You could turn with me to the Gospel of John once again. I will read the verses that the Lord laid on my heart for these evening times.
Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.
He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, from within him shall flow rivers of living water.
But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believed on Him were to receive: for the Spirit was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified.
And He began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
And He spake the saying openly. And Peter took Him, and began to rebuke Him.
But He turning about, and seeing His disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind Me, Satan; for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men.
And He called unto Him the multitude with His disciples, and said unto them, If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
For whosoever would save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall save it.
And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.
He that loveth his life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
If any man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall also My servant be: if any man serve Me, him will the Father honor.
Beloved Lord, we are thankful that we have been remembering that tremendous sacrifice of our Lord Jesus. Father, we thank You. We would not be here but for Him. We thank You for that finished work of His at Calvary.
As we come to the ministry of Your Word, Lord, we want to confess in Your presence that apart from You we can do nothing. We can speak many words, outline truths, and have sound doctrine; but, Lord, if that anointing of Yours is not upon the speaking and the hearing, nothing will be done that will go into eternity.
We want this time to be filled with eternal significance—something done in our lives, something deposited within us. Lord, You are the only One who can do it. Therefore, we come to You, and we thank You that through that finished work of our Lord Jesus, You have provided us with anointing, grace, power, and wisdom.
Into that anointing, for the speaking and for the hearing, we stand by faith. Manifest it, Lord, by Your Holy Spirit in all of us. We shall be very careful, Lord, to give You all the praise and all the glory for answering this our prayer, which we ask in the name of our Lord Jesus, the Messiah. Amen.
Well, I think everybody probably knows that I have been speaking from this little phrase in the Gospel of John, chapter 7, verse 38:
He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, from within him shall flow rivers of living water.
It is too late now, I think, to go over everything that we have said in these evenings. We spent the first evening talking about rivers of living water: the power of such rivers, the effect of such rivers, the change that such rivers bring, and the life-giving qualities of those waters. In desert areas, it is particularly noticeable.
We spent another evening on the phrase, “He that believeth on Me.” It is not a little phrase in significance, but it is a very small phrase. “He that believeth on Me, from within him shall flow rivers of living water.” That is the key.
I pointed out to you that it is not, as unfortunately so many modern versions translate it, “he that believes in Me.” That is, you are here and He is there: you believe in Him here, and He is still there. That is academic belief.
But saving faith takes us to the Lord and joins us to the Lord. We have committed ourselves to the Lord. We are carried, as it were, to the Lord. We have been delivered from the authority and power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. It is a different position.
Living faith means that you have left the old man and come into the new. You have left the old creation and come into the new. You have left darkness and come into light. That is your position.
It is at that point that rivers of living water can burst out of your innermost being. Can you believe that there might not just be a little stream, or a shower, or a downpour, but rivers of living water?
We have in Hebrew two words for rivers. One is nahal and one is nahar. Nahar is an ever-flowing river. It never ceases; it flows all the time. The Nile is such a river. The Euphrates is such a river. The Orontes is such a river. The Litani is such a river. Even the Jordan, which we could pack into one of your small rivers ten times, is a flowing river.
But nahal is a seasonal wadi. It is something that only comes in the winter, when there are great thunderstorms and downpours. I think even in California you know something about that. These seasonal wadis are nahal in Hebrew.
God never meant a believer to be a nahal. He never meant a single believer to be a seasonal riverbed, dry for most of the year and every now and again, in a specific year, filled with water.
Some of us are like that. We go to a conference, we get blessed, and suddenly the rivers flow out of us. Then we go back to our dried-up, drought-ridden condition. God preserve us from such. We are meant to be watersheds of rivers of living water.
Last night, I spoke on the other phrase in this wonderful declaration. Jesus actually—it was not His words; it is the words of John the apostle:
But this spake He of the Spirit.
I love the way it is put: “But this spake He of the Spirit.” It is as if John is emphasizing that Jesus could have said, “I am the water of life. If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.” He could rightly and legitimately have said that.
But it is the Holy Spirit who is in charge of these rivers of living water flowing out of our innermost being. Once we grieve the Holy Spirit, we alienate ourselves from the possibility of rivers of living water flowing out of our innermost being. If we quench the Holy Spirit, it is even worse.
So we spent a whole evening talking about the person and work of the Holy Spirit.
But now, this last evening, for my responsibility, I want to talk about what it is that dams up these rivers. Why are there so few believers who are watersheds of such rivers? Why are these rivers not flowing out of the innermost being of so many believers?
Those out of whom the rivers are flowing are so notable, so exceptional, we would say unique. But that is not what the Lord wants. It was never for the unique, the notable, the exceptional, or the spiritually elite. It was something for every believer.
Can you imagine what would happen if every born-again child of God had rivers of living water flowing from the innermost being? It would transform our Sunday schools. It would transform our youth work. It would transform church life. It would transform our families. It would transform our workplaces, our places of everyday work. It would touch society and the communities in which we live. It might even touch nations.
Now, someone says, “No, no, no. They are all going to hell. We are supposed to be just going on with the Lord. We leave that lot—the government, the president, and everything else—to itself.”
My dear friend, you do not know the history of the church. If you look carefully at the history of the church, you will find that every time God has found a nucleus of people from whom rivers of living water flow, nations have been changed.
Perhaps all these national churches have been a big mistake, but the fact remains that they are graveyard monuments to something that happened: the work of the Holy Spirit. Then it crystallized, institutionalized, denominationalized, and became a monument.
But, my dear family of God, dear people of God, once these rivers of living water flow out of more than one person—often it begins with one person—it is like an infection. It goes to another, and another, and another; and before long, something is happening within a community and within a nation.
What is it that dams up these rivers? What is it that powerfully stops those rivers from flowing in the majority of believers’ lives?
Only the Lord can help me at this point. It is so difficult to put clearly into words, and I am going to upset some people. So I shall just forget it. I will upset everybody who needs to be upset.
The problem is wholeness. Oh, you say, “Now, don’t say that. The whole gospel is to make us whole.” Yes. But the problem with the damming up of these rivers is that we have never been broken. We are self-sufficient. We have got everything—or so we think.
We talked about living faith: “He that believeth into Me, from within him shall flow rivers of living water.” We talked about the Holy Spirit as the supervisor, the manager, of these rivers of living water flowing out of our innermost being. Now we need to speak about being whole.
The message of the gospel is that we are made whole. But once you have been made whole, you have to be broken. And we do not like it.
The deepest instinct in the human being is self-preservation. Therefore, every nerve within us screams out not to be touched. We do not want to be broken. We do not want the Lord to deal with us in such a way that we become poor in spirit and contrite in heart. We want to be whole.
Why do you think the apostle Paul began to conclude that amazing exposition of the gospel—the clearest exposition of the gospel in the Bible, the Roman letter—with these words?
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.
What is spiritually intelligent worship? There is emotional worship, and there is nothing wrong with it. Some people get terribly afraid of emotion, but there is nothing wrong with emotional worship. I feel very sad when people are all strapped up, as if they were in spiritual straitjackets, and give the impression that this is being spiritual.
I do not think it is being spiritual at all. I think whilst rivers of living water flowed, the straitjacket would go with it. There is nothing wrong with emotion or expressing emotion. We do not want you weeping so much that we cannot even hear what you are saying, nor getting into some sort of strange state.
I know people who feel that they can only worship the Lord when they are shaking. I remember one sister who always wore boots, and the zip used to go, “Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick.” When one of the brothers said to her, “Wouldn’t it be an idea just to unzip them?” she said, “No, that is how I know when the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
Well, we do not want anything like that. That is, I think, nonsensical. But it is a tremendous thing when we recognize that spiritually intelligent worship is to be a sacrifice. Now, that is painful. That is not emotional; that is painful.
But that is your spiritually intelligent worship, and it is the goal of the gospel. You may have been made whole, thank God for that. You may have been touched by the Lord and brought into a new place altogether. But the goal of the gospel, at least in this life on earth, is that you become a living sacrifice.
Now think: what in the world does that mean? A sacrifice went up in smoke. Think of it.
People talk about consecration. “I must consecrate my talents. I must consecrate this. I must consecrate that. I must dedicate myself to the Lord.” Then they throw everything into the Lord’s service. The church of God has suffered far more from the talents of its members than it has ever suffered from their faults and sins.
You may have a gift for music. You may have a gift for organizing. But if it does not come to Calvary, it is dangerous. It makes you whole; it makes you self-sufficient.
It is only when the Lord enables you, by His mercies, to become a living sacrifice that you can prove what is the good, perfect, and acceptable will of God. You prove it because all the rebellion has been dealt with—all the problem we have within ourselves, all the problem we have with doing the will of God, all the problem of preserving our self-life.
Does this make sense to you, or is it too hard to hear?
And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.
In other words, when you become a living sacrifice, you are freed from the world’s mould. It will put you in a mould, and you do not even know it. The way you think, the way you act, the problem you have with the will of God—all of it is due to this mould. When you become a living sacrifice, it is the end.
Do you get it? You are in charge of your destiny, your talents, your energy, and your life until you become a living sacrifice. When you are a living sacrifice, you are on the altar, and you do not get off it. You go up in smoke—fire and smoke. Think of it.
You may say, “I would rather go to some other conference than this, to be told that the end of the Lord’s dealings with us is to bring us to be a living sacrifice.”
But this living sacrifice is incredible, for out of it come rivers of living water. From being a living sacrifice comes the proving of what is the good, perfect, and acceptable will of God. Out of this, the mould of the world is broken, the caste in which you are trapped is broken, and you are renewed in your mind so that you can think what God is thinking.
The apostle Paul says in Philippians:
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.
You work out your salvation; He works in you, both to will and to work of His good pleasure. You will never know that until you are a living sacrifice. When you are a living sacrifice, then you are working out your salvation. Then you will know that it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
Now come back to what we read in Mark’s Gospel, chapter 8. Listen to the words of the Lord Jesus:
If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
For whosoever would save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall save it.
Please note very carefully: this is the gospel. Well, this is a different kind of gospel from what most of us are used to. It is not just, “Come and make a decision for Jesus. Come to Jesus; He will do you good. Come to Jesus; He will give you a ticket to heaven.” It is absolutely true, of course, that the Lord does all that. But this is the heart of the gospel.
Once you are saved, once you have been justified in the sight of God through the finished work of the Lord Jesus, once you are born of the Spirit of God, listen to the gospel as Jesus preached it. “If any man follow Me”—the word in Greek is the same: follow, follow—“let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.”
How do you follow? By denying yourself and taking up your cross.
The word there for “life” is psuchē in Greek. We get the word “psychology” from it, and “psychiatry,” and all the other things that are not so wonderful. Sorry, anyone here who is a psychologist. I keep saying negative things about psychology, but the fact of the matter is that it has to do with your soul.
Our translations say “life” because they feel that if we just say “soul,” people get all theological. But the way I would translate it, to bring it home, is this: “He that loses his self-life.”
If you seek to preserve your self-life, you lose it. If you lose your self-life, you find it unto life eternal. Got it?
The reason there are no rivers of living water flowing out of most of us is that we are in the job of preserving ourselves. We gloss it all up with biblical terms: consecration, dedication, giving your talents to the Lord, devoting them to the Lord, and all the rest of it. Now, we do not want the Lord to break us.
It is a wonderful thing when a person has a talent and it has gone through Calvary. Then the Lord comes through it. But otherwise, can you see what has happened to the church through organizing talents? They have organized the Holy Spirit out.
Even where the Holy Spirit is spoken of tremendously, the thing has become so highly organized that you really wonder where the Holy Spirit is.
Jesus began to speak openly about Calvary at this point. He had not talked about it before. Now He told the disciples plainly that He was going to die, that He was going to be buried, and that on the third day He would rise again.
Peter got more and more upset about it. Peter was always, to me, one of the most remarkable of the apostles because he was always opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. But the interesting thing is that, when you read the record, you discover that the others agreed with him. They never got called off because they kept their big mouths shut.
Peter was often the spokesman for the others. He said to the Lord, “Never, Lord. Die? That is not in the plan. We know You are going to be King, and as Messiah You are going to restore the kingdom to Israel. We are going to beat the Romans and everybody else.”
Then the Lord turned, looked into his eyes, and said, “Get thee behind Me, Satan.”
If I were to say to anybody here who is a believer, “Get behind me, Satan,” looking straight into your eyes, I would not be welcome again. People would say, “How could that brother have said such a thing about someone born of God? I am a child of God. I have been converted. I am saved. I belong to the family.”
Why did the Lord not say, “Peter, Simon, Satan is troubling you”? That would have been a nice way of putting it. Or, “Satan is putting thoughts into you, Peter.” But He did not. He looked into his eyes and said, “Get behind Me, Satan. You are not for the interests of God, but the interests of the world.”
What I am trying to say is that this was his self-life. And in that self-life was the poison of the serpent.
If you, as a believer, will not allow the Lord to deal with your self-life, the poison within your self-life will not only destroy you; it will destroy your family, your children, and church life. It can destroy the work of God. I am old enough to have seen it a thousand times.
There is poison within our self-life, and we never know it until we have laid it down, until we have allowed the Lord to break it. Then suddenly we see it.
Do you remember when the Lord met with Moses? Moses said, “I cannot go to Pharaoh. I have a stutter.” Very interestingly, the Lord took care of that. Yet afterwards it was Moses who did all the talking and Aaron who did all the acting. The Lord is the psychologist.
The Lord said to Moses, “What is that in your hand?” Moses said, “My rod.” This was the rod that he lifted up over the Red Sea. This was the rod with which he faced Pharaoh and the ten plagues. This was the rod that touched the rock, and water came out in the wilderness. It had always been with him, when he was with the sheep, the goats, and the camels.
The Lord said, “What is that in your hand?” Moses said, “It is my rod, Lord.”
“Throw it down.”
He threw it down, and instantly his rod became a viper—a sand viper, the most poisonous of the desert snakes, at least in the Middle East. Moses fled. Of course he fled. He had been forty years in the wilderness with sheep and goats. He knew all about vipers.
I can imagine him thinking, “Oh, God, I never knew what was in my rod. I have had that in my bedroom for forty years. I used it with the sheep and everything else. It was almost the symbol of my authority over the flocks. I never knew there was a poisonous snake in it.”
Then the Lord said, “Moses.” He turned around. “Take that viper up by its tail.”
Now, that is the one thing you do not do with a viper, because it will turn and sting you. Moses knew all about poisonous snakes. But he took it up by the tail, perhaps exercising faith, and it became a rod again—the rod that was to be used a thousand times in the ministry of Moses.
That talent you have, that natural gift you have, that ability to organize, is like that rod. Only when you lay it down do you find out that within it is the serpent.
All the rivalries, jealousies, and fights we have in churches, assemblies, the work of God, and among ourselves come from this kind of thing. We do not know what is in our self-life. We have no idea.
Only when we lose it, when we put it on the altar as a living sacrifice, when it is given over to God, when it is broken, do we suddenly discover what is in it. Then we are fearful; we will not touch it. But the Lord says, “No, no, no. Take it up by the tail.”
Now you understand the wisdom of our Lord Jesus—not merely knowledge, but wisdom—when He said, “He that seeks to preserve his self-life will lose it.” It will destroy him. It will destroy the work I would give him. It will destroy his family life. It will destroy relationships. It will destroy church life.
He that loseth his life, his self-life, for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall find it.
It is very interesting that in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 10, it says, “He that findeth his life shall lose it.” The word in Greek is he who has gained it, procured it, discovered it, and is happy with it. You will lose it.
It is an unfailing spiritual law. In one way or another, every person in this room is evidence of it. Either your self-life has not been laid down, but you are preserving it, and it is becoming the very thing that destroys you; or you have laid it down, discovered what was in it, and now God is using even your self-life.
What is it that stops these rivers of living water flowing out of our innermost being? An unbroken self-life. It is a dam. It is a damming-up of the waters, like an impenetrable wall that traps all those living waters from flowing out.
Like the Dead Sea: it takes everything and gives nothing. That is why it is sterile. That is what happens in so many believers. These living waters become sterile because there is no outlet.
It is only when what the Lord gives you, you give, that you get more. You give, and He gives more. Do you understand? It is a simple law.
Look again at Mark 8:
If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
“Deny himself” is an interesting word in the original. It means to disown yourself, to refuse yourself, or to give up yourself. I feel the best way to understand it is this: “If any man would come after Me, let him give up right to himself. Disown himself. Take up his cross. Follow Me.”
What did the Lord mean when He said, “Take up your cross”? In Luke’s version, He says that you should take up your cross daily. I like that. You must take up your cross daily.
Our problem is that we live in an age of human rights. There are rights for everything: women’s rights, unborn rights, animal rights, plant rights, tree rights. I do not doubt the beauty of trees, animals, and all the rest, but it is very strange: rights, rights, rights, and rights. We hear it all day long.
It has bitten into us so deeply that somehow we feel we have rights. Here is the Lord saying, “If any man would come after Me, let him give up right to himself.”
What was His cross? Everyone thinks of that great cross—the stake and the crossbeam—and they see the pictures of Jesus bearing it. But, of course, when a person was sentenced to death in those days, they carried only the crossbeam. The stake was already in position.
They carried the crossbeam on their shoulder, with the message of their sentence around their neck—or, if they were wealthy, carried by a servant in front of them. The soldiers would call, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” The person was carrying the crossbeam to the place of execution.
That helps considerably, because no one can crucify himself. It is impossible to crucify yourself. I tried for years—I am joking. From the day I was saved at thirteen, being a lively kind of person with a lively self-life, I found it so hard.
I pushed it down; it came up here. I pushed it down there; it came up everywhere. You do your best to crucify yourself. But how can you crucify yourself? You have a hammer; perhaps you can bang it through your feet. Then you have one hand; perhaps you can do that hand. But what about the other? You cannot do it. You cannot crucify yourself.
Yet the Scripture says that the world is crucified to you and you to the world. What does it mean? Here we have a wonderful picture. The Lord says, “If any man would come after Me, let him give up all right to himself, disown himself, take up the crossbeam, and go to the place of execution.” The Lord will take care of the execution.
Once you have committed yourself—once you have said, “I am going to follow the Lord at whatever the cost. If it means I am a sacrifice, I am a sacrifice. I give up all right to myself. I disown myself. I take up the crossbeam and go”—others will crucify you.
Your boss will. Your employees will. Your wife will. Your husband will. Your children will. Your parents will. And the church is the best of all. They are absolute experts at crucifying one another.
You do not have to worry your head about it. The idea that you can go to some conference, be in a wonderful spiritual atmosphere with beautiful sunrises, sunsets, and twittering birds, and then the Lord will come to you and say, “You are crucified,” and you say, “Ah, what a wonderful experience!”—it does not come like that.
What you have to do in cold blood is make the decision that you are disowning yourself and giving up your rights to yourself. You take up your crossbeam, and the Lord will arrange the circumstances of your execution.
But you cannot follow the Lord without the cross. Jesus said:
If any man will not take up his cross, he cannot be My disciple.
Please hear it: cannot. It does not matter how much Bible knowledge you have, how much you go to church, or how much you believe. If you are not ready to take up the cross and deny yourself, you cannot be His disciple. Saved you may be, but you cannot be a disciple.
Once you follow the Lord Jesus, to begin with it is all wonderful. He does so much for us: so many miracles, so many wonderful things, answering our prayers in a thousand ways. Then we come up, in the path, to a cross—stark, bloody, inescapable.
If you avoid it, you are finished. No more growth, no more blessing. You become a monument.
We are all very adept at blaming it on circumstances. “My circumstances are very unusual. If you knew my husband, you would understand. If you knew my wife, you would understand my situation. Oh, my children. Oh, the parents I have.” We are always blaming it on somebody.
Sometimes we blame it on the church. We say, “Never seen a crowd like it. They would kill anybody. You do not expect us to have rivers of living water with an assembly like this.” We always have excuses for it. There is no excuse.
If we follow the Lord, it is inescapable that we have to disown ourselves—our self-life. Now listen to this: if you disown that self-life, God gives it back under new management.
That is very important, because we have emotions, we have feelings, and we have a thousand and one other things. They have to be under new management.
You can never crucify yourself. You can take up the crossbeam and go to the place of execution, but it is absolutely necessary to see first and foremost that in Christ you are already crucified.
I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.
—Galatians 2:20
When we become religious about the teaching of the cross, we get heavier and heavier, darker and darker, and more miserable. But listen carefully: “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live.” It is all life. It is not death; it is life. Death is the gateway to life.
Death is the gateway to rivers of living water bursting out of the innermost being.
Years ago, Miss Fischbacher illustrated this for me. She may have got it from Bethany. This sheet of notes is me—or it is you. This Bible is Christ.
God took me and you and put us in Him. God lives in the eternal present; there is no past with Him and no future. It is always, “I AM THAT I AM.”
When Christ died, you died. The note is hidden in the Bible. Whatever happened to the Bible happened to the note. The history of the Bible, from my hand to the lectern and to the little table, is the history of the note.
In other words, when God the Father placed you in Christ, the history of Christ became yours. When He was crucified, you were crucified. When He was buried, you were buried, thank God. When He was raised from the dead, you were raised from the dead to walk in newness of life—rivers of living water.
This has to be revealed by the Holy Spirit. I only know that I tried and tried and tried to crucify myself. I had a very lively self-life, and I found it impossible.
In the end, I was in such desperation that a little book came into my hands. I decided to spend the whole afternoon with it. It was a tiny booklet; you could read it in twenty minutes. I got on my knees in the dustiest old parish church you have ever had. The smell of dust was everywhere. I do not think they had opened the windows in a hundred years.
I knelt in that old place because I could find nowhere else to pray. I was at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, and there were students, professors, and lecturers everywhere.
I knelt in that place, and it was as if heaven opened. I understood, first of all, that the Holy Spirit had been given as the vice-regent of the Lord Jesus to reproduce His life and His nature in us. That was the first thing.
The second thing was this: you were crucified with Christ. This time it came as shafts of life. I had always understood this as a religious thing: one had to afflict oneself, be miserable, crucify oneself, and never laugh. I had the impression of a Christianity that was dark, heavy, miserable, and joyless.
I said, “Lord, I have been trying to Christianize myself, and I have had a very hard job doing it. I made myself pray. I made myself study the Bible. I made myself go to church. I made myself witness to one person a day.”
It was John Wesley’s practice that I had adopted. Poor people—the ones to whom I witnessed—they were terrified of me. I used to get them in a corner and really give it to them: “You are on your way to hell. You need to be saved.” Terrible, really, when I think about it.
The best thing about it was that I always had a place in the students’ common room to myself. As soon as they saw me coming, they moved out.
But I have never forgotten it: I had been trying to Christianize my old self, and God’s verdict was crucifixion.
When it shone into my heart, I actually felt like saying goodbye to myself. “Now I know what You have done, Lord. You crucified me.” A huge load that I felt upon my back just rolled off. For the first time, I began to live. Actually, I began to laugh, and I have been laughing ever since.
I became normal. I did not ditch the truth, but I stopped trying to be a Christian. It is a terrible business, trying to be a Christian. I let the whole thing go when I saw that I was crucified with Christ. From that moment on, I blossomed by the grace of God.
Certainly, that was the beginning of people coming to the Lord. I had tried so much to get people saved and had never seen anyone saved through all my endeavors. Not a single person.
But when I got to this, the Lord said, “No more witnessing. Only when I give you the opportunity, then you can speak.” Now I was under government.
I enjoyed three weeks in which I lived freely and happily. Then I was in the common room, and suddenly this fellow, who was captain of the rugby team, came up and said, “Lance, can I ask you some personal questions?”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Some of us have been talking. There is a change. What is it?”
A few weeks before, I would have said, “You are on your way to hell. I am on my way to heaven.” But now I looked at him and wondered whether this was a deception. Here was this very normal, tough man asking me what the difference was between us.
So I said, “Well, we are both sinners. I have been saved by the grace of God, and maybe you have not.”
Then he looked at me and said, “Well, how can I be saved?”
I said, “You have to ask. You have to tell the Lord that you believe He is your Saviour, that He died for your sin, and ask Him into your heart.”
“Do I have to go to a church to do that?” he said.
“No,” I said. “You can do it anywhere.”
“What, here?” he said.
“Well, I suppose so.”
There in the common room, he bowed his head, with tears running down his cheeks, and said, “Oh God, You know what a sinner I am. Please save me.”
For the next few days, I was quite sure that this whole thing was a work of Satan. I thought, “I have worked my hands to the bone for three or four years to get people saved, and not a soul has been saved. Now all of a sudden, I sit there and someone comes up, asks me, starts weeping in the common room, and asks the Lord to come into his heart with all these students talking and chattering around. It cannot be the Lord.”
But it was the Lord. That was the beginning for me of seeing the Lord at work—not me, but the Lord at work—beginning to save others, help others, and build them up in the Lord. It was rivers of living water.
I say it to the glory of the Lord, not because there was anything in me, because it is the norm for the Christian. It is what every one of us ought to be. I am poor, a very unworthy servant, as dear Stephen knows only too well. But I have found out that it is the Lord.
It is a tremendous thing when the Lord gets hold of a human being and when what is in the Book becomes real in them.
May the Lord help every one of you, because we should have these rivers of living water. Why should we think that the growth of darkness in the United States, the growth of Satanism, or the slide into immorality is going to quench all this?
Rivers of living water come bursting out of the innermost part of your being. It does not matter if Satan does a war dance around you; the rivers will come out. It does not matter if the antichrist appears; the rivers will be there.
They are meant to be with us until the coming of the Lord, until we are caught up to be with Him. May God give us grace this night: rivers of living water.
If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
He that would save his life shall lose it; and he that shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall save it.
He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, from within him shall flow rivers of living water.
Beloved Lord, make this real in every one of us. We are all blood-bought children of God. We are all members of the body of our Lord Jesus. We are all those who are witnesses to Your grace and Your power.
Lord, make it true of every one of us that whatever blocks and dams up these rivers of living water may be broken down. Lord, hear us. Enable us to make the decision that we will disown ourselves.
We will give up all right to ourselves. We will take up our cross and follow You, whatever the cost. We know, Lord, that this will mean fruitfulness, life, building up, and glory to You, Lord, for Your name’s sake. Amen.