Return with me this evening to the last book of the Bible, to Revelation. I want to read some verses from different chapters in this book.
First of all, Revelation 1:9-18.
I John, your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience which are in Jesus, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it to the seven churches: unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamum, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.
And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands; and in the midst of the lampstands one like unto a son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle.
And His head and His hair were white as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of many waters.
And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword: and His countenance was as the sun shineth in His strength.
And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the Living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.
Then turn to Revelation 21:5-7.
And He that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And He saith, Write: for these words are faithful and true.
And He said unto me, They are come to pass. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.
He that overcometh shall inherit these things; and I will be His God, and he shall be My son.
Revelation 22:13:
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
Lastly, Revelation 3:14:
And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.
We have a word of prayer together. Let us really ask the Lord that He will be to us what we need in this time this evening.
Lord, we do not just come to You as a kind of routine thing, a kind of ritual. We turn to You, Lord, because we need You. And Lord, I certainly need You in the ministry of the Word, and we all need You in the hearing of that Word.
We are thankful, heavenly Father, that You have made provision for us. You have not left us to our own devices, or energies, or talents; but You have provided us with an anointing through the finished work of our Lord Jesus. We want, by faith, to stand into that anointing, for speaker and hearer alike, so that together we may experience Your ability and power in this time.
Lord, we need to hear You. I am so conscious, Lord, that we can say so much, and yet, Lord, unless Your Holy Spirit gives revelation, illumination, and enlightenment, then it remains, Lord, only in our brain. O heavenly Lord, get this Word of Yours into our hearts. Let that Word of Christ come to dwell in us richly, in all wisdom, we pray.
O Father, hear us then, as together we commit ourselves to You. We thank You and we praise You, Lord. We believe You have a greater interest in this time than we have, and that, O Lord, we believe You want to meet us in this way. We praise You and worship You and give to You all the glory, in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, the theme of these days together is the unfolding of God’s work of recovery in the church. Last night, in these evening times which are my responsibility, I said that we really need to know: what is it the Lord is recovering? It is one thing to talk about God’s work of recovery, but what is it that He is recovering? We spent last night talking about that matter.
Tonight I want to talk about the recovery itself. I want to say something about God’s work of recovery.
It is a most remarkable thing to me when we understand what the church is. When we understand that the church is not an institution, tradition, system, or organization merely; when we understand it is not a particular denomination; when we understand it is not even a congregation at its highest level—but begin to understand that the church is simply oneness with the Lord Jesus.
You and I have been made one with Him. Since I am one with Him and you have been made one with Him, then something has happened in our relationship with one another. We find that we are members of Christ, limbs of Christ, and members one of another—limbs of one another. That is how the Word of God describes it.
It is an amazing matter once we begin to see this. Hence, when you begin to see the church as union with Christ, there is a sense in which we cannot set it up, organize it, systematize it, or institutionalize it. It is something beyond that.
It is this which turned the Roman Empire, in the end, upside down. Beginning with a day of very small things that anyone could despise, it ended by turning the whole thing upside down; and it has always done that. That is the history of the true church.
Every time the Holy Spirit has worked in recovery, the world has not been the same. The world has felt the impact of the risen, ascended, enthroned Messiah. It has felt the impact of those who belong to Him, who are filled with Him, who become, as it were, His body. This is the history of the true church.
It is an amazing thing to me that in the last book of the Bible—which, by its very nature and position, must be more than usually significant, since it must be a summing up, a consummation, of the whole revelation of God bound up in the other sixty-five books—I find it quite amazing that Christ introduces Himself in this Revelation again and again as:
I am the first and the last.
The beginning and the end.
The Alpha and the Omega.
This is the only book in which we find this title given to the Lord Jesus, and He gives it to Himself. He introduces Himself all through this incredible book as the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.
You would say, in English, the A and the Z—proper English, I think you say “zed.” We say in Hebrew, aleph and tav: the first and the last letters of the alphabet. In other words, Jesus is everything.
Now, this is quite remarkable when we look at this book of Revelation, because whatever interpretation you and I adopt of this book—and there are an enormous variety of them—the more you investigate the different interpretations of the book of Revelation, the more confused you become.
I understand it very well, brother. You have to have a very little mind to be satisfied totally with one interpretation. The more you look at the different ones, the more you see the value of this interpretation, of that interpretation, and the rest of it. Of course, in the end, you just feel that you have to put an ice pack on your head. You return to the reading and study of the book of Revelation for relief from the many books that are written upon it.
Yet the Lord Jesus said there was a special and unique blessing for those who read and heeded the words of this book.
Now, whatever interpretation we adopt, we have to agree that the whole Revelation begins with the risen and glorified Messiah in the midst of His church on earth. Seven churches are selected.
Whatever we make of it—whether these seven churches are the history of the whole church from beginning to end, or whether we understand them simply as seven particular churches in Asia Minor—the fact is that the Holy Spirit selected seven, and seven only: seven churches on earth, in time and locality, representing the whole church of God on earth.
In the midst of these seven churches, we see the risen, glorified, enthroned Messiah: Head of the church, King of kings and Lord of lords. Each of these churches is represented by a lampstand, and, as I understand it, all are of gold.
This is so significant in the Bible. From the tabernacle, to the temple, to the book of Zechariah, whenever you come to the lampstand, you find it representing something of the purpose of God for mankind.
Here, in the midst of these seven churches represented by seven golden lampstands, we see the Lord. To each of these churches He speaks, and to each one He ends with the same words: “He that overcometh”—not those that overcome, but “he that overcometh.” Within the context of each of these churches, in time and on earth, there is to be an overcoming.
How does He introduce Himself? He could have done so as the Saviour: “I am the Saviour of the body.” As Redeemer, He could have said, “I am your Redeemer.” As King, He could have said, “I am King of kings and Lord of lords.” As Head of the church, He could have said, “I am the Head of the church—the only Head of the church.”
But He says:
I am the first and the last.
I became dead, and I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.
When we come to the end of the book of Revelation, again, whatever interpretation we adopt, we suddenly discover that all the Lord Jesus wanted for His church on earth has been realized. It is being secured.
We hear these wonderful words as we see this bride, this city of Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, having the glory of God:
Behold, I make all things new.
The former things have passed away. Behold, I make all things new. I am the Alpha and the Omega. To him that overcometh, I will be his God, and he shall be My son. He that overcometh shall inherit these things.
You have the lampstand there. If you look very carefully at that amazing vision of the New Jerusalem, that city of God coming down out of heaven having the glory of God, you discover in Revelation 21:21 onward that, first of all, the glory of God lightens it.
In other words, we are told that the nations will walk in its light, and the glory of God is the light of it. It does not need the light of sun or moon because the glory of the Lord lightens it.
Then we are told another most significant thing: the Lamb is the lamp thereof. So the glory of God in the Lamb makes the testimony of Jesus all over again. It is the light of God in Jesus. He is the container, the vessel, if you like, of the glory of God—the light of God—in which all the nations will walk.
Then we make this amazing discovery: the city is the lampstand. The Lamb is the lamp, and the glory of God is in the lamp and shining out.
There are seven lampstands in the first three chapters, and in the last two chapters one glorious lampstand, all of gold—refined so that it is transparent as crystal. This cannot be coincidence. Whatever interpretation we adopt of the book of Revelation, this cannot be coincidence.
Somewhere between these first chapters and these last chapters, we discover the whole conflict concerning God’s people. We discover what you and I are experiencing, whether we know it or not. For the deeper we go with the Lord, the more we know of fellowship with one another, the nearer we come to some kind of recovery of the church, so we discover all hell is let loose.
That is exactly what we find from Revelation 4 right through to Revelation 20: one long record of ferocious controversy, confrontation, conflict, and battle. It never ends all the way through.
There are visions of dragons, serpents, false prophets, antichrists, great worldwide systems, 666, multitudes pursuing the believers, destruction of their bodies, taking away their rights, and subjugating them to forces that are anti-God and anti-Christ. This is the book of Revelation.
Some people put all the visions in the future; they may be right. Some people put all the visions in the past; I feel they are wrong. Some people, like our brother Mr. Sparks, saw this book as a book of symbols: the whole purpose of God from eternity to eternity, and the great conflict over it centered in the person of the Lamb and the followers of the Lamb.
But whatever interpretation we adopt, the fact remains: we have one long, consistent, enduring, ferocious, and violent battle and conflict from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. It is almost as if all the forces of darkness come out against this matter of the golden lampstand, vested in these simple, uncomplicated, very weak, and failing churches in time, on earth, and in locality.
My dear friends, that is the significance of the title with which the Lord Jesus introduces Himself. Once we begin to understand that, whether we know it or not, we have been introduced by new birth, by being redeemed, and by being named with the name of the Lord Jesus into a conflict.
It is not merely something allowed; it is something which has been so through the whole of the ages of time, and now it is building up to its crescendo.
Now we understand why the Lord Jesus says:
I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.
You cannot end with God unless you begin with God. It is as simple as that.
Any church entity that does not originate in the finished work of the Lord Jesus, in the risen life of the Lord Jesus, in the nature of the Lord Jesus, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, will never reach God’s end. It may be dressed up in all the biblical pattern; it may talk the biblical language; it may have everything correct and sound about it. But if it does not originate in the Lord Jesus, if it has not been born of God, it will not go on to the end of God.
That is why Jesus says, “I am the first and the last.” He did not mean, “I am the first one, then a whole lot of others will come, and then I will be the last,” as if He were two people. That is stupid.
He does not say, “I am the beginning, and then you just get on with it. Do anything. Set up churches. Use every method you want—train, fundraise, evangelize; it does not matter, adopt the world. I do not care what you do because I am the beginning and I am going to be the end. What you do in between is your business.” Of course, that is rubbish.
When the Lord Jesus said, “I am the A and the Z”—I have to speak the language of the foreigners here—He meant, “I am the whole alphabet.” In other words, He was saying, “I own everything. I am everything.”
Where did this church come from on the Day of Pentecost? It came from heaven, in the Person of the Holy Spirit, poured out by the Lord Jesus. When this church was born in one hundred and twenty, within a matter of hours they were three thousand one hundred and twenty. Within a matter of weeks they were five thousand, and within a matter of a few more weeks they were eight thousand.
I was interested in what Jean said this afternoon. Jewish professors of New Testament and of the early church tell us now, in their latest discovery, that they believe over one third of the Jews in Israel after the crucifixion of Jesus became believers in Jesus.
This explains why the historic break came between the Jewish people and the Messianic Jews over the Bar Kokhba revolt. The Messianic Jews were asked to help defeat the Romans, but they said, “We cannot, because you say Bar Kokhba is the Messiah, and we know Who the Messiah is. He has not only come, but He is coming again; and this is not the Messiah. It is bound to fail.”
When it failed, if there were such a large number of them, we understand why they were blamed for the defeat. It is an interesting thing.
My dear friends, how wonderful it is to understand that Jesus is the first and the last, the beginning and the end. This is all-important when it comes to the work of recovery, because the whole question of recovery is to recover that which is to do with the Lord Jesus and His body.
Let me say it again, because it is true on every level: whether it is your personal life, our life together as God’s people, church life, or the work of the Lord. If we want to reach the Lord’s end, we must begin with the Lord’s beginning.
We cannot come to Him as the last if He is not the origin, the source, the beginning. Then we cannot come to His end. All that is of the earth is earthy, and all that is of heaven goes through.
This is the history of the true church. It came in the Person of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. That day, something was born which was not of the earth. It did not come out of the earth. It came down from heaven into people living on the earth and joined them to a Head who was in heaven, so that His headship was more real to them than their own heads.
There is so much self-manufactured Christianity. My dear friend, you can be christened, confirmed, immunized, inoculated, and a thousand other things; but if you are not born of God, you cannot go through into the kingdom of God.
You can be so religious, it is incredible—unbelievable—but if you are not born of God, you do not go through into the kingdom of heaven.
This is the stark, radical—we could almost call it revolutionary—fact: if we do not begin with Jesus, we will not end with Him. If He is not the first, He will not be the last.
This is why Colossians 1:18 speaks of the Lord Jesus in this way:
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.
It is a most interesting fact that in every single new move of the Holy Spirit, without exception in the whole history of the church up to this present time, the feature at the beginning has been the pre-eminence of the Lord Jesus.
The Holy Spirit will commit Himself to nothing else. Only when Jesus is given His rightful place—as Lord, as King, as Head, as Saviour, as Life, as all—then the world is once again turned upside down by the impact of a heavenly force in human beings. That is the testimony of Jesus.
The key to all recovery is the pre-eminence of the Lord Jesus.
The older I get, the more I view the Christian scene with perplexity. I see people who started out with an anointing, born of God, ending up in the most tragic fiasco.
Nor, I hasten to add, is this all charismatic. There are others who are not charismatic who have done similarly. I could give you names, but I am not going to—names that are household words all about. They were anointed of God, born of God, called by God, began in the Spirit, and ended in the flesh.
Then I say to myself, “Can I escape?” If there are so many who begin with God and end with themselves, begin with the Spirit and end with the flesh, start with the truth of God and end in error, start with purity and end in the cult—what guarantee have I got that I will not end that way?
My friend, I want to say something before God: nothing whatsoever. Left to myself, within another decade I will be off the rails—and so will you.
This is the tendency within us all. There is only one God-given way through all the conflict and all the devices of Satan: to give the Lord Jesus the pre-eminence.
You give Him prominence, you will go off the rails. But when you give Him pre-eminence in everything, He will keep you on the way.
Church history bears witness to this. The moment the church compromised the rights of the Lord Jesus, it began to decline. Then the world came in like a flood with all its ways, its means, and its ideals.
Until the church itself became a persecutor, in many, many instances—not just Roman, as much Protestant as Roman. The church became the persecutor of the real believer.
Does that not say something to you? Do you remember: “Thou hast left thy first love,” and, “I will remove thy lampstand out of its place”?
What does that mean? The church would go on. It would still have its buildings, its organization, its charity, and its activities—and yet the testimony of Jesus would be gone.
The pre-eminence of Jesus is not from duty, but from a quality of love which we call first love.
First love is not a question of the timing of love; it is a question of the quality of love. When a person is first in love—really in love—they sometimes go without meals. They forget time. They do the most extraordinary things.
I am not saying that you should be walking around in a daze the whole time, but the point I am trying to make is this: nothing is too much for a person with first love. They will go to the ends of the earth for the one they love, if they really love them with that quality of love.
Jesus began these messages with this word about first love. Sometimes I have been asked by folks who are very fresh in the Lord, who have just come to the Lord, “I think the Lord was rather harsh on that church at Ephesus.”
When you go on to the others—about Jezebel, the deep things of Satan, Nicolaitanism, and a few other things—you can understand the Lord saying, “I am going to kick you all out.” But Ephesus, they were a good lot.
Yet it is to the church at Ephesus that the Lord says, “I am going to remove your lampstand.” Why? Because if you have lost your first love, there will be no question of the Lord Jesus having the pre-eminence in everything.
Shortly, before very long, He will only be Lord in name. His rights will be whittled away and compromised. He will take a back seat. He will first be prominent, then not even prominent, until finally He is out altogether—as He was in the church of Laodicea, knocking on the door of His own church.
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock.
That is why it is for our encouragement that, when we come to the church of Laodicea—so often understood as representing the church in the last days—we find the Lord Jesus saying:
These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.
He was saying to the church of Laodicea, “There is still hope. I am outside the door, knocking on the door, outside; but I am still the Amen. To everyone who will hear My voice, open the door, and let Me come in, we will have union. We will have oneness. We will know what the church is really all about.”
“I will come in,” He said, “and will sup with him, and he with Me.” That is how He puts it. Beautiful, very beautiful—the whole matter of oneness again, the whole matter of union and communion again.
Amen comes from a Hebrew root meaning “to believe.” You say in Hebrew, amen: “I believe.”
Jesus is the One who has the faith that the end will be reached. He is the Author and Finisher of our faith. So, my dear friends, here we have something of encouragement. Even though we have a Laodicean situation in the church, we can still recognize Jesus as the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the beginning of the creation of God.
I find this tremendous. Why? Because the Lord Jesus made one simple statement about the church that I go back to in prayer warfare again and again and again. It is the most comprehensive, simple, and categorical statement Jesus made about the church:
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
This is so dogmatic. This is so categorical. It is simple. There is no way you can explain it away. Jesus says concerning His church—not our church, His church—“I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”
If we look at church history, it seems as if the gates of hell have prevailed against the church again and again and again. But what we have to look at is this: again and again and again, the Holy Spirit has done a new thing.
The history of the real, true church of God is explained only in the Person and work of the Holy Spirit, to Whom has been given this work. Jesus is building His church through the Holy Spirit.
That is why, buried in the midst of all those dragons and serpents, martyrdom, persecution, breakdown, and failure, I find in Revelation 10:7 these glorious words:
But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, then is finished the mystery of God, according to the good tidings which He declared to His servants the prophets.
The mystery of God finished—in spite of all the power of Satan, all this tremendous work of the powers of darkness. It says, “Then is finished the mystery of God.”
Not half finished. Not finished in another way because the Lord found the powers of darkness and human beings a little too devious and too obstinate. But according to the good tidings which He declared to His servants the prophets.
In other words, God is going to do this work. What He has set His heart on, He is going to achieve. What He has revealed concerning His eternal purpose is going to be realized, not only in the Lord Jesus, but in the redeemed.
Now, dear friends, I would like, for a few moments, to consider this work of recovery. Up till now, in what we could call the last four hundred years, we all really feel that the major beginning of this recovery was with Martin Luther and the Reformers.
In fact, when we really study church history, we find a whole number of extraordinary groups of people, with the most incredible-sounding names, who all down through the years have followed the Lamb. The tragedy is that the institutional church destroyed every single thing they ever wrote. The only way we know anything about them is from what the church accused them of when it burned them or drowned them as heretics.
I am speaking of the Paulicians, Bogomils, Waldensians, Albigensians, and a thousand other names. Even in the Dark Ages, there were groups of those who knew the Lord, worshipped the Lord, went back to the pristine purity of the beginning, and knew Jesus as the first and the last.
It makes me very, very proud to think of the heritage that you and I have. I do not mean all those great prelates and popes with their pomp and glory. I mean those humble, true servants of God who served the Lord with a pure heart and saw the mighty works of God in their own day to such an extent that the established church had to liquidate them.
These poor, simple people were no threat. It was the Lord Jesus Whom they represented Who was the threat. It was the Holy Spirit Who was in them. The powers of darkness, established and entrenched in the state and so often in the established church, knew very well that if this thing was allowed to continue, it would, in the end, come to the top.
I find some very interesting things in this work of recovery, beginning from the Reformers. I have noted just a few things down. I will only mention them, but I find them very, very interesting.
First of all, I notice that it is the Holy Spirit Who takes the initiative in every case. It does not matter where you turn: in every single move of recovery in the last four hundred years, you will find that it was a man, or men, upon whom the Holy Spirit came—men who sought God.
How did they seek the Lord? The Holy Spirit created within them a hunger and thirst after God which only the Lord could meet.
After all, I wonder how many more people looked at that painting that Count Nicholas Zinzendorf looked at and were unmoved. But when Zinzendorf looked at that picture, it was as if the Lord Jesus looked at him through the picture.
How many others had studied the Word of God as Martin Luther had—putting on hair shirts, putting things round their necks, shackling themselves to the wall all night, trying somehow to obtain salvation—only to discover the light of God shining into their heart through some verse of God’s Word?
It was the Holy Spirit Who took the initiative again and again and again. I find that tremendous, because there is an ebb and flow in church history.
There is a flow: every time the Holy Spirit moves, there is a flow forward, and something is recovered in the flow. Then, as sure as night follows day, there is an ebb. Things tighten up, crystallize, and institutionalize.
The features of every one of the flows forward in the last four hundred years are common: Jesus as all; Jesus as the only Saviour; Jesus as life; the Word of God unshackled and absolutely supreme.
There is also experience of the Lord—not just something up here, but experience. People saw the Lord, understood the Lord, heard the Lord, and began to discover the Lord. It turned their lives upside down and inside out.
Another feature common to all of them—it does not matter whether early Methodists, early Quakers, early Brethren, early Pentecostals, or the early Reformers—is fellowship.
We sometimes think fellowship is our own prerogative, as if somehow we, in the middle or latter part of the twentieth century, discovered fellowship. But in every one of these moves, these flows of the Holy Spirit forward, the believers simply thought they belonged to each other.
They felt that this was their family, the household of faith—more real to them than their own background, even their own families.
Another common feature is multiplication. It does not matter where you look in the last four hundred years: every time the Lord has moved, the thing has burst out on all sides. Though despised, derided, and smeared at, it has gone and gone and gone, multiplying—not organization, but people. Multiply, multiply, multiply.
My dear friend, I do not know how much more has to be recovered, but this I do know: the Holy Spirit will always take the initiative in every further recovery work of God in the last days. Praise the Lord’s name.
Then there is a second thing I find very interesting, if you will bear with me: the despised day of small things. Zechariah said, “Who hath despised the day of small things?”
It is so easy to be a Lutheran four hundred years after Luther nailed his theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg. But when he did it, the whole world rose up in condemnation. He was hunted and hounded, and everybody who was with him was looked upon as fanatics and heretics.
“Who has ever heard of such a thing as justification by faith? What newfangled doctrine is this? This half-drunk monk!” That is exactly what they said. “This half-drunk monk dabbling in the Word of God! You cannot give the Word of God to peasants. What do you think they will do with the Word of God?”
I will tell you: they will be changed, and they will rapidly become a middle class. It has happened every single time in the history of the church.
That is why the established church was so frightened. They called Luther a crazy monk. They said he was Satan let loose. Did you know that? That was the official verdict on Luther: a thousand years of peace were over—the millennium—and now the devil had been let loose for a short time in the person of Martin Luther.
Martin Luther had his real weaknesses and failings, but, my dear friends, when the Holy Spirit took hold of Martin Luther, it was the hardest thing in the world to be with him. It was a day of small things. It was a day that could be easily despised.
“You are not meeting with Martin Luther—that crazy, fanatical, unbalanced monk? You must be mad. It is a cult. It is heretical.”
But within fifty years, it was very, very fashionable to be a Lutheran. “What are you?” “I am a Lutheran.” “Oh, how nice.”
Then it was the Puritans who were despised. You in the States ought to know something about the Puritans. They were the despised ones, hounded from pillar to post. Everyone spoke against them.
Even to this day, the most incredible stories are told about them, as if they were the most narrow-minded, joyless, dark, heavy people in the world. But the early Puritans were full of laughter, full of love, full of life, and full of light. It was the most difficult thing in the world to be associated with the Puritans.
What do I think of the Quakers? It is terribly fashionable today to be a Quaker. “Oh, how lovely, you are a Quaker.” We conjure up ideas of sunsets, sunrises, twittering birds, and peace. But the early Quakers were blood and fire. They turned the whole world upside down.
One of the Quakers went into the streets of London prophesying, “God will judge this city within a year, and after the judgment will come a fire that will destroy this whole city.” The great plague came to London and nearly wiped it out; and the year after that came the Great Fire, which destroyed the whole of London in 1666.
The ordinary people remembered the Quaker, the old Quaker prophet whom they had pelted with dung and mud and put in the stocks. At one time, over one third of all the sons of God in the Quaker movement were in prison.
That is how disreputable it was to be a Quaker. The very term Quaker was used as an insult: “They sit in silence in their meetings until they shake and quake—Quakers.”
What did they do in prison? They preached to all the inmates, refused to come out free, and turned those vermin-infested prisons into Bible schools. Men of God came out of the prisons of Britain, trained by other servants of God in the dungeons and prisons themselves.
It was a day of small things everywhere you went. Today it is so respectable to be a Methodist, but in those days they called them enthusiasts. That was their first name: enthusiasts. “Dear emotionalism! Gone wild! That stupid vicar!”
No one would have turned him out of all the churches if they knew what he would do. He preached a fiery sermon in the pulpit, and the rector came and turned him out. Do you know what he did? He went and stood on his father’s grave and said, “You cannot turn me off. This is family property.”
He preached on his father’s grave, and half the church congregation got saved. Everyone said, “I never heard of such things—preaching in the open air! The most vulgar, disgusting thing. Only Methodists could do such a thing.”
And they turned the world upside down. Oh, it was so easy to despise them. Who wants to be a despised friend of the Wesleys or Whitefield? Who wants to be in anything that God is doing? But today, it is very respectable.
It was the same with the Brethren. I can remember when people said, “You are going to a Brethren meeting?” There was a slight curl on the lips. “Pastors? Any Tom, Dick, and Harry can stand up. They have those little tin shacks they meet in.”
I can remember that. In the early days, it was easy to despise it.
The Pentecostals were exactly the same. I remember when I was first saved, the pastor took me and sat me down and gave me a half-hour lecture on the evils of Pentecostalism. They were emotional, unbalanced, in error, and immoral. Whatever I did, I could even go into a Roman Catholic church, but I must never, ever, at any time, enter a Pentecostal church.
Today it is quite respectable to be a Pentecostal. They are being asked onto all the interdenominational boards now. Amazing, is it not?
Now it is the charismatics. I am quite sure that in time it will be quite respectable to be associated with either Mr. Sparks or Watchman Nee, because it is always the way of church history to martyr the person, and then the next generation garnish their graves.
This is the day of small things. It is much easier to settle into something secure and established than to follow the Lord in the day of His doing.
My dear friends, it is easy to despise the day of small things. Do you know that every single great movement of the Holy Spirit in the whole history of the church began with a few people? Even at the very beginning, one hundred and twenty. We do not know, except for just a few names, any of them.
Then again, there is something else in this matter: what is recovered is never lost again. Now, this I find very exciting. All that is recovered is never lost again.
Take, for instance, the supremacy of the Word of God. This is now accepted by everybody who is a real believer. Do you know anybody who is a born-again believer who does not accept the authority and inspiration of the Word of God? It is an established thing. We do not argue amongst ourselves about it.
Or again, take justification by faith. Who argues against justification by faith? It is looked upon as so normal to the child of God that it is relegated to spiritual kindergarten—with the result that very few believers understand justification, I think, to their own injury. But nobody argues about it. It has never been lost again.
Think of new birth. It is a very interesting thing that the Reformers never spoke about being born again. It was an unknown phrase to them. They thought of baptism as new birth, as being born again.
It was the Wesleys who began to talk about being born again: a new birth, a second birth. Now it has become such a household term that I open American newspapers and see a “born-again president,” a “born-again economist,” or something else. That is a devaluation of the term, I fear.
But everybody knows it now; there is no discussion. In Wesley’s day, they called them enthusiasts because they said, “This is subjective. It is not objective. This is emotional.”
My dear friends, I could go on and on, but what I find so marvellous is that there is an essential continuity in what God is doing in recovery. It is never lost again.
Woe betide any new move of God that cuts itself off from all that the Lord has been doing, because it is one church. Not only one church as far as we are concerned; it is one church in time, going back to Pentecost.
This is tremendously important. I find it so exciting when you look at the past. Very simply, this is how I see it.
With the Reformers—Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin—we have the recovery of the Word of God as the supreme arbiter in all matters to do with faith and practice. We have the finished work of the Lord Jesus, and particularly justification by faith. These, I believe, were recovered in that great work of the Reformers.
Then I think of the Anabaptists, those despised people drowned in their thousands, with chains round their necks, put in sacks—men, women, and children—and drowned in the rivers, streams, and fountains of Europe.
I can hardly go to Salzburg and look at some of those beautiful fountains without remembering the thousands of Anabaptists who were drowned in them.
Today, believers’ baptism by immersion is almost a household word. I know Episcopalians who get baptized by immersion. I even know Episcopalian ministers who quietly baptize believers by immersion. It does not matter what denomination you belong to; now it is accepted more or less everywhere.
The Anabaptists also recovered the independence of each local church. It was revolutionary in their day that no church had the right to boss another true church.
Then I think of the Quakers: the freedom of the Holy Spirit and the priesthood of all believers. Actually, the Anabaptists believed in the priesthood of all believers, and then God, as it were, took another try on this one because it did not get completely through. The Quakers were very strong on this matter.
The freedom of the Spirit taught us that you do not have to have forms; you can do without them. Now, personally, I do not think you should do without them, but they taught us that it is possible spiritually to know the Lord and have the reality of the ritual without the actual ritual. It was freedom in the Holy Spirit.
Or I think of the Moravians, of whom our brother Stephen spoke this morning: the sacrificial missionary service that they recovered. It has never been lost, has it?
Wherever you find true believers all over the world, everybody believes now that we should go and preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations. But it was revolutionary in the time of the Moravians.
When William Carey went to India, he caused the biggest furor in the Congregational churches in which he was known. They said they were not going to support him. “It is God’s job to save the heathen,” they said.
“You mean to tell us that everyone should go out to the far parts of the earth? It is God’s work. If He wants to save the heathen, He will save them.”
But today, this is accepted. So we can go on: the Methodists with their new birth; the Brethren with the oneness of believers and the priesthood of all believers; Christ as the foundation, the only foundation.
Or even the Pentecostals, with their emphasis on the Person and power of the Holy Spirit.
Then I think of T. Austin-Sparks, Watchman Nee, and many others associated with them. I believe they recovered for us one of the most precious truths that was reacted against so much in the time of the Reformation: Christ as the church.
Not merely a congregation of believers, but being in Christ, part of Christ. And something else that I feel these dear brothers—and we could almost add Mrs. Penn-Lewis—recovered was the cross: the work of God, the centrality and universality, as Mr. Sparks called it, of the cross.
I think of the charismatics, to bring us right up to date. Here is another example of God having a second go, as it were. He never quite got through the matter of the Person and power of the Holy Spirit with the Pentecostals, so once again He is coming; and this time it is related to the body of Christ.
How incredibly exciting this really is—at least, I think it is. Whatever God has recovered has never been lost again. It is an accumulation of precious truth which we step into almost without sacrifice today.
But I must watch the time. I want to say two other things and then conclude with a final thought.
Everything crystallizes and institutionalizes. Now, please listen to me on this; it is so important. Everything crystallizes and institutionalizes.
I know there are brothers and sisters here who will find this very hard to swallow. They want to believe that it would not be so. But if we look at church history, especially the last four hundred years, every single recovery work of God—in the flow of the Holy Spirit forward—has, in the ebb, crystallized, institutionalized, and turned into a monument to past glory.
Without exception. Interestingly, the Brethren lasted the longest. Very, very interesting.
Within two or three generations—listen, within two or three generations—the whole movement of the Holy Spirit has crystallized, formalized, systematized, and institutionalized. It generally ends up as a denomination.
Would you not think that perhaps the Lord could preserve us from this? I have often thought to myself: I personally believe in the absolute sovereignty and power of God. I believe He can do anything. If He wants to, He can raise up children from a stone.
So I think to myself, why in the world does the Lord not move out of heaven and stop it institutionalizing?
It is almost as if the Lord has no vested interest in keeping anything alive beyond the third or fourth generation. Think about that.
Here is another interesting fact. With a few exceptions, every move of recovery in the last four hundred years has had major division within the first twenty or thirty years.
Take the Reformers. Within twenty years, they split irrevocably from one another into Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Lutherans.
The Puritans split irrevocably into Episcopalians, Brownists or Congregationalists, Baptists, and Presbyterians.
Take the Methodists. Within twenty years of the glorious beginning of that huge movement of the Holy Spirit, the Wesleys and Whitefield split to form and plant different churches based on a different concept concerning the sovereignty of God.
The Brethren, within twenty years of that massive movement of the Spirit of God simultaneously all over the British Isles and beyond, split into two enormous camps: the Open Brethren and the Exclusive Brethren.
The Pentecostals did not wait for twenty years. Within five years of the move of the Holy Spirit, they were almost irrevocably split into anything up to ten or fifteen major groups.
We are witnessing today, in the last move of the Holy Spirit, the same major division. The only group I can find that did not split, strangely and interestingly—though Stephen will probably know more about this than I do—were the Moravians; and the other group were the Quakers. These are the exceptions.
Now, my dear friends, the last point on this matter of recovery that I want to mention is this. I do not want to leave it at the negative.
The building of the city of God—the New Jerusalem, the bride—comes out of the first and second generation of every move of God’s Holy Spirit. It seems as if, in that move of the Holy Spirit, the gold, the precious stone, and the pearl out of which the city of God—the bride of Christ, the wife of the Lamb—is produced.
It seems as if it is all found at the end. I see church history like this: I see that marvellous picture of the man-child being caught up to God. Now, I know the real interpretation is something else, but I see it almost as a picture of every time something is born of God.
The real values in the overcomer in that generation are caught up into the city of God, and Satan can never destroy them. At the end, all the values in every one of these great moves of the Holy Spirit will be found in the city—every one.
I have often said to folks—and I shall only know when we get to glory, and it will be one of my great excitements to see if it is so—that if we could bring the first generation of all these movements together, including the leaders, in one great conference, we would have the most extraordinary unity of the Spirit and the most extraordinary unanimity.
It is the third and fourth generation that has been so alienated. When you bring those first generations together, you might have the Wesleys, Luther, and Calvin. They would have some problems, mind you. But in those great moves of the Holy Spirit, there would be something that bound them together.
Well, my dear friend, that is really what I wanted to say this evening. Jesus said:
Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
I want to be in that building work of the Lord Jesus. I do not want to be in anything over which the gates of hell have prevailed. I want to be in that which is invincible, that which the Lord Jesus is doing.
I do not mind how small it is, how insignificant it is, how poor it is, or how few there are, provided God is doing something.
Dear folks, I find this tremendous. Why? Because many, many years ago, in the old covenant, God gave a vision to a prophet called Zechariah.
In the vision he saw a lampstand, all of gold. On either side he saw two olive trees feeding the oil out of their branches into the lampstand. Then the angel said, “Do you understand what you see?” And he said, “No, my lord. What is it?”
Then the word of the Lord came:
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 top stone with shoutings of, Grace, grace, unto it.
The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it.
For who hath despised the day of small things?
My dear friend, Zechariah came to understand that that lampstand represented a divine building programme. He also saw that all the obstacles and all the satanic devices would be overcome—not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord.
Jesus has laid the foundation of this church. He will finish it. The top stone, which is Himself, shall be brought forth with shouts of “Grace, grace.”
With all our problems in fellowship, all our queries, and all our perplexities, I think it is abundantly worthwhile to follow the Lord.
I think it would be a tragedy, even with all the devices and power of Satan in these last days, if we should just throw in the glove and give up. No, dear friend. If God has been so faithful over the centuries of church history, He is going to prove as faithful as ever in the last days of church history.
May God give you and me vision. May He give us an understanding of what it is He is seeking to do, and may you and I, by the grace of God, be within that recovery work of His.
Shall we pray?
O heavenly Father, You know how often we are tempted just to give up, to go back, to find something less full of conflict, less thorny or difficult.
But, Lord, in every single move of Yours in the history of the church, in the recovery work that You have been doing, there have been mountainous obstacles, formidable and complex difficulties, satanic opposition, even to blood.
Dear Lord, we pray that every one of us may be given such a heavenly vision of Your purpose that, in these last and troubled days, we shall be committed to You as never before.
Because, Lord, You come to us and You say:
I am the first and the last, and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.
Lord, we pray that we may take our eyes off our circumstances, one another, and all our difficulties, and get them onto Yourself. Lord, restore our first love, we pray, that we might be enabled to give You Your place in our lives, in our homes, in our businesses, and in our church life.
O Lord, help us to give You the pre-eminence in all things, to give You the place that the Father has given You. Dear Lord, help us.
O Lord, we need Your Holy Spirit to melt our hearts, to open up our understanding, and to bring to birth within every one of us a determination to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goes, whatever the cost.
We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus.