If you would turn with me to the prophecies of Isaiah, chapter 43, I will read the two verses that we have been considering in these times in which I have been responsible for the ministry of the Word.
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
And He that formed thee, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee;
I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine.When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned;
Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.
I want to add to that a passage in the New Testament, in the Philippian letter—Philippians, chapter 3.
Though I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If any other man thinketh to have confidence in the flesh, I yet more:
Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee;
As touching zeal, persecuting the church; as touching the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless.Howbeit what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ.
Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for Whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ,
And be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith:
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death;
If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself yet to have laid hold: but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before,
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Father, when we come to Your Word, we must acknowledge in Your presence—and willingly we do so—that without You we can do nothing. I can speak many words and outline truths, but in the end, Lord, it will be to no avail unless You are the ability and the power of this time this evening.
The same is true with all of us as we listen. We can hear many words; we can hear many truths. But, Lord, unless You give us that kind of hearing ear, we shall never hear what You are saying to the churches by Your Spirit.
Therefore, Lord, together we avail ourselves of that anointing which You have provided for us, both speaker and hearer, that together we may know ability beyond our natural ability: that grace and power of Yours which can enable me to speak Your Word and communicate the burden which is on Your heart, and enable us to hear what it is You are saying, and have the grace to obey You.
Lord, will You work in our time this evening, delivering it from all futility and vanity; and, in the weakness of the physical vessel, let Your power be made manifest. We pray in the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.
The literal phrase that has been so much with me is the phrase in Isaiah 43:1: “Thou art Mine.”
I saw in this amazing statement of the Lord through the prophet Isaiah a fourfold way in which we are His. We are His by creation: “Thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob.”
The Hebrew word bara comes from a root meaning to press into shape. It is an amazing thing, even when we think of Jacob in his fallen state—in all his twistedness, in all his self-will, in the strength of his natural man—still God had created him. He was not a mistake.
His temperament, his personality, his genetic history—every single thing about him had been under the sovereign rule of God. Jacob was not a mistake or an accident that God somehow took up and began to use. Jacob, the Lord says to Jacob, “I created thee, O Jacob.”
This matter of being pressed into shape concerns the mould in which God made us: men and women in threefold spirit, soul, and body. That is of tremendous importance if we are going to understand this claim of the Lord upon us.
For in the end, it is your entire being—your whole spirit and soul and body—which the Lord wants to save and redeem. He wants to preserve it entire, as the apostle says in 1 Thessalonians: preserve it entire and blameless unto the coming of the Lord Jesus.
There are all kinds of strange extremisms, one way or the other. Sometimes so much of present-day Christianity, and very much of our charismatic context, is so soulish. It is just flesh that somehow or other has got into the things of God. What we sometimes call the spirit is, in actual fact, the flesh.
Much of the worked-up way in which we do things can simply come from our flesh. We need to see that. But there is the other way too. We can go so far in the matter of the spirit that we make the body seem, as the Greeks used to think, something evil in itself.
We can believe in a kind of annihilation of the soul. The result is that, in what I call—if you know what I mean, for want of a better word, without trying to get at anybody—holiness companies, there can be very little creativity. Nobody ever writes a song, and nobody even dares bring out a guitar sometimes, let alone any other kind of instrument.
There is a fear of anything that might be the soul: “We have got to annihilate it.” Yet the soul is, in one sense, the vehicle of our creativity. There can be no marvellous works of the Lord that finally come out otherwise. After all, the hymns we have were not written in the ether.
They were written by actual fingers and minds, in which the soul kindled something which the Holy Spirit had first initiated in the spirit of the person. We saw this in Mary when she said:
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
It began in her spirit, and it spilled over into her soul. So the experience of the psalmist is one that we too can know once we are born again. There are times when we have to say to our souls, “Be still. Sit still. Do not say a word—not a murmur.”
But there are other times when we can say to our soul, “Bless the Lord.” Think about that. Say to your soul, “Get on with it. Bless the Lord.” If it is once in your spirit, do you understand what I am trying to say?
Then, of course, there are our bodies. I remember when I was first saved, I could never understand some of the ladies in the church. They really did look like shipwrecks. Their hair was all over the place, pinned down. Of course, they were terribly godly: they never went into a movie house, never went to a theatre, never watched television, never listened to the radio, never read the newspaper—but they looked absolute shipwrecks.
The men were not much better either. I came from quite a worldly background, so I used to be embarrassed. I thought, “If my mother saw these people—the people I am among—she would die a million deaths.” She had said to me at the very beginning, “Why did you have to go amongst the Baptists, the most vulgar of them all?” I do not know. I remember it very well.
It is worth the joke. I am not saying the Baptists are like that. It is something that runs through the whole of Christendom. It seems that the more godly people get, the more they feel it is incumbent upon them to disregard their bodies—to let them go to rack and ruin. “It does not matter, does it? It is decaying anyway.”
But I do not think it is very nice to have an obviously decayed person next to you. It is lovely to know that next to you is somebody who has a body that is beginning to decay, but who is living in the glorious hope of the redemption of the body—not just saying goodbye to it. It is going to be redeemed.
Well, I must not stop there. That was an outgoing, you see.
The second time we considered this wonderful phrase, “Thou art Mine,” we thought of these words: “He that formed thee, O Israel. Fear not, for I have redeemed thee.”
This word again in Hebrew, yatsar, means to fashion, to form, or to constitute. You may have been pressed into shape; you may have the mould, even though it has fallen and is alienated from God. But the wonderful thing about the redeeming work and grace of God is that He wants to take Jacobs and form them into Israel.
He wants to take the twister and form him into a blesser and a worshipper. He wants to take the supplanter and turn him into a builder of the house of God. That is the glory of God’s redeeming power.
That is what He is doing with you and with me. He has predestined us to be conformed to the image—to the likeness—of His Son. That, I think, is a simply wonderful subject.
When we think of the words, “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee,” we see that we are His by redemption. Is it not a marvellous thing, we who are born of God, to know that we are not only the Lord’s by creation, but the Lord’s by redemption? We are doubly the Lord’s.
The word “redeemed” means, in Hebrew, to free by repayment or ransom, or by avenging. That is exactly what the Lord has done for you and for me. When we had fallen into sin and been alienated from God, we were dead in trespasses and sins. We were in the slave market of the world, demonised in many ways.
Then our Lord came, the Redeemer, and He paid the ransom for us. He avenged us in the sense that He stripped principalities and powers naked, making a show of them openly, triumphing over them through His cross.
Now this evening I want to take the third of these ways in which we are His: “Thou art Mine.” It is in this little phrase: “I have called thee by thy name. Thou art Mine.”
This calling is not that we are called to be created. That is obvious, is it not? We have to be created to be called. For the calling to operate, we have to be created.
We have a much bigger problem when it comes to salvation, because again and again in the New Testament it seems superficially as if this calling is connected with being born again, with being converted, with being saved.
But, in actual fact, our calling must be more than even our great salvation. Our salvation is only the means by which the Lord has retrieved us from our fallen state and brought us into His kingdom.
Originally, when He created man, He called man. Man had a calling. What was God’s original calling? It was that man should take up the tree of life—or, in New Testament terms, that man should receive the eternal life of God in the Lord Jesus.
Man was to become, as it were, joined to Him in one spirit; and together with the Lord Jesus, man would come to govern the whole universe. That was the calling. Man fell from it. Because of sin, he fell short of the glory of God.
Our salvation is the means by which God puts us back into the race, puts us back into the course. Although our calling has very much to do with salvation, it is not merely a calling to be saved.
The calling becomes operative the moment we are saved, because within our salvation is all the grace and power that you and I need to hear the call of God, obey the call of God, and fulfil the call of God.
Here, then, is the third way in which the Lord claims us. When He says, “Thou art Mine,” we are His by calling—not only by creation, not only by redemption, but also by calling. “I have called thee by thy name. Thou art Mine.”
I would like to take you through a few Scriptures. I do not want to overburden you with them, but I want you to catch the glory of this thing.
No wonder the world thinks we are a dreary lot. When somehow all there is to being a child of God, all there is to being saved, is to say a few prayers, sing a few hymns, attend our rather boring routine meetings, witness if we are very keen, go out on the streets if we are extremely committed—and then one day die—what do they think is going to happen?
We are going into eternity, and we are going to sing a hallelujah chorus forever afterwards. This evidently is the gospel as the world sees it. This is the impression we have given to the world: that this is the good news.
I have said to you many times before: the idea somehow or other that we sit on a damp cloud in a glorified nightdress and play a harp for ever and ever!
But if we could catch even the smallest glimpse of what our calling is, I promise you, it would spoil you for ever after. You would never be the same again. You would catch a glimpse of what the goal of your salvation is, what the objective of God’s love is, what aim He is driving at.
You would begin to see, as you walk with Him, that all the many things which happen to you in your life are being turned to work for you an exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
The world is passing inevitably and irreversibly into a time of greater and greater turmoil and upheaval: monetary collapse, terrorism, lawlessness, nation against nation, superpowers trying to outwit one another, and all the consequent problems.
You and I will become more and more depressed and disappointed as believers unless we have caught the heavenly vision. If we are people of the heavenly vision, then we shall see all the turmoil, upheaval, and shaking as a blessing in many ways, bringing us to priorities and helping us understand what we must put first if we are to have treasure that outlasts time.
Consider Ephesians 4:1:
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called.
“I beseech you to walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called.” This is not merely a calling, important and significant as that may be, to some particular function in the Body of Christ, some particular work the Lord wants to give you, or some particular contribution you are to make to the house of God.
This is, in the most general way, the calling that becomes operative when you and I are born of God. When we are not born of God, there can be no call. But the moment you and I are born of God, the moment we are saved, then inherent within our very salvation is the calling of the Lord.
Walk worthily of it. It is so tremendous, so wonderful, so eternal in its significance and dimension. Do not devalue it. Do not debase it. Do not ignore it. Do not live in an unworthy manner in the light of it, as if you had not been called. Walk worthily of this calling wherewith you have been called.
In the same letter, Ephesians 1:17-18, we read:
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him;
Having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling.
I wonder how many of us really know what is the hope of His calling. It cannot merely be salvation, surely, in the sense that we are already saved. It may have something to do with the redemption of the body, but is that really the extent of the hope of His calling?
Is it not interesting that the apostle feels he cannot write any more of this letter to the church at Ephesus until he has let them know what he is praying for them? It is as if he is almost afraid that they will merely mentally understand this as theology.
“I want that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ will give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your heart being enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling.”
This is what will take them through periods of tribulation, when in Ephesus they may face wild beasts in the arenas. This is what will enable the church, in times of great suffering, to realise that they have a calling—a glorious calling.
Turn to Romans 8:28:
And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them who are called according to His purpose.
“His” is actually not in the original. If you think of it for a moment, it brings out the force of the phrase all the more:
We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, and who are called according to purpose.
Called according to purpose. There is a purpose in this calling. This calling is not merely a general thing. You and I are called according to a plan, according to a programme, according to a goal that God has for His own.
The most general way I can explain this calling is that we are called to be in Christ. We are called to be in Christ. If you think of it like that, everything begins to make sense.
You cannot be in Christ unless you are saved, and in Christ you find your great salvation. In Him, you will be saved to the uttermost—from sinner to saint, from Jacob to Israel. It is all in Christ.
But this calling is more than being called to salvation. If we are called to be in Christ, then we are called to share His destiny, share His throne, share His Body, share His life and His name, share His inheritance, and share His glory.
We are called to be in Christ. This marvellous little phrase, “in Christ”—that is the church, is it not? Ecclesia: called out and called in. We are the called ones, the elect. We are called. Is that not marvellous?
If we are called to be in Christ, how can it be possible that we will not share His destiny, His love, and His glory? How can we be in Christ, joined to Christ—“he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit”—and not share His destiny, His inheritance, His throne, and His glory?
My dear friends, here is your calling. A little Jacob like you, and a little Jacob like me, has been called to share the destiny of the Messiah. Think of that.
You and I, little Jacobs that we are, have been called to share the inheritance of the Lord Jesus. Everything was made through Him, everything was made in Him, and in Him everything holds together. You and I have been called to share His inheritance.
For the sake of those who are young in the Lord, young in age and young in the Lord: you and I are called to be in Christ. If we are called to be in Christ, then our calling concerns the sharing of His destiny, His throne, His future, His inheritance, and His glory.
Through the redeeming grace and love of God, you and I have become recipients of the eternal life which is in our Lord Jesus. He said, “I am the resurrection, and the life.” We who have been born of God have the Son, and he that hath the Son hath the life.
We have this life in us—the life of the Lord Jesus, the very life of God in the Lord Jesus. It is in me. It is in you.
We share His name. Why did He say to us, “If ye shall ask anything of the Father in My name, He will give it you”? This does not mean using His name as a little charm.
It means that we have been married to the Lord. We have lost our surnames, and we have received His.
To be in Christ means that you and I are called to be the Body of the Lord Jesus. We are called to be joined to Him. Because I am joined to Him and you are joined to Him, what has happened to us? We are joined together. We cannot help it.
You may not like the idea, and I may not like it—especially as we are coming to Independence Day—but the fact is that you and I, being joined to the one Lord, are joined to one another. We have different backgrounds, different races, different outlooks, different temperaments, and different personalities, but we have only one Lord.
We are His Body. Is there anything more intimate than that?
I often think about how Paul came to use this term, which he uses more than any other as an illustration of what it means to be the church: the Body. When you think about it, it is an extraordinarily awkward thing, is it not, to speak about people as the Body of the Lord, the church of which He is Head?
We are so used to it. Some of you have read it from childhood: “The church, which is His Body,” or, “He is Head of the church, which is His Body.” But what is the point of talking about Jesus as Head and ourselves as Body unless we are joined together in a living entity, in a living humanity?
Have you ever seen a living bodyless head? You would die of shock if a head walked in across the stage. Once a head is parted from the body, you can pickle it, you can stick it upon a wall, or do something else with it—but it is dead. It has no practical living function whatsoever.
Have you ever seen a living headless body? Again, you would die of shock if suddenly a headless body walked down the aisle and sat in a chair here. I am giving you ideas for the skits! But you would get the shock of your life, would you not? Why? Because you have never seen a living headless body.
A body, to live, has to have a head. A head, to live, has to have a body. The head and the body belong together, and they can only live insofar as they are joined together in a unity, in an entity.
Do you begin to realise why the Holy Spirit put into the heart of the apostle Paul this illustration of the unity between those whom the Lord Jesus has redeemed and Himself as Head and Body? He was saying: you belong to Him. You belong to Him in such a way that you cannot live without Him.
Although He could actually live without you, He does not want to live without you. That is the glory. You have been given by the Father to the Son, and the Son loves you and me so much that He says He will lose none of those whom the Father gives to Him.
We are called to be the Body of the Lord Jesus. We are called to be the Bride of the Lord Jesus. It is the same thing in another way.
In the first chapters of the Bible it says, “These two shall become one flesh.” When we come to the end of the Bible, we find the Lamb and the wife of the Lamb; there is the marriage supper of the Lamb, and these two finally come together. This is the calling.
When I begin to think of it like this, I understand Paul. I understand also Mr. Sparks. The first time I ever heard Austin-Sparks, many years ago, he prayed at great length before he spoke about the need for us all to have revelation. I thought he must be nuts.
I had never heard a Christian minister or servant of God pray that we all needed revelation. I thought we had all the revelation we needed in the Bible. All you had to do was use your little brain.
Why, I thought, did he pray that we might all have revelation? Then he gave the Word. Afterwards, he prayed again and again that we might have revelation. I thought to myself, “No wonder people think he is strange.”
I had been warned about him. “Be very careful of him,” they said. “He is a sheep-stealer. He has very strange doctrines.”
But Mr. Sparks only had the same burden that the apostle Paul had. When we see what happened to the church shortly after Paul’s death, I fully understand why Paul had that burden. It was some kind of intimation in his spirit by the Holy Spirit that unless these people really had revelation, the whole thing would go off the rails.
No wonder that, when the apostle had seen something of the calling, he prayed, “Oh, that God would give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, the eyes of your hearts being enlightened, that you might know what is the hope of His calling.”
If they settled for anything less than God’s highest, fullest, and best, they would be sport for all this superficial worldliness in the church. They would be sport for reducing the house of God to a human club, with all the systems of the world, the organisation of the world, the fundraising techniques of the world, and the electoral procedures of the world.
But if they understood that their calling was in another dimension, they would never be the same again. Like the apostle Paul, they would be caught by an obsession. They would have a passion that would spoil them for anything else.
Listen to this man in the most amazing testimony in the whole Bible. I consider Paul’s testimony in Philippians 3 to be the most amazing testimony in the Bible. When you really think of what he said, it is shattering.
He says, “I forget the things which are behind.” What is wrong with the man? Most Christians do not forget the things which are behind; they never even think of the things which are before.
Most people are always talking about a blessing they had twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or an experience they had. It is always the past. The past is not the way to close the book on the past. But what has happened to this apostle?
Then he says, “I press toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Here is this man who had written Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians, and he says, “I do not count myself yet to have obtained, but I press on.”
If there were one person in the whole family of God of whom we could say, “Well, we feel he has got it,” surely it would be the apostle Paul. I would give anything to be able to write just 1 Corinthians 15. You would hear about it all through eternity if I had only got that! I would always say, “Did you read what I wrote?”
What about 1 Corinthians 13? What about Romans 8? Here is a man who had received such great revelations, had been caught up to the third heaven, heard things not lawful for a man to utter, and had such experiences of the Lord. Yet he says, “I do not count myself yet to have obtained, but I press on.”
Then he says, “That I may lay hold on”—apprehend. It is a very strong word in Greek. It means to arrest, the way you take a person into custody: “That I may arrest that for which Christ Jesus arrested me.”
In other words, when the Lord saved me, He had a purpose, and I want to take hold of that purpose. What was in His heart when He saved me? Why did He persevere with me? Why does He say, “I created you,” even though fallen and alienated from God, and then redeem me? What is His purpose in creating and redeeming?
Paul says, “I caught a glimpse of it. I will never be the same again. I do not care whether I go to lions in the arenas, fight with gladiators, face death by execution, suffer affliction, shipwrecks, privations, or have my reputation torn from me. If only I can reach the goal that God has set; if only I can come to the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
The man is obsessed. I tell you something: one day in the ages to come, we will never think of Paul as obsessed. We will only say, “Would to God we had all been obsessed.”
The man has seen through the things of time. He has seen that things which seem to us so important are actually secondary, and he has seen through to that which is eternal, that which abides for ever. He cannot be the same again.
He says that he counts all things as refuse, that he may gain Christ. That sounds like the most unevangelical language I have ever heard. “That I may gain Christ.” Paul, you do not win Christ. Christ is God’s unspeakable gift to you. What are you talking about, counting everything but loss?
Then later he says that he counts all these things but loss that he may attain unto the resurrection from the dead. What is he talking about? Everybody is going to be raised from the dead anyway.
Someone says, “No, no. It is resurrection from the dead, not resurrection of the dead.” Oh! There is a difference between a resurrection from the dead and the resurrection of the dead.
Paul uses a very interesting little word in Greek. He says, “That I may attain unto the resurrection which is out from among the dead.” He has put the cat amongst the pigeons.
What does he mean? It is as if he sees something that God is calling him to. He calls it the prize—the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Evidently, this prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus is something for which you and I have to appropriate the grace and power of God, keep on course, run the race, and fulfil our ministry, until finally, by the grace of God, we reach the finishing line.
It is not salvation. Personally, I do not believe that you can lose your salvation, although some do. But I do believe you can lose your position in the city of God, because I understand that in many ways the kingdom is bigger than the city.
Concerning the Bride, it says, “Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” Who are they? These blessed ones who are invited to the marriage supper cannot be the Bride, since the whole marriage supper is in her honour. They cannot be the angels, because they will be there anyway, attending and serving.
So who are the ones who are told that they are so blessed even to be invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb?
I believe Paul is not talking about gaining the Lord Jesus as Saviour, nor even gaining Him as Lord. He is talking about gaining Him as Bride.
Do you really mean to tell me that our Lord is going to be satisfied with a lot of empty-headed Hollywood stars sitting at His side for all eternity? They have never been able to govern their own circumstances, let alone reign over the universe; but because they are saved, evidently they are going to sit on a golden throne next to the Lord? It is nonsense, is it not?
Even the Lord Jesus was made perfect through the things which He suffered. Even the Lord Jesus, Who was without sin, was made completely perfect—made mature—through the things which He suffered.
It is nonsense to talk about inheriting the world to come and reigning over the universe with a hedonistic idea of the ages to come. We are not simply going to enjoy ourselves, lie around while angels bring sherbet, ice cream, coffee, tea, peaches, plums, and mangoes, never having to peel an orange because an angel will do it for us!
We are not going to lie on flowery beds of ease, rising only when a bell rings for another hallelujah chorus, then returning to eat peaches and ice cream. My dear friends, I know some of you are thinking, “I cannot think of anything more lovely.”
But think for a moment. At present you feel weary. You have circumstances against you, problems of fellowship, and so many other things around you. Are you going to tell me that, as a human being whom God has created—spirit, soul, and body—you will not be bored after thousands and thousands of years of sitting around doing nothing?
The human being has been made with a genius for creativity. You would only be satisfied for a few months—if we could measure eternity that way—before you would say, “I would like to do something.”
That is the whole point. In the ages to come, God is going to do so much. This universe, this globe, this natural creation, with all its beauty and intricate complexity, is a little shadow of what God really desires.
One day, when the whole parenthesis of sin is over and the first things have passed away, God will say, “Now, let us get on with the real job. Let us fling new universes into being. Let us create new stars. Let us do all kinds of things.”
I am not being stupid. Romans 8 says that creation has been subjected to a bondage of corruption. What God may get out of it in the future, I do not know. But I do know this: this world, with all its beauty in its fallen state, is the palest, palest, palest, inhibited, bound, caged shadow of what God would have had if there had been no fall.
If man had obeyed his original calling, taken the tree of life, received the Lord Jesus, entered into partnership with the Lord Jesus, and been transfigured in glory, a whole new phase would have begun. God would have said, “Now you look after the garden. That is the first allotment. Now you have conquered the world. That was the next allotment. Now we are going to get on with the next job.”
We do not know what the next job is. But if you and I think that we can simply sit on thrones, administering the will of God and doing the works of God automatically, we have another thing coming.
The real meaning of kingship is service. That is what we see in the Lord Jesus, Who was King of the Jews, in Whose veins there was nothing but royal blood, even humanly speaking, and Who is now King of kings and Lord of lords. He was the Servant, the suffering Servant, the Servant of the Lord.
The whole point of this calling is that you and I have to be trained. If we are going to administer the will of God in the ages to come, if we are going to watch over the works of the Lord in the ages to come, we have to learn now how to walk in step with the Lord, voluntarily, of our own free will, in spite of a world that is against us.
We want to be at His side. We choose to be at His side. We are not there because we are frightened of hell. We are there because we want to be, and we are prepared to pay the price to be with Him. That is the kind of person the Lord wants to marry.
He does not want people who are there merely because they are frightened of the other place, or merely because they want to be admired by others, popular with the world, cheered and acclaimed. He does not want that kind of empty-headed arrogance.
He wants people who, like Himself, have learned to lay down their lives; who have sacrificed themselves; who have lost their reputation; who have served Him faithfully in humdrum circumstances; who have learned to discern His mind in times of great stress and pressure, and to do His will; and who have loved Him with their first love all the way through.
That is why He has called you and me. The lovely thing about this call is that the Lord calls us, but He does not push us.
Did you hear that? He calls us. He does not push us.
If you do not want to hear that call, if you do not want to obey that call, you do not have to. You will not lose your salvation. You will not lose your place in the family of God. But you will not come to the throne.
Consider 1 Thessalonians 2:12:
To the end that ye should walk worthily of God, Who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory.
Kingdom and glory—kingship, if you like—into His own rule and His own glory.
Now look at Revelation 3:21:
He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne, as I also overcame, and sat down with My Father in His throne.
This is a very interesting thing. It is not to the whole church at Laodicea. It is not to every born-again believer. It is to him that overcomes.
Listen carefully:
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.He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne,
As I also overcame, and sat down with My Father in His throne.He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.
If any man hears My voice and opens the door—he that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. If you and I are going to realise our calling to the kingdom, to kingship, to the throne, and to His glory, we have to have an ear.
Even when the Lord has been shut out of so much of Christendom, we must be those who open the door and say, “Come in.” He will come in, He will sup with us and we with Him, and we will be given grace to overcome.
Consider also 2 Thessalonians 2:14:
Whereunto He called you through our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Called through the gospel to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And 1 Peter 5:10:
And the God of all grace, Who called you unto His eternal glory in Christ, after that ye have suffered a little while, shall Himself perfect, establish, strengthen you.
Called unto His eternal glory in Christ Jesus. What a wonderful thing, this glory. No one has really been able adequately to explain or define glory. It has something to do with the manifested presence of the Lord.
It is when God is totally satisfied that His presence is manifested in glory. When the Lord Jesus was transfigured in glory, He did not lose anything of His body, personality, or temperament. It was not like a spotlight coming upon Him from above. Rather, an enormous energy was switched on inside Him, and it shone through Him.
Every member of His body was lit with light, even His clothing. That is what you and I are going to have one day. It is amazing. He is bringing many sons unto glory.
Glory is not Queen Victoria pinning a medal on somebody’s chest while bands play “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Rule Britannia.” I should not say this on Independence Day. I am sorry—I will be good.
No, that is not glory. Glory is when something happens and God is so satisfied, so absolutely at home, that it is as if a tremendous energy is switched on in the whole universe.
At the end of the Bible, the New Jerusalem, the holy city, the wife of the Lamb, the Bride of Christ, comes down out of heaven having the glory of God. There is no need of the light of the sun, because the glory of God lightens her.
This is your calling. I am telling you something: it is worth suffering for this calling. It is worth paying any price for this calling. You will thank me a million times one day. You will say, “I am so thankful I went out of that place and decided there would be no price too big to follow the Lord, no cost too great.”
“I am going to follow the Lord. I am going to obey the Lord. I am going to seek the Lord with all my heart right to the end.”
There are many other Scriptures. In Hebrews 9:15 we are told that we are called to receive the promise of an eternal inheritance.
In Romans 8, we are made heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. The Lord Jesus is the heir of all things. Everything was made through Him and for Him—the whole universe and everything to do with it, and much more. He is the heir, and you and I are joint-heirs with Him.
That is a calling. Are you going to throw it away so that you can spend millions and millions of years in a divine kindergarten, romping around on the floor?
Are you ready to let God expand you, extend you, cause you to grow, and bring you to maturity through the things which you suffer?
Consider 1 Corinthians 1:9:
God is faithful, through Whom ye were called into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Some modern versions sadly say, “Called into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” Of course, we are called into fellowship with His Son. But the Holy Spirit said something more: we are called into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
This city of God at the end of the Bible, this wife of the Lamb, is not one person. It is made up of countless, innumerable saints who, down through the ages, have followed the Lamb whithersoever He went—those who have laid down their lives for His sake and for the gospel.
It is a fellowship. You and I cannot pursue this calling, nor can we realise it, on our own. If God put you in a cell in solitary confinement for the rest of your life, it may well be that you could not have this fellowship. But you and I are not in a solitary cell.
It is the hardest thing in the world for us to stay together, allow God to discipline us, and let Him do His work in us through our brothers and sisters. We are all looking for the perfect church.
If you find the perfect church, I will come and join it—and it will not be perfect any more.
We have all got the idea of the perfect church. There is no such thing as a perfect church down here. The whole idea of the church down here is like a pressure cooker: everything is flung in it, the lid is put down, and it is being cooked. You cannot get out of it. It is a messy business.
It is a building site. The building is going up, but everywhere around there are heaps of sand, cement, stones, chippings, and all the tools of the trade. A building site is never a very pleasant thing. But how can you have a house being built without a building site?
Everyone wants the building. They are all looking for a perfect building. They forget that we are growing up together into a spiritual house for the Lord, being built together, growing into a holy temple.
If you ever find a church that looks absolutely perfect, it is without any shadow of doubt a sign that it is not the house of the Lord, because there must be something very static about it if none of the seamy side is being brought to the surface.
If we could stop anyone being saved, we could have a little circle of perfect people—perfect aged saints who had been battered about and were beyond gossip, scandal, backbiting, pride, and arrogance; perfectly given to the Lord in prayer, good works, and faith.
But suppose the Holy Spirit fell upon us and three thousand were saved. Your perfect little church would suddenly lose its perfection. Suddenly three thousand come in: prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics, adulterers, fornicators—the whole lot begin to get saved and come in.
You are not going to tell me you will not have problems. People are not delivered in one single moment. They have problems in their temperaments and problems in their backgrounds. Your perfect church is no longer perfect. So do not pray for anyone to be saved if you want to remain a little elite group.
You see how nonsensical it is. The fact of the matter is that we need this fellowship, obviously, and we have been called into it.
How can we not have some kind of fellowship with one another? How can we not come under the authority of other brothers and sisters? How can we not learn to take responsibility for other brothers and sisters? Somewhere we have to learn something about fellowship down here.
Some of you younger ones may find it difficult at times. You think, “They are so old. They are so much older than we are.” But why do you not die to yourself and bring in a bit of new life? Just come in. You will find those older folks begin to smile at you sweetly after a while.
It is not easy when someone comes in and asks, “Why do you do it this way? Why do you do it that way? What a strange thing you do.”
I could never understand, when I was first saved, why in one group they played the organ on Sunday evenings but never played a single instrument at the Lord’s Table. I could not understand, so I asked.
Oh, I was sent to Coventry for months. Nobody had asked such a question before. Apparently, I should have known that you do not play instruments at the Lord’s Table. But I did not know. I was young, and I wanted to find out, so I asked.
If you are young in the Lord, listen: do not let the enemy work on you with propaganda. Do not withdraw from that fellowship or that group because they are all old and you are young. Perhaps, without your even realising it, the enemy is trying to deny your calling and frustrate the purpose of the Lord in your life.
Do you begin to see what an amazing thing this is—His by calling? It is wonderful enough to be His by creation and His by redemption. But we are also His by calling. We are trebly His. Is that not marvellous?
“I have called thee by thy name.” Sometimes we have the idea that the Lord is calling the whole church in a general way, and anyone who responds becomes very precious. It is your own call.
If you have been saved, He is calling you by name. He has made provision for you: provision of grace and provision of power, that that calling may be realised and that you may come to obtain the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
How are you to react to this calling?
First, you must have vision. If you have never seen what the Lord is calling you to, how can you respond?
Secondly, you must get your priorities sorted out. This is the surest way the enemy will keep you from obtaining the prize of God’s high calling in Christ: by preventing you from sorting out your priorities.
Where is the Lord in your life? Where is the purpose of the Lord in your life? Is it third, fourth, fifth, or sixth? Where is it in priority? You have got to get it sorted out.
Thirdly, you have got to face the cost. I will say more about that tomorrow.
Fourthly, there is an involvement of fellowship. There are others whom you have got to find in the Lord if you are really going to come to God’s goal.
Fifthly, you must have a hearing ear, and you must obey the Lord. If you do not hear what the Lord is saying, it will not be long before you are out of the course.
Many years ago, when I was first beginning to see these things, I asked Mr. Sparks, “Please tell me: what is an overcomer?”
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “An overcomer is not a perfect person, and he is not even a powerful person. He is someone who is still in the race at the end.”
I have never forgotten it. That is an overcomer. If you are going to stay in the race to the end, you are going to have to have an ear that can hear. May God give you a hearing ear to hear what the Lord is saying to you.
Heavenly Father, You have called us with such a calling. Lord, when we see the end of the Bible—that wonderful city of Yours, that Bride of Christ, that wife of the Lamb—we want to be those who obtain the prize of Your high calling in Christ Jesus.
Challenge us tonight, Lord. No matter how—