It is a joy for me to be able to be with you all once again, to be in the presence of the Lord.
I was thinking about that question about the Book of Acts: “When are you going to stop being in the Book of Acts?” Remember, it is the only book in the Bible that does not have a proper ending. We are in the Book of Acts till He comes.
I like that.
I would like to turn you to the prophecies of Isaiah, chapter 6, from verse 1.
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and His train filled the temple.
Above Him stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory.
And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.
Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar:
And he touched my mouth with it, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin forgiven.
And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.
And He said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.
Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed.
Then said I, Lord, how long? And He answered, Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste,
And the Lord have removed men far away, and the forsaken places be many in the midst of the land.
Then, in the Gospel of John, chapter 21, from verse 15:
So when they had broken their fast, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me more than these? He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord; Thou knowest that I love Thee. He saith unto him, Feed My lambs.
He saith to him again a second time, Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me? He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord; Thou knowest that I love Thee. He saith unto him, Tend My sheep.
He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me? Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time, Lovest thou Me? And he said unto Him, Lord, Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed My sheep.
Let us bow in a word of prayer.
Beloved Lord, we are so thankful that we are gathered in Your presence this morning. When we are in Your presence, we know anything can happen. It is a wonderful thing, Lord, to be found before You and to be found justified by the finished work that You completed at Calvary.
We want now, very simply, to ask that You will take this little time together and make it live with Your speaking and working. We ask, Lord, that You will give clarity to the speaking and clarity to the hearing.
We thank You for the anointing which is ours in the Lord Jesus, which He won for us at Calvary. Into that anointing, grace, and power, we stand by faith. Let that anointing be upon both speaking and hearing, that, Lord, something may be done in our time together, and Your Word may come to dwell in us richly in all wisdom.
Hear our prayer, Lord, and we shall be careful to give You all the praise and thanksgiving. We ask this in the name of our Lord Jesus the Messiah. Amen.
One of the greatest ministries in the whole sixty-six books of the Bible was born in a vision that the Spirit of God gave to a man called Isaiah.
I have often pondered, over the years, about Isaiah and how he saw the Lord. Out of that seeing of the Lord, and hearing of the Lord, and his response—we must not forget that—came a ministry that was not easy.
According to Jewish tradition, he lived till he was eighty-eight years of age. He was martyred when he was sawn in half, hiding in an olive tree. He lived through king after king, a number of them utterly evil, such as Ahaz and Manasseh, as well as those like Hezekiah and Jotham—Hezekiah, in particular, a good king.
This ministry of his was extraordinary. It was not the normal evangelical ministry we come to expect, where we understand that if thousands turn to the Lord, and there is some great national awakening, this is the sign that the ministry is valid.
But with Isaiah, the more he prophesied, the less they understood. The more he outlined the purpose of God for the people of God, the less they understood that purpose. Indeed, the more they contradicted it and rebelled against it.
He stood at a historic turn in the history of Israel. Uzziah was actually a good king, and in the year that he died, I imagine Isaiah was very troubled and confused. Uzziah had been a good king, but he tried to be a priest as well as a king, which was forbidden. As a result, when he became angry with the high priest and the priesthood in the temple, and told them to get out of the way because he was going into the holiest place of all to offer incense on the golden altar, leprosy broke out upon him. He had to live alone from then on, under the judgment of God, until finally he died.
I think that probably Isaiah, as a young man, was somewhat confused and questioning. He went to the one place where he could get an answer.
David spoke of dwelling in the house of the Lord, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple. Isaiah went into the temple of the Lord, the house of God, I imagine, because he wanted an answer.
It is always a good thing when a child of God inquires of the Lord.
The vision he got shattered him. I do not know whether he thought the Lord could be contained in the house of God. The temple was very beautiful; it had all its services. Somehow or other, I imagine—I shall one day find out, for I will ask him—I think he thought the Lord was sitting on the mercy seat, and that that was where you would find Him.
When suddenly he saw the Lord, He was far greater than Isaiah imagined: high and lifted up, enthroned, and the train of His robe filling the temple.
It was a revelation of the majesty of the Lord, the greatness of the Lord, and the sovereignty of the Lord that was to enable this man to endure through times of backsliding, contradiction, and evil.
In one sense, Isaiah held the testimony of the Lord. It was as if, in that nation, with all its backsliding, deafness, blindness, and disobedience, he was altogether different.
He saw vision after vision of the Lord—not only blessings, but judgments upon nations. Some Christians only think the Lord gives visions of blessing. They think that God is some benign old gentleman who is senile, almost suffering from Alzheimer’s, who would never judge people. He is not like that.
“That is the God of the Old Testament,” people say. Someone wrote to me a little while ago and said, “You seem to only worship the God of the Old Testament.”
I do not understand that kind of talk. For me, there is only one God, and He is the God of both the Old and the New Testament. God has not changed His character and suddenly become, from being a God of judgment, a God of love.
But Isaiah, because of what he saw, was able to hold that testimony faithfully to his martyrdom.
How much Isaiah really understood of the prophecies given to him is an open question. Did he really understand the coming of the Messiah? Did he, in fact, by the Spirit of God, see the Lord Jesus? Did he understand what the Lord Jesus was going to do?
When I think of Scriptures such as Isaiah 53:5:
He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement of our peace was upon Him;
And with His stripes we are healed.
What did he see? What did he really understand? Certainly, I think he understood more than many imagine.
He saw something. The apostle Peter says that these prophets inquired concerning the Spirit of Christ which was in them, what it meant when it prophesied these things.
I sometimes think how amazing the ministry of this man was, and how much we owe to him today because of what he saw, what he understood, and his faithfulness to the end.
Now, I believe you and I are at such a historic turn.
I take note of what is happening in the world. It began with a huge tsunami. It has moved on from judgment after judgment. People say to me, “This cannot be God. God does not do these kinds of things.”
These are the very people who read their Bible—or at least they sometimes wonder what they read—but they read their Bible. I wonder: Noah—eight people survived. What about all the children? What about all the so-called innocents? They all died.
Sodom and Gomorrah—they were not all evil, of course. When Abraham interceded, he got right down to ten. He never went below that, and apparently there were not ten in the sight of God. But there were lots of children and others in that terrible judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. One can go on and on when speaking about the various judgments of God.
We are living in an incredible time. Suddenly, things have moved into another dimension. You cannot have an earthquake and a tsunami that swept away a minimum of 176,000 people without waking up.
But I find most of God’s people are asleep, including many of the folks we know—quite asleep. They are caught up with the routine of church life, caught up with doctrine, caught up with all kinds of things, and somehow or other asleep. They do not hear what the Lord is saying, and they do not understand what He is doing.
It is frightening.
One American evangelical has said that he does not believe that Jesus died for the punishment of our sin. He said that if He did, then God is a torturer.
This was followed by an English evangelical, a very well-known one, who wrote a pamphlet on the same subject. He said he does not believe that when Jesus died, He died for the punishment of our sin. In theological terms, penal substitution: that He died in our place and bore the punishment of our sin.
He said, “If He did, then God the Father is a child abuser.” Can you believe such a thing? These are evangelicals.
This man I have just mentioned is one of the leading lights in the Evangelical Alliance of Britain. When two evangelical leaders came to speak with me about a matter to do with Israel, we got onto this other subject. I asked them what they were going to do about it, and they said, “Well, we are going to have a symposium at the London Bible School. All evangelical leaders can come to it, and the whole student body of the London Bible School can be present.”
They had it. My good friend David Pawson went along to see what it was all about, and he said he was horrified when the resolution was not passed that penal substitution is right. Can you believe this? Over a third of those present voted against it, including all the younger people present.
This is where we are going. Once the apostasy starts—after all, dear brothers and sisters, if you say that Jesus did not die and bear the punishment of our sin, where does it leave us? It leaves us with religion. That is all: moralistic, ethical religion.
It is unbelievable to me, because I think every day that He died for me. David Pawson said to me, “The problem with our brother, if he is a brother, is that he has a wrong concept of God.”
God never forced His Son to die. He loved me and gave Himself for me. It was a willing, voluntary action on the part of the Son, as it says prophetically: “I come to do Thy will, O God.” You remember?
I only want to say that we are at a historic turn. I have said it before. I said it a year ago, I think. We are at a point when we are on the threshold of tremendous things happening.
I think it is the beginning of the shaking of the heavens: first the earth, then comes the heavens. When the powers of the heavens are shaken, then people will begin to tremble. That is what the Lord Jesus said:
Men fainting for fear, and for expectation of the things which are coming on the world: for the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.
That means you and I need to wake up. I think there is only one real answer, and that is to be faithful to the testimony of Jesus.
We are meant to hold that testimony, and it will become increasingly hard to hold it, because the whole tide in national life and international life will flow against those who are going to be faithful.
For me, I feel there is a real sense in which we are at a point much like Isaiah. The answer is the same: we need to see the Lord.
We need to see the greatness of the Lord. We need to see the sovereignty of the Lord, the authority of the Lord. Nothing else will carry us through.
For Isaiah, a Jew, the temple was everything. It was amazing to him suddenly to discover that the Lord was much greater than the temple. Somehow or other, the temple revealed the Lord and expressed the Lord in so many ways, but the Lord was much greater than the temple.
I think it is the same with the church. If you are church-centred, you lose the church. If you are Christ-centred, you find the church.
When you get people who are simply caught up with the doctrine and teaching of the church, it does not function. But when you have people who are centred in the greatness of the Lord Jesus, the peace of the Lord Jesus, the power of the Lord Jesus, the authority and sovereignty of the Lord Jesus, it functions.
In other words, it seems to me that the thing which carried Isaiah through was that, when he saw the Lord and the Lord touched his lips, he fell in love with the Lord. I put it in my own words; it is not there in Isaiah, but I think that is what happened.
Now, I think that is a tremendous thing. The apostle Paul, when speaking about the church in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14—when he speaks about the body and the many members, one body, so also Christ; when he speaks about the different gifts and the manifestation of the Spirit; and when he speaks about our meetings in chapter 14—everyone forgets that between chapter 12 and chapter 14 there is chapter 13.
The apostle says, simply but profoundly, “A more excellent way show I unto you.”
In other words, if the church is to function, it can only function by love.
You can have faith and be divided. You can have hope and be divided. But only the love of God will keep us in unity. Only the love of God will enable the members of the body to lay down their lives for one another.
There is no other way. Church truth does not do it. Look at the scene. Look at church history. You will find people divided and divided and divided and divided and divided.
You can have all the truth. You can divide on baptism. You can divide on the Lord’s table. You can divide on the coming of the Lord—whether there is a rapture or no rapture, whether there is a millennium or no millennium. The more knowledge you have, the more possibility of division.
But when there is divine love, there is the ability not only to hold the truth but to be a living sacrifice. There is no other way for the house of God to be built.
If you look at Ephesians 4:16, which we all know well:
From whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.
The body is building itself up in love. Love is the vital, strategically necessary ingredient. Without it, you have only doctrine and dogma.
Then, again, talking about the temple, listen to Ephesians 2:21-22:
In whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord;
In whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
Is that not interesting? This temple is in the Lord—exactly what Isaiah saw. He saw the temple in the Lord. He saw the Lord filling it, enthroned above it.
Where is the Head? At the right hand of God. Where are we? On this earth. When the body is joined to the Head by the Holy Spirit and begins, by the Holy Spirit, to function in love, then something begins to happen. The world is turned upside down.
I do not know how else to put it more clearly, but some people see the church as the church, and others see the church as Christ.
The interesting thing is that if you see the church as the church, you can organise it. It is very simple: committees and councils, every form of organisation known to man—which is exactly what we have done.
But when you see the church as Christ, then somehow we have to find out: What is the mind of the Head? What is the thought of the Head? We can have the doctrine and the truth, but we do not have the wisdom to apply the truth to our situation.
Going back to Isaiah again, was it not Uzziah who said, “Mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”? It is a wonderful term, this term “the Lord of hosts.”
Who is the King? As far as I know, we have only one King, and that is the Lord Jesus. Who is the Lord of hosts? This King.
Psalm 24 puts it beautifully:
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord of hosts,
He is the King of glory.
Now, this term, “Lord of hosts,” which sounds so poetic in English, has a very different meaning in Hebrew. It means “Commander of the armies.”
I like that: Commander. That puts a whole different picture to it. This is Someone who is in charge of the military strategy of the kingdom of God, in charge of the military strategy of the church.
Is it not extraordinary if we never seek His face, if we never hear Him, if we do not know? If we simply say, “Well, this is what the Book says. We should do this, this, and this,” and then we do this, this, and this, and nothing happens.
I used to be amazed at the committees I had to sit on when I was young in the Lord. They were youth committees, of course—never big things, but youth committees.
I always remember we would start, and the pastor would say, “Now let us pray.” We would all bow our heads, and he would say, “Lord, we really need to know Your mind about the winter programme and a few other things. In the name of Jesus, amen.”
We all lifted our heads. “Now, what do you think about this?” Someone would say, “Well, I think we should have coffee evenings.” “Yes, yes.” Someone else would say we should do this, and someone else would say we should do that. Then we would bow our heads, and the pastor would say, “Thank You, Lord, for revealing to us Your strategy for this coming winter.”
Then we wondered, when the winter came, why no one ever got saved.
That can apply to every kind of thing we do. We put our heads together, and we come up with something for ourselves. We are republicans.
I was born and brought up in a kingdom, but the Queen—our present Queen—is a figurehead. Poor lady. At the opening of Parliament, when both the Commons and the Lords are together, she has to give a speech in which she says, “My Government will do so and so,” and it is not her policy at all. She may be absolutely out of sorts with it, but she has to say it because it is written for her by the Prime Minister.
That is exactly what we have done with the Lord Jesus. We write His speeches for Him. We actually evolve His policy, and we say, “My Government will do so and so.”
Thank God the Lord Jesus does not play ball. He leaves us to ourselves, and then we find that the Lord does not bless in the way we expect Him to. He does not add in the way we expect Him to. What do we expect?
Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, saw Him enthroned, and saw Him as the King, the Commander of the armies of heaven. If you and I could only hear what the Commander is saying, we might get somewhere.
Do not get me wrong in this matter. We need fellowship, but it must be active, not passive: actively getting on our knees and seeking the Lord to hear what He says. Then we need fellowship.
When we have a consensus feeling that this is the way we should go, then we can say, “Lord, are we right or are we wrong? Have we read Your mind rightly?”
People think this is all mystical. The times I have been accused of being a mystic simply because I said that if only we were to get on our knees and ask the Lord to reveal to us—do we expect the Lord to speak to us?
Many Christians do not expect the Lord to speak to them. They say, “It is all in the Book.” I agree with you: it is all in the Book. But the Lord, the Holy Spirit, has to take the Book and make it real to us.
I have told some of you this story before, but I will tell it again because it encapsulates it beautifully.
When I lived in Richmond, Surrey, England, there was a lady who used to phone us every now and again from at least sixty or seventy miles away. If she finally got through to me and heard my voice, she would explode and say, “Oh, praise the Lord! I asked the Lord that you might be at the end of the phone when I phoned.” Margaret, who looked after the house, would never let her get through.
Every time I was there alone and answered the phone, she would say, “Oh, praise the Lord. God has gifted you with the spirit of counsel and wisdom. I have such a problem. I asked the Lord that I might be able to get through to you, that you might be able to counsel me and advise me.”
Then she started. You could not get a word in sideways. She poured out this problem for twenty minutes nonstop. Then I would say, “Yes,” and she would go on again. She hardly breathed. It was incredible to me how she managed it.
At the end of it, before I had a chance to say a single word, she said, “Thank you for this advice that you have given. I knew you would counsel me this way. Thank you, dear brother,” and put the phone down.
I could have said, “My dear sister, I do not agree with what you were thinking at all.”
This is how many people seek the Lord in prayer. They never expect Him to answer. Some Christians would drop dead if He actually said, “I am here, and I want to say something.”
After a while, what I did was very simple. Every time she got going, I used to say, “Oh yes,” then put the phone down and get on with something else. Every now and again I would take it up and say, “Yes, yes,” put the phone down, then take it up again and say, “Yes, yes.” Finally, she would say, “Thank you for that counsel,” and put the phone down.
I think this is very much like how we pray. We do not expect the Lord to speak. We do not expect Him to make His mind known.
But if we have a Head in heaven, at the right hand of God the Father, should we not expect the Head to make known His mind, to reveal His intelligence, to reveal His heart? Of course we should.
This matter of Christ being the King, the Commander of the armies of heaven, is something tremendous. To be able to grow into a holy temple in the Lord, a home for God in the Spirit, is really basically what Isaiah saw. He did not experience it in the way we should experience it, but nevertheless he saw it.
Let me put it in a word: the supremacy and centrality of the Lord Jesus is the key to the building of the church.
When we see the Lord as supreme, when we see Him as the beginning and the end, when we see Him as the fullness of God, when we see that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Him, when we see that all life is in Him, when we see that all the grace of God is in Him and manifested in and through Him, then somehow we find one another.
Now let me come to the next point I want to make. Why do we always think we have to love one another?
I am not suggesting that we should now relapse from this and dislike one another. But every time we talk about love, we immediately think, “Who do I not love?” Normally, if we are honest, there are a certain number of members of the body that we do not love quite so much.
But I think we have got the shoe on the wrong foot. I think the first thing is to love the Lord.
If we love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength, we shall find that we love our neighbour as ourselves. There is no way that we can love the Lord from a pure heart and be out of sorts with our brothers and sisters.
But the fact of the matter is that most Christians are very much out of sorts with one another. I travel all over the world, and everywhere I go I hear the same things.
I remember years and years ago, when I lived in Egypt, going to a mission station. I will not say which mission, but there were three missionaries there. They had not talked to each other for two years. They lived in the same house, sat down for meals, and had not really talked for three years. It is not too strong a term to say they hated each other.
Of course, they said it was incompatibility—that wonderful Freudian term that allows us to get out of so much. Incompatibility! There is no such thing. All you have to do is lay down your life. That is all.
When there is someone you cannot get on with and cannot love, it is normally a challenge as to whether you are a living sacrifice.
It is not for nothing that Romans 12 says:
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.
If we are out of sorts with one another—because if you read on, it talks about the body of Christ, being many members, one body, and then about the gifts functioning—it is all there in Romans 12. But it begins with being a living sacrifice.
How can anyone be a living sacrifice unless they are filled with the love of God?
We normally have problems with one another and do not see it as a challenge to sacrifice. Instead, we feel that they ought to sacrifice themselves. “When so-and-so humbles himself or herself, then I will.”
We need to be able to be a living sacrifice.
The end of the gospel is not your satisfaction, your joy, your will fulfilled, your advance, or your expansion. The end of the gospel is to be a living sacrifice. Out of that comes the church.
How could Isaiah have overcome unless he was in love with God? I see no other possibility.
That brings me to say another thing. It is very simple. When the Lord spoke to the church at Ephesus, He said, “I have one thing against you: you have left your first love.”
First love is not puppy love. It is not the first flush of feeling we have for a member of the opposite sex when we are at the beginning of our teens, or for some in the middle of their teens, or for some in the latter part of their teens.
That is not first love. First love is a quality of love.
It is the kind of love that means nothing is too much trouble for you to please the one you love. That is first love.
You will travel twenty miles just to see a person for a few minutes. That is first love. You never say, “I have come twenty miles. It is a lot of trouble I have gone to.” That is not first love.
We put up with things and say, “It costs me no end to love you.” That kind of love is not first love. You do not think about the cost. When you buy the ring, or whatever else, you do not think all the time, “This is too much. It is going to make such a hole in my pocket.” It is a question of first love.
That is why the Lord took the one thing most of us like to bypass: an unforgiving spirit.
Do you know what the Lord Jesus said about it? He said:
If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
That is unbelievably stark. Did you hear that? The Lord says He will not forgive you if you do not forgive men their trespasses.
It is not so easy to forgive men their trespasses. Of course, women are included.
I found it very difficult to go to Germany. For many years, at the beginning, I avoided going to Germany. I found it so hard to visit the country because everywhere I went, as soon as I saw anyone with silver or white hair, I immediately thought, “Were they part of the Nazi thing?”
It is not so easy. People say, “Oh yes, if you have the love of God…” It is not so easy. You have to do something quite deliberate to forgive.
I always remember the story told to me by Lady Ogle when she was a missionary in Egypt. She came, of course, from an aristocratic home and had enormous wealth. She came from a standard of living that most people do not live at, and she went as a missionary to Egypt.
She told me, “I found Egypt—I hope there is no Egyptian here—the most unhygienic and dirty country in the world.”
When she was interviewed by the board of the mission, they said, “Lady Ogle, do you love the Egyptian?” She thought for a moment and said, “No.” There was silence all around the board, among these old gentlemen. Then one said, “Why are you going?” She said, “Because I believe the Lord will give me the love.”
So, of course, they accepted her. I think partly because of the money, but that is my own view. I am not sure that anybody else would have been accepted as a candidate, but she was accepted.
She could not love the Egyptians. The more she saw of Egyptian life, the more she saw Islam, the more horrified she was with the whole thing. You could smell a village a mile away—I am not joking, because I lived there. I had seen little children with what seemed to be black eyes, until I found it was flies swarming over their eyes.
She was working with a senior missionary. She was young, in her twenties. Suddenly someone came in and said, “So-and-so has collapsed at the city gate.”
The senior missionary said, “I cannot leave the clinic. You go, sister, and give her an injection.”
This lady was a well-known prostitute. She was suffering from syphilis, gonorrhoea, and a number of other things. When Lady Ogle got there and could smell her from metres away, she thought, “How could anyone even lie with this woman?”
She knelt down, and the woman struggled as she tried to give her the injection. Lady Ogle said, “Lord, I cannot love these people.”
The Lord said, “Kiss her.”
Lady Ogle was so shocked that she almost pulled the needle out of the woman’s arm. “Kiss her?” she thought to herself. “I cannot do that. What will I catch?”
The Lord said, “Kiss her.”
Lady Ogle kissed her, and the moment she kissed her, the love of God filled her heart for Egypt and the Egyptians, and never left her.
It was faith in action. When Rahab put that scarlet thread in the window, that was her faith in action. When Abraham offered Isaac up, that was faith in action.
It is not faith and works, as if you have to have works as well as faith. It is working faith: faith that operates, faith that has expression, faith that is concrete in its expression.
People say to me again and again, “I cannot forgive.” While you are in that condition, you never will forgive. There has to come a time when, with your lips, you say, “I forgive you.”
Maybe then you have to take some action. Then the love of God will fill your heart.
Do you not think it remarkable that the Lord spoke to one of the best churches of the seven and said, “I have this against you: you have left your first love”?
You have got the doctrine. You have got the truth. You have the gifts. But you have lost your first love.
When we lose our first love, before long rigor mortis begins to set into the body. First it starts as a paralytic condition. It is a little more difficult to function, a little more difficult to contribute, a little more difficult to move spiritually.
Before long, it becomes totally passive. You are a wheelchair case; you can no longer move. And you end with death.
Well, my dear friends, I think that is enough for one morning. But you see, I think that what Isaiah saw has tremendous significance, not only to him but for us.
If we are going to see the Bride make herself ready, it is that first love that you and I need above everything else.
I never could love the German people until finally I said with my lips, “I love you.” Then I found the love.
Not only that, I have gone back to Germany again and again and spoken many times to them. They have all become great supporters and warriors for Israel.
It is not so easy to love. Sentimentally, you can love easily. Superficially, you can love easily. But real love costs you your life.
I do not know that there is any other way for the church of God to be built.
It is not a question, first of all, of loving one another. First and foremost, it is whether we are in love with the Lord. If we are in love with the Lord, the rest will follow.
May the Lord take this poor word of mine and make it real to everyone who is here.
We need not only the truth. We need to find that most excellent way: the love of God.
Father, when Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, His train filling the temple, he was undone and said, “Woe is me.”
Lord, when we really do see You in all Your glory, holiness, authority, and power, we feel that we are undone. We are so unlike You, so different from You.
Lord, You know that very often we are here for what we can get out of You rather than what we can be for You. Therefore, Lord, have mercy upon us. Be gracious to us, Lord, and reveal Yourself in a new way to us. Help us to come to the place where we have a clean slate.
Lord, if there is anyone we cannot forgive, we forgive. Fill us, Lord, with that love of Yours yet more and more unto the day of Your appearing.
So immerse us and baptise us in Your love and in the fire of Your love, that we shall, by Your grace and power alone, overcome and stand one day before You in Your presence.
Hear us, Lord. We ask all this in the name of our Lord Jesus.