I am very glad to be able to be with you this afternoon, and trust that the Lord will make this a very living and powerful time.
Could we read Psalm 110 again?
The Lord saith unto my Lord,
Sit Thou at My right hand,
Until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.
The Lord will send forth the rod of Thy strength out of Zion:
Rule Thou in the midst of Thine enemies.
Thy people offer themselves willingly
In the day of Thy power, in holy array:
Out of the womb of the morning
Thou hast the dew of Thy youth.
The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent:
Thou art a priest for ever
After the order of Melchizedek.
The Lord at Thy right hand
Will strike through kings in the day of His wrath.
He will judge among the nations,
He will fill the places with dead bodies;
He will strike through the head in many countries.
He will drink of the brook in the way:
Therefore will He lift up the head.
Then, if you could turn to the New Testament, to the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 12, from verse 1.
Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,
lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us,
and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
looking unto Jesus the Author and Perfecter of our faith,
Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising shame,
and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
For consider Him that hath endured such gainsaying of sinners against Himself,
that ye wax not weary, fainting in your souls.
Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin:
and ye have forgotten the exhortation which reasoneth with you as with sons,
My son, regard not lightly the chastening of the Lord,
Nor faint when thou art reproved of Him;
For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
And scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.
It is for chastening that ye endure;
God dealeth with you as with sons;
for what son is there whom his father chasteneth not?
But if ye are without chastening, whereof all have been made partakers,
then are ye bastards, and not sons.
Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence:
shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?
For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed good to them;
but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness.
All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous but grievous;
yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised thereby.
Then, if you will turn also in the New Testament, to 2 Timothy 2, verses 3 and 4.
Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
No soldier on service entangleth himself in the affairs of this life,
that he may please Him Who enrolled him as a soldier.
Also, 1 Timothy 1:18:
This charge I commit unto thee, my child Timothy,
according to the prophecies which led the way to thee,
that by them thou mayest war the good warfare.
And again, in the same letter, 1 Timothy 6:12:
Fight the good fight of the faith,
lay hold on the life eternal, whereunto thou wast called,
and didst confess the good confession in the sight of many witnesses.
In 2 Timothy 4:7, Paul’s last words:
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith:
henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give to me at that day;
and not only to me, but also to all them that have loved His appearing.
We will just have a word of prayer.
Beloved Lord, we do bow here in Your presence this afternoon. We know that sometimes afternoon times can be very sleepy and heavy. Well, we ask that You, by Your Holy Spirit, blow upon this whole time.
Make it alive with Yourself. Make it a living time when You really reach our hearts and speak to us. Lord, You see the situation that we are all in, as far as the world is concerned and as far as this nation is concerned. We need You, Lord.
We need You to speak to us, and we need not just to, as it were, add a little bit to our head knowledge of these things. We need something that will redirect our lives and take hold of us in the most wonderful way for these days.
Hear us, Lord. We are asking this in the name of Jesus. And Lord, You have given us an anointing. It was won for us by the Lord Jesus at Calvary, and it is being made a living reality in the Person of the Holy Spirit.
We simply stand in that anointing for the speaking of Your Word and for the hearing. Lord, hear us. We shall give You all the praise and glory of our hearts for answering this prayer, which we ask in the name of our Lord Jesus, the Messiah. Amen.
Well, yesterday I spoke about the present world situation and about Israel as the root cause of much of the controversy the Lord has with the nations, and the Middle East, and the possibilities immediately ahead of us in the Middle East. I am not going to say any more about that. It is all recorded.
We spoke about what this all portends. There is no doubt about it: the world is at the crossroads, and a whole new system of social life and political life is probably going to be introduced in these next few years. It is the advent of the Antichrist.
We look for the coming of the Lord, of course, and this can only make us full of joy, because the Lord Jesus said, “When you see these things beginning to come to pass, straighten up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.”
So we have hope. It is not just the coming of the Antichrist; it is the coming of the Kingdom and the King.
So we have said something about this. I have also asked the question: What should we be, and what should we do?
I spoke last night about Psalm 110. It is the only way that you and I can really face this situation—with the confusion, the instability, the loss of jobs, the loss of income.
The only way we can face this situation and be alive and fulfil the purpose of God in our lives is looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
It is a wonderful fact that Jesus is seated—not fighting, not struggling, if I may be rather irreverent, not neurotic, not wondering whether His children are going to get through or not, whether His purpose is going to be fulfilled. Jesus is seated.
In other words, Jesus has won the battle. It does not matter what the devil does. Jesus has won the battle and sat down.
Furthermore, the Father says to Him, “Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Your enemies Your footstool.” Could there be anything that more confirms the fact that Jesus has won than the words of the Father to the Son: “Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Your enemies the footstool of Your feet”?
Then He says, “Let the rod, or sceptre, of Your strength go out of Zion. Rule Thou in the midst of Your enemies.”
The fury of the enemy—his whole strategy—is to get at us. On this earth, we are the only ones he can get at. The saints who have gone home, he cannot get at. He can only get at us.
Therefore, there is a sense in which that extraordinary vision in Revelation 12 is very real. Satan is thrown out of heaven. Jesus has won, and he comes down with great wrath, knowing that his time is short.
He has a fury in his heart to somehow or other wreck everything that is being done by the Lord, by the Spirit of God, on this earth. But Jesus has won.
The whole wonderful picture we have—and I spoke about it last night—of the Lion of Judah, the Root of David, the little Lamb as though slain, is the key to all the following chapters of the Book of Revelation: all the judgments, all the wonderful salvation of human beings, the transforming of them into the likeness of the Lord Jesus, the overcomers. It is all there in the Book of Revelation, and it is all because Jesus has won.
There are many wonderful things about that which we could stay with and talk about this afternoon, but we must get on and move into fresh ground, I think.
Are we involved in any way in this word of the Father, “Sit Thou until I make Your enemies the footstool of Your feet”? Are we involved, or are we to be spectators, observers, just sitting around, as it were, observing what is happening but not part of it—not partakers in it?
There is one wonderful thing where the Lamb goes forth in the Book of Revelation, and it says, “With Him are those who are called and chosen and faithful.” Now, are we involved? Are we to be involved in any way?
This Psalm, Psalm 110, is the most quoted Psalm in the Old Testament by the New Testament. Everywhere, there is not only the seating of the Lord Jesus at the right hand of God, His ruling from the throne, and the fact that the Father is going to make His enemies His footstool, but also the fact that He is priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
Now, some of you have no doubt studied your Bibles, and you might wonder, why is there this big song and dance about Jesus being after the order of Melchizedek? Should He not be after the order of Aaron? The high priests came from the family of Aaron, the Cohens.
Should He not be a High Priest after that order? But it specifically says He is a Priest, a High Priest, after the order—or fashion—of Melchizedek.
The difference between Melchizedek and Aaron is very simple. Scripture forbids a king to be a priest, or a priest to be a king. But Jesus is the same as Melchizedek: He was both High Priest and King of Jerusalem.
King of righteousness—that is what His name means, Melchizedek—and King of Salem, that is, Jerusalem. So He combines in Himself the two offices of both King and Priest. He is King of kings and Lord of lords, King of Israel, and Head of the Church. It is wonderful when you begin to see it. He is also High Priest.
So there is something marvellous in this statement in Psalm 110, that He is a Priest for ever after the order, or fashion, of Melchizedek.
Do you remember King Uzziah? Do you remember that he became a leper? His grave is with us to this day, just a few miles from where I live. It is set apart. They discovered it only some years ago.
He became a leper because he barged into the holy place with a censer and tried to be a priest. When the high priest and the other chief priests tried to stop him, a great argument took place. Immediately leprosy broke out on his forehead, and he was a leper to the day he died. His tomb is segregated even from other tombs.
That will help you to understand why Jesus is not after the order of Aaron, at least for those of you who study the Word, but is after the order—or fashion—of Melchizedek.
Now, it is more than that. I have asked the question: Should we be involved, or are we just spectators watching what the Father is doing, making the enemies of Jesus His footstool?
Why does the next verse say, “Thy people offer themselves willingly in the day of Thy power”? What connection is there between the people of God being freewill offerings—not giving freewill offerings; they are a freewill offering? There is a great difference.
Giving a freewill offering just means that you take a certain amount of money and give it, or gold and give it, or silver and give it, or something else. But it says, “Thy people are freewill offerings.” That is precisely what the Hebrew says in this extraordinary Messianic Psalm.
It seems to suggest that somehow or other we, the people of God, have some part to play in these enemies becoming the footstool of the Lord Jesus. I cannot put it really in any other way.
I said last night, you have two things, if you wish to look at them. These are the Scriptures: Leviticus 27:30-32 and Exodus 36.
Leviticus deals with tithes. It tells you exactly what you are ordered, or commanded, to give: one tenth of all that you possess, or all your income, whether it be fruit, grain, animals—whatever it is. One tenth of your income or money, you give one tenth. The rest of it, the other ninety percent, is yours to do as you feel you should with. The one tenth belongs to the Lord; the rest is yours.
The trouble with the church today is that we are tithes, not freewill offerings. In other words, one tenth of our energy, one tenth of our input, one tenth of our personality, one tenth of what we are, is given to the Lord, and the rest is ours.
“Do not fiddle with it, Lord. You leave me to boss my own life, to be in charge of my own life. I will give You ten percent, and that is all You will get. One day on Sunday, I will come to a meeting. Maybe now and again I will go to a prayer meeting. Maybe now and again I will witness to somebody. I will give You a tenth, but the rest of it is mine. It is my life. Do not fiddle with it. Do not impose anything else on me.”
That is modern Christianity. But the Word of God is very, very simple: “In the day of Thy power, Thy people are freewill offerings.”
When that happens, it is—I can only say—impactful. That is the only word.
When the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Day of Pentecost, something happened that had never happened before in the long history of mankind.
A Head at the right hand of God became joined to one hundred and twenty human beings saved by His finished work. It was an organism, not an organisation.
Now, an organism has an incredible organisation, but it is an organism. It is a thing of life.
I must have said this to you before, so I do not want to bore you, but look here—do not look at me too long. This body of mine was born in 1931, and it was about that much. My eyes did not open for three weeks, so my mother thought I was going to be blind. But they did open after three weeks.
Now here I am in 2009. I am seventy-eight years of age, and I am reasonably contemporary. There is nothing now that is 1931. The whole of my body—I think I am right, of course; my dear doctor there will correct me—but I believe that every cell in my body changes every seven years.
It is an extraordinary thing that somehow or other this organism has extraordinary organisation. When I get cold, I shiver. When I get too warm, I perspire, or sweat—whichever you like—because my body has a whole system within it.
My brain—what there is of it—turns all the time and sends messages to the rest of my body as to what to do. If I want to move here, it moves me there. If I want to lift my hand, it lifts my hand.
As a Chinese brother said to us in San Francisco, “When there is a mosquito on your head, you hit it.” Where did that come from? Did you read a book? Did you get it somewhere? No, you spontaneously did it. That is the organisation of an organism.
When that church was born on that Day of Pentecost, with that one hundred and twenty joined to a Head at the right hand of God, something colossal happened. Within hours, they became three thousand one hundred and twenty.
They turned the whole of the Jewish establishment upside down: first Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria, and then Caesarea, where they began to turn upside down the whole Roman Empire.
Within the first hundred years of the existence of the church, listen to this: fifty million were martyred. If we translate that into modern population figures, it means that one hundred million were murdered. But the church triumphed.
It is amazing. Without theological seminaries, without Bible schools—I am not against them, but I am just saying—without those, without great missionary organisations, without fundraising schemes, without all the things that we think are absolutely essential for the church to be built and for the work of God to go forward, they were joined to the Head at the right hand of God. They heard Him. They obeyed Him.
Now, there were many faults. There were Ananias and Sapphira, Simon the sorcerer, Jezebels, and I do not know what else in the church. There were plenty of faults, because the church is not perfect.
If you are looking for the perfect church, you will never find it, because the church down here is a mess. It is meant to be a mess. It is where the whole work is being done.
It is like a pressure cooker. Everybody is in it, and the meal is being prepared. It is like the cutting-out place of a tailor. It is one big mess. You cannot see the suit, or the dress, or anything else—one big mess—because a whole lot of work is being done.
It is like a builder’s yard. Everything is all over the place. You cannot see a house. That is the real church.
And in that milieu—I cannot think of the word—you have to love your brothers and sisters, obey your brothers and sisters, especially those who are responsible. You have to do this, you have to do that, you have to wash one another’s feet. That is overcoming.
It is a very simple little matter, seemingly, but colossal in its impact. Whenever the Lord has initiated many Pentecosts all through the years of the church, it has resulted in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands getting saved, and the church making a colossal impact upon the world around it.
I could give so many examples of it. The great evangelical awakening simply revolutionised Britain and saved her from real physical revolution. It also did the same here in what were then called the colonies.
The same thing happened. It brought people into living touch with God and did something quite extraordinary in their lives.
I think of the Moravians who, when the Holy Spirit fell upon them, decided that the only way they could respond was to go to the ends of the earth, go to the most difficult places, and sell themselves as slaves in order to save black slaves.
Some of the Moravians became lepers in trying to reach lepers. They had no idea in their day what to do with leprosy and contracted it, but in so doing, reached the lepers. It was the most extraordinary thing that happened when the Lord launched the Moravian movement.
Out of that movement, three remarkable men got saved: George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Charles Wesley. They would never have been saved unless they had listened to a Moravian brother reading Martin Luther’s preface to the Letter to the Romans.
We could go on. I could talk about the Quakers, that very despised people. We would have no nursing but for the Quakers. It was Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale—Quakers.
They went in not only for the nursing of people, but they changed the whole face of the world wherever they came.
You see, without all this wonderful highfalutin organisation, being joined to the Head, being alive to the Head, has far greater impact upon the world around us.
Prison reform all came partly from the Quakers. Later, the abolition of child labour came through the Brethren. But it was not that they set out to do this; it was one of the side effects of hearing the Lord and knowing the Lord.
Well, freewill offerings. What is it to be a freewill offering? Let me be as plain as I can be. It means total commitment. It means total surrender. It means, very simply, not part, but the whole. That is what it means to be a freewill offering.
Now, this word here is interesting in Psalm 110:3: “Thy people are freewill offerings in the day of Thy power.” This word in Hebrew, chayil, means force, might, power; it even means wealth. It also means army.
You will notice that the New American Standard Bible has translated it, “in the day of Thy army.” It is interesting. That is really what it is getting at here.
“Thy people are freewill offerings.” They volunteer freely in the day of Thy army. God’s army is not conscripted; it is a volunteer army.
In other words, the Lord does not push you into His army. He does not hedge you in or force you into it by circumstances. It is a completely voluntary action on your part that you will be a soldier of the Lord Jesus.
Is it not interesting how it puts it: “In the beauty of holiness,” or, as some modern versions put it, “in holy array”? It has the same idea of an army, but in the beauty of holiness.
Listen: “Out of the womb of the morning, Thy youth are to Thee as the dew.” What an extraordinary thing. It is poetic, but whatever does it mean?
“Out of the womb of the morning, Thy youth are to Thee as the dew.” Now, you girls do not get upset. The Hebrew is in the masculine: the youth, a young man. But it is a very interesting thing that it is saying.
Out of the womb of the morning: new birth, new creation, a new day, a new man—everything new. It is a womb. It is a most extraordinary expression: the womb of the dawn.
It signifies a new day. The sitting of the Lord Jesus at the right hand of God, when He ascended on high, spells a new day. He has won.
It is just a question of time before finally the whole world, the universe, will know it. But we are involved. We cannot just step aside, as it were, from this.
The challenge is this: if you want to be a tithe, be a tithe. But if you are going to be a freewill offering, you are in the army of the Lord. It is quite as simple as that.
“In the beauty of holiness.” Have you all noticed in your Bibles that it has a colon: “In the beauty of holiness: out of the womb of the dawn, Thy youth are to Thee as the dew”?
Now, what does the dew do? I do not know about you here. I never seem to see any dew here in Memphis, but I imagine there is dew sometimes, some portion of the year.
In Israel, there comes a dry season when there is no further rain of any kind, and all the fruit is literally dependent upon the dew: the grapes, the dates, the pomegranates, and a whole lot of other fruit. Literally, it is the dew that ripens them and brings moisture to them. This is before the days of irrigation.
Is that not amazing? The dew is so amazing and juicy, you can almost hear it fall. One moment the cars are dry where they are parked, but the next moment you go up and it looks as though there has been a big, heavy shower. It is dew.
Is it not interesting? Out of the womb of the dawn, this new day, Thy youth are to Thee as dew—renewing, quickening, reviving. Wonderful, I think, anyway.
I do not know if anyone else gets what I am trying to say, but basically the Bible is a little bit one-sided when it comes to men and women at times. For instance, the youths means the young men will utterly faint, it says in Isaiah 40. Again, it includes the ladies, of course, in all of this, but it just mentions the men. Here you have got the same thing.
Well, I will not labour this anymore, but if you turn to Romans 12, before I leave this matter about “Thy people are freewill offerings,” I want just to point something out.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,
to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God,
which is your spiritual service.
This is incredible. This is the greatest exposition of the gospel in the sixty-six books of the Bible.
The apostle has taken eight chapters to define the gospel and the resultant consequences of the gospel. Then he takes three chapters—Romans 9, 10, and 11—to deal with the Jewish question.
Can God elect and unelect? Can God choose and unchoose? Can He take and then throw away? What is this problem we have with the Jewish people? Are they finished?
The church has come into being through them. Is that all that they were? Were they like the booster on a space rocket that, once it helped the rocket off the ground, fell away? Was the job of Israel just to get the rocket going, or is there something more in it?
Well, there is something more in it. The apostle takes three whole chapters, in which, in the first two, he more or less gives a foundation for replacement theology, and then in the last chapter, Romans 11, he qualifies and conditions everything he has said in chapters 9 and 10.
Now, having gone behind history to the whole question of God’s design in history, His design for the nations, and His eternal purpose, he sums the whole thing up and says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren.” Therefore.
When commentators and Bible teachers tell us it is the first eight chapters he is going back to, it is quite wrong. “Therefore” means all eleven chapters.
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, to present your bodies a living sacrifice.” What does that mean? It means you are a freewill offering. It means you have no right over your life anymore. You are a sacrifice—a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.
Here is the very big problem you will find in all the modern versions. They all have different ways of putting it: “which is your spiritually intelligent worship.” I remember going to a Cambridge don who was amongst us and asking him, “What do you really think this means?”
The different versions say “reasonable service,” and so on. I said, “If we were to say ‘spiritually intelligent worship,’ do you think that would really give the meaning of the Greek?” He said, “Absolutely, but you must add two words: ‘and service.’”
Spiritually intelligent worship and service.
Now, sometimes we have worship that is emotional. There is nothing wrong in it. If you cut emotion out of worship, what kind of worship is it going to be? We all murmur the hymns or the songs. I mean, it is something dull. But when there is emotion in it, it is tremendous.
But we make a mistake when we think that worship and service is only emotion. Someone responds to a tremendous emotional appeal in a meeting to go to China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Timbuktu, or somewhere else in the world, and emotionally does it. They last about two years and come back.
It was emotion. It was not a real, spiritually intelligent response.
Spiritually intelligent worship and service means that you are a living sacrifice. In cold blood, you have willed to be a living sacrifice.
See the consequences. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God”—mercies, by the way, in the plural—“that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your spiritually intelligent worship and service.”
Then he goes on to say this:
And be not fashioned according to this world:
but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.
There is a mindset that is the world’s mindset. We automatically, spontaneously, have that mindset.
But when you are a living sacrifice, it is almost as if the umbilical cord has been broken—cut—and for the first time you can have another mindset.
“Be not fashioned, moulded, according to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” You and I can never be renewed in our mind except through being a living sacrifice. That is why.
Worldliness is not that you do not smoke, that you do not drink, that you do not go to films, or that you do not have a television. I knew people in the old days who did not even have a radio. Unbelievable, but they believed that that was the world.
But I discovered as a youngster that people were far more worldly who had never, ever been near tobacco smoke and never drunk even wine, let alone anything else. Their communion wine, of course, was sacramental—grape juice or something else.
How those folk in Corinth got drunk, I have often wondered. It was a miracle, a New Testament miracle, that they went under the table drunk at the Lord’s Table on fruit juice or Ribena. I mean, I just do not understand. Never mind; that is another subject altogether.
What I am saying is this: there is a mindset, and the only way you can be released from the mindset is not by abstaining from certain things. The idea that by abstaining from certain things you are separated is not correct.
The real world is inside. It is jealousy, rivalry, hatred, bitterness. It is all those things that wreck marriages, wreck relationships, wreck homes, and wreck churches. That is worldliness, and it all comes from the mindset.
It is being moulded by the fashion of this world. You cannot get free from it. All you can do is build a façade of Christianity. You can have an outward façade: you look Christian, you speak as a Christian, you behave in a way likewise, but inside it is the world. Your mindset is the world’s mindset.
But when you are freed from that by being a living sacrifice, then, for the first time, you have another mindset. It is being renewed in your mind. Is that not amazing?
Now listen to this: “that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” That is a problem with many young people, let alone older people. That is why some old people are crabby: because they have always been frightened of doing the will of God.
They think that if they really gave themselves to do the will of God, they would be another kind of person. They would have to be like a nun, or a monk, or something of that sort.
God’s will is good, perfect, and acceptable. But the only way you can say that God’s will is good, perfect, and acceptable is by being a living sacrifice—no other way.
Otherwise, always within you there is a fear that the will of God is going to be something awful for you. It is going to put you in a straitjacket, inhibit you, and destroy your real personality.
Jesus said, “The truth will make you free,” and, “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” He does not want a whole set of puppets or automatons. He wants people with personality, with something released within them by the truth of God.
Well, then I think there is a further thing. If you look further down, you see what I call realistic humility.
There is an awful lot of false humility. You know the kind of thing: “Would you play the piano, please?” “Oh no, I cannot play the piano. I am no good at it. I am absolutely—no, no, I cannot do it.” The person may have a degree in music.
It is false. If someone else says, “So-and-so cannot play for toffee,” and it gets back to them, they get furious. “How can so-and-so say such a thing about me? I have a degree in music. Of course I can play the piano.”
It is not realistic humility. Listen to this:
For I say, through the grace that was given me,
to every man that is among you,
not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think;
but so to think as to think soberly,
according as God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith.
Realistic humility. If you are asked to play the piano, do not say, “Oh no, I cannot play.” If you are asked to do something, do not say, “No, no, I am no good at that.”
I am tempted to tell you an illustration of how I first preached, because the first time I ever preached was to Sunday school teachers, and it was a disaster. They had a time; they laughed so much. I got myself absolutely tied up in knots.
I said afterwards, “I am not a preacher. I will never be a preacher. I will never preach again.” And so it was. For a couple of years, I did not.
Then I was in Egypt, and the superintendent of the mission there in Ismailia came to me and said, “Would you preach next Sunday out to the soldiers?” “No, no,” I said, “I do not have that gift.”
But she said, “You have been seconded to us by the China Inland Mission. You are going to be a missionary. How can you possibly say that you cannot preach?” “No,” I said, “not every missionary preaches.”
Oh, he went off in high dudgeon. He was really angry. Then his dear wife was pouring out tea to all these servicemen. I was getting my tea, and she said to me, “Lance, I hear from my husband that you say you cannot preach.”
She said, “Nobody from Ireland can ever say they cannot preach. You must be able to preach.” “No,” I said, “I know I am not a preacher.”
Then she said, “Take little pieces of paper and write out in full exactly what you are going to say. Put it in your Bible. You are a good actor; put it in your Bible, and they will never know that you are reading it.”
So I wrote it all out on pieces of paper, a little smaller than that, and put it in my Bible. I read it, keeping my eyes on them and on the Bible. They all thought I was reading the Scriptures, and a whole lot of people got saved that night.
For three years, every message I gave, I wrote out in full. The lady who was in charge of the mission to the Mediterranean garrison said to me, “Oh, when you are delivered from your notes, it will be a wonderful day.”
I finally got delivered on the very last Sunday in Egypt. Well, you see, all these years I preached and preached and preached. Thank God for Susan Hamel, who said, “Of course you can do it.”
I followed her unbelievably wise instruction, and she is responsible for this ministry.
But come now, I have wandered. I am sorry, everybody. This is amazing. We should have realistic humility. If you have got a gift, be realistic about it. Do not have that stupid modest thing.
You are like the people who always sit in the back, but are nearly always the people who want to rule the whole meeting. Forgive me, those of you sitting in the back; I do not mean anything by it. But it is true that people sit at the back and look very humble, but actually want to rule the whole thing.
Realistic humility.
Here is another thing that comes out of this living sacrifice, this being a freewill offering: the Body of Christ. It is amazing.
For even as we have many members in one body,
and all the members have not the same office:
so we, who are many, are one body in Christ,
and severally members one of another.
Is that not amazing? So the Body of Christ, as an organism, comes out of being a living sacrifice.
Then, if you go on, you have the priesthood of all believers. This one is prophesying, this one is preaching, this one is giving, this one has something else to give. Everyone has something. It all comes out of this thing.
In the day of Thy army—see, in the day of Thy power, Thy people are freewill offerings in the day of Thy army.
An army has a commander. The important matter in this is the surrender of your will. If you have an army of generals, you are going to have a mess. If you have an army of colonels, you are going to have a mess.
An army has to begin with volunteers, and the first thing about the army is that they can take orders.
What is the real meaning of an army? Supposing every soldier has his own idea as to where to go, what weapons to use, and whom to shoot. You know what I mean. The whole thing is going to be a mess.
An army has a Commander-in-Chief. This term in your Old Testament is “the Lord of hosts”—Commander of the armies. That is the actual word in Hebrew. “Lord of hosts” is a military kind of term.
This army has a Commander: Jesus, King; Jesus, High Priest. One matter is all to do with authority; the other matter is all to do with intercession.
It seems to me tremendous, because twice in the Word of God it says very clearly that we have been made kings and priests unto God: Revelation 1:6 and Revelation 5:10. We are kings and priests.
Now, I know that in America you have a kind of false conception of kingship, if I may stop for one moment to digress. The idea is that you had a dreadful king—he was nuts anyway—George III. George II and George III, they were both nuts.
I think if I had been here, I would have been one of those in the revolution against him. He was stupid.
But because you live in a republic, the idea is that a king is a ceremonial thing, that he just flicks his hand and so-and-so does this; he sits there with the orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other, looks very pretty, and is stupid. He has no education or anything else. Why should he be the boss?
But if you live in a kingdom, you understand, in a good kingdom, that whoever is king is the hardest-working person in the kingdom.
You take Queen Elizabeth. At eighty-two, she has the most incredible day of work, beginning early in the morning at six and going right through the day. You take Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, exactly the same. You take the King and Queen of Denmark, exactly the same.
The idea behind kingship is service. That is the biblical idea of the king. It is service.
So when you talk about being kings and priests, it means that you are under the authority of the King, but you have authority to see that His will is done.
Well, I have to move on swiftly and finish. Is it not interesting in this Psalm, Psalm 110? I do not know if you noticed it. Perhaps you found it a bit difficult.
After saying that He is a High Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek, it says:
The Lord at Thy right hand
Will strike through kings in the day of His wrath.
He will judge among the nations,
He will fill the places with dead bodies;
He will strike through the head in many countries.
That does not quite sound like the gospel. It sounds as if enemies are being made the footstool of the Lord Jesus.
That is something, I think, of very great interest for us. We are born into warfare. You do not have to be a soldier, but we are born into warfare as believers—spiritual warfare.
That is why the Apostle Paul said, “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” It is why he says in another place, “The prophecies pointed toward you, Timothy, my child, that you would war the good warfare.”
It is why the Apostle Paul could say, “Fight the good fight of faith. Lay hold on life eternal, to which you are called.”
If the Lord does not have an army like this, we lose the life. Everything becomes institutionalised, crystallised; it dies; it becomes dead.
I wish I could make it plain and clear to you all, but this matter that I am talking about is absolutely vital, especially with facing the situation we are in as the people of God.
There is apostasy on all sides in the church. As Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say, “You cannot backslide if you have not had a position from which to backslide.”
So I am not talking about some things that have been perfectly dead for years. I am talking about those who really know the Lord. But in many areas today, hell is never mentioned, judgment is never mentioned.
“Oh, God would not dream of doing anything like that. God is a dear old gentleman in the sky, with hair whiter than mine, a wonderful old boy who is half asleep most of the time. You could hoodwink Him anyway—dear old thing, so sweet.”
But the New Testament is very clear about judgment, especially the Book of Revelation. It is quite horrifying the way it describes it.
What is the character of a soldier? I will just run through a few things and finish.
First of all, the first characteristic is to be unquestioningly obedient: the absolute lordship of Jesus.
That is the issue. You young people, that is the issue: whether you will boss your own life, be the commander of your own life, or whether you will let Jesus be Lord. That is the first absolute.
The second is that you have to grow spiritually to a minimum maturity. A baby cannot be a soldier. A kindergarten child cannot be a soldier. A child cannot be a soldier. An early teenager cannot be a soldier.
The earliest possibility of being a volunteer in this army is when you reach seventeen or eighteen. I mean, I am talking physically.
Spiritually, you and I have to grow, and if we do not grow, we cannot be soldiers.
How does the Book put it? It puts it very simply. Do you remember the last word of 2 Peter?
Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
That was the first message I ever preached when I wrote it all out and all these people got saved. It was wonderful to me, this one word: grow in the grace.
You will never grow outside of grace. The only way you can grow is by the grace of the Lord. Do not think that you are going to work it. It is the grace of the Lord.
But once you put yourself into the grace of God, once you give yourself to the grace of God, you will grow. Grow in the grace and in the knowledge.
That does not mean head knowledge. It means heart knowledge—that you know the Lord. You know His voice. You hear His voice. You actually know Him.
There is a vast difference between knowing about somebody and knowing somebody. That is the difference: knowledge of the Lord Jesus.
Again, I think of Ephesians 1. There are three amazing things that Paul prays for those who read this letter, all to do with being soldiers, really.
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,
what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe,
according to that working of the strength of His might
which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead,
and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places.
Here is the first thing: the hope of His calling. Do you know what the hope of His calling is? Do you really know what the hope of His calling is? Have you been called? Of course you have, if you are saved. Do you know what the hope of that calling is?
It is that you should be part of the New Jerusalem. You should be part of the Bride. That is the hope of your calling.
Here is the second thing: “what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” What is His inheritance in the saints? To be the Bride. That is His inheritance.
Here is the third: “what the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit at His right hand.”
Here is something tremendous: the exceeding greatness of His power. Oh, to really know the Holy Spirit like that—to know the exceeding greatness of His power.
If He could take Jesus through the cross and through death, in a locked tomb and out on that resurrection day, ascending to the right hand of God, the same Holy Spirit is in you. That is the exceeding greatness of His power to us who believe.
Here is another characteristic of being a soldier: relationship with others. An army is not made up of a whole lot of individuals who have nothing to do with each other at all. They think their own thoughts and do their own thing. They are absolutely independent of one another.
An army is a matter of relationship. These good soldiers, in the day of His army, are those whom the Lord is looking for to be to Him as dew.
The Lord, if I may so put it, is revived and renewed as He sees real relationship between believers, as we grow in the Lord. That is something, I think, tremendous. You are not just doing your own thing, but you are in relationship with others.
Here is another thing: you take orders and you give orders. I have mentioned that.
There is no soldier on active service—this is how the New American Standard Bible puts that verse in 2 Timothy 2—who entangles himself in the affairs of this life. It does not mean that you do not have affairs of this life. It means that when you are on active service, the priority is the war, or whatever it is in which you are involved.
I hope I have made myself clear on that. Get your priorities right. Take orders and give orders.
It is very interesting that the Word of God says, “Obey them that have the rule over you.” Sometimes some of those who have the rule over us are nuts. I mean, they are quite stupid. They sometimes do the wrong thing.
So why does the Word of God say, “Obey them that have the rule over you,” if they are nuts? Does it excuse you? No, it does not.
It is a question in this army of obedience. You talk about it, argue about it, but there is a place for it. Obedience is very interesting. Children, obey your parents. Do not answer back.
So it is exactly the same thing in the church: “Obey them that have the rule over you.” If you cannot accept orders, you cannot give them.
You have to learn how to take orders before you can give orders. That is very simple, is it not?
A soldier is a soldier. Then he becomes a corporal and starts giving orders. He becomes a sergeant and starts giving more orders. Before long he may become an officer; then he can give more orders. Then he becomes a colonel, then a general, and gives more orders. But it is a chain of command.
This goes right to the root of our problem, which is the surrender of our will to God. That is really one of the great problems that we have.
The other two things I want to say are quite important. One is discipline.
Most people find that passage I read in Hebrews 12 very difficult. Chastening, chastening—every other verse is chastening. In fact, in some verses it comes twice: chastening, chastening, chastening, chastening. Dreadful word.
It seems that it is all affliction, trouble, tribulation. The whole thing is completely put into another sphere when we understand the Greek. It is child training.
The moment we see that this is discipline, that to be discipled is a matter of being trained as a child, that transforms it.
No wonder, then, it says, “You had fathers after the flesh who trained you as children.” They even scourged you—gave you a spanking now and again.
Well, it never hurt. I know you are not allowed to do it anymore, but I mean, it never hurt anybody to get a spanking, merely, thankfully. Most of us who are older have had a spanking some time or another, and we do not blame our parents for it.
I mean, there are one or two who are dreadful and sadistic, but most parents were not sadistic. We thank God that we got some child training. It says, “He scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.”
That means He gives us a spanking now and again, simply because we are sons.
Discipline is one of the biggest problems we have. But the Lord wonderfully uses discipline. You cannot be a soldier without hardship.
I am not a military type, but I remember in the Royal Air Force, dearly me, having this awful flight sergeant come right up and put his nose about that far away and yell at you.
You could not say anything. You could not even look badly at him, or you were in real trouble. Discipline.
Lastly, a soldier in the army of God has to be Christ-centred.
This being kings and priests—I do not see how you can hear the Lord unless you are Christ-centred. I do not know how the intercession of the Lord can ever get into your spirit unless you are Christ-centred.
If He is the centre and circumference of your life, if you are a freewill offering, a living sacrifice, then I believe you and I can hear the Lord, and we can, by His grace and power, obey the Lord.
So here is this amazing word:
Thy people offer themselves willingly
In the day of Thy army.
Out of the womb of the dawn,
Thy youth are to Thee
As the dew.
May the Lord really speak to us. The only way you and I can be a soldier is to ask the Lord to take us on, train us, cause us to grow, and bring us to the place where we can, with Him, really work.
Shall we pray?
Beloved Lord, You know very well just how much we need You. We are facing much confusion in our circumstances, in this nation, nationally, and in the world in general, and there is much more to come.
Lord, we need You, and we ask together that You will meet us, touch us, and bring us to the place where we are ready to become soldiers.
Lord, hear us, so that even in this world situation we can be an army under Your command. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.