If you could take your Bibles, I would like to start where we have all begun at each of these ministry sessions: in the Ephesian letter of the Apostle Paul, Ephesians 1.
I am just going to read Ephesians 1:9-10:
Making known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Him,
unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ,
the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth; in Him, I say.
Then I would like to add to that Matthew 24, beginning at verse 36.
For as in those days which were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark,
and they knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall be the coming of the Son of man.
Then shall two men be in the field; one is taken, and one is left:
two women shall be grinding at the mill; one is taken, and one is left.
Watch therefore: for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh.
But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken through.
Therefore be ye also ready: for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh.
Then, back in the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians, chapter 5, from verse 15:
Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise;
redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Wherefore be ye not foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit;
speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord;
giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father;
subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.
Beloved Lord, we are so thankful that we are in Your presence. We are gathered to You, Lord. When it comes to the ministry of Your Word, Lord, You have not left us to our own energy, our own thoughts, our own talents, and gifts; but You have provided us with an anointing so that, Lord, beyond the human voice, we can hear Your voice.
Lord, we do not want to ignore that anointing. We need it both in the speaking of Your Word, in the translating of it, and in the hearing of it.
Therefore, Lord, we want to come very simply to say that, Lord, without You we can do nothing. Nothing will go into eternity unless You are present here by Your Spirit.
We want to stand now by faith in that anointing, grace, and power in full portion for this evening: that, Lord, You will touch our hearts; You will open the eyes of our hearts; You will fill our whole beings with light; You will meet us in a way that, Lord, will direct our lives into Your will.
We ask it all in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, I am quite sure all of you know what the theme of this conference is: the summing up of all things in Christ. I am quite sure you know that our brother Dana has the responsibility of presenting Christ, Brother Stephen the responsibility of returning to Christ, and I have the responsibility of being ready for Christ.
I think it is very interesting that this word in Matthew 24:44 has this idea of being equipped, prepared, and fitted for the Lord.
Yesterday evening I spoke at some length about where we are as the people of God, as the redeemed—where we are, and at what point in history we have come. I believe that we are going to see tremendous developments within the next years.
If we have felt the speed with which things are taking place to be remarkable, the speed with which things will take place in these next years will leave us breathless.
The whole world is deteriorating. There is a sense in which the Lord is withdrawing. That which restrains is being removed, and the mystery of lawlessness is becoming more and more apparent.
This lawlessness is not gangsterism. It is not some kind of mixture of mafia, triad, and other sorts of groups along that line. This lawlessness is a rejection—a deliberate, cold-blooded rejection—of the revealed law of God. It is a choice to live apart from the Word of God, apart from the law of God.
Therefore, there has to be judgment. There will be greater and greater judgments that we will witness, because these things fall upon the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the unsaved.
I spent some time last night talking about these things. I hope it was not too heavy and frightening for you. The fact of the matter is that most of us, in our heads, believed that these days would come at the end of time. Maybe we thought it would not be in our time.
Therefore, it comes as a bit of a shock to us suddenly to realize that it is happening all around us. That is why this question of being ready for Christ is all-important.
In every single sphere, we need to be ready for Christ.
Now, I am not going to say any more about last night. I want to talk about what I have called imperatives if we are to be ready for Christ. Imperatives.
I do not know whether that makes sense to you in American English. By “imperatives,” I mean those things that are absolutely strategic, absolutely essential. An imperative is not something you can do without.
There are a whole lot of things I could talk about concerning being ready for Christ, but I have selected certain things which I believe the Lord wants me just to touch upon. There are certain matters I am taking for granted.
My dear brother Dana said, of course, that I had sort of put God’s prophetic Word on one side and said that what really matters is that you should be ready. Of course, I never said that. That is how he understood it.
I never said you should ignore God’s prophetic Word. I believe you should be very careful in your study of God’s prophetic Word.
And we have the word of prophecy made more sure; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts.
But my point is very simple. The emphasis of our Lord Jesus is not on the sequence of events. There is a sequence of events, but His emphasis is not on the sequence of events. His emphasis is: “Take heed. Take heed to yourselves. Be alert. Be watchful.”
“What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.” “Be ye also ready: for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh.”
He is talking to believers. He is talking to the most responsible in the inner circle: Andrew, Peter, James, and John. He says to them, “In an hour that ye think not, the Son of man cometh.”
That means that it has something to say to me as a servant of the Lord, as someone who ministers the Word of God and teaches the Word of God. Is it really possible that the Lord will come in an hour that I do not think He is coming? It comes again and again: “In an hour that ye think not.”
So this is a very, very important matter. There are some things I am taking for granted.
For instance, you cannot be ready for Christ if you are not born of God. I do not mean signing a decision card or simply putting your hand up.
I do not despise that, but I have known many, many people who have done such things and have not been born of God. They have then acquired all the evangelical phraseology and everything else, but they are not truly converted. They have not been born of the Spirit of God.
When a person is born of the Spirit of God, their eyes open, their ears open, they start to breathe, and before long they start to walk.
I mean, look at you all. How did you get here? So many years ago, you were all this size. Someone carried you; something was done for you. But what happened when you were born? You had eyes, and they opened.
My eyes did not open for three weeks. My mother thought I did not have eyes until they finally opened. When they opened, I saw her and I saw everything else, and ever since then my eyes have watched and seen things.
My ears opened, and I breathed. I was whacked by the doctor, and suddenly I started breathing. So were you. It is the experience of every one of us.
But if you are going to be ready for Christ, for the coming of Christ, you must be born again. There is no alternative. It is no good hiding in religion, church membership, or evangelical phraseology.
Are you born of God? If you are born of God, there will be evidences. Make your calling and election sure.
The second thing I am taking for granted is also foundational, and it is this: unconfessed sin.
However much you know the Bible, unconfessed sin renders you totally unready for the coming of the Lord. If there is something in your life that is sin—iniquity—whether it is dishonesty, fraudulence, lying, or immorality, and you are hiding it, that thing negates all your Bible knowledge and all your profession. It renders you unready for the coming of the Lord.
I take it for granted that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
It sometimes costs to confess sin, especially when other people are involved. But there is no other way than to say about sin what God says about it.
Now those two things I take for granted. Here is the first imperative: if you want to be ready for the coming of the Lord, when He comes suddenly and unexpectedly, with that great shout—or even the rapture—if you want to be ready, then this imperative is absolute: total devotion to the Person of the Lord Jesus.
There is no alternative to total devotion to the Lord Jesus.
He is not interested in you working your hands to the bone. He is not interested in you merely trotting around the world preaching the gospel.
The first essential imperative is that you are totally devoted to Him.
He never said, “Follow the teaching.” He never said, “Follow the church.” He never said, “Follow Christian leaders.” He said, “Follow Me.”
I find that this imperative finds us out, because again and again we get caught up in the rigmarole and routine of Christian living, of church life, and somehow or other, in the course of it, we lose our first love.
It is interesting that the Lord said right back in the beginning:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.
When the Lord Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He said:
Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one:
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
This question of personal devotion to the Lord Jesus is something fundamental to the whole matter of being ready.
You cannot be ready if you have lost your love for the Lord Jesus. No amount of biblical knowledge will make up for it. No amount of Christian work will make up for it.
In the final analysis, it is a question of your relationship to Him.
Listen to the Apostle Paul as he gives his testimony in Philippians 1:21:
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
We are talking about things being summed up. Here was the apostle’s testimony. He said, “Jesus is the sum of my life. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is more of Christ.”
That is, in essence, being ready for the coming of the Lord.
Let me put it another way. In Colossians, Paul says:
When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with Him be manifested in glory.
Christ, who is our life. Is that not wonderful?
Or listen again. Colossians 1:18:
And He is the head of the body, the church: Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He might have the preeminence.
Not that in all things He might have the prominence, but that in all things He might have the preeminence. The Lord is not interested in being prominent in your life. He is interested in being preeminent in your life.
This question of being devoted—totally devoted—to the Person of the Lord Jesus is something tremendous. Why did the Lord say to those apostles, “Follow Me”? Why does He always say to us, “Follow Me”? It has to be something to do with getting to know Him.
No wonder, again, in Philippians 3:10, the apostle says:
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death.
There is a little prefix in the Greek here which is not so great that we have to translate it, but it means, “That I may fully know.”
Not just know Him, but fully know Him.
For the apostle, his whole ministry, his whole work, his service, and his life were summed up in this one great passion: to know the Lord.
And, you know, the more you know the Lord, the more you know you do not know the Lord. Did you get me? I hope the translator got it.
The more you know the Lord, the more you know you do not know the Lord. In other words, the more you come to know the Lord, the more you know there is to know of the Lord. It is a vast ocean of experience.
This is not just academic knowledge. This is experiential knowledge. You are getting to know the Lord through experience.
I could give you so many illustrations. I remember once staying with Lady Ogle. In her drawing room was a little plaque on the wall, and it simply said, “My peace I give unto you.”
Now, I was young. I was in my twenties—arrogant, as only I could be at that age—going around telling everybody where they were wrong, and sometimes where they were right.
I remember thinking to myself, “What a trite little thing to put up on the wall. There are far more wonderful verses than that which could have gone up on the wall: ‘My peace I give unto you.’”
But at one point we were talking about battles or troubles which I was in, and she was in. She said, “You see up there?”
“Yes,” I said.
She said, “I was in a terrible, terrible affliction, and I did not know where to turn. Suddenly, into my heart came the word, ‘Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you.’”
She said, “In a flash, I was different. My situation was the same; I was different. Because I suddenly saw that the peace He leaves with us is peace for sins forgiven. He never needed that. That is why He did not call it, ‘My peace I leave with you.’ It is simply, ‘Peace I leave with you,’ because He did not need it.”
“But His peace was the peace He had in Gethsemane, when He said, ‘Not My will, but Thine, be done.’ And His peace was the peace He had on the cross when, after saying, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ He could say, ‘Into Thy hands I commend My spirit.’”
She said, “It changed my life.”
Now that is experiential knowledge. That is when the Word of God leaps out of the book and becomes flesh and blood. That is when something happens in your life by the Word of God that can never be taken away. It is foundational now for the rest of your life.
I never forgot that. When Lady Ogle died, she left that little plaque to me.
Everyone here who has walked with the Lord must surely have had, in their own experience, times when you did not know what to do or where to turn. Then the Lord breathed the Word into the situation, and that Word became yours.
Every time you read it, you know something that others do not know about that Word. It is yours.
That is why I find it tremendous that the Apostle Peter, in 2 Peter 3:18, says:
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Grow in grace and in knowledge. The only way you can grow in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus is by grace. The Lord does not cast pearls before swine.
But when you really are humble and ready to walk with Him, then the Lord reveals His secrets. He unlocks the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in the Lord Jesus. It is so wonderful when you walk with Him, when those things become your experience.
This matter of absolute devotion to the Lord Jesus is so tremendous. I think it is basically sanctification.
Some people have made this whole matter of sanctification so heavy, so dark, and so religious that it grinds you into the ground. You have to wear black, you have to look miserable, and you can do nothing. You cannot even smile. It is like being in a straitjacket.
That is not sanctification. The word means to be set apart. Set apart.
Set apart from what? Set apart from the world. The Lord has delivered you from the world, delivered you from the power of darkness, and transferred you into the kingdom of His dear Son.
And now it is not just that you are in the kingdom. You are set apart to the Lord. You belong to the Lord Jesus. That is sanctification: set apart to Him. True holiness.
There are so many things one could say about this, but I will come back again to the message we had this morning from Dana. How wonderful it was. He spoke about John’s Gospel.
I think John’s Gospel is the most incredible of the four Gospels. It is not that I despise the other three; it is simply that I think John’s Gospel is something unbelievable.
It is the most Jewish of the Gospels. That is a start for me. I do not think Matthew is as Jewish as everybody says. I think John is essentially Jewish.
I find tremendous the revelation of the Lord Jesus as the unmentionable name of God: “I am.”
I am the bread of life.
I am the door.
I am the good shepherd.
I am the resurrection, and the life.
I am the way, and the truth, and the life.
I am the true vine.
It is so tremendous to me.
When I was first saved, I did not have a Bible, and nobody thought to ask whether I possessed one. In this wonderful interdenominational Baptist church, led by that marvellous Keswick speaker and evangelist, Alan Redpath, nobody thought to say, “Do you have a Bible?”
They told me to read the Bible and never gave me a Bible. All I had was a little Gospel of John. I read it and read it and read it until it fell to pieces.
But this is the point I want to make this evening. This tremendous Gospel, which presents the Lord Jesus as God, ends in this way, in its last chapter: “Do you love Me?”
Three times. The first two times He uses one Greek word; the last time, another, because Peter could not rise to it.
Jesus said, “Do you love Me?”
It is not enough to have theology. It is not enough to have knowledge. It is not enough to be a worker. The question is, “Do you love Me?”
Peter could not lie to Him. He said, “Lord, Thou knowest I have an affection.”
The Lord said, “Tend My sheep.”
He speaks about tending sheep, feeding the lambs, feeding the sheep. He is not interested in routine Christian work. He is interested in people who are personally devoted to Him, in love with Him; and out of that love comes service.
It is the church, the flock—whether young or old, whatever age. “Do you love Me?”
Then, after saying to Peter, “Thou shalt be taken where thou wouldest not,” meaning the way Peter would die, He said, “Follow Me.”
Is that not an extraordinary way for this tremendous Gospel to end? “Do you love Me? Then tend My sheep. Feed My sheep. Feed My lambs. Follow Me.”
There is no need for me to say anything else on this imperative. It should be clear. How can you and I be ready for the coming of the Lord unless we are in love with the Lord Jesus?
Nothing else will satisfy Him, and nothing else will make us ready for His coming.
That is the first thing. Here is the second imperative: a living, active, working faith.
No, I am not talking about academic faith. I always remember how James said that the demons believe—and tremble. At least they make some manifestation.
A living, active, working faith. There is no other faith.
Faith is not natural. Some people try to say that we all exercise faith when we sit in a chair, get on a bus, get in a plane, or whatever we do—as if faith were some natural thing.
This is Christian Science. You pump it up, you sort of get it and expand it, inflate it, until you have so much faith that you can do something with it. You can bulldoze things out of the way. You can get rid of mountains because you have blown up the faith in you.
Of course, the devil loves this. He comes and says, “You do not have enough faith. This problem you have—you just do not have enough. You must wait. You must get more faith.”
You wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you will wait until the coming of the Lord. It is as simple as that, because the devil has got you just where he wants you.
He breathes into your ear, “You see, these other people have great faith. You do not have faith.”
But our Lord Jesus said:
If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove.
Faith as a grain of mustard seed—that is so small that if I had one seed in the palm of my hand, not even the front row could see it. That is how small faith is.
My beloved brother, beloved sister, all you need is a great Lord. You need a grain of faith that unites you to the infinity of God. When you are united to the infinity of God, everything can happen. Nothing is impossible.
That is living, active faith. When the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham and said, “Get out,” by faith he went out.
He did not get something inflated and say, “If I have enough faith to get out of here, I must get more.” No, not at all. When he saw the Lord, something happened, and that great aristocrat walked out of the city to become a shepherd and a camel-herd for the rest of his life.
It changed him. Such is living, active faith.
I have a verse that I want to underline in this connection because I think it has so much to say to us. It is Hebrews 11:27:
By faith Moses forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing Him Who is invisible.
If you and I are going to be ready for the coming of the Lord, we need to endure as seeing Him Who is invisible. He cannot be seen, and yet somehow we have to see the invisible One.
Now, this is a contradiction. How do you see an invisible Person?
The only way you can possibly see the Lord is outside of reason. That is why I thank God I never went to a theological seminary. It is like a cemetery to me. They trap you with reason, reason, reason. Everything is reason.
Faith—living faith—comes from seeing the Lord.
I want to tell you something. When you see the Lord, faith, which is the gift of God in you, may be as small as a mustard seed, but it is activated the moment you see the Lord.
Now, how do you see the Lord, since He is invisible? You see with the eyes of your heart.
How did Moses see Him Who is invisible? It is amazing. He endured.
There may be a lot to endure in these coming few years, and only those who see Him Who is invisible will endure.
It is something to do with living, active faith. Why do you think martyrs are able to die as they do?
How do you think that in Britain, when those two great bishops—in a day when we had godly bishops—Latimer and Ridley, under that dreadful woman, Bloody Queen Mary, were sentenced to be burned at the stake?
As they were being burned, Latimer said to Ridley, “Play the man, Ridley. For this day we shall set alight a candle that, by the grace of God, will never go out.”
I think it is going out in Britain. But martyrs—how do they go to their death?
If the story I heard about Watchman Nee is right, that with his own blood he wrote, “I believe that Jesus is my Saviour,” how could he do it, still in prison?
How could you do it unless there is living faith, unless there is an endurance that comes not from Churchillian grit, but from something God has done in our spirit that enables us to endure to the end?
If we keep our eyes on the Lord Jesus, faith is spontaneously activated.
You never get faith by looking in your heart to see how much faith you have. When you do that, the faith you have disappears. It literally fades away before your gaze.
You get faith by seeing your Lord. Every time you see the Lord, something is spontaneously activated. It is the gift of God: faith.
Some of you have heard me say this before, but you have two stories of storms in the Gospel of Matthew.
One is where the Lord came into the boat. The normal explanation is that He was human and so tired and worn out by all the ministry that He went to the back of the boat and fell fast asleep.
A huge storm blew up, and all the apostles were bailing water out furiously. But the water came in more quickly than they could bail it out. Finally, they shook Him and said, “Do You not care? We are about to go down.”
All He did was stand up and say, “Peace, be still.” And the whole thing stopped.
The second story is in Matthew 14. This time, He would not get in the boat. I find that very interesting. He refused to get in the boat. He said, “I must send the multitudes away.” A good excuse.
He was sending them all away, and He said, “I will meet you on the other side.” Then another storm came. Can you remember?
Then He walked on the water. They said, “It is a ghost.” Peter said, “I think it is the Lord.” He called out, “Is it You, Jesus? Is it You?”
Jesus said, “Yes.”
Peter said, “If it is You, tell me to come.” Jesus said, “Come.”
The amazing thing is that Peter climbed over the side of the boat and walked on the water. He had never been to Bible school and never read a book about the four steps to walking on water, or how to do the impossible.
He saw the Lord, he heard the Lord, he obeyed the Lord, and he did the impossible.
Now tell me: if we are to be ready for the coming of the Lord, what is the most important experience we need to have?
I will tell you. It is not the stopping of the storm.
That reveals the majesty of the Lord Jesus, the power of the Lord Jesus, and the sovereign authority of the Lord. It is wonderful. But it does not help us if we lose the boat and find ourselves in a stormy sea.
I suspect—and I will only know when we get to glory whether I am right—but I suspect that the Lord was hoping the boat would go down when He was asleep in the back. Then He would say to them, “Follow Me,” and they would all walk on the water.
But instead they panicked. They said, “No, Master, You must do something.” Of course, when we panic, the Lord has to step in and say, “Stop, stop, shh.”
What have we learned? That the Lord can stop a storm. But there are times—a day of evil, times of darkness, times of insoluble problems—when the Lord does not step in. Then what do we do?
It is a tremendous lesson that the Lord taught Peter. He did the impossible. He walked on a stormy sea.
I say that is the greatest lesson anyone can learn if you want to be ready for the coming of the Lord. When the boat has gone and the storm is rolling around, walk on the water with the Lord.
Here is the third imperative: a hearing ear.
If you want to be ready for the coming of the Lord, you need a hearing ear. Now I want to tell you something: the vast number of Christians never hear the Lord.
I remember years ago Brother Sparks saying to me—and I was so shocked when he said it—he quoted the Scripture in Romans 8:
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
He said to me, “Do you know, I can count on the fingers of one hand those who are with me in the work who hear the Lord.”
I was so shocked. I thought, “Well, you know, Brother Sparks was always a very critical person. A bit too critical.”
But as I have got older myself, I have come to the conclusion that he was right.
Many people talk about being led by the Spirit. Many people say they are led by the Spirit. Very few people are truly led by the Spirit.
A hearing ear—what is a hearing ear? It is that, spiritually, within your spirit, you have an organ that can hear the voice of the Lord.
Now, it is not extra revelation. Do not get me wrong: I am not talking about things extra to the Bible, or the weird kind of things that get into cultic matters.
But when God takes the Word of God and, by the Spirit of God, makes it live to you, you are hearing something. It is not merely the words; beyond the words, you are hearing the voice of the Lord.
Many people do not believe that they will ever hear the Word of the Lord because they think that only people like John Wesley, Charles Wesley, Zwingli, John Calvin, or Watchman Nee hear the Lord. We ordinary mortals think the Lord is far too busy to speak to us.
We imagine some vast heavenly telephone system, with all these voices coming in and the Lord saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” and we cannot bother Him.
But Jesus put it very simply:
My sheep hear My voice.
Could anything be simpler? “My sheep hear My voice.”
That means that the Lord is interested in a relationship with you in which you can hear Him.
Now, why am I making so much of this as an imperative? Very simple. If you turn to the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, where we are dealing with the last events that are going to come, we find this.
Revelation 2:7:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
Revelation 2:11:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
Revelation 2:17:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
Revelation 2:29:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
Revelation 3:6:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
Revelation 3:13:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
Lastly, Revelation 3:22:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
In other words, you will not be ready for the coming of the Lord if you do not hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
If you do not have an ear tuned to hear the voice of God in His Word, you will never have an understanding of the times in which we live.
It is imperative that we have an understanding of the times.
That is why I spoke about Israel yesterday. People say to me, just as in the first letter of Peter, “Well, people have always believed in the Lord’s coming. It has always been the same. You have all these crazy nutcases running around.”
But there are certain things that have happened in our day and generation that have never happened before since the ascension of the Lord Jesus.
That means certain prophetic milestones have been passed. However long this last phase of world history will last, it has begun.
We are watching something speed up almost visibly: a deterioration, a breaking up, an altogether new system of life being set up.
There are people who believe in human conspiracies, and they tell us that there are all these Illuminati and others, and they are the ones doing all this. Personally, I do not go along with all these conspiracy theories.
They tell us that a lot of it is Jewish bankers and tycoons. I do not go along with it. It is nonsense.
But I do believe in one conspirator: Satan.
He is the arch-conspirator who is organizing a whole worldwide network and coordinating them with one great aim: to frustrate the purpose of God concerning the Lord Jesus.
Thank God, the Lord Jesus will come on time. He will not, for one single moment, be delayed by all these machinations of Satan and the powers of darkness. He will come on time—not early, not late.
We do not know the hour or the day. I know people are always writing these things.
I remember years ago a man who wrote a book, 88 Reasons Why the Lord Is Coming Back on such-and-such a date in September 1988. Everywhere I went, people asked me about this little booklet and said, “What do you think?”
I was so surprised at some of the people who asked me the question. I thought they knew their Bibles better. I said, “Come back in October and speak with me then.”
Then the extraordinary thing was that the man who wrote it wrote 89 Reasons Why the Lord Is Coming Back in September, on such-and-such a date. Eighty-nine. The same thing happened.
A hearing ear. We need to hear what the Lord is saying. When we truly hear what the Lord is saying, He gives us an understanding of the times in which we are living.
But more than that, we can know what the will of the Lord is:
Be not foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
Be not unwise, but wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
If we hear the Lord, we shall be redeeming the time. If we hear the Lord, we shall be walking with Him. We shall be kept within the will of God.
I am sure some of you have heard me speak on this matter of hearing before, so I am not going to say much more about it. But when you come to the Old Testament and find that amazing picture of the leper—the sinner—saved by the grace of God, do you remember what the priest was to do?
He took the blood. Where did he put the blood? First on the ear, then on the thumb, then on the big toe.
Most of us would say, “No, no. Put the blood on the thumb. We must do.” Others would say, “No, no, no. On the big toe. We must walk in the ways of the Lord. We must fulfil His purpose.”
But God says, “No. It is the ear I want. If I do not have the ear, I have neither the hand nor the foot.” You got it?
Do you remember how the priest then took oil and put it where? On the ear, then on the thumb, then on the big toe.
It is as if the Lord is saying, “You not only need a saved hearing; you need a Holy Spirit-enlightened hearing.” No other way.
I always think this is so tremendous. I love it when the bondservant said, “I love my master; I will not go out.”
The law says the master shall take him to the doorpost and put an awl through his ear. Not leave him pinned to the doorpost, but pierce his ear and put a ring in it. That is not in the Bible, but it is within the Talmud.
Then everybody could say, “Look, see that man? He has got a ring in his ear. He is a bondslave forever.”
Why the ear? Why not a beautiful ring on his hand with the master’s emblem on it? Why not an anklet, a bracelet around his ankle? Then people could see that he belonged to his master forever.
But the Lord says, “If I do not have his ear, I neither have his hand nor his feet.”
That is why, if you and I want to be ready for the coming of the Lord, it is essential that we have a hearing ear.
Do you know what I consider to be the saddest, most moving, and most plaintive word of our Lord Jesus in the New Testament?
I find it in Revelation 3:20:
Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.
I find that one of the most moving, plaintive, sad words the Lord has ever spoken: He is outside His own church.
These are born-again believers, evangelicals. They believe, they sing wonderful hymns, they study His Word, they have prayer meetings, they have evangelistic times—and the Head of the church, the Saviour of the body, is outside, knocking.
He is saying, “Listen. If any man hear My voice.”
If you were to interview those people in that church at Laodicea and announce to them, “You know, the Lord does not think you are hearing Him,” they would say, “Oh, ridiculous. What a ridiculous suggestion.”
“We love Him. We have His table. We remember Him. We sing hymns. We study His Word. We are out with the gospel in the streets. Oh yes, we are quite wealthy. Thank God, it is the Lord Who has given us such wealth.”
But the Lord was outside.
Do you think it is possible for the Lord to be shut outside of an assembly?
He did not say, “If you all hear My voice.” No, He said, “If any man hear My voice.”
It is almost as if He said, “There is no way this church can hear My voice corporately. They are so caught up in their own routine and in their own thing that there is no way we can do it.”
“But if there is any man or woman who hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in, and I will sup with him, and he with Me.”
Well, now you see, our time is virtually gone. I would like to speak about priorities, and that is the end for this evening. That is another imperative: priorities.
Listen to the words of the Lord Jesus in Matthew 6:33:
But seek ye first His kingdom, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
What a wonderful word. Priority.
No one can be ready for the coming of the Lord unless they have their priorities right.
What do we mean? If you look at the context, it is all to do with eating, clothing, drinking, and all the rest of it—all the things that make up life: the cares of this life, the worries of this life, the drudgery of this life.
Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.”
He did not excuse the housewife. He did not excuse the mother of little children. He did not excuse the husband. He did not excuse the businessman. He did not excuse the big executive. He did not excuse anybody. No one is excused.
He said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
It has been my experience that the Lord adds and adds and adds and adds once you seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. The Lord is so generous. He floods you with things. That is my experience. I do not know whether it is anybody else’s.
But all I know is this: if you really seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will not want.
Why? You are never going to get to heaven and say, “Well, Lord, You are in my debt. I mean, I did a lot for You, Lord. I worked my hands to the bone, and I did this and that and the other. I am glad to get here now for a bit of rest.”
I do not think the Lord will ever be in anyone’s debt. He makes absolutely sure that you and I are in His debt up to the eyeballs.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. All these things shall be added unto you.
There is the shortest verse in the New Testament. It is found within the Lord’s word about His return. It is contained in Luke 17:32:
Remember Lot’s wife.
Like a gun going off in the middle of all this else about the Lord, His coming, and everything: “Remember Lot’s wife.”
Why are we to remember Lot’s wife? Was she such an amazing woman? Did she have such a beautiful home and such a gift of hospitality? Why does He say, “Remember Lot’s wife”?
You remember that the angels had to carry them out. They were so reluctant to go. The angels carried them out. Lot went.
On the way up, poor Lot’s wife looked back to that lovely home, with all that was hers. She saw it in fire and ruin, and everything that belonged to her.
In that moment, she was turned to a pillar of salt as a memorial for all believers. “Remember Lot’s wife.” Why?
In the moment of judgment, in the moment of turmoil, in the moment of colossal tribulation, she looked back. Why did she look back? Because her heart was in her home.
Just wait. Some of you would say to me, “That is a bit mean. That is a bit harsh.”
Do not judge the Lord.
Some people say to me that when the Lord struck Uzzah dead because he steadied the ark, it was a terrible thing to do. But that arrogant young man—how many times had the Spirit of God wrestled with him?
The same with Ananias and Sapphira when they fell dead. What a meeting. One got up to give testimony, fell dead, and was carried out. Then the wife came in, said the same thing, and fell dead.
If we had meetings like that, the fear of God might really come upon us all.
Someone said that if the Lord judged everybody the way He judged Ananias and Sapphira, about forty percent of the church would be dead. Probably true.
But listen: what is the point in this? I believe the Lord tried many times to get Lot’s wife to get her priorities right, but she never got there.
Her priority was her home and her possessions.
Well, I must finish. I remember years ago sitting in one of the more guesthouse-type hotels in Israel, in Zohar on the Dead Sea. The whole place was filled with Jewish people. Tourists do not go to that type of hotel.
I was with one of the boys there, and we were sharing a table with a husband and wife. She looked at me for a few moments and said, “You are Jewish, are you not?”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “But your friend here is not.”
I said, “No, he is not.”
Then we got talking. I could tell from her accent that she was not native-born, and I asked, “Where were you born?”
“Oh,” she said, “I was born in Kraków, and my husband was born in Łódź.”
I said, “How did you survive?”
Her husband said to me, “It is an amazing story. I owned three factories with my brothers. I came back one day, and my wife said to me, calling me by my first name, ‘We have got to get out.’”
He said, “I thought, ‘Is she mentally unwell? What does she mean?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘We have to get out.’”
She said to me, “A strange thing came to me. I could not rest. I thought, ‘Am I going mad?’”
Then he went on. He said, “She was so upset, I said, ‘All right, my dear. Pack a bag. We will get on the train.’”
Immediately, he phoned his brothers and said, “Can I leave the factories to you? We are just going away, but something is wrong with her. I think the best thing is to humour her.”
They went out, and they got to Kiev in Ukraine. The next morning, early in the morning—four or five o’clock—the Nazis rolled into Poland.
Every member of that family died: one hundred and seventy people. Not a single one survived—only her and her husband.
But the extraordinary thing was that a year later, her husband came home again to Kiev, and she said, “We have got to go.” This time he never questioned it.
That same night they got on the Trans-Siberian Railway and went all the way to Vladivostok. The Nazis swept into Ukraine, and you all know the story of Babi Yar. Hundreds of thousands were massacred.
That taught me a very simple lesson: how could someone walk out of their home without anything? Just shut the door and walk out.
Remember Lot’s wife.
On another occasion—and I am finishing with this story—one of my friends was involved in a fatal accident. I got a phone call from the police asking if I could come to help him. He was in such a bad state.
So I went to sit with him. After I had sat with him for a while, arrangements were made for him to go back to Norway. There would be a court case, and he would have to come back.
I was taken back by the chief accident officer for Israel in Avis—you know, the hired-car people. On the way back, we were talking. He was saying how sorry he was about it all, what a fine fellow my friend was, and how sorry he was that it had happened like this.
Then I said to him, “Where were you born?”
“Berlin,” he said.
I said, “How did you survive?”
He said, “Oh, there is a story. I was a little boy at school, and when I came out from school, there was my mother waiting. She said to me, ‘Now, no argument, no questioning: you are going on a long journey.’”
He said, “We went to the station, the big station in Berlin. There my father was with my sister. We had four little cases and my aunt. We all got on the Orient Express.”
“We got to Turkey, and there is a long story, but we were smuggled into what was called Palestine then. We were safe. Every member of our family died.”
I said, “Do you mean that your mother and father walked out of a beautiful home?” They were quite wealthy people.
“Yes,” he said. “We only took the small bags with sleeping things and washing things. That is all we had.”
“But the most amazing thing was my aunt. After we became British citizens in Mandatory Palestine, she said, ‘I think I will go back.’ This was 1938.”
“She said, ‘I will go back to Berlin and settle the property that we have there, because we are not wealthy people anymore, but we should get something.’”
There was a rehabilitation centre set up by the Nazis, which was actually a façade. She went back and was never seen again.
She went with a friend and was taken in. They would not let the friend in; they told her to wait outside. She went through a door, and they never saw her again.
Remember Lot’s wife.
What is all this really saying? It is simply this: you need to get your priorities right.
If you are wedded to things—to possessions, property, money, and all kinds of things—then in the moment of turmoil, in the panic that comes with great upheavals, you will lose everything.
We need to keep our eye upon the Lord. These are imperatives.
We have time now to sort out our priorities, to make sure that we are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Then all these other things will be added in His time and in His way.
May the Lord make this real to every one of us. Shall we pray?
Lord, help us to be ready. Each one of us knows unreadiness, one way or another.
Now we need You, Lord, and we pray that You will come to us. You will touch us. You will direct us. You will comfort us. You will strengthen us. Challenge us.
We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.