When I first met Brother Sparks, forty-seven years ago, and then when I actually came into this place just forty years ago, in 1931, little thought I that, after all these years, it would fall to me here today to gather you, to offer our sympathetic condolences to his family, and, more than anything, to offer thanksgiving to God for him.
Thus things have worked out. It has not always been an easy forty years. It was not for him. But, thank God, we went right through it together, and here at the end our privilege is to worship God for all His goodness.
Many of you will be familiar with his books, and, if so, you will know the title of one of them, The School of Christ. I think that title enshrines his concept of what the Christian life is all about.
We are here, as long as we are here, to be taught by the Holy Spirit in the school which has as its objective the making of us like the true, the perfect Son, Who is our model, even Jesus Christ. We are here to learn Christ.
That, of course, means many things besides actual Bible studies. It was in the chastening—or, as he much preferred to render it, the child-training—of that school of Christ that Brother Sparks himself was a pupil, although, thank God, he was also a teacher. You can be both.
I think he was most able to help people just because he himself recognized that he was always a learner. His discipleship began when he was only seventeen years old and was walking down a Glasgow street, feeling rather miserable on a Sunday.
I have an idea Glasgow on a Sunday could be miserable in those days. But it was not the outside; it was the inside that was miserable. There was a crowd of eager young people holding an open-air meeting. He stopped, and he listened.
That night, in his own room, he trusted Christ as his Saviour. The next week he was out with them. He also was a witness. Before very long, he took his hat off, got into the ring, and started preaching.
He went on preaching for sixty-five years, and we thank God for that long and fruitful ministry. But, to the end, though a teacher, he always regarded himself as a learner in the school of Christ.
Indeed, I think I can say, in all respect—and with great respect—that in his last years he was more ready to confess how little he knew, and how many mistakes he had made, than ever he had been before. That is as it should be. That is the sure evidence of growing maturity.
Like the great apostle, whose words were his favourites and have been read to us, he was always ready, right through to the end, to say:
I have not yet apprehended, but I am pressing on toward the mark for the prize.
He always taught that in the school of Christ one learns more by suffering than by study. In one way and another, our dear brother suffered more than most of us.
However, we are not going to pity him in that, but rather to give thanks to our heavenly Father. This was the authentic child-training. The Father was dealing with our brother as with a son, not sparing the pain and the perplexing problems that must come for those who are in this school and are being conformed to Christ.
I have thought back quite a bit during these past days and have come to this conclusion: if it is true that the Father chastens the man whom He loves, God must have loved Brother Sparks very much.
We thank God that, through the chastening, he proved, as one always can prove, the abundance of grace. Those of you who have your motto card—the cards that used to come every year so regularly—will know that the one for this year, 1971, contains those very well-known and loved words:
My grace is sufficient for thee.
It was for him. Those of us who knew him forty years ago might perhaps testify that they saw God’s grace in him. Those of us who knew him right to the end will gladly affirm that there were new and fuller evidences of that grace, even in the closing years and months of his life. To God be the glory.
Many of you have come here with appreciative recollections of our brother’s life story, and I am sure could supplement what I can say. But the truth is that even I am not able to deal adequately with even the main features of his life, because it was not only a long life; it was a full life.
It was a full life of publishing. In 1922, when he came over from North London, there began in a very humble form what most of you will now know as the magazine A Witness and a Testimony, which this year entered upon the forty-ninth year of its worldwide ministry.
As I have told you already, we have many letters from readers all over the world saying how much the ministry has meant to them: a full life of sending out the printed Word into many lands.
It was also a full life of preaching: the Overcomer testimony, the ministry in Christian gatherings in many lands of Europe, India, the Far East, and America.
He never called them conferences, you know. We did; he did not. Look it up in your Witness and Testimony: “special gatherings.” And they were special gatherings—how many of them in this place, up in Westminster, and, of course, in many other places in the British Isles.
Then there was that series in Switzerland, culminating last year at Hilterfingen, which everybody felt to be the best. Just like the Lord, is it not, to leave the best wine until last?
It seemed rather puzzling, having found such a marvellous site, that it was not possible to rebook it for 1971. Brother Sparks could not understand that, but the Lord’s plans are always perfect. I am sure all of us who were there were full of praise to God for the ministry we received, for the fellowship we enjoyed, and for the wonderful way in which our brother seemed thoroughly to enjoy himself there.
I have things to say about his spiritual ministry, but you might have only seen him from a distance. I can assure you, he was very human. I have seen him blowing balloons in this hall at a Christmas party.
In the old days, before they put the terraces out in the garden, he was a really cunning left-hand slow bowler. Of course, sailing on the Clyde was his great love. That is why I mentioned Hilterfingen, because even at his age, if he could have got on the lake last year, he would have done it.
We are full of praise for all the ministries Brother Sparks was able to give—the preaching ministry. But, of course, his ministry was not only on the platform, but off the platform: in conversations and counselling.
Whether on the platform or privately, I have always felt that his greatest helpfulness was when, through the Word and by his experience, he was interpreting to you what you had been through.
People who had not been through it could not always understand. Sometimes he would say, “You know, you do not understand what I am saying, but you will one day.” But those who had been through something, were puzzled, and did not quite know what it was all about or what God was doing with them, often found that our brother was a true interpreter and could make the Word of God have a very personal application.
These were the lessons that he had learned in the school of Christ, and in the battle for life. That is another book—and not only a book, but a battle for life.
Although his sense of calling was to expound the Scriptures to believers, he was always concerned about carrying the gospel message to those who did not know the Lord as Saviour.
Not only was this true of him as a teenager in the open air in Glasgow; as a matter of fact, the last public message he ever gave was to a group of London City Missioners. It was the complete span of all those years, from men witnessing in the streets of Glasgow to men witnessing in the City of London.
As I understand it, the time he spoke before that, toward the end of last year, was to that great crowd of OM people waiting to be let loose on Europe with the gospel message.
A surprising number of people came to know Jesus Christ through Brother Sparks. While we are praising God for the blessing brought to His people through the Word, let us praise God also for those who would have been wandering in darkness but for his ability—and what an ability he had—for making Christ real.
Some of the most fragrant memories that I have of Brother Sparks’s ministry are not those of which I can write down the details and points of the message, though I could do quite a bit of that. They were the times when somehow one was melted. Christ was so real. The love of God was so precious. The call of grace was going up.
Our brother could preach the gospel, and we thank God for that too: a life full of preaching. Not without significance, in his book of supplementary hymns, with the great hymns of worship—about more light and truth and all that—there is also, and he chose to have it there:
I love to tell the story
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory,
Of Jesus and His love.
Of course, to fulfil his ministry, he had to travel. So we have to say that his was a full life of travelling. He was privileged to carry his message and vision to many lands. He counted it a privilege, and greatly regretted when he was not able to respond to the many calls coming to him, right up to the end of last year.
His first flying experience in Switzerland was very unnerving. In those days before the war, navigational aids were not particularly developed.
He was at a conference at Brümigen and was to fly on the direct flight from Basle to London. But in order to get to it, he had to take a little—really a little toy—light plane from Berne to Basle.
The pilot lost his way. The clouds made him overshoot Basle. At one point, he did not even know whether he was flying upside down or right side up.
By the mercy of the Lord, they found a gap in the clouds, came down, landed on a French military airport, and were promptly surrounded by gendarmes. In the end, he had to get back to Basle by road, and then travel by trains and boats back to England.
At the time, he came to the conclusion that flying was not for him. As is often the case with all of us, it was a wrong conclusion. Indeed, he did what probably nobody much here would have done: he even went in a flying boat once for the East.
How many thousands of miles he travelled, right through to 1970. We thank God for safe journeys. It could have been a tragic end over in Switzerland all those years ago. We are grateful also that strength was given to him in journeys of which we may say little.
I cannot take time to say any more, except that I must stress what I feel is the most important way in which his life was full: the realm of prayer.
He taught us to pray. Make no mistake about it. At the funeral service, I said that, could I appeal for people to stand up and say, “I learned more of Christ through Brother Sparks,” most of them would have stood up.
I think I can say today that if I put this question, “Have you learned something of prayer through Brother Sparks?” every one of us will say yes.
Some of you young ones who did not know him, if you belong here, I can tell you that the foundation of prayer life which, by God’s grace, we are trying to build upon, was well and truly laid by Brother Sparks. It is not only that he prayed; he brought prayer before us as the great supreme occupation of the Christian.
His favourite phrase—well, you see, everybody will say he had a favourite phrase, and I have said several different things already—but I would say this: I think his favourite phrase was “an open heaven.”
Of course, he often applied that to the Word: an open heaven, because the light of God shone into his heart, and he was able to speak not just from study but from what had shone in from heaven. But I think the phrase quite equally applies to prayer, perhaps even more so.
His favourite thought was that heaven is open to the man, the woman, the church that cares to take the time and the trouble to pray. There is a throne. Remember his book, In Touch with the Throne? That was his idea of prayer: not just a little wishful thinking with a tag of “Amen” on the end, but being in touch with the throne.
He taught us that prayer was worship. This was a new idea to most of us. We could not get through many sentences in prayer without asking God to bless us, teach us, or do something or other for us.
He taught us, “No, there is a prayer which is a pure, wholehearted offering of thanks and praise and worship to God, with no request—just adoration.” Let us not forget that lesson, for such prayer is precious to God.
He also had a great belief in what he called “executive prayer.” By that he meant not just, in a vague and general way, asking God to do something, but really laying hold of God, really touching that throne, really expecting something to happen, really claiming that something should happen in answer to prayer.
Mr. Taylor, too old and frail to be with us, would have loved to have been here this afternoon. He told me that when he worked as an engineer in town, and Mr. Patterson, the other one of the trio, was in his government office, Brother Sparks, the pastor here—or rather, down at the church down the road—used to take a train and go up to town, and they would give their lunchtime to praying together.
No wonder God worked. No wonder foundations were laid for a testimony here. As they prayed and claimed things from God, God was pleased and responded, and those prayers were answered.
He introduced many of us into the reality of prayer warfare. He himself was conscious, sometimes a little apologetic, because when the prayer meeting tended to be rather saggy and rather flat, somehow he was a little impatient.
But, oh, how thrilled and how wholeheartedly he rejoiced when, in our prayer gatherings, we did not allow the blanket to settle on, but in the name of the Lord claimed victory, fought the fight, broke through, and indeed touched the throne. That was what he called prayer.
That is how he taught us to pray, and we must go on making use of this that has come to us through our brother: the challenge and the inspiration to pray.
In calling you to give thanks at this memorial service, I would like to stress above all thanks for the throne of grace. This is the heritage with which Brother Sparks has left us.
His preaching will no longer be heard. His travelling days are over. But his prayers continue, because the throne continues.
As one of those for whom he prayed, and as one of the members of the church here over which he laboured in much earnest prayer, I thank God not only for the past answers which have already come, but for those which are yet to be.
In this sense, we believe, more than in any other, “he being dead yet speaketh.”
Was it not he who put also in the supplement the chorus that he brought us from Miss Barber in China, with the music which his daughter composed?
For He is God; He cannot fail.
He cannot fail; He is pledged His Word.
He cannot fail; He’ll see me through.
’Tis God with Whom I have to do.
God saw him through, and He will see us through.
Most of what I have said has concerned the past, but we have to face the future. The rest of the occasion that we have here, of being together, will be devoted to the future.
Two members of the new generation have something to say. Our brother Roger Forster has been specially asked to give us a message on Philippians 3, and then our brother Alan Barrow will lead us in a final prayer of dedication to God. Thank you.
First of all, I ask your indulgent sympathy as I stand before you this afternoon. It is one thing to have the high honour and privilege of speaking at a time like this, and another to be so unqualified to do so.
I am sure there are many of you in our presence this afternoon who would be far better equipped, and whose words would add far greater weight to the things that have already been said and give a greater note on which to conclude this unique occasion than possibly my words could.
My acquaintance with Brother Sparks has been for a shorter period than that of many of you. My time involved here has been much shorter. Please, therefore, give me your sympathy and indulgence as I seek to do something which you could do far better.
Secondly, I have been asked to speak about the future. We have spent so much time, of course rightly so, looking back at the past, and I have been asked to speak a word concerning what shall be in the future.
Well, have mercy on me, please, once again. What can I say? We have had brought before us the life of a man whose age certainly was more than double mine, and certainly whose walk with Christ was more than double mine.
How on earth could I, as it were, go beyond what has been presented to us, or what he has presented to us in his ministry? How can I dare look forward to the future and say anything which would be really positive, and which would lay any sort of guidelines?
Then have sympathy with me for that. I have been asked also not to eulogise, and I have been asked not to mourn. I am following on after two other speakers; you have heard already a lot. To cap it all, I have been given less than ten minutes.
Nonetheless, I shall do my best to go back to that passage which was so familiar to our brother, and which so often he brought before us in writing and in speech: that Philippians 3 passage which has been read to us.
I suppose we cannot really look forward at all unless we know where we stand, or unless we know the direction in which to look. If we find our feet firmly planted in the things that we have been considering already this afternoon, which came to us through our brother’s ministry, then we shall be in the place to have at least some possibility of looking forward to the future.
Perhaps you will turn with me to the third chapter of Philippians.
It is the passage which brings before us the one-thingness of Christianity. There is nothing more, in a sense, that can be added than what Paul says here: “one thing.” Not even so much, “one thing I do”; the “I do” is in italics.
It is the one-thingness that belongs to Christianity as a whole, and which, in a sense, we cannot go beyond. If we have our feet firmly secured in it through past ministries and through future ministries, we shall be in the place to know where God is taking us and in which direction He is leading His people.
This one thing: forgetting the things which are behind, and looking forward to the things which are before. “I press on,” says the apostle. “I press on.”
We start to read at Philippians 3:10:
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death;
if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold: but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before,
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, even this shall God reveal unto you:
only, whereunto we have attained, by that same rule let us walk.
I think it must have been about thirteen years ago that I first called on Brother Sparks in his home, and there we had an afternoon together. I shared with him my few years of Christian experience and how God had been leading me.
Then he shared with me his many years of experience of walking with Christ. So we took all afternoon. His story was about ten times longer than mine at the time. I have been catching up a little bit as the years have gone on; instead of just being a tenth, after a few years it becomes a quarter, and then after a while nearly a half.
That was an afternoon of fellowship. When we came to the end of the period, I was due to go off to take a meeting. It was not a very consequential meeting, I would have thought: a handful of youngsters gathered around the Word of God, and one was seeking to share something of Christ with them.
He knew I was going to take this meeting, so when it came to praying together, he began to pray concerning this particular ministry, this service that I had before me.
I was very surprised. I was surprised because he prayed for the meeting as though it was going to be about the last meeting on earth, and every other thing seemed to hang upon it.
Then I began to get the spirit of the thing. It was not so much what was contributed to me in those moments of fellowship with Brother Sparks—his teaching or the things that he had to say—but it was his spirit that was doing the very thing that this passage we have been reading about was describing. It never left me.
He was showing me the importance of the moments in time, of the things that we were doing: that they were press-on moments, moments of getting hold of eternity while we are in time.
Only as each individual moment of time has something to do with stretching forward to eternity, reaching up to the high calling, laying hold of the high calling which is in Christ Jesus, do the moments of time become of any consequence.
Moments of time are consequential; they are all that we have. But it is whether we are laying hold of them in terms of eternity, whether the high calling is touching the temporal thing, whether what we are doing is involved with our pressing on to the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
That was the atmosphere left with my spirit. At times it has been recaptured and relived, but it has not always been, as I suppose most of us could testify, the overall approach to every minute of our lives.
But obviously it was for the apostle, in some degree translated to us by our brother, and it is the ideal for every Christian. We are pressing on, and that pressing on means that every single moment is to be related to eternity, related to God’s high calling in Christ Jesus.
“Ah, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what is heaven for?” says the poet. That is the Christian viewpoint. What is heaven for but to grasp, to reach forward, to seek to lay hold of it?
The apostle saw life just like that. He did not see the Christian life as something already attained, something which had reached a perfection, something which was an accomplishment, and therefore we have arrived. There was nothing about the apostle Paul’s view of Christianity in those sorts of terms.
Rather, as Luther would put it, commenting on these ideas of the apostle: the Christian life is more a thing of taking than of having. It is more of a becoming godly than being godly.
It is a going-on business which is never culminated—certainly not in this scene of things. It is a continual reaching into the eternal, a continual bringing of heaven into touch with time, a continual relating of God’s eternal purpose to our little temporal affairs.
That is Christianity in proportion. That is the sort of Christianity to which we have been exhorted in our brother’s ministry. This is the sort of Christianity we have before us in Philippians 3.
It certainly is not a self-righteous perfectionism. Paul says, “I am not already perfect.” So that is excluded. There is nothing self-righteous in the Christian experience of Philippians 3, because we are not yet perfect.
There is nothing about it of self-complacency or self-sufficiency. We have not yet arrived. We have not yet apprehended. So there is not a bit of complacency. That is not a Christian experience at all, just as self-righteousness is not and could never be, not by Paul’s definition.
Nor is it a kind of lazy imperfectionism: “Well, we are all sinners anyway. We shall never get very much better here on earth.” You know the sort of thing. It is not that either, for the apostle Paul tells us that he is pressing on.
Rather, it is this one-thingness business: this one thing, forgetting the things which are behind, reaching forth to those things which are before.
Paul is painting a picture of the life that runs right through our earthly scene and right through the grave, because it is a race. It is a race like that of a runner who has his eye on the mark.
That word “mark,” in “the prize of the high calling,” is the tape in front of him. It is something upon which we set our eye, toward which we gear our whole being and steer our direction. It is something which calls forth our hand, as the runner puts his hand forward, stretching forward.
It is something for which our feet have got to move. We pursue—a word of hunting—until we catch it. The whole of our earthly life is a pursuing to capture something. It is a stretching forth because we have not got it yet. It is an eye on the goal, and our whole being is geared into this intense aim.
We have got to go on. We must press on, says the apostle. If we have learned anything about Christian living at all, it is a pressing-on one-thingness, running right through life, running through the grave.
Perhaps then we find the goal, and perhaps only then. Maybe that is why Paul says, “If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection from the dead.”
When he goes on to say, “I have not yet attained,” he does not mean that he has not yet attained the resurrection, because that is self-evident. He is still there; the resurrection has not yet taken place. He could not be saying that.
But the thought of the resurrection has once again awakened in him the concept of knowing Christ in the fullest possible way, which will only be ours in that day of resurrection, when we have run and run and run right through the grave and out the other side.
In that day—oh, to know Him, the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of His sufferings, conformed to His death—to achieve that moment of running out of the grave and knowing our Lord face to face, perfectly, as we have never been able to know Him here in this scene.
That is the aim, the striding, and the intensity of the Christian experience. Some of us have run right into the grave. Others are still running. There are more who have run into the grave than are still running. Praise the Lord.
One day, all together, we will be knowing Him in the completion of this experience which has begun: that we may know Christ as fully as a man may know Him when we know Him face to face and have become like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.
The aim of the Christian’s intense running is to run through life and out the other end into the arms of the Saviour, Whom already we have been longing and yearning and aching to know in ever-deeper ways.
There is no time to see how far we have got. There is no time to assess how far we have run. Forget that, because if you do that in a race, others will overtake you.
It is not our concern whether others overtake us or not. It is our concern to run as though we were running the race and wanted to win. There is no time to see how far we have lost; that belongs to the past.
Runners do not do that sort of thing. All they are concerned to do is to get on to the next step and the next reach, to see the tape just that little bit more clearly because they are that little bit nearer, and to keep on and keep on running.
We press on for the prize. We press on to the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
What has Paul got in mind when he says, “forgetting those things which are behind”? Perhaps if you look in the context, you would say, “His Jewish righteousness of works”—that he had seen himself as a Pharisee, as one who had kept the law blamelessly, as one who had done so many religious works to be counted highly in his Pharisaic culture, one who was born of the tribe of Benjamin, and so forth.
But I think Paul must have realized that he used those words as expressions of men’s righteousness, of men’s attainments—the attainments you know you have when you really have arrived, and you have got it, and there it is: complete and perfect.
Anything in my Christian experience, Paul would say, where I think, “I have got it, and I have arrived,” is to be forgotten. I have got to press on.
Are we prepared to forget those things and press on? For that is the Christian life. That is the Christian spirit.
This is what our brother touched me with as he prayed, and it is what, surely, he would redirect our steps toward as we come back to this most prominent of passages in his ministry: to press on and to hold nothing as our achievement.
That is the righteousness which means permission must be left behind. I am not concerned as to how far or how little we have got. None of us are perfect. None of us have totally apprehended. Keep running.
The pressing on is until the eternal purpose, which has touched our souls and which we cannot lose or forget, energizes us to get hold of that for which we have been got hold of. I have been pressed on to that end. I must lay hold of it. It is to know Him.
He is the prize, just as equally as He is the Author of the race. He Who has laid hold of us is the One Whom we want to lay hold of: to know Christ.
This one thing—this one thing, forgetting everything else that will stand in the way. One thing is to know Him.
David said:
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple.
The Lord said:
One thing is needful.
To the young man, He said:
If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me.
One thing is needful: follow Me. I am what you need for.
“One thing I know: whereas I was blind, now I see.” One thing I do. The one thing of Christianity is Christ, and that we can never get beyond.
If we have really learned the apostle’s lessons, which have been so often brought before us by the brother in whose memory we meet this afternoon, that Christ is all, and is therefore to fill all things, and is the object and pursuit of our spiritual lives, then we have a foundation for the future.
If I am taking hold of the moments of time and running to pursue that which is eternal, to get them related to that which is eternal, then I will begin to know what it is, in this end of the church age, that I must be accomplishing and achieving in the new sort of society which is rapidly forming around us.
The way to do it has always been the same and always will be. It is Christ. He is the end; He is what we are aiming at. He is the One Whom we pursue.
But if I am taking hold of the subculture strata of our Western civilization, if I am taking hold of the moments of our atomic, polluting world, if I am taking hold of the revolution undercurrent that is running through our economic and student society, if I am laying hold of the permissiveness that is round about me in my experience—if I am getting hold of these moments and running, by the eternal purpose, to know Christ in these moments—then something will happen.
The most wonderful thing of all is that there will be a translation in our experience of the eternal purpose of God down into time. Something will happen there in a hundred and one different ways. None of us can anticipate what they will be, for they have never been before.
This is another age, another sort of world, a very rapidly changing world. Yet the same old answer remains. The apostle Paul gave it to us. Our brother’s ministry emphasized it.
For the future, then, we must express it by taking our moments of time, hitching them into the eternal of knowing Christ. The result must be an impact in the world, like the apostle Paul’s impact in the first century, like our brother’s throughout the earth.
He has served his generation and fallen asleep, as David did. God asks nothing more of any of us.
In that way, the resurrection spirit can take place, and people can be served throughout the earth, as what has gone into the ground comes out in new sort of life to meet a new sort of world in a new sort of way.
The foundations are laid. We know where we stand. We pursue the same Christ. We are going to express Him in a hundred and one fresh and thrilling new ways, in all the different avenues into which God so privileges us to move in the coming days.