spoke in tongues. The Waldensians spoke in tongues. The Bogomils spoke in tongues. The Paulicians spoke in tongues. The Anabaptists spoke in tongues. Some of the Huguenots—the Prophets of the Cévennes—spoke in tongues. The early Methodists spoke in tongues. The Quakers spoke in tongues. Where is all this nonsense?
Is baptism something that came in with the late nineteenth century? Never. The Waldensians practised baptism. The Bogomils practised baptism. The Paulicians practised baptism. Now you are getting fogged by all these marvellous names.
There is nothing new about it. The Anabaptists, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were drowned in their thousands in the fountains of central Europe—sewed up in sacks, mothers and children, and flung into rivers—for baptism by immersion.
Believers’ baptism is a household word amongst the people of God now. Even Episcopalians slip away to some Baptist place to get baptised, and Presbyterians, and Methodists, and all the rest. We recognise it.
Because when the enemy is seeking to undo something through our ignorance of this principle of continuity, he presses in innovations—things that have never been known before from the beginning until now. By those things, he seeks to divide and destroy the people of God in that generation.
Now, what I am saying is this: I do not want to be on the negative side; I want to be on the positive side. We have a tremendous heritage, brothers and sisters—dear family of God.
It is the most wonderful privilege to be alive in the last half of the twentieth century. There are people who tell me they would have given a right arm to be there on the day of Pentecost. I would not. Who wants to be there on the day of Pentecost? I think it is simply tremendous that we are here in the last part of the twentieth century. Do you not?
They were starting out, and it was wonderful when they were starting out and seeing all the wonderful works of God, the power of God, the signs and miracles authenticating the ministry and the gospel.
But I find it even more wonderful that we should come at the end of the age and have behind us a heritage which has cost the blood and life of thousands of God’s choicest overcomers. Shall we trample it underfoot? Shall we treat it as refuse?
Shall we look upon it as having nothing to do with us, merely as little historical illustrations of the power of God in such-and-such a century? Or did God do something then which is essentially part of what He is doing today?
Only today, He wants to lead us on just that step further. With all that fullness behind us, with all that heritage behind us, He wants to take us on for the last step that will result in the coming of our Lord and the top stone going into place.
One of the prophets once said to the children of Israel, and it is recorded in Isaiah 51:
Hearken to Me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord:
Look unto the rock whence ye were hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye were digged.
Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you; for when he was but one, I called him, and I blessed him, and made him many.
For the Lord hath comforted Zion; He hath comforted all her waste places, and hath made her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.
I am asking you this night that you will remember all the way that the Lord our God has led us from the day of Pentecost. Of course, if I had the time, I would like to go right back to Father Abraham and start there—and well we might—and go right the way through the whole Old Testament and into the New. But we have not time to do that.
The fact of the matter is this: God has been doing something all the way through the centuries of this age. The work that He has been doing is a continuous work. It is a consistent and continuous work.
Within it, therefore, we shall find all the values that we need for the day and age in which we live. Why should we be, as an illustration of what Mark Twain said, those who learn from history that we never learn from history?
If the people of God would only understand the ways of the Lord—understand some of those ways by which He led His own through the centuries of this age—we would be saved from many tragedies and become much wiser in our understanding of what God is doing in our own day.
Now I would like to say something about the testimony of Jesus. You will notice in the prophecy of Zechariah 4 that the first thing Zechariah saw was that lampstand all of gold.
He was very taken with the olive tree on either side which fed the lampstand all of gold. Of course, I think most of us recognise that the lampstand all of gold is a symbol of the testimony of Jesus.
We find later on in the book of Revelation that it stands for seven churches—the church expressed in seven localities. But we discover that it is not just the church, because the lampstand could be removed while the church, its activities, its meetings, and its routine could rumble on.
The lampstand is not just the outward paraphernalia of the church. The lampstand stands for our Lord Jesus: the testimony of Jesus, that Christ is everything and that in Him is everything we need, individually and corporately.
Now we find here in Zechariah 4 that this lampstand stands for building. We immediately discover that the whole thing is to do with building. It is an extraordinary vision.
The first thing Zechariah sees is a gold lampstand with its seven branches and its seven lamps alight; then an olive tree on the left hand and on the right hand. Then he sees pipes feeding gold from the olive trees into the lampstand. Extraordinary.
Then he says to the angel, “What are these, my lord?” He means the olive trees, because he has some feeling that the olive trees have to do with himself. We are all self-centred. “What are these?” he says to the angel. He forgot the lampstand altogether. He was most interested in where he came into the picture.
The angel said:
This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain; and he shall bring forth the top stone with shoutings of Grace, grace, unto it.
“The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation; his hands shall also finish it.”
We suddenly discover, to our amazement, that this lampstand is not something static. It represents a building work of God, a building programme of God—something that God is doing in His people, in His redeemed ones.
He is calling them out of every nation and kindred and tongue and people, and doing something in them whereby Christ becomes in them everything in everyone.
If we had the time, we could talk much more about it. It comes down to locality, the area in which we live, and our relatedness with one another, and so on. Of course, it must include all that. But what I am trying simply to say is this.
This lampstand is not some abstract, glorious ideal set before the church. It is not some beautiful, ethereal thing somewhere up there in the heavenlies that no one ever sees, but which invisibly is taking place.
It is a building programme in which God is engaged, with living stones being built together upon a foundation. As the building goes up, the word of the Lord comes to Zerubbabel: “Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.”
The top stone—the last stone of the whole building programme—shall come forth with shoutings of “Grace, grace, unto it.”
I have always been amazed that the word is “Grace, grace,” and not “Glory, glory.” Good charismatics, I suppose, would all feel that the shouts would be, “Glory! God has done it! A great press, like a tidal wave, has come in, and the work has been finished.”
But I think there will be such conflict, such pressure, such intense pressure, and so many complex problems, that when the building is ready for the top stone—who is the Messiah—all we shall be able to say when we see the Messiah is, “The grace of God has completed the work.”
Grace began it, grace developed it, grace kept it moving, and grace has completed the work.
We read of the mystery of Christ in Ephesians 3:3-6. This is the same thought again, all to do with the testimony of Jesus:
Whereby, when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ;
Which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit;
To wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
Oh, what a wonderful thing this mystery is. It has been hidden. You see, I believe that God started this whole work with Abraham, and that the faithful of the old covenant are indissolubly joined to us. God has held them back that they should not be made perfect without us. Is that not wonderful?
We have been brought here. Nevertheless, in one sense it is a new thing that God is doing. What is the new thing? The body was not revealed in the old covenant. This organic entity was not revealed.
Now it has been revealed by the Spirit of God. The coming of the Holy Spirit has brought the whole thing from outside to within. We are joined to the Lord and joined to one another in an organic union in Christ.
What a wonderful thing it is that the book of Revelation tells us that the mystery of God is completed. It says that when the seventh angel sounds, the mystery of God is completed.
Thank God, the battle over the mystery is going to be completed. The Lord is going to win this great battle. The purpose of God has never at any time been annulled, nor even frustrated.
Jesus said:
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
Now, you will see that some versions say “the gates of Hades,” and some modern versions say something about death—the power of death, perhaps. This phrase, “the gates of Hades,” is a difficult idea.
Gates are the strongest point in one sense. The walls are strong, but the gates are also massive and strong. Within the gates, the elders used to sit for judgment. Thus, gates came to represent judgment or counsel.
So here we have the very judgment or counsels of hell. I think the King James Version was quite right to use the word “hell” rather than “Hades,” because really the idea is of death. What is the weapon of Satan? What is his supreme weapon when he fights the building work of Christ? It is death—death and death and more death.
That is how he always works. We have here the very counsels of death. If you like, the Lord Jesus said, “Upon this rock I will build My church, and the counsel of Satan shall not prevail against it. The judgment of hell shall not prevail against it. The will and design of hell shall not prevail against it.”
There is another way of looking at it, for it is deliberately ambiguous. It could mean that when the church presses into enemy territory, the gates of hell—the counsel of hell to keep captives in its hold—shall not prevail.
Is that not wonderful? When hell comes against us, it is not going to prevail over us. And when we, by the grace of God and by the command and commission of our risen Lord, go into the very realm of Satan to take out captives, he will not be able to stop us.
Gates can be unlocked. Gates can be locked up. “Unto thee have I given the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” We must unlock gates at times, and we must lock them up at other times.
Oh, there is a battle over this purpose of our Lord. All the combined power and authority of hell cannot deter our Lord Jesus from fulfilling His purpose to build the church.
Christ’s hands laid the foundation. His hands are going to finish the work. Thanks be unto God, Who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
There are mountains before us. There have always been mountains before us. There were mountains of difficulty and complexity before the early church.
The Jewish-Hebrew side found it very difficult to sit down and have a meal even with the Gentile side that was saved. Even the apostle Peter got carried away at one point. Do you not call that a mountain of complexity? I do.
Circumcision was another great problem. It was a mountain of complexity. They had so many problems. Sometimes they had immorality amongst them, because those Gentiles coming in had not got the law, as it were, burnt into their beings as the Jewish side had. There were many problems. There have always been problems.
Would you not think that those poor souls called the Waldensians had problems? It was they who caused the Roman Catholic Church to withhold the Word of God from ordinary people, because they said, “These wild, wild, wild fanatics have got wild by reading the Word of God.”
So they passed the decree: “The ordinary people shall not read the Word of God.” Do you not call that a mountain of difficulty? I do.
Oh, the mountains! But it does not matter what mountains have been before our Lord Jesus Christ in the fulfilment of His purpose to build the church. They have all become a plain. Not a single mountain has stood in the way of our Lord once He has moved forward in the fulfilment of His purpose.
When we look at the book of Revelation, we see false prophets and beasts and dragons—visions of the most terrifying creatures, worldwide systems that are anti-God and antichrist, with seemingly supreme power. But none of it stops the Lord Jesus from fulfilling His purpose and finally finishing the mystery, completing the mystery. It all comes to pass.
Christ calls Himself, in Revelation 22:13:
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
Oh, dear child of God, see this principle of fellowship, the principle of continuity. Jesus said, “I am the Alpha,” and He is the Omega. Dear child of God, we are all in between.
He is the first and He is the last; dear child of God, we are all between. He is the beginning and He is the end; dear child of God, we are all in between.
Oh, to me it is such a thrill to think of those early ones who overcame by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, because they loved not their lives unto death.
Whether they were Paulicians or Bogomils, Donatists or Montanists, Priscillianists or Waldensians, whether they were the Reformers, the Huguenots, the Moravians, Quakers, Methodists, or Pentecostals—whoever they were—we are together with them.
Jesus is the first and Jesus is the last. Jesus is the beginning and Jesus is the end. There is a continuity in this whole thing. Here, dear child of God, we have behind us tremendous wealth: that which God has wrought in the members of His Son’s body. It has cost them everything.
I very much love this title of our Lord Jesus in Revelation 3:14:
And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.
I think it is unparalleled grace that when the Lord speaks to the church of Laodicea, He reveals Himself as the Amen. Amen. Amen is the last word. You do not say anything beyond amen—or you should not.
I knew a little boy who thought that when he heard people say “Amen,” it meant the end of everything. So, as soon as his parents began to talk too long about other things, he began to say, “Amen, amen, amen, amen.” He thought that was the best way to shut them up, because amen was the ultimate.
Now, normally you understand that word as “Even so. Let it be.” But amen comes from the Hebrew amin. Amin simply means to have faith. When you say, “Amen,” you are saying, “I have faith. Even so.”
Think of that next time you say amen. Our Lord Jesus is the Amen to the purpose of God. Even if you have not got faith, He has.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is the One Who is going to carry the purpose of God through to its fulfilment by the grace of God. We are in something God began at Pentecost by His Spirit through Christ’s finished work.
Oh, dear child of God, the prophecy of Joel was never completely fulfilled on the day of Pentecost. I think most of you know that. If you look at the prophecy of Joel in Joel 2 and compare it with Acts 2, you have to come to the conclusion that it has not been fulfilled, for it speaks of that great and notable day of the Lord.
What does it mean, then? It means this: the Holy Spirit is to characterise the whole of this age. It was by the Holy Spirit that this age was ushered in at Pentecost.
Every single move right through the history of the church of God in this age has been initiated by the Holy Spirit. Whether it has been keeping alive something in the Dark Ages, whether it was a recovery of something in the Reformation, or whether it has been in the successive recoveries that have come since then, it has been the Holy Spirit Who has taken hold of men and women and used them in recovery.
Now, I do not want to bore you all, because I know that most people are frightened to death of history—especially Americans. Mind you, you are now coming of age. I do not wish to be superior. But, of course, you are coming of age, and increasingly you will be more and more interested in history, if the Lord tarries.
I wish we could learn the lessons of history. I wish we could understand what God has done in history. Never at any moment, even in what are called the Dark Ages, has the testimony of Jesus been completely lost.
It is a mistake to say that from the second century after Christ until the Reformation everything was lost. It is just not true. An intensive and exhaustive study of the history of the church of God will reveal some of the most remarkable movements of the Spirit in the so-called Dark Ages.
You think of these people called Montanists. Charismatics have not got a monopoly. The Montanists were the charismatics of the fourth century. They shook the Roman Catholic Church.
Tertullian, the great church father, severed his connection with the institutional church and joined the Montanists. Their principle was that where two or three are gathered together in our Lord Jesus Christ, there is the church.
There are many others too. By the way, the Montanists never took the name “Montanists”; that was given to them by everybody else. The Donatists who came later did not take that name either; it was given to them by others.
Then there were the Paulicians. They were very proud because they said they went right back to Paul himself, and so people called them Paulicians because they had such an understanding of the eternal purpose of God and the mystery of Christ as found in the Pauline letters.
Then there were the Bogomils. “Bogomil” sounds dreadful, does it not? But Bogomil means “friend of God.” They called them the friends of God.
All these were great movements. The Priscillianists in the south of France, Spain, and Italy were one of the greatest moves of the church of God. These people saw certain principles.
They saw that a congregation should not be ruled by any other congregation. They saw that there should be elders in charge of the congregation. They saw the Lord’s Table as something that illustrated their fellowship together in Christ. In some of these congregations, they saw the matter of baptism.
I mean, this is all the Dark Ages. We are normally told that nothing happened there. So much of the information we have about these people can only be gleaned from those who hated them and martyred them.
You know as well as I do that when you read little booklets written about some of my friends—those from whom I have gained so much through the Lord—if that was all we had, we would believe they were heretics. Thank God, we have their ministry as well as the little pamphlets written against them.
All these names were given to them by other people, and much of what has so far been understood about these people has come from sources violently against them, sources out to blacken their name and justify their mass martyrdom.
Oh, dear child of God, the fact of the matter is that in the darkest part of the Dark Ages, the testimony of Jesus never at any single point died out. It was kept alive in different parts of Europe and Asia by the Spirit of God.
There were movements of the Spirit of God which cost the lives of those who were in them to obey the Lord and to honour Him.
I wish I could say a good deal more about this, but time does not permit us to. I would like to talk about the Waldensians and the Albigensians.
I suppose most of you have heard of the Waldensian church. You have an airline here called Piedmont, and of course it was in those valleys of the Piedmont that the Waldensians were finally driven and found their refuge.
I understand that no atheist ever travels on Piedmont—so I am told—and if you should get on as an atheist, you will never get off as an atheist. So they tell me.
The fact of the matter is that we find different movements of the Spirit of God all the way through the Dark Ages. When we come to the Reformation era, of course, we begin to see something much more wonderful.
We begin with John Wycliffe. I can only give you a few thoughts here. In 1320, in Britain, he was not forgotten. John Wycliffe was converted by reading the Word of God in Latin.
God did such a work in his heart that, as he began to investigate the various activities and traditions of the church, he became increasingly troubled that they did not measure up to the Word of God. Fearlessly, he began to preach against various abuses in the church. He was hated for it.
John Wycliffe was so hated that they held a special council in London, at which both the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Canterbury came, as well as all the bishops of England.
They had well-nigh decided to burn John Wycliffe as a heretic, but they adjourned for lunch. During that adjournment, London was hit by one of the only earthquakes that has ever hit London. The bishops were so frightened that they never reconvened, and Wycliffe died in bed.
Wycliffe was the man who set Britain on fire. His followers were called the Lollards. We do not know why they were called Lollards—whether it was because they talked so much, or because they seemed to be drunk with the Spirit. We do not know.
But this we know: they said that if there were three men together in any place in Britain, two of them were bound to be Lollards. That was a common saying throughout Britain.
The only thing the church could do with Wycliffe was to dig up his bones one hundred years after his death, desecrate them, and throw them in the river. I do not think that worried John Wycliffe.
Jerome of Prague heard John Wycliffe, and went back to Prague and began to preach in the University of Prague, one of the oldest universities of Europe. A young man, John Huss, listened to him.
That man was to go over the whole of Bohemia—what is now Czechoslovakia and part of Germany. Everywhere he went, people found God and began to gather together in simple gatherings in farmhouses and homes, having fellowship together and listening to the Word of God.
John Wycliffe translated the Bible from Latin into English, and that was the greatest gift that he gave. From that, it began to go out everywhere.
The church caught John Huss at Constance and burned him at the stake. But when they burned John Huss, they set Europe on fire. From then on, the Reformation was under way.
William Tyndale, in Britain, had his lifelong ambition to take the Bible from the original Greek—and later from the Hebrew—and put it into the language of the man in the street.
A theologian was sent to convert him from his wicked ways. Tyndale said to that theologian, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
William Tyndale was hounded from Britain to Brussels and Antwerp, where finally he was caught, strangled, and burned. But before he died, he prayed, “O God, open the King of England’s eyes.”
He died in 1536. In 1538, by royal proclamation, a copy of the Bible in English was chained to a lectern in every parish church of England and Wales.
The Bible, which the whole establishment was so against, got into the hands of the people. At one time, an appeal was made to the king that he should do something about it, because in church services people were so bored with the vicar that they left him preaching in the pulpit, went over around the lectern, and had one of their number read the Scriptures in English to them.
They got more from the Word of God than from the vicar.
Of course, Erasmus is another man whom we must mention in this Reformation. God took hold of this man, and as someone said, “Erasmus laid the egg that Martin Luther hatched.”
The point was that Erasmus gave us, for the first time, the Bible in our own tongue from the original Greek. Until then, every version had been from Jerome’s old Latin. Now, for the first time, a Greek New Testament was put into the hands of people all over Europe. It was revolutionary.
It was that Greek New Testament which William Tyndale translated into English, and which became really the basis of the King James Version.
When Martin Luther came—that man so hated by some, so courageous—the Reformation was fully come. Nothing stopped Martin Luther.
By 1517, three things that caused controversy throughout the civilised world became household words and were accepted by all true believers:
Now those three things, dear child of God, you accept as bread and butter. Who argues about justification? Who gets heated about justification? I wish they did. Everyone accepts that we can go to the holiest place of all without a priest by the blood of Jesus, that we can come before God and speak with Him immediately.
All of us accept the supreme authority and inspiration of the Word of God. But it cost those men their lives. It has come to us by the Spirit of God and has been given to us so that it has become our bread and butter.
God recovered something in the Reformation that was never to be lost again. To this very day, it has not been lost. There may be people who do not preach justification and people who do not believe in the Word of God, but every true believer knows what justification is. Every true believer understands that the Word of God is authoritative and entire.
Since the Reformation, there have been so many other things that it would take us all night and all the morrow to deal adequately with the many moves of the Spirit of God. I can only touch on a few.
Take what we call the Puritans. You folks here in the United States must thank God for those Puritans, because it was the persecution of the Puritans that sent those founding fathers across the Atlantic to these shores.
The very best of the people of God were expelled into a life of suffering and endurance, and they did it for the sake of our Lord. They could so easily have sacrificed everything for just a few adjustments on principle, but they would not. They would not.
The Puritans may be sneered at by some, but they laid a foundation for us as the people of God that has never been taken away. They gave us a godliness and an attitude to the things of God which has permeated Christian things from that day to this.
We can divide the Puritans into three groups, basically: the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists—or Independents—and the Baptists.
In a very short time, that movement of the Spirit of God, with Calvin and others really the fathers of the Puritans, had split into four great groups: the establishment, the evangelical churchmen, and these other groups.
Just think of the three free groups: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. They gave us something which has never been taken away.
Is it not interesting now that all over our countries we are coming to recognise eldership as the recognised norm, as far as God is concerned, for the government of the people of God? Who recovered this truth? The Presbyterians.
They were called Presbyterians because they believed in presbyters—elders. They believed that the church should be ruled by a court of elders, a plurality of elders.
The Congregationalists believed in the independence of every congregation. It was a fantastic view in the day they set it forward. They believed that every congregation, consisting of the believers in any given locality, had no right to be ruled or dominated by any other congregation of believers.
Oh, if only God had kept that thought alive. There is something that was recovered for us—and which cost the blood and life of many—which in some movements has been flung on one side. Churches all over the place have been taken under the control of one or two, or a group of individuals.
But the Congregationalists saw that every single company of God’s people, locally constituted, was independent and in direct liaison with God. They saw the need, of course, for fellowship between the companies, but not domination by one company over others.
Then, of course, we have the Baptists. They practised baptism by immersion. In Holland and Britain, and then increasingly over here, these dear ones gave us something which is now a household word.
Within a century after this great move of God, the whole thing had died. It had become institutionalised and crystallised—formal and dead.
Then God did a remarkable thing. A young man went all through the Puritans seeking to find God. His name was George Fox, but he could find God nowhere. He only heard their choirs, their singing, and their dead preaching.
He took his New Testament in English and went out into the hills of Derbyshire. For three years, like a young hippie, he sought for God, wandering up and down Britain, until one day he said, “My heart burned, and God showed me that Christ was my Saviour.” George Fox had been converted.
Many evangelicals are suspicious of the Quakers. They say they are not really true evangelicals, not really born again. Oh, it is rubbish.
The Quakers were one of the greatest moves of the Spirit of God in the history of the church, because they taught us a tremendous truth which, I pray God, has never yet been lost. It is this: the inward is far more important with God than all the outward in the whole world.
What is needed is communion with God, not merely bread and wine. What is needed is to know what it is to die with Christ and to live in His resurrection, not merely baptism. What is needed is to know what it is to submit to one another, not merely elders.
What we need is to be built together, not merely to have a nice church building. Oh, the Quakers went everywhere. They turned the world upside down. The Puritans hated them.
But the Quakers recovered something which has never been lost: that the nature of the church is essentially an inward thing, an inward and organic thing.
You know, the Quakers used to meet together and wait in silence. Not like they do today, with all that long silence and sentimentality—twittering birds and lovely sunsets and all that kind of thing.
The early Quakers met together as solid, sturdy, rough men. They would wait in quietness before God, and before very long someone would tremble with the power of God and stand up and speak the Word of the Lord.
Then someone would open the Bible and, as they said, get a word from God. Then someone would prophesy. Then someone would worship God. They did not sing because they were reacting against dead singing, as they called it.
It is amazing to me that the Quakers got the same results as the Pentecostals. The Pentecostals sometimes tremble and shake, and yet they sing beautifully. But the Quakers did not believe in singing or music. Is that not interesting?
A hundred years after that, of course, we have another great movement of God which I can only touch upon: the Moravians. It began in central Europe and was one of the most remarkable contributions of the Spirit of God for recovery in the history of the church.
Up to them, the Puritans had perhaps not really considered the evangelistic mission of the church. But the Moravians saw something that no one else saw—not even the Quakers.
They saw that there were people dying in outer darkness, and that it was the commission of the church to take the gospel to them. They said, “We will choose the hardest parts of the earth.” They went to the Arctic and to the most difficult parts of the world. They died in their hundreds.
The Moravians had a prayer meeting twenty-four hours a day which lasted one hundred years. Do not think I am exaggerating. They had an around-the-clock, twenty-four-hour prayer meeting which lasted a hundred years.
They are all connected, by the way. You see how they are connected? George Fox would never have had a Bible in English but for William Tyndale. William Tyndale could not have been awakened but for Erasmus, and Erasmus would not have been awakened but for John Huss and others, and for Wycliffe. So we can see it all going on.
Now we suddenly find that a man came over to these parts, a good Britisher. He came over here to convert you all, and especially the Red Indians. His name was John Wesley.
But in his journals he said, “O God, I have come to convert the Indians, but who will convert me?” On his way over in the ship, he heard singing during a most terrible storm. Even the captain was terrified.
Wesley said that he would not admit it, but he was frightened. He went down to the bowels of the ship, and as he went down he heard singing. He said, “Oh, it must be heaven.”
Then he looked through a door and saw a whole group of Moravians—men, women, and children. He said it was just as if it were a drawing-room meeting. They were sitting there singing hymns as if there were no danger at all.
Wesley’s heart longed to have the faith those Moravians had. He never got it here in the States. He went back to Britain, and in Fleet Street, at a little meeting where a Moravian preacher was preaching, Wesley went along.
What do you think the Moravian preacher was reading? He was reading Luther’s preface to Romans. As he heard it being read, Wesley said, “I felt a strange warming in my heart.” God had saved him.
Thus began the first great evangelical awakening in the British Isles. It spread to every part of Britain. John Wesley went everywhere. They turned him out of the churches, so he stood on gravestones and tombs and preached to people in graveyards.
Then they turned him out of the graveyards, so he went to the fields. One time he preached to thirty thousand men who were considered the offscouring of society. They were all miners.
He said, “You know, I was so dead when I preached to them that I could not believe anything was happening until I saw a strange sight. I saw that all their faces were black, with white stripes. Then I understood that they were weeping.”
Thousands and thousands of people were saved all over Britain and here in the States, for those early Methodists came over here before long.
George Whitefield, the other great colleague and companion in that move of God, and the Wesleys fell out over the whole battle of predestination and split the thing in two.
Almost a hundred years later, simultaneously in Dublin, Plymouth, Bath, and Bristol, companies of people came together seeking simply to meet as Christians and believers without any regard to denominations.
It was one of the most remarkable movements of the Spirit of God in the history of the church. It was the beginning of what we now call Brethrenism. It was to spread over the whole British Isles and far beyond, and to have an influence upon the things of God such as no other movement of the Spirit of God has had.
The Wesleyans gave us something. The Puritans never accentuated new birth, but the Wesleyans emphasised being born again. They gave us the truth—which has never again been taken away from us—that we are to be born again.
They also gave us something else: that there is a fulness of salvation to be had, an experience of the Spirit of God to be had.
The Brethren gave us another wonderful truth: all the people of God are one. We all belong to one another. They emphasised the coming of the Lord as no other group before them had done.
Oh, the simple way in which they broke bread together and worshipped the Lord together, giving themselves, as it were, over to the Spirit of God to lead whom He would in worship and praise and in serving the Lord together.
Some of these features had been in the others, by the way. The Wesleyans had class meetings in the early days, where they met together. One would have a hymn, one a Scripture, one a testimony, and one would pray as the Spirit of God led. The Quakers also had these features in their beginnings.
But I must hasten on or we will be here all night. Through the Brethren, the Spirit of God recovered the unity of God’s people and gave it to us in a way that has never been lost, at least for the true believer.
Then, in 1906—and there were many things before it—we had the advent of Pentecostalism. Some people do not really recognise Pentecostalism as a move of God at all, but we have to.
More recently, a history has been written for the first time from the academic point of view of Pentecostalism. When you read it in a detached way, you have to recognise that God was in this thing.
God was telling us that the gifts of the Spirit are not lost, but are present in the body of man; that there is an enduement with power from on high.
Now, you see, dear child of God, if we were to bring all these features together, we would have fulness.
The tragedy of the whole thing is that nearly every single one of these movements, within ten years, had major divisions. The Puritans, within fifteen years, divided into four. The Reformers, within twenty years, divided again into three major groups.
The Quakers did not get divided, thank God—until much later. The Methodists divided within the first twenty years into two huge groups: Whitefield on one side, the Wesleys on the other.
The Brethren, within twenty years, divided into Open Brethren and Exclusive Brethren. The Pentecostals had not gone more than ten years before they were divided into so many divisions that it is impossible to enumerate them.
But is that not amazing?
Of course, since then there have been some remarkable things in modern history. We must mention what happened in China with Watchman Nee. We must also mention what happened in our country with that prophet of God, T. Austin-Sparks.
We are now in a move of God which, I believe, we are being pushed into by political and economic pressures, behind which comes God.
We are being pushed into a discovery of one another again. We are being pushed into fellowship with one another. We are being pushed into a sort of grassroots participation.
Everywhere I go now, in universities, everyone wants grassroots participation. The students want to take part. They want to be able to talk back, and all the rest.
Now at last something is happening in the church of God. The old pulpit-pew relationship appears to have gone forever. Thank God.
Something is happening. There would never have been a Reformation without economic and political pressures; God was behind them. Now God has turned the whole table around and is using something to push us back to finding one another in the Lord, moving together in the Lord, and expressing our priesthood as believers in the Lord.
I do not believe, as we come to the end of this age and enter into whatever, however long, this last phase will be, that we can cut ourselves off from all that has gone before. It is a continuity.
God forbid that any one of us should cut ourselves off from what God has done in the past. We belong to them, as they belong to us.
It leaves me finally to say that there are lessons we must learn. I shall only enumerate them and not spend time on them.
Within a generation, most movements of the Spirit of God have formalised, died, and crystallised into institutions. In nearly all of them, within twenty years, major division has resulted in the fragmentation of the whole.
It is an interesting fact that God, Who is absolutely sovereign, appears not to be bothered about keeping them alive. Now, this must be a question to all of you who are students of the Word: why, if God is sovereign, does He not keep alive these things?
It seems to me that once the first generation is over, it is as if God says, “Well now, let that die.” God gets in the first generation, and in the second generation, if they are in the good of the first, all the values He wants. Then He lets it die.
In other words, it seems to me that the materials for the city of God are produced by the Spirit during the beginnings of these movements and are never lost.
In every single thing that God has ever done by His Spirit in the history of the church, it may seem that man has destroyed it. It has not been destroyed. God has caught it up to heaven.
It is the Lamb’s wife. It has gone into heaven. The gold, the precious stones, the pearls which Christ laboured long in His people under the most difficult circumstances have gone into the city of God, and at the end you will find them there.
Sometimes people think of what happened in China and say that it has all been lost. No, no, no, no. All the values of what God did in China are in the city, and in the end you shall find them there.
In every single generation in the history of the church, God has brought all that together. Recovery appears to be progressive.
We find, first, justification; access for every redeemed child of God into the presence of God through the Lord Jesus; the Word of God as authority; independent congregations, if you like to put it that way; eldership; baptism; the inward nature of everything in the church; new birth; the oneness of the people of God; the gifts of the Spirit; and enduement with power.
I wonder what God is trying to do in our day. I have sometimes wondered whether God is trying to reveal to us, and finally recover, the outward nature of the vessel, that we might finally understand what kind of vessel it is that all this is to be contained within. I do not know.
But what I do know is this: what has been recovered by the Spirit of God through the history of the church has never again been lost.
In the real people of God, in every generation, those values live on. That is why I am so concerned that I should speak about this principle of continuity. Why should we cut ourselves off from it? Why impoverish ourselves as if it does not belong to us, as if it is merely history?
It is all ours. And we, dear child of God, have something to add in our day and generation. May God make us faithful.
It seems to me that we have in that whole matter an illustration of the overcomer and the whole people of God.
You will notice that once something has been lost, every time God recovers it, it is through that little remnant, that little minority amongst the people of God, who have been prepared to lay down their lives and suffer whatever it is for the whole.
They are not called to be a superior elite in a circle, but to be for the whole church of God.
May the Lord show us what it means to be an overcomer: that in our own generation we may be those who are prepared to go the whole way with the Lord, whatever the price, whatever the cost, to lay down our lives so that all the people of God in our day and generation may benefit.
May the Lord help us. Vision determines how long any move of the Spirit of God lives.
It is interesting that the Brethren have lasted in life the longest of many of these moves of God, because they saw something more than many others.
May God make His people a people of vision—real vision—people who have an understanding of the will of God and an understanding of the purpose of God.
Shall we pray?
Dear Lord, help us to understand what has been said this evening. We are all, Lord, in, as it were, this one thing that Thou hast been doing through this age.
Help us, Lord, to understand it, and help us to draw from all those values that Thou hast recovered and deposited, as it were, in the life of Thy people.
We do not want to do without any of them, Lord. We want these features to be found in our gathering. We want, Lord, somehow, rather than all these things that have been so fragmented and isolated in crystallised denominations, that they might somehow all be brought together in a fulness.
May we express, dear Lord, something of Thy full mind in these days in which we live.
Only Thou canst make this wordless evening a living reality to us all. Do it, Lord. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.