If you turn with me to the Hebrew letter, and chapter 12.
The letter to the Hebrews, chapter 12, from verse 1:
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
Looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
For consider Him that hath endured such gainsaying of sinners against Himself, that ye be not weary, fainting in your souls.
And then in the first letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 9. I am going to read this again in the New American Standard Version, from verse 24:
Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.
And everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.
Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; but I buffet my body, and make it my slave, lest possibly, after I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.
Just a further word of prayer. Beloved Lord, we are so thankful that we are found here in Your presence this afternoon. We are thankful, Lord, that You are able to renew and quicken us, so that we are able to receive something from Yourself.
Thank You, Lord, for that anointing, grace, and power that You have made available to us, both for the speaking of the Word, the translating of it, and the hearing of it. We praise You for that grace and power made available to us through the finished work of our Lord Jesus, and made such a glorious reality in the person of the Holy Spirit.
We want now to stand by faith in that anointing for this time, that, Lord, You will meet with us. Deliver it from just being another meeting; make it a meeting with Yourself. We thank You for every time in these days that we have met with You.
Lord, now make this again the venue through which You come to us and touch our hearts. We need You, Lord. We are living in tremendous days, days of colossal change taking place in world society. We are on the brink of enormous things, and above all, the coming of our Lord Jesus.
We praise You, Father, that You are able by Your Spirit to quicken us, and, as it were, forewarn us, and enable us to be prepared. Hear us. We ask all this in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
The theme of these times together, which the brothers have felt before the Lord, is The Time Is at Hand. There have been, of course, different aspects of it. The aspect I have been asked to take as my responsibility is running the race.
I have to say that we are so near to enormous changes taking place in the world as we know it. There has been a kind of slow movement over a number of years toward a global society, and we are right on the verge of a breakthrough of enormous consequences for the whole world.
Of course, the European Union is having a hiccup, for which we could be thankful. But there are other areas too in which there has been the same thing, such as the United Nations. Yet this does not stop the enormous, energetic thrust of the principle of darkness to take the world finally for himself.
We must not be depressed because there may be a night to endure, but the day comes. It is the coming of the Lord that is the real key to this whole thing. It is interesting that the Word says that He will slay the Antichrist with the breath of His mouth. He does not need tanks, atomic weapons, or anything else—just the breath of His mouth. This whole great power of evil will be destroyed, and the kingdom of our God and of His Messiah will finally come.
Now we need to be prepared and ready for these days. Quite honestly, we have so little time left to us—little time for us to be prepared by the Spirit of God. We have one short life, and that one short life is a race. The Bible describes it for believers as a race. There is a prize to be won.
In this one short life, God has to do everything, in one sense. He has to save us, change us, educate us, train us, prepare us, and perfect us. One day, when we have other kinds of conferences in the glory, in eternity, we shall look upon our lives—the normal average seventy years—as a pinprick, just a tiny little atom that passed in a moment.
I look forward to those times; I suppose you do. Somehow or other, it would be wonderful to have the Lord explain to us the mysteries of the universe and the mysteries of history. The Book of Acts is a wonderful explanation, but it only goes so far. It is the only book in the Bible that has no end; it is an open-ended book, with no conclusion, because the story is still being written.
Maybe, I do not know whether someone is actually writing it, or whether it is being videoed and taped in some spiritual mechanism. But one day we shall understand all these wonderful things: what happened, how the Spirit of God took hold of people in prayer, and how, as an answer to prayer, big things came. We often think of the key to movements of the Spirit of God as great personalities, but only God knows what lies behind.
One day we shall understand it all. I look forward to such times. I cannot imagine that they could be boring—to be able to find the whole story. How wonderful it will be if you and I have been partakers in this whole movement; I mean that we have had some part to play in it, however small.
Well, running the race. I spoke yesterday about running the race set before us, and today, this afternoon, I want to talk about running so that you may attain—or, if you do not like the word attain, obtain; or, in simpler words, so that you may win.
The New American Standard puts it beautifully: “Run in such a way that you may win.” The whole point of this race that you and I are in by the grace of God is that there is a prize to be won.
When we think of rewards, we immediately think that we have to work, do this, do that, and do the other. There is a sense in which that is true. But it is all of grace. The first thing I want to underline this afternoon is that all the grace you need to win the prize is available to you.
All the grace—the same grace that brought you into the salvation of God, by which you have been saved—is now available to you, so that you may win the prize. You may finish the course. You may run the race. You may win.
Winning is just another word for being an overcomer. I once asked T. Austin-Sparks, in his home in Scotland, “Can you explain to me, simply, what an overcomer is?”
In his own inimitable way, he looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, then at the fire, and then he looked at me and said, “Overcoming is to be in the race at the end—not to have been knocked out, but to be there right through to the finishing line.”
I thought that was a very simple explanation. At the time, I wondered whether it was a complete one, but I have come to understand what he meant by that. We get these ideas about overcomers—that they have thousands of medals on their chest, pomp and glory, bands playing, and that they are super people anyway: supermen, superwomen, you know, that type of thing.
I think overcomers are like the little widow who threw into the treasury two copper coins. The Lord said, “She hath given more than all.” That is an overcomer.
I have no doubt that if we could ask her, “Did you realize you were an overcomer? Did you realize that the Lord Jesus watched you?”—she would have been amazed. He lifted up His eyes and saw all those rich people putting their money into the treasury, and He saw her bring her two little coins and throw them in. Only He knew that was her whole living.
All the rest gave out of their abundance, their superfluity; she gave her all. I have no doubt she would say, “Oh, you have no idea of the problems I had at home—the children I had, finding everything to cope with and do. I had a thousand and one problems, and no one really to help me.” I do not think for a moment she felt like an overcomer, but she was an overcomer.
I do not know if you have ever thought that Joseph of Arimathea will be in the glory. I do. In the day that he voted in the Sanhedrin against the sentence of death for the Lord Jesus, he redeemed the name of the house of Israel—he and Nicodemus. When he came to bury the Lord Jesus, he thought everything was finished. Perhaps, if you had questioned him, he would have said, “An overcomer? Me an overcomer? I do not think I am an overcomer.” But I think he was an overcomer.
We could go on and on, taking names out of the Word of God—those who are real overcomers. These are winners. How did they win? They did not win through any great intelligence in themselves, nor any great academic background. They had not been to theological seminary, or any other kind of university, for that matter, for the most part. They were very simple people.
Of course, that is not true of Joseph of Arimathea. But they were, for the most part, quite ordinary, simple people. In some amazing way, they had drawn upon the resources made available to them: the grace and the power of God.
An overcomer is simply that. Normally, you do not think of martyrs as overcomers—mangled bodies, brutally tortured, horribly put to death. You can hardly think of those as overcomers. Yet the great army of martyrs are all winners, every one of them, because they drew upon the grace of God and the power of God, and were faithful to the end.
That is an overcomer: to be in the purpose of God, at the centre of the purpose of God, at the end of your life. All the grace you need to win that prize is made available to you.
If I may put it this way, it has your name on it. It is not some general fund or resource. God has made His grace available to you, in His name, to your name. He has actually made it available.
When the Apostle Paul was given a messenger of Satan—it seems a very strange thing for the Lord to give anybody—the Apostle felt it was the end of his ministry, the denial of everything. It is natural to understand how he would have looked at this. “I need deliverance.” He called upon the Lord: “Take this thing away. Get rid of it. If I do not neutralize it, it will be the end of the ministry You have given me.”
The Lord said only one thing to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee.” Sufficient. That is, the grace God makes available to you and to me is exactly commensurate with your need.
People come and say, “No, no, no, I am not a Watchman Nee. I am not an Amy Carmichael. I am not a John Wesley. I am not a Martin Luther. I am just an ordinary little person.” Sometimes a housewife says to me, “I doubt my name is known in glory. I am just an ordinary person. I have thousands of problems—an impossible husband, nearly impossible children, all kinds of things pressing upon me.”
Then others come and say, “You have no idea what kind of family I come from. I have great-aunts that are nuts. I have uncles that are ogres. I have people in the family line that you would hardly believe—they are like Rasputin and Nero rolled into one. How can I become a sweet Christian? There is no way I can. I have DNA in me. I have genes in me.”
Do you mean to tell me the Lord never knew this when He saved you? He never knew the DNA in you, the genes that are yours? He had no idea about your pedigree? Now He is scratching His head and saying, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea they had such problems. If I had known, I would never have saved them. I would have saved others more simple, more easy to deal with.”
When God saved you, you were an open book to Him. That book was a closed book to you. You did not know very much—perhaps anything—but your whole history, your genetic makeup, everything that makes you who you are and what you are temperamentally and personality-wise, every single thing about you, is an open book to the Lord.
And you are trying to tell me that the Lord has made available to you such meagre grace and such impoverished power that you cannot get through? Think. Most Christians do not think. It is one of the biggest problems we have with Christians: they do not think. They get into this mentality where they sit in seats and listen, and never really think.
You mean to tell me that God has saved you and then made available to you so little grace that your problems are going to completely destroy you? What kind of God is that? What kind of salvation is that? What kind of race is this that God has set you in?
It is obvious—think—it is obvious that if God has saved you, He knows everything about you. He has made a special grace available to you, sufficient exactly, precisely, for your need. Now, if you do not avail yourself of that grace, that is not God’s problem. That is your problem.
If you want to be a moaning Minnie—one of these ladies always saying, “Oh, poor me, poor me. I have this. I have that”—let me put it another way: a dying duck. Have you ever heard a duck die? They are always groaning, “Ooh, ooh.” Poor things. Many believers are dying ducks. Do not get near them. They are so pessimistic. They see everything in negative, dark colours.
They have not got their eyes fixed on Jesus. It is so simple. They have their eyes fixed on their problems, on themselves, and on all the difficulties and the thousand and one other things that make them depressed, despondent, and defeated.
Grace sufficient. Do you not think the Lord is amazing? These are the kinds of questions I want to ask Him. “You mean, Lord, You gave the Apostle Paul a messenger of Satan, and then made grace sufficient for that messenger of Satan? Why did You do that?”
The Apostle Paul himself explains it. He said, “I was given so much revelation, so much understanding, that in order to keep me humble, the Lord sent a messenger of Satan—a thorn in my flesh.”
A thorn in the flesh can be a very small thing; you can localize it. But it is a little more than that, because the word actually is a stake—something far bigger. It immobilized the Apostle. Three times he had these prayer sessions. I would call them prayer warfare, where he felt he had to go to war on this whole thing because his ministry was at stake.
I imagine he called those who were with him at the time and got them all in on this prayer matter. “Look here, this thing has got to be dealt with, or I am finished.” Grace sufficient. Do you really believe it?
Do you believe that the One Who saved you, Who loved you and gave Himself for you, has made available to you grace with your name on it—for your conditions, your circumstances, and your peculiar difficulties? Do you really believe that it is yours?
All the grace is available. It is not just grace; all the power is available. When the Apostle was writing that tremendous letter to the Ephesians, he said, “I want to tell you what I am praying for you—what we are praying for you.”
He said, “I am praying that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of His calling; what the riches of His inheritance in the saints; and, thirdly”—listen—“the surpassing greatness of His power.” That is power—surpassing power, enormous power.
We speak of nuclear power; it is nothing compared with the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has always been the agent by which everything has been brought into being. The Father is the source; the Son—it was through Him, and for Him, and in Him. The Holy Spirit was, may I say reverently, the manager, the supervisor, the agent.
It is a tragedy when Christians think of the Holy Spirit as an it, as some impersonal force, some impersonal power, a mere agent. The Holy Spirit is the Person of the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit Who brought into being all the things that we see. He was the agent of it. It was through the Lord Jesus, for the Lord Jesus, and in the Lord Jesus, but it was the Holy Spirit Who brought it all into being.
He has always been the agent. He was the agent by which the Lord Jesus offered Himself up on the cross. By the eternal Spirit, He offered Himself to God without spot or blemish. It was the Holy Spirit by Whom He was raised from the dead, when everything was holding Him in, and when the whole of hell was mobilized to keep Jesus in the grave.
It was the Holy Spirit. Dear child of God, this Holy Spirit is the way the Lord Jesus dwells in you. He is the One Who makes the Lord Jesus a reality in your life. The resurrection life of the Lord Jesus, the power of God, is made a living reality in your life.
I prayed a little earlier about the anointing. How do we know the anointing? Only in the Person of the Holy Spirit. It is through the finished work of the Lord Jesus; it is through the Holy Spirit, by the Holy Spirit, that that anointing becomes an actual experience.
Grace and power—all available. To me, that is tremendous.
I was thinking, when I listened to our brother Stephen this morning, of this wonderful Scripture in Philippians, chapter 2. I thought it was absolutely what he was saying, because we are talking about a mystery when we talk about our will and God’s will.
It says this in Philippians 2:12-13:
So then, my beloved, even as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;
For it is God Who worketh in you both to will and to work, for His good pleasure.
Is that not an extraordinary declaration of God’s Word? “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God Who worketh in you.” Those two: to will and to work. Think. You will never be able to say, “Well, Lord, I worked it. I did it.” He both wills and works for His good pleasure.
That is the mystery. Again, forgive me for quoting T. Austin-Sparks, but he is with the Lord now, which is far better—certainly for him. I remember once saying to him, “By nature, I am a Calvinist, and so many of our brothers and sisters are Arminian in their theology. Can you in any way wrap this up?”
He said, “No.” It is as simple as that. He said, “Accept your free will and responsibility, and God’s predestinating power, as the two opposite ends of one single truth. Only our minds are so small and finite that we cannot contain the two in one mind.”
Does that get home to you? Here it is: if you do not work out your own salvation, God does not work in you. When you, by faith, begin to will to do His will and to will to do His work, then He works in you both to will and to work. In some extraordinary way, these things come together.
Now come back to this matter of grace and power. God has made all this grace and power available to you and to me. It is not as if the Lord has set us in a race and said, “Now I am leaving you to it.”
It is by the grace of God that you will win the prize, and by the power of the Holy Spirit that you will win the prize. There is no other way. No overcomer in the whole history of the work of God has ever become a winner, an overcomer, except by the grace of God and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So I find this tremendous. There is no excuse. I am sorry. When next you come to me, I shall just sort of look at you with a glazed look. There is no excuse. You have no excuse. I have no excuse.
It is no good saying, “I have enormous problems. Even the Lord is defeated by them.” Of course, you would not say that, but that is what you are really saying: “The Lord is defeated by my problems. I have such a personality, He does not know what to do with it, and He is no match for me.”
You really wonder why the Lord saved you, do you not? I mean, really, why did He save you? Well, you say you want to get into glory, you want to get into heaven, as they say, but you are not quite sure about anything else.
You need the Lord. You need that grace of God, and you need that power of God. That is the way you will win the prize.
Here is the second thing I want to underline this afternoon: what is it that disqualifies us? Paul said, “I am afraid that, having been a herald to others, I myself might be disqualified.”
It is an interesting word. In my version it is translated “rejected”: not approved, disqualified. “Disqualified” is a good word, actually. What is it that disqualifies us? What is it that knocks us out of the race? What is it that means that, even if we run part of the race, we never win the prize?
I have listed only a few things that I believe disqualify us, or knock us out of the race.
The first is this: aimlessness—or, let me put it another way, double-mindedness. Did you notice in 1 Corinthians 9:26 how it is put in the New American Standard? “Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim.” The old version was, “not uncertainly.”
You will never win the prize if you run uncertainly, without aim. You do not know quite what you are going to do. You have two minds: “Should I be in this race, or should I not be in this race?”
So many believers have no idea what the prize is and no idea what the Lord is seeking to do with us. That is the first thing: aimlessness.
You know what it says in James 1:7-8:
Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord;
A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
When you have two minds, you are unstable. If you are going to run a race, as Paul says, you have to train. You have to get your body into condition. You may have a thousand and one exercises to do. There is no way you can compete in a race without that.
If you are aimless, if you are double-minded, if you are not sure that you should be in it or not, if you are not committed, you are not going to win the prize. You will be knocked out of the race.
Here is the second: Galatians 5:7:
Ye were running well; who hindered you that ye should not obey the truth?
Another reason why we get knocked out of the race is that, at some point in our spiritual experience, our spiritual history, we refuse to obey the truth. God never gives revelation if you have not obeyed the previous illumination. When God illuminates something, reveals something, and you do not obey, everything stops.
Now that is a severe word, is it not? You think about it. Sometimes the Lord speaks to us about the most ridiculous things. I remember when the Lord spoke to me about going to the movies. I loved the movies. I came from a totally unsaved background, and I loved Charlie Chaplin and all those kinds of things—the funnies.
The day I was saved, I went to see Charlie Chaplin two hours after I got saved. Is that not amazing? Thank God nobody told me it was wrong, and tried to push me into some little format they had for Puritan believers.
I am so thankful that there came a day when God spoke to me. It was a big thing for me to give up films. In my home, we had quite a number of actors and actresses. They were friends of my stepfather and mother, and so on; they were always in and out. When the Lord spoke to me about giving it up, it was a big thing to me.
I gave it up, and upon that hinged so much. I am not sure I would ever have had some of the experiences I had, but for that small little thing of obedience.
I told you perhaps the story before. There was a young woman—she was not a sister; she was unsaved. She was a waitress at a well-known local restaurant. The only meeting she could come to was the Lord’s Table. In some places she would have been shut out, but we did not have that attitude. Of course, we always gave a warning and said, “Please do not take the Lord’s Table if you do not belong to the Lord,” but there is no better time than now.
Afterward she came up to me and said, “As the bread was being broken, I saw the Lord Jesus. I have never had an experience like this. I know that God touched me.”
I was able to say to her, “Now look, listen carefully to me. Remember the words of the mother of the Lord Jesus to the servants: ‘Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.’” I said, “The key to the Christian life is, whatsoever He says, do it.”
She was very happy. She got up from her knees and went out the door. As she was going out, she suddenly wheeled around and said, “Oh, just wait, just wait. I am not taking off any cosmetics.”
I said, “But who spoke about cosmetics?” “No one,” she said. “Well, did I preach about it?” “No.” “Then why has this come up? What have cosmetics got to do with being saved? You can have lipstick and be saved, and you can have no lipstick and be saved. You can put powder on your face and be saved, and you can take it off and be saved.”
I said, “Why are you wearing it?” “I am a very pale person, you can see,” she said. “I do not want to look like a dying duck. I want to look alive, so I put a little colour in my cheeks and on my nails. I am not taking it off.”
She explained that she had noticed the number of ladies who did not have lipstick or powder, because she had never been in the meeting before. I said, “Did anyone say anything to you?” “No.” “Well then, I think that is between them and God, and between you and God.”
Then I said to her, “Will you make me a promise?” She said yes—at first wondering what I meant. I said, “You must trust me.” So she said, “Yes, I will trust you. What is the promise?”
I said, “I want you to promise me you will never take your makeup off.” “Oh,” she said, “certainly.” Then I said, “Unless the Lord speaks to you. If the Lord speaks to you, that is something between you and the Lord.”
About a year and a half later, I noticed that she had no cosmetics. So I went up to her and said, “What about the promise?” “Oh,” she said, “the promise. Well, I kept it. But just recently the Lord has been speaking to me, and I said, ‘Yes, Lord.’”
The interesting thing is that it was the beginning of a whole new dimension of spiritual experience for her. Would you believe it? She had argued and argued with the Lord about it. “Why should I take it off? I am young; some of these are old. Does it really matter if they have cosmetics on or not? I want to look attractive. I am not married. Maybe I can get a man at some point.”
You know the types of things young people think. Forgive me for being so down to earth, but you know what I mean. She said the Lord went on and on and on, and finally she said, “Okay, Lord, if You want, I will take it all off.”
It was only for a while, only for a couple of years that she did not wear it. But you see, that was her doorway into a whole new experience of the Lord: obeying the truth.
When the Lord reveals something to you, it can be mammoth; it may be very small. Listen and obey, because obedience is of more price to God than anything else. The way to grow in the Lord is to obey the Lord.
Sometimes the Lord will speak to you about the most ridiculous things, and you will feel, “Well, so-and-so does it.” The pastor of the church I attended when I got saved was an international rugby player, and he gave it up. He loved it. He lived for rugby.
When he got saved and the Lord said to him, “I want this. I want you to surrender it,” he fought and fought until finally he said yes. This was Alan Redpath, for those of you who know the name. He would never have become the evangelist he became if he had not surrendered that to the Lord.
That does not mean rugby is wrong. I have two boys at home who play rugby. I spend my time in prayer when they are out playing, that they will come back. One comes back with a broken nose and the other with his shoulder, and I do not know what to expect next. But that is by the way.
The fact of the matter is, the Lord has not spoken to them. I try to make up for the Lord not speaking, but so far it has had little effect. All I can say is this: when God speaks, obey Him. You know Who is speaking to you—it is the Lord.
Do not argue: “What about so-and-so? What about this? What about that?” If the Lord, Who knows your heart, is speaking to you, you know it. Everybody knows it, even when they try to pretend, “Well, it is not the Lord. I think it is my imagination.”
Obey the truth. If you do not, it will put you out of the race. Simple as that. The Lord’s work is filled with memorial stones of people who once lived and died. There their name is. They no longer breathe. They no longer live. They have become monuments to a past experience.
There came a point when the Lord spoke to them about something, revealed some truth to them, and they did not obey.
Thirdly, the flesh taking over. In Galatians 3:3, Paul asks:
Are ye so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now perfected in the flesh?
Actually, the Greek reads, “Do ye now make an end in the flesh?” In other words, you began in the Spirit and now you are ending in the flesh. Is it possible to begin in the Spirit and end in the flesh? Very much so.
I could give a whole number of evidences of this in really big things: big television evangelists and others who, in some way, did so much for the Lord to begin with and then fell. In their fall, it became clear that what began in the Spirit ended in the flesh.
So many great movements of the Spirit of God in the history of the church began truly in the Spirit, with an amazing outburst of fellowship, understanding of the Word of God, the centrality and supremacy of the Lord Jesus, and so much else—and ended in an institution.
Begin in the Spirit; end in the flesh. There are all kinds of things that bring us to the place where somehow the flesh finally takes over. What was once a real walk with the Lord is now religious.
Do not think that we here are not capable of becoming religious. We can become just as religious as some of the old traditional denominations. What was once a walk with the Lord, a walk in the Spirit, has now become something to do with the flesh.
Here is a fourth thing: Hebrews 12, the verses we have read together both these times. “Let us lay aside every weight.” That is my version: every weight. Some of the new versions say every encumbrance—the kinds of weights or things that encumber a person.
Now these things may be legitimate. That is the interesting thing. These encumbrances and weights are not all evil or illegal. They can be totally legitimate things.
In Luke 21:34, we are told that we should watch and pray and not let dissipation, surfeiting, and the cares of this life take over. The cares of this life are very real. The Greek actually is the worries of this life. Care is a nicer word because it does not have the negative feeling about it.
Of course you care. You are meant to care for things. If you have a household, a family, a business, relatives, and so on, you have to care for them. That is perfectly right. There is nothing illegitimate in it. In fact, it is very correct, even biblical, to care for such things.
But the word worry gets to the root of it: the worries of this life. In other words, we are caring for things without rest in the Lord, without trust in the Lord. Then care becomes worry. When we have these worries, we become stressed, and when we are stressed, we are much more likely to get into serious trouble.
You cannot run a race with encumbrances. If you came back from shopping loaded from top to bottom with packages and I do not know what else, you could not go for a run. This run we are talking about is a marathon. It is a lifetime race, not some small sprint, fast and over quickly.
This is a marathon. You cannot come loaded down with things. So we have to lay aside the encumbrances. Only God can tell you what your encumbrance is, or what weight is holding you down. But the things that hold you down make you heavy. They exhaust you, slow you down, and can even pull you down. That is an encumbrance.
Here is the fifth thing. This one, I think, will meet everyone: weariness. Hebrews 12:3 says:
For consider Him that hath endured such gainsaying of sinners against Himself, that ye wax not weary, fainting in your souls.
The newer versions say, “growing weary,” “losing heart.” I wonder how many here have lost heart in the race. We just get so weary.
Interestingly, it is not the big things that wear us out; it is the small things. I can illustrate this very easily. Here in the States, everything is done for your convenience. Now, you Americans may not feel that, but we who come from elsewhere do.
I can go to the bank here and get something done in half an hour—less than half an hour. I can go to the post office and get something taken care of. I am not talking about what happens after the post office takes it, but I mean that I can get it done quickly when I take it to the post office.
Where I come from, you go to the bank to pay cheques into your own account, and it takes you a whole morning. You are absolutely exhausted, especially in the heat of the day. There are no drive-in things. We have McDonald’s, I am sorry to say, but we have no drive-ins and no wonderful things done for your convenience. We certainly do not have a drive-in bank.
When you pay the television licence, you have to go in and stand at the back of a squalling mob of people, all fighting to get to one little counter. The only way you can do it is slowly, and you have to be very rude. You have to shove and push. Let me tell you, some of these ladies know how to use their elbows. It is no good being very English and sort of standing there politely.
I remember two girls who came to us. They were volunteer nurses at one of the biggest hospitals in Jerusalem. They said to me, “Do you think you could help us?” I thought they had some great spiritual problem. They said, “We do not know what to do. When we come to the nurses’ cafeteria, we queue up for ten or fifteen minutes. When we get there, someone comes right over our shoulder and takes what has been prepared for us. It exhausts us.”
They said, “When it comes to a bus, we stand there, the bus comes up, the doors open, and suddenly all these people go in, and we cannot get in.” So I said—and this is very strange advice to have to give believers—“You have got to fight. You are living in Israel. We are a very impolite people. You have to fight.”
Two years later, after they had been there, they came back to me for a cup of tea before they went home to Manchester in England. They said, “Could you pray for us?” “What about?” They said, “We have become such fighters. When the bus comes up, we go bang, bang, bang, bang like this. We are the first in. When we are at the cafeteria, we take the food before anyone else. We do not know what people are going to think about us when we get home.”
Weariness. You can be in one of these little offices filled with people all talking loudly and pushing forward. Finally you get to the desk, and just as you are about to be served, someone comes right over you and puts their thing in front of you. Because they have a relative connected somehow to the person, they are dealt with. Protection, we call it.
Weariness. It is the little things that wear us out. Where I come from—in Israel, in Jerusalem—I have never found anyone worn out by the big things: war, even bombs. Everybody thinks, “Oh dear, how can you live with suicide bombs and everything else?” Quite easily. Life goes on absolutely normally. You get used to it. We are like old war horses: the sound of a few bangs, and our ears go up, and that is all.
But it is the small things that wear us out. So it is in most of our lives: the small things. Someone who always sees everything in depressingly dark colours. Someone who comes to fellowship with you and drags you down. Meetings that never get anywhere. Fights that go on between the Lord’s people. These are the things that so often wear out the saints.
We become weary and lose heart. That is a way of being pushed out of the race.
By the way, I ought to give you another Scripture. It is a beautiful one: Hebrews 10:35:
Cast not away therefore your boldness, which hath great recompense of reward.
It is so easy, when you begin to lose heart, to throw in the towel. You are finished, and you are out of the race.
Sixthly: sin which besets us. Hebrews 12:1 speaks of “the sin which doth so easily beset us.”
I sometimes think that when we speak about besetting sins, we give them a better feeling than other sins. Somebody’s irritability, for example: “Well, it is a besetting sin.” But actually all sin is sin.
The meaning here is a sin which besets us—that is, takes hold of us. I think some of the modern versions put it better: “the sin which doth so easily entangle us.” There you have it: sin which entangles us.
Once you get into some sin, you find it is like an octopus. It has eight arms. You get rid of two, and you have six more. You get rid of four, and you still have four. Sin certainly disqualifies us in this way, and we are all given to sin.
I am appalled at some of the gross sin amongst the Lord’s people. You hear of it everywhere. Whether it is because of the new way of looking at sex, the new way of looking at social behaviour, I do not know, but it is like an enormous tsunami sweeping over the people of God.
If it were only sin that could be easily dealt with—after all, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But Satan is far more clever at times.
He brings us into the kind of sin which entangles us. It compromises us. In some way or other, it binds us so that we cannot easily get out of it.
The fact that the Spirit of God says through the writer to the Hebrew letter, “Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily entangle us,” means you and I can lay it aside by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no other way, but it can be laid aside.
Finally, on this matter of things that disqualify us: an unforgiving spirit.
Do you not think it is quite remarkable that when our Lord gave us the pattern prayer, “Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” He only took one single thing out of it and emphasized it?
He said:
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Does that sink in? The only thing the Lord emphasized in this amazing pattern—“Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth; give us this day our daily bread; forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one”—was this: “Do you realize what you are praying?”
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us.” Do you hear it?
You remember later in Matthew 18, from verse 21, the Lord told a parable—quite an extraordinary parable, because of the amount of money He spoke about. It was the unforgiving servant. Do you remember the story?
The Lord said there was a king going on a journey, and he brought all the stewards together and said, “You are to look after everything while I am gone.” One steward had been given a loan of ten million dollars. The actual value of it would have been far greater than the silver content.
The king said, “Let his whole family be sold—his children, everything to do with him—to pay back his loan.” The servant came and fell before him and said, “Lord, forgive me, forgive me.” The king relented and said, “Okay. I forgive you. I will not require of you one penny. I cancel your debt.”
But when the king went, the same servant found another servant under him who owed him just a few denarii, the equivalent of a day’s wage. He threw him into prison and said he would not come out until he had paid every penny. When the king heard of it, he had the unjust steward thrown out.
You know the story. Then the Lord said that if you do not forgive men their trespasses, as your Father has forgiven you, this is what will happen. I am putting it in my own words.
Hear, brothers and sisters: if there is one thing more than any other that knocks us out of the race, that disqualifies us, it is our relationships with one another.
So many harbour an unforgiving spirit. Someone said something, someone slighted them, someone wrote about them, someone misrepresented them, and they cannot let it go. It is deep within them, like bitterness. The Word of God says this is like a root of bitterness, which springs up and defiles many.
There are many Scriptures about this root of bitterness: jealousy, faction, gossip, biting, divisions—all these things that come amongst us as the people of God.
In the first instance, the Lord was speaking about all men. Some believers have the idea that they can have a bitter spirit toward an unsaved person who has stolen money from them or done something wrong to them, and they can harbour this bad feeling. But the Lord said, “If you do not forgive men, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you.” That is severe.
But in the parable in Matthew 18, He was speaking about believers, because Peter came and said, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother? Seven times?” Seven in Hebrew thought means completeness. Peter thought seven times was a lot. Three times, perhaps; seven times!
The Lord said, “Seventy times seven.” That is four hundred and ninety, if my mathematics are right, which may not be. But all I know is this: what the Lord was saying was that seventy times seven means ad infinitum.
Every one of us has been forgiven. Our debt has been cancelled. What is the price of your soul? Have you ever thought about the value of your soul—your eternal soul?
When the Lord saved you, He died in your place and forgave you and cancelled out your sin. Can you think of anything more amazing?
But we spend our time in a state of criticism of one another. We do not take the log out of our own eye; we spend our whole time trying to get the speck out of our brothers’ and sisters’ eyes. This surely disqualifies us from the race.
Seven things that can knock us out of the race. I look in my heart: can I forgive? Do you look in your heart: can you forgive?
I found it incredibly difficult to go to Germany years ago, because I lost fifty-eight members of my family in Auschwitz. Every time I went to Germany, I spent my time looking at silver-haired people. In those days, I had nice dark black hair. I would look at those silver-haired people and wonder where they were.
I found it very difficult. It took a long time for the Lord to bring me to the place where, even amongst German believers, I could be absolutely free and love them.
I found it even more difficult when believers misrepresented me. I am sorry to talk about myself, but I do not want to bash you or beat you over the head. I want you to understand from my own heart.
When someone misrepresented me, as they did so much in the early days of Hash House, saying that I was giving sex instruction to young people, that we were worshipping the devil, that the money came from the devil, that everything to do with us was of the devil, I used to think, “Why does not God come out of heaven and strike them dead?”
They were believers. That was the hard thing about it. I began to wonder whether they were really believers. Now some of those same people are my greatest prayer warriors.
We are all going to spend eternity together. Think of it. You might as well get it put right now, or you might find yourself sharing a bedroom with somebody forever.
No, my dear friends, can you trust the Lord for grace to forgive? Can you trust the Lord for power to use those beautiful words, “I forgive you, and I love you”?
There is something about the words we use. You believe in the heart, and you confess with the mouth. When you just say, “I forgive him, I forgive him,” and it is all quiet and trapped inside, there is still a sense in which it has not been dealt with.
But when finally, with your lips, you say, “I forgive you”—now be careful about this. I have suffered from this. People have come to me and said, “I want to tell you something. You hurt me terribly—and listen, listen—I forgive you,” in this wonderful, superior Christian way of beating me over the head.
I felt very, very small, and said, “Do not do that.” But there is a place for saying, “Lord, I forgive them, and I love them.”
If you fix your eyes upon the Lord Jesus, you will not have any problem, because He endured the gainsaying of sinners. He knows all about this, and He forgave.
May God touch your heart this afternoon and do something in it. Maybe one or other of these things that knock us out of the race is an explanation for your condition.
Shall we pray? Shall we be quiet for just a moment? Let us ask the Lord, “Speak in my heart. Is there something I need to get right?” We want to win the prize. It is not as if that has to be an elite super-breed. It is for anyone who has the faith to trust the Lord.
Search our hearts, Lord, by Your Spirit. See if there be any evil way in any one of us. We want, Lord, to be in this race, and by Your grace, through Your power, we want to win the prize.
We want to be able to say with the Apostle Paul, “Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.”
Touch our hearts, Lord, and do something in them. Where there is sin, help us by that grace of Yours and power of Yours to break free from the entanglement. Help us, Lord, to get out of it.
Where there are encumbrances or weights that are somehow causing us to lose heart and exhausting us, Lord, help us to see them. Work in our hearts, Lord.
Where there is an unforgiving spirit, something that is holding us up, embittering us, paralyzing us, Lord, help us to let go of it and to be able to say in Your presence, “I forgive, and I love.”
Then, Lord, fill us with Your Holy Spirit, and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.