Turn to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16, from verse 15.
Jesus saith unto them, But who say ye that I am?
And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.
And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
And then in the Old Testament, in the prophet Zechariah, chapter 4, from verse 1.
And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep.
And he said unto me, What seest thou?
And I said, I have seen, and behold, a lampstand all of gold, with its bowl upon the top of it, and its seven lamps thereon; there are seven pipes to each of the lamps which are upon the top thereof;
And two olive trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.
And I answered and spake to the angel that talked with me, saying, What are these, my lord?
Then the angel that talked with me answered and said unto me, Knowest thou not what these are?
And I said, No, my lord.
Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain: and he shall bring forth the topstone with shoutings of Grace, grace, unto it.
Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts hath sent Me unto you.
For who hath despised the day of small things? For these seven shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. These are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth.
Shall we bow together in a word of prayer?
Father, we want to thank Thee that we are here in Thy presence this evening. We thank Thee for the fellowship. We thank Thee for the spirit of worship and praise.
And as we come now to Thy Word, we want to ask, Lord, that Thou wilt make Thy Word live to us. Deliver it, Lord, from being just a lecture, or a Bible reading, or an outline of truth and doctrine. We pray that it may mean more than that. We pray, O Lord, that Thou wilt make it a meeting with Thyself. Come to us in Thy Word, Lord.
We thank Thee for the provision Thou hast made for us all, for this gathering, for this specific meeting. We thank Thee for the anointing which Thou hast provided, for the grace and the power that is in that anointing, for all of us, for speaker and hearer.
Dear Lord, by faith we stand into that anointing now, that Thy design for this time be fulfilled, and the end may be that Thou shalt be glorified, Father, and the Lord Jesus honoured, and that purpose of Thine concerning Him understood more fully by all of us. And in our hearts, there come a committal to it in obedience.
We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Now, in these evening times, I have been speaking about living faith: practical, living, working faith. Not the faith that is up here, not the faith that is in here.
It is a very interesting thing that, in the Word of God, obedience is almost synonymous with faith. To obey is to trust, because, in actual fact, obedience is the only real evidence that you are the possessor of living faith.
What a need there is today for such living faith. We Christians believe so much, we profess so much, and we possess so little. There is so little in our lives individually and in our life corporately that reveals what we profess as a reality.
And this matter of living faith is really all-important. Now, I do not want to say any more about that; otherwise, with time going, we will not be able to deal with the matter for this evening.
I want to speak about living faith and the church of God.
I would just like to say this straight away. I believe that in these days in which we live, unless we believers understand the heart of God, we shall be undone.
It is not enough merely to have a biblical knowledge. We must understand what is the heart desire of God, because as we come toward the end of the age and move into the very last phase of human history, the enemy is going to work in ways unparalleled in the long history of mankind—in seducing, deceiving, deluding, and compromising.
And we need to understand what really is the heart burden of God. Now, I would just like to say, in a sentence or two, that you cannot understand the burden on the heart of the Lord for our day and generation, and have an understanding of the times we live in, unless you see two matters.
One is the church. The church is the matter: this whole question of the church—the body of the Messiah, the body of Christ, the house of God, this growing into a holy temple in the Lord, this one body in Christ, this building up of itself in love, growing, as it were, into the Head, holding fast the Head, and discovering the body fitly framed and knit together.
If we do not understand this, we miss the burden of God’s heart for our generation. We have to have an understanding of this.
And that is why, in my estimation, there has been such a moving of the Spirit all over the globe. Thirty years ago, I remember when I first began ministry and began to talk about the church, people’s mouths dropped open. They did not understand what you were talking about. It was something that was rarely spoken of.
It has been an amazing thing to me to watch the moving of the Spirit of God. Whatever people may feel about some of its extremes and excesses, to see the way that this matter now has become almost common knowledge. I cannot say it is always understood, but at least everyone today talks about the church as the body of Christ, and talks about the church as being something more organic, about living stones being built together.
This is the most exciting development, and surely it is exactly what we expect. A. B. Simpson said, at the end of the last century, that the last phase of human history would be marked by a great movement of the Spirit of God—a rediscovery of the Person of the Holy Spirit leading us to a rediscovery of the church. And it seems to me that that really is one of the things that has happened.
The other thing, I believe, that we have to understand—the other matter that is so much on the heart of God—is Israel.
And if we do not understand these two things, we cannot understand the times in which we live. For these two matters lie now heavily upon the heart of the Lord, and everything He is doing has these two matters in front of Him.
Now I will leave it and say no more about that. Tonight, I want to talk about living faith and the church of God.
You can have all the doctrine of the church you want. You can outline church patterns, tell us what church ground is, tell us how living stones must be built together; but if you do not have living faith, all your knowledge is theoretical.
There will be no building of stone to stone. There will be no living birth of the church. There will be no real church life. There will be no functioning of the body of Christ, because unless there is living faith, there is no possibility for the church to be built and to function.
Its birth, its development, its outbuilding—pardon—its ministry and testimony, its completion: your participation in it, your involvement, your input, if you like, is all linked to this matter of living faith.
If the enemy cannot stop you from seeing what the church is, what he will do is bring disbelief into your heart, so that you will sit endlessly in meetings, hear all about the church and how it should function, and hear all about gifts and ministry and everything else, but nothing ever happens.
And, in particular, you are never practically, genuinely, realistically involved. It is living faith, and living faith alone, which not only grants that you have a vision, but brings you right into the practical outworking of that vision.
Without such living faith, the whole matter is an ideal. The whole matter is doctrine. It is truth. It is something that has not become flesh and blood.
Now, just have a look, will you, for a moment, at one or two aspects of this matter. First of all, I would like to underline the glorious fact.
Look at our Lord’s declaration. Is it not a marvellous declaration? So majestic, so grand in its words, so simple:
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
If it were not for this marvellous declaration of the Builder and Head of the church, I, for one, would long ago have given up.
When I see the mess—when I see not just the mess in traditional circles, institutional circles, but when I see the mess in so-called groups that see something of the church—I would long ago have given up, would not you?
I could be tempted to believe in some of these theories that some have propounded: that the church was marvellously born and planted and developed in the first century of the church era, but very quickly after that it went to pieces. And it is no good bemoaning the fact, because now it has all gone to pieces.
And we who are born again should not have anything to do with the ecumenical movement, because it is false anyway. And we should not look for any manifestation of unity in a concrete way amongst the people of God, because it is a hopeless matter.
Now, I am very glad the Lord Jesus did not say, “Upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it until the time of the end. And then the gates of hell will prevail against it.”
He never said that. Some people seem to think it is written there. They seem to think it is implied. But the Lord Jesus never said it.
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
If that is so, I have an eternal fact. I have a fact to which living faith can be anchored. Whatever might be apparent, whatever the problems and difficulties may be that I see with these eyes and feel even in my spirit, the fact is I have a statement—not of an apostle, not even of the first apostle—but I have a statement of the Head of the church and the Saviour of the body, the Lord Jesus Himself.
And this is what He said:
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
And I am not a Catholic. My background is Jewish, and so I am not a Catholic. I never was a Catholic. Thank God, I was never a Protestant either, but still, that does not matter. I mean, I have never had much to do with either one of them, to be quite honest.
But the fact of the matter is this: I am very thankful that it was to Peter that the Lord spoke, and that He said, “You are Peter, a little splinter of the rock; upon this rock,” using another word, “the massif of the rock, I will build My church.”
Now, I am so glad that it was Peter that He said this to. You are not?
Peter, who was so impulsive; Peter, who was so forceful; Peter, who was so in the forefront; Peter, who wanted to serve the Lord with all his heart; who said, “I will die with You rather than deny You”; Peter, who swore three times that he did not even know Jesus.
To this man, who denied his Lord three times with oaths, Jesus said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church.”
Oh, the Peters that there are in the church. Of course, most of us do not come so quickly to see the trouble in ourselves; we do see it in one another. We are always being let down by one another, are not we? We always say, “What is the point? How can the Lord build the church here? How can He build it there? We have got so-and-so.”
I imagine that if we had so-and-so, who denied the Lord three times with oaths and almost with curses, we would feel, “Oh, it is impossible. It is impossible. The Lord cannot—how dreadful. Did not the Lord say, ‘Let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay’? No oaths.”
And yet this man said, “I do not even know the Man.” Fancy speaking about the One he had called, “Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” “I do not even know the Man,” he said.
And what is more, to a little slip of a girl. Now, I know some women are formidable. I know our brother spoke this afternoon about them being the weaker vessels, but I have always noted that women outlive men by ten years on average. And some women’s voices—they are like foghorns. So strong some women can be. Weaker vessels in another way, yes.
But, you know, it is amazing to me that Peter buckled, collapsed, completely went down in front of some little slip of a serving girl who tripped him and said, “You were with that Jesus.”
And this great rugged fisherman, so masculine, so virile, so forceful, so aggressive, collapses in front of such a little slip of a girl. And when he said, “No, no, no, no, no, no,” she came back a bit later and said, “Listen, you speak with a dialect.”
You know, if it were in the British Isles, I would say, “You speak with a Yorkshire dialect.” You can tell a person a mile off where they come from. This Galilean—the Galilean dialect had a lisp. They lisped. They could not quite say “s.”
And so she said, “Your speech betrays you.” And he collapsed in a heap. And with oaths he said, “I do not know the Man.”
Now think for a moment. This is the one of whom Jesus said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock—you are just a little splinter of the rock, but upon this massif of the rock—I will build My church.”
I would say that if we had a few people like that in the company in which we are worshipping, we could well give up. We might say, “It is impossible. Do you mean to tell me the Lord is going to build the church and the gates of hell are not going to prevail against it when we have got this kind of material? My goodness, hell is inside. It is the Trojan horse. We have already got hell inside.”
And yet it was Peter that the Lord Jesus singled out, as if to say, “Peter, you represent a kind of material that I am going to take hold of and work out of the living Rock, producing living stones. And I am going to build you, together with other living stones, upon this rock. I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Oh, if we only had living faith. You know, it is amazing how disillusioned and depressed and disappointed we become in this matter.
Of course, I know that, again, it is our concepts that often are wrong. You see, we are looking for something perfect. We are all looking for the perfect church. We do not want Peters. We want saints of the canonised variety—no evil thought, never a breakdown, never a failing, never a sin.
We are looking for people who all see clearly, who all walk purely, who are all absolutely powerful in the Spirit. We want to see all the elite drawn together, somehow or other, like that. Perfect.
The church down here will never be perfect. If it was, you would not join it.
Well, I would put it more kindly and say, if it was perfect and I joined it, it would be imperfect, would not it?
The fact of the matter is that the church down here was never meant to be perfect. It is here that the whole work of perfecting goes on. And the wonder of it all is that God takes the most hopeless material—He takes this material which in itself could not stand up to the test—and He does such a work with that material, and out of that material He builds His church.
I am thankful for the declaration of the Lord Jesus. He must have known that there would come the Dark Ages, that the light of God in the church would almost be eclipsed.
He must have known that the Middle Ages would bring such a system that would kill everything. He must have known that when the Reformation broke out, before a generation had gone they were at each other’s throats. He must have known all these things. He must have known all the thousand and one divisions that were developed amongst us down through the centuries of church history.
He knows in our day and generation that we are facing the rise of the antichrist, of that period of darkness and lawlessness which soon must make its presence felt. Surely the iniquity and lawlessness in the whole of society around the world is the first harbinger of what is coming upon the earth at this time.
And if we are moving into such a time, when the very atmosphere will be antagonistic, when in the atmosphere there will be something that will wear out the saints, oh, how we need an anchor ground for faith.
No wonder the love of the many will wax cold, because iniquity shall abound. No wonder there will not be such a thing as enduring faith unless we put on the breastplate of faith and love deliberately.
We need more than natural understanding, natural talents, natural grip, natural courage, or natural character. We need supernatural power and grace if we are to overcome in the days that lie immediately ahead of us.
I am thankful for this wonderful word of our Lord Jesus. I am thankful that He did not just say, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church.” I am thankful that He said, “And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Oh, the grace of the Lord to go on to the second part of the sentence, enforcing the whole. It would have been wonderful enough if He had just said, “Upon this rock I will build My church,” but He actually says, “And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
What an anchor ground for living faith. Have you seen anything concerning the body of Christ? Have you seen anything concerning the church of God?
Do you notice that lovely word: “Upon this rock I will build My church”? It is not a church; it is My church. And the gates of hell are not going to prevail against it. Praise God for that.
We have an anchor ground for faith here. Oh, have we got anything else in the Word of God that we can turn to? Yes, we have. We have some other wonderful things.
I mentioned it the other evening, I believe, when speaking to you in connection with another matter. But when we come to Revelation 19, we hear those wonderful words after seeing visions of persecution and martyrdom and worldwide systems, and the mark of the beast, 666, and this awful prostitute religious thing that rides on the back of the beast, and all these fearsome visions.
We hear these marvellous words:
Hallelujah.
Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, for the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigneth.
Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, for the marriage supper of the Lamb is come, and His bride hath made herself ready.
Praise God. Right up to the moment of the rapture, there is going to be a people in the earth who are making themselves ready by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the work of the cross.
They are going to take the grace of God. They are going to take the power of God, and in the midst of difficult circumstances, contradictory circumstances, in the midst of colossal problems and difficulties, they are going to make themselves ready.
I think that is the most marvellous thing. And then I go back to the Old Testament, and I read this marvellous prophecy of Zechariah, as it is contained in chapter 4.
And there I find that he saw a lampstand all of gold. Do you remember when John the apostle turned round in the day of the Lord and saw, in the midst of seven golden lampstands, One Who was the risen, ascended, glorified Messiah? Do you remember it?
And he was expressly told that those seven lampstands, all of gold, represented seven local churches. Do you remember?
Now, long before, Zechariah had a vision. And being awakened as one out of sleep—I always love that phrase. I do not know what you are like when you are awakened out of sleep. Ha! Dead.
I do not know. Some people seem to wake the moment their eyes open. Poof, they are off. They jump up and they are ready. But some of us are more human.
We are those whose one eye opens, and then the other eye opens, and one hand moves, and then the next hand moves. And actually, we are walking around still asleep for about half an hour.
You know, I know people say all kinds of things. They say, “Have a cold bath, drink a black cup of coffee,” but I do not really find it particularly helps. But it is interesting that it says, “As one who was awakened out of sleep,” which I take it to mean that he was a little bit dozy.
And he looked, and he saw a lampstand all of gold, and on either side two olive trees, one olive tree on either side. And then he saw something. He said, “What are these, my lord?” He was very interested in the olive trees.
That is interesting. He was so interested in the olive trees, and the angel almost ignored it. He said, “Do you not understand?”
Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Now, this is very interesting, because as we go on, we discover it is a divine building programme. It is a building programme. First and foremost, this lampstand represents the building work of God, the eternal building work of God.
Of course, when it was given to Zechariah, it was something to do with the actual rebuilding of the second temple. And that was very important for that dispensation, because it was into that temple that the Messiah was to come suddenly, and that whole age would be finished.
But how marvellous it is: a building programme. And now listen. Listen to the word:
Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Oh, the difficulties those builders had in Haggai and Zechariah’s day, in Zerubbabel’s day. They were so small, they were so sparse, they were a tiny little remnant. The vast majority—hundreds and hundreds of thousands of the people of God—had been left behind in their comfortable homes in Babylon, in Persia, in Assyria, in all that whole region.
This was just a little small group that had gone back, and everything was against them. They got so disillusioned, so disappointed, so worn out. They had not their own homes to sleep in or live in, and so they first started on that; and then they realised they had put the thing the wrong way round.
Instead of getting the Lord’s house built, they were all bothered about their own homes. And God had to speak to them.
How interesting it is: “Do not despise the day of small things.” That sounds like a word to disappointed people.
They were beginning to wonder, “Is it worth it? We hear about all our other friends all back there enjoying themselves in luxury and peace. They have got their synagogues, their places of worship, their schools, their educational programmes, their businesses. They are doing very well.”
“I wonder if it is worth it—all this wear and tear, all this antagonism in the atmosphere over this matter of getting this temple built. Is it perhaps that the whole thing is finished? Perhaps God is no longer interested in temples anymore. Maybe the idea is the synagogue now, not the temple.”
They did not realise, as we do with the wisdom of hindsight, how important that temple was.
The seven eyes of God, meaning the whole divine intelligence, will rejoice so much when it sees the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. But what is a plummet? A plummet has no meaning outside a building, is that not so?
By that line you tell whether a thing is true, whether it is straight. You understand, I am not a builder, so I can only put it in my own terms. But you do not use a plummet to paint a picture, and you do not use a plummet to fish.
A plummet has only one meaning: a building programme is in operation. And it says the whole divine intelligence will rejoice when it sees the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. His hands laid the foundation; his hands will also finish it.
Now, here is another word. Listen to it very carefully:
Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.
Now, what was this great mountain? Well, it could not have been one of the mountains around Jerusalem. I mean, that is obvious. So it was a moral mountain, if you like, a spiritual mountain—some great range of difficulty that lay between the builders and the completion of the building programme. Do you understand?
And here comes the word:
Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain; and the topstone shall be brought forth with shouts of, “Grace, grace, unto it.”
Not glory. I am sure, as some of us who have been influenced in a good way by the moving of the Spirit of God in this past age would be, we might say, “Why does He not say, ‘Glory, glory’?”
So tremendous is the completion of this work, so colossal the building programme coming to its completion, the only way we could cry is, “Glory!” No, they say, “Grace.”
Do you know that denotes something? It denotes that there will be such difficulties at the end, such problems at the end, that but for the grace of God, it would not be completed. But the grace of God will complete it, and all involved will say, “Grace, grace.”
Oh, listen. You might look at me, you know, weary or whatever, half dead, I do not know, or may not quite know what I am talking about this evening. But let me just say this: here is an anchor ground for living faith in the whole matter of the church of God.
Not by might, nor by power.
Not even by spiritual might—that is, our might sort of spiritualised. Do you understand what I mean? Christian might and Christian power.
But by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
How will that mountain be removed? Only by people with faith as a grain of mustard seed, who, having seen that the Lord has said that upon this rock He will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, say to the mountain, “Be removed out of the way of our Lord.”
This work is going to be completed, not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit. And when the Spirit of the Lord not only revives and renews the little faith that is in you, but puts the word of faith into your mouth concerning the difficulties that stand in the way of the upbuilding and completion of the church, then the mountain will be removed.
But thank God, here is an anchor ground for living faith:
The topstone shall be brought forth with shouts of, “Grace, grace, unto it.”
Now, this church that God is building—really, it all comes down, does it not, to the fellowship we have in our own areas.
We can all hide in this wonderful universal church that is all over the place, that nobody ever sees, and that is perfect and without spot or blemish. You know, we can hide behind this invisible church. Of course, basically, it is invisible.
But the invisible reality has to have a concrete expression. And what it really comes down to is this: I can be one with my brothers and sisters in Australia because they happen to be a few thousand miles away. It is as easy as that.
I can love my brothers and sisters in China because they happen to be in China. Now, if some of our brothers and sisters come here, then I might begin to have some of the problems, because they are here.
I can talk about the church of God. Oh, church of God! How wonderful the church of God is. How wonderful is its unity, how glorious its power, how marvellous that the Lord is building the church.
And, you see, I can be so in love with them all as long as they are a few miles away. I can be so committed to this matter of the church, providing it is nothing to do with where I live.
I can say, “I see this matter. I see this matter. I see it is on the heart of God. Really, I do.”
We can devour books and magazines that seem to be coming out galore now on the whole matter of the church. Oh, how wonderful it is.
And when it comes to it, the whole thing is up there. It is a facade.
It is a facade. It is like living in the wilderness and singing hymns about the promised land, having studies about the promised land, always having outlines about the promised land, glorying in the milk and honey that flows in the promised land.
The springs that are found in the valleys in the promised land, the rain that comes down—but, of course, down in the Sinai, the rain hardly ever comes, and when it does, it can wash you away.
But up there in the hills, it is a little different. It can be green; everything can be covered with flowers. It is so fertile and fruitful in its season.
We can stay there in the wilderness singing about all these wonderful things: the copper that is in the mountains, the iron that is in the hills, all the wonder of the promised land. Thank God, the promised land, the promised land, the promised land—and we are never in the promised land, because living faith never united us to the Word of God concerning this matter.
So it is with the church. The proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof. And if you really believe in the church, then it is a question of your relationship to your brothers and sisters in the area where you live.
And that is where we have all our problems. Now people always come up to me and say, “Oh, it was so wonderful to hear about the Holy Spirit. How much?” And they seem to think that one of these days the Holy Spirit is going to fall upon them and they are going to do some spiritual levitation.
They are going to float in the air, horizontally possibly, sort of float along with wonderful ecstasies and marvellous visions, and hear the Lord speaking, and all this kind of thing.
Listen, I will tell you something. If you begin to understand something about this matter of the church and really commit yourself to it, and obey the truth, so that your attitude to your brothers and sisters in the area where you live has to undergo a radical change—a revolution—that you commit yourself to them, really commit yourself, and not on the perimeter, but really commit yourself to them, you will need the empowering of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
You will get so desperate after a while that unless the Holy Spirit comes upon you, my word.
You try and minister to these dear ones, especially if there are only a few of you. Oh, it can get so claustrophobic. You will need the Holy Spirit.
People come to me and say, “Oh, what about this matter of the way of the cross? I do not know. I would love to have an experience of being crucified. I see it, but how?”
Oh, do not worry your head. You just commit yourself to your brothers and sisters. They will crucify you.
I do not know any church company in the world that has not done a marvellous job of crucifying one another. We can do it in the loveliest of ways, the most biblical ways, with Scripture in our mouths.
You cannot crucify yourself, but God can use your brothers and sisters to do it. People say, “Oh, I really ought to fall into the ground and die. I ought to go down. You said, ‘If I humble myself’—how can I humble myself?”
Dear brother, I say, “Do not be so unnatural. You will have an opportunity within twenty-four hours. Someone will collide with you, and in that moment you either go down or you go up.”
Either you fight for your rights, or you say, “Here is my opportunity. Thank You, Lord.”
Living faith. All these things we have been talking about—Brother Steve has been talking in the morning about unity, and all the wonders of that unity of the Spirit, and the unity of the faith to which we are coming—and all these other things that I have been talking about in the evening in connection with living faith, all these things have to become reality in this matter of the church.
This is the test of it all. I can talk about love till I am blue in the face and hate some of the brothers and sisters I am fellowshipping with. I can talk about loyalty till kingdom come, and yet there are brothers and sisters that I will gossip about, whom I am fellowshipping with, with whom I am breaking bread. I go away talking about them endlessly.
These are the spots in our feasts. These are the hidden rocks that shipwreck us.
You see, we can talk about all these lovely things—about humility. Real humility is discovered in real fellowship.
Power—real power—is discovered in the fellowship of the local church. Really.
It does not mean a thing to me that a man says he has got power to stand up on a platform somewhere and do this or that or the other. That does not mean anything.
But in actual fact, if he has power within a company of the Lord’s people to really do the right thing, then we know he has got power.
Living faith. Oh, dear brothers and sisters, as usual, the clock starts to beat us.
This matter of the church that is so on the heart of God—do you think that Satan, who has fought for thousands of years, not just two thousand years, but for the thousands of years of human history, to frustrate this purpose of grace, this heart’s desire in God—do you think that he is going to give up now?
Do you not think that, with the time short, he will pull out every stop? He will empty his armoury and weaponry of every single bit of equipment he has to fling into the battle. Do you not think he will do everything with one final great onslaught to overcome the purpose of God and destroy it?
Dear brothers and sisters, Satan is no match for you or me. If you think that you can stand up against Satan, you have another thing coming. Really.
He has been on this job for so long—so powerful, so ingenious, so intelligent, so cunning. Do not think for a single moment that we ourselves are going to come through this thing.
Only if we have living faith anchored cold-bloodedly in the Word of the living God. Satan has no answer to the Word of God. It is truth, and he is the father of lies. His whole weapon is half-truth and lie. And once we anchor ourselves in truth, he disintegrates. He disintegrates.
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
What do we expect in our church meetings? Well, some people say, “We expect perfect love, and perfect humility, and perfect unity,” and all these other things.
Listen, my dear ones. The early church, once you take your rose-coloured spectacles off, was not so marvellous.
Within a very short time—well, I have to be careful how I put it—but within a very short time they were having a marvellous meeting, and boom, someone dies. Not beautifully. He lied to the Holy Spirit.
I have often wondered what would have happened to all of us if the Lord had dealt with us in quite the same way as He dealt with Ananias and Sapphira. She trips into the meeting all sweet, and someone is being carried out. She says, “Who is it?” No one says anything. She trips in, and she says the same thing as her husband, but she is gone.
And Peter says, “Carry her out and bury her.” I guarantee that if we were in such a church meeting, there would be a lot of murmuring. People would say, “Oh, where is the love? Where is the grace? What a dreadful thing. Two lovely people in our church died, and Peter just said, ‘Carry them out and bury them.’”
They should not have lied to the Holy Spirit. Now, I am not playing light with this matter. If you take your rose-coloured spectacles off and really look at the early church, there are a number of things that would upset a lot of people.
If I went on, we would be here all night talking about lots of the other things that happened in the early church.
My dear friends, do seek to be mature in this matter. That church was a real church. That is why Ananias and Sapphira fell dead, and that is why the fear of the Lord fell on that whole people.
Do not look for some sentimental, lovely, sweet thing that is all ideal. That is a theory. When it comes down to it, this church which the Lord—the Head of the church, the great Builder—is building, is all a matter of boiling out the dirt, getting rid of the mixture, through confrontation and collisions and the incompatibility of temperaments, bringing us to a real understanding of ourselves and a desperate seeking of Himself in reality.
Living faith and the church.
It is an interesting thing that the Lord went on to Peter, this one who fell so greatly and who exhibits so many of the traits of character that we all can identify in ourselves and in one another.
This dear Peter—to him the Lord Jesus said:
To thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
And whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.
And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven.
Now, “gates of hell,” you will see, is translated in some modern versions as “powers of darkness,” or “forces of death.” “Power of death” is another translation. In the old Revised Version and Standard Version of the end of the last century, they translated it literally, “the gates of Hades.”
Now, I do not know what that is supposed to mean to many people. Hades is the sort of place of the departed. What on earth does it mean, “the gates of the departed”?
I think the old King James Authorised Version translators were much nearer to the truth when they simply translated it “gates of hell.” Literally, it is “gates of Hades,” and it is quite right for the New English Bible to translate it “forces of death,” if you want to be literal, because that is just what it means: power of death, forces of death.
But “gates of hell” is actually nearer to the real heart of its meaning, because gates in Scripture are always a symbol of counsel and judgment. Always in the gates of cities sat the elders, and anyone who had any problem went to the elders sitting in the gate, and there they judged it. They sorted it out. They gave them counsel. They explained the law. They defined policy. Do you understand? Divine policy.
Now therefore, if you understand it this way, gates speak of the counsel of darkness, the purpose or policies of the powers of darkness. Got it? The judgment and the purpose of Satan, really: gates of hell.
Now, another interesting thing is this. If you take it as Hades, death, what is the weapon of Satan? The weapon of Satan is death—spiritual death, not only physical death, but spiritual death. It is his one great weapon. He touches everything with death.
That is why sometimes we feel such a heaviness come upon our meetings, because the enemy is trying to smother or suffocate us, stop anything happening, and he fills the whole atmosphere with death.
Keys. What are keys for? Keys can lock up gates. Keys can unlock gates.
Now listen again. There are two ways of translating this. One is, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church.” That is the idea that hell is on the offensive and has said, “This building work of the Lord Jesus—we will frustrate it. We will undo it. We will hinder it. We will stop it. We will liquidate it. We will destroy it.”
But another way of translating it is, “The gates of hell shall not hold out against it.” And that is a most marvellous way of looking at it, for it means that the building work of the Lord Jesus is on the offensive, going into the very area held by Satan and taking out captives that will become living stones in His church.
Well now, dear people of God, is there not a tremendous need when we look around us now? It used to be in the so-called mission field that we felt the antagonism in the air—this occultism, spiritism, magic, and all these black things, these dark things.
We used to think of it only in the mission field. Now it has come right back into all the Western countries, and we are face to face with men and women who, even if they wanted to come to the Lord Jesus, cannot come until gates are unlocked.
I have known on so many occasions people whom I counselled in a gospel meeting and who have said to me, “I want to find the Lord, but I cannot.” I never used to know what to do with these people. I used to think, “Well, there is something wrong with their will. They have got to surrender their will,” or something.
But after a while I realised, and I began to ask them, “Have you ever been involved in a spiritual séance? Have you ever been involved in spiritism somewhere in your childhood or in your youth? Have you had anything to do with the occult?”
And I find unfailingly that all those who want to come to the Lord but cannot come have got some connection with the occult, or with spiritism, or with Satanism; and it has to be broken in the name of the Lord.
And I found always that once it is broken in the name of the Lord, they immediately blossom and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and surrender to Him, and become the best of believers.
Gates have keys, and we can talk about, “Oh Lord, please save them. Please multiply us. Please do this.” But until we learn with living faith to unlock the gates that hold them captive in the thrall of the powers of darkness, they cannot come out.
How many times, once there has been a real building work going ahead, Satan has come in. He has brought in some awkward person—not just awkward. I mean, you have to make a distinction between people who are naturally awkward and people who are demonically awkward.
Some people are natural eccentrics. I could keep you here for half an hour talking about eccentrics I have known whom God has used. Some people cannot help it; they are just eccentric people. They would always be eccentric, and God loves them.
Now, this is no excuse for you to try and become eccentric. Some people try to be eccentric. You know, it is a sort of thing—they want to be unique, they want to be special. Leave it to those who are eccentric. It is enough to have them, believe me, without people trying to be eccentric.
But having said that, there are people that Satan brings into the midst who are demonically awkward. They will destroy any group.
And sometimes we can start to try to deal with it as if it is all flesh and blood. It is not the way. Somewhere, those who are responsible in that group have got to get behind the scenes, and that prayer battle has got to be fought and won. Keys have to be used.
Keys speak of executive authority. They speak of authority. Oh, my dear brothers and sisters, why do you not now begin to see how we need living faith? If you have not got living faith, how can anyone use keys?
It is just a theory. It is an ideal. It is something marvellous. We know the name of the Lord. We know that we have to do all things in the name of the Lord, but nobody is prepared to do anything because they have not got living faith.
This is not to get unbalanced—that any Tom, Dick, and Harry can think that he can take on Satan and rebuke him. This has been the undoing of many, many a company: people thinking that they can hurl epithets at Satan, call him names, rebuke him, and everybody else. It is nonsense.
It is a church matter. But oh, for living faith, especially in leadership, in those who are responsible—living faith that enables us to face these problems and enables us to exercise the authority which is ours in the name of our risen Head.
There are so many problems, but our time really has gone. Let me just mention at least one or two simply.
What do we do about heaviness in a meeting? Some people’s answer to heaviness is, “There never should be any heaviness.” I think it is nonsense. I tell you, I think it is absolute nonsense.
Those meetings that never know a time of heaviness coming upon the meeting are ones that Satan does not bother with. They are one of these glory holes that Satan just says, “Leave them to it. Leave them to it. Let them just go on as much as they want, and they can shout and rant away and everything else. It does not make any difference. They are in the bag. We have caught them. They are no problem to us.”
But if ever there comes together a group of people in Christ in an area, and they really commit themselves to Him first and then to one another, and they have seen something of God’s purpose concerning the church, I believe that the enemy will smother them if he can.
He will bring in sometimes such a heaviness. And then he will breathe demonically into their ears, “It is so-and-so. It is so-and-so.” And before you know it, you may only be ten people, but they are all at sixes and sevens, believing things about one another. They do not realise it is the enemy.
Living faith helps us to face this kind of heaviness, to identify what it is, and nearly always there is a way through. Sometimes it is to praise the Lord, and really praise the Lord, and worship the Lord. Then we find, certainly, the whole thing is rolled away and we are under an open heaven.
Now, any of you who have had this experience must know that it revolutionises your whole attitude to church life. I remember in the early days, when we had all this kind of heaviness, we never knew what to do with the thing until we learned that the way through is to really praise the Lord and declare truth together.
It only takes a little while, but we always find the thing rolls away and it is as if there is an open heaven. Now, it is essential for the church to have an open heaven.
If there is no open heaven, there is no building, no hearing of the Lord, no working of the Lord. That is why the enemy will do every single thing to close heaven, as it were, or at least apparently close heaven.
Now, there are so many other things I could talk about in this matter, but you begin to understand what I mean, I think.
What about this matter of bondage? Sometimes people feel they just cannot take part. You see, this is where we need living faith. Has God given you something? Is the Holy Spirit dwelling in you? Is the Lord Jesus there?
You should be participating in church life. You should be participating in worship, participating in prayer, participating in intercession, participating in practical help. But sometimes the enemy puts us into a straitjacket, and if there is no living faith, we just sit in the straitjacket.
Stir up the gift that is within you. Do not think that somehow or other the Lord is always going to fall on you every time, so that you shake from head to toe and then you know that you have got to participate.
No. If you do not stir up that gift, it will slowly settle, settle, settle, settle, settle, and you will become stale and stagnant.
Living faith is the thing that stirs it up, pokes the embers so that they burst again into flame, and fans them—living faith.
We shall never have this living faith unless we see the Lord. That is why, at the beginning of Isaiah’s ministry, he saw the Lord high and lifted up, and His train filling the temple.
If you and I do not see the Lord, this matter of church truth is the most binding, inhibiting matter in the whole area of truth.
We just become afraid of one another, self-conscious, fearful, bound. We know so much; we experience so much. We need to see the Lord.
Now, what I have said this evening, I am conscious, can sometimes be misunderstood. But we are moving now into days when, before very long, the very possibility of being built up will have gone.
The pressures—the economic pressures, the political pressures, the pressures of natural life—there will be so much strife in the world, so much war in the world, that we will not be able to have the settled type of existence we at present are enjoying.
Now, you may not feel it is over-settled in comparison with ten years ago, but believe me, compared with what is coming, this will be a paradise.
And that is why we need now to allow the Holy Spirit to kindle the little faith that is in us, that we may exercise it whilst we have time, to really be made ready.
God has such a work to do, even in the time of anarchy and lawlessness, and whatever else comes upon the face of the earth. This topstone is going to be brought forth with shouts of, “Grace, grace, unto it.”
The Lord will not make up for your lethargy and apathy. Only when you have given yourself to the Lord in times of quietness and peace, when those days of distress come, then you will find the grace of God will take over and do it.
May God challenge us on this matter. Everyone puts things off, and one year follows another year and follows another year until, before we know where we are, time has gone.
May God help us in this matter. Shall we bow together in prayer?
Father, we want to thank Thee for the declaration of our Lord Jesus:
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Lord, we just worship Thee that He has given us this marvellous statement as an anchor ground for the faith which is Thy gift to us.
Dear Lord, help every one of us in this place tonight to see that the living faith in our hearts is anchored in this statement of our Lord Jesus.
We have all got problems and difficulties—personal, local; sometimes they are bigger things. Lord, we have got the kind of mountains that lie between us and the fulfilment of Thy purpose. But, O Lord, we thank Thee: not by might, nor by power, but by Thy Spirit.
Lord, this night, grant that every one of us may receive new vision. And not only new vision, Lord, but we pray, O may we exercise that faith which Thou hast given us. Help us to obey, Lord.
If there are some who have started off well but somehow or other, Lord, have become weary, disappointed, disillusioned, grant that this night their vision may be restored, and that faith may be renewed, that they might rise up and recommit themselves to Thee for this matter.
O Father, hear us, we pray. And we shall give to Thee all the glory. How well able Thou art to keep us. How marvellously sufficient Thy grace is for every emergency and every difficulty. How marvellously overcoming Thy power is, the ability that Thou dost give us in the Holy Spirit.
So we worship Thee, and we thank Thee, in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.