I would like to turn to this psalm that we have considered these last two sessions: Psalm 110, this most quoted psalm in the New Testament.
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.
And then, in the New Testament, if you will turn to Ephesians 6, from verse 10.
Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles, or stratagems, of the devil.
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places.
Wherefore take up the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.
Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness,
And having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Withal taking up the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:
With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints,
And on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel,
For which I am an ambassador in chains; that in it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
To that I would like to add Romans, the Roman letter, chapter 13, from verse 11.
And this, knowing the season, that already it is time for you to awake out of sleep: for now is salvation nearer to us than when we first believed.
The night is far spent, and the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
Let us walk becomingly, as in the day; not in revelling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and jealousy.
But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.
In the second letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 10—just verses 3, 4, and 5:
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh;
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds,
Casting down imaginations, or speculations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God,
And bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
Back to the Old Testament, and to Psalm 149, verse 6.
Let the high praises of God be in their mouth,
And a two-edged sword in their hand;
To execute vengeance upon the nations,
And punishments upon the peoples;
To bind their kings with chains,
And their nobles with fetters of iron;
To execute upon them the judgment written:
This honour have all His saints.
Just a further word of prayer.
Dear Lord, will You revive and quicken us as we give ourselves to the ministry of Your Word this morning? We need You, Lord, and we need You to be here by the Holy Spirit, to open the eyes of our hearts and give us understanding in these things.
Lord, we can hear the theology of things. We can hear the sort of truth, as it were, defined and outlined; but it is only when Your Holy Spirit opens the eyes of our hearts, and we see the matter, that something happens in us. Do it, Lord, this morning.
You have provided us with an anointing, and into that anointing of grace and power we stand by faith, both for the speaking and for the hearing of Your Word. Reach us, Lord, with Your Word. Make it alive to every one of us.
We ask it in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, I think a number of you know that we have spoken for two sessions, both Friday evening and yesterday afternoon, about this Psalm 110. I have sought to give a survey of the world situation, particularly the Western nations, the United States, and Israel at the heart of it all.
I am not going to go over that; it is all recorded. It would make this far too long if I were to give one more going-over of that matter. I want to go immediately to what I talked about at the end of yesterday’s session: being soldiers.
“In the day of Thy army,” or “the day of Thy power,” the day of Thy might. When the Father said to the Lord Jesus, “Sit Thou at My right hand, till I make Your enemies Your footstool,” it was the day of His army. The pouring out of the Holy Spirit was to create an army of God on the face of the earth.
But the problem is that the church is anything but an army.
C. T. Studd was the first Christian book I ever read. It turned my life upside down. I had never believed it was possible for a human being to know God, Jew or Gentile, until I read that book.
I prayed the most unscriptural prayer that Saturday morning, that Sabbath morning. I stood, and then I thought, “No, they do not stand; they kneel.” So I knelt. Then I felt uncomfortable, and I thought, “No, they do not kneel; I will stand.” So I stood and said, “Oh God, if there is a God, would You please do in me what You did in C. T. Studd, and make me what You made him?”
Well, I do not know about anything else, but C. T. Studd was called a museum of diseases, and it seems to me that the Lord has answered that one.
It was amazing to me that dear Kit gave me, last night, a little book he discovered in his library: The Chocolate Soldier.
C. T. Studd offended the whole Christian world by writing a parody on “Onward, Christian Soldiers”:
Backward, chocolate soldiers,
Marching as to war.
Many Christians only want a gospel that is all to do with being carried on a bed of roses to glory: no judgment, no correction, no chastisement, no discipline, no training, no hardship, no tribulation—just glory.
Now, there is no doubt about it: if you are a child of God and born of the Spirit, there is glory. The Spirit of glory is given to you. There are times of ecstasy. There are times when you are just blown out of your mind by the Lord.
But the Christian life is also a warfare, and God, in the enthronement of the Lord Jesus, wants an army of soldiers.
My burden, really, in sharing these things here, is that maybe the Lord would take this little assembly, with all its weaknesses and faults, and turn them into an army in His hand to do something about our world situation, the purpose of God, and for Israel too.
That is what my burden has really been. I talked about soldiers yesterday afternoon, and I am not going to go over it again. I spoke about the character of soldiers—those things that the Lord looks for in us, that we might become soldiers.
We are not soldiers at birth; we are babies. Babies cannot be soldiers. Kindergarten children cannot be soldiers. Young children cannot be soldiers. It is only when we grow up that we can enlist as a soldier.
This army is a volunteer army. We are freewill offerings. The Lord just leaves it to you whether you will be in the army or not. But once you say yes, the Lord will take you and start your education. It is immediate, and there is no one who need be left out of this.
You will have days when you will be beside still waters and in green pastures. There will be days when you are, as it were, on the heights of heaven. There will be other days when you are in the midst of enormous warfare.
The two things I want to dwell upon this morning should be quite short, but they probably will not be. The first is armour, and the second is weapons.
Here is an amazing thing: we are told that we have armour. “Put on the whole armour of God.” Look at Ephesians 6. It is incredible that the apostle ends this marvellous letter in this way.
This is the high-water mark of revelation in the New Testament. He has been pouring out his heart by the Holy Spirit. No one has ever yet plumbed the depths of the phrases that the apostle has used in this letter. It is incredible.
You would have thought that he would have ended by saying, “Now then, all of you, let us get on with this,” or, “Let us do this.” But he says, “Be strong.” Finally, be strong. This is the last word, the summing-up of the whole matter.
You will lose everything if you are not strong in the Lord. The trouble with many of us is that we are strong in ourselves, or strong in doctrine, or strong in this, that, and the other. It is to be strong in the Lord.
“Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles, the stratagems, of the devil.”
Do not think the devil is some rabid dog that wanders around on the periphery, and all you have to do is bang a few trash-can lids and he will run away frightened to death. The devil is incredibly intelligent—more intelligent than any one of us, and all of us put together.
The devil has a whole case history on you. He knows your moods, your failings, your weaknesses; he knows everything about you. He has a great intelligence network covering the whole world.
These are the spirits that Ephesians speaks about: hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places. He has a case history on every one of us. Do you think he allows someone to slip out of his grip? Of course not.
He has a case history on every one of us and knows everything about us. We have been watched. It has been noted down how the enemy can trip us up. The way he can trip me up is not the way he can trip you up. You have strengths where you would not fall, while I have weaknesses where I would fall. But he knows it all.
There are wiles; there are stratagems. The devil is not some silly old fool who runs around blustering and causing trouble here, there, and everywhere simply by barging in. The enemy has supreme intelligence, and the only way to meet him is with the wisdom of God.
There is only one Person who has outwitted Satan, and that is the Lord Jesus. He has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty. That is simply wonderful.
That means the Holy Spirit can take the intelligence in the Lord Jesus and make it real to you and me, so that in some way we know what Satan is up to. So this putting on the whole armour of God is something tremendous.
You have it again a few verses on: “Wherefore take up the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day.”
I have said many, many times: there is an evil day. Thank God it is not every day, but there is what the Bible calls an evil day. That means it seems as if Satan is in charge. Every single thing goes his way. It seems as if he is supreme and sovereign.
But when you put on the whole armour of God, you not only stand; you withstand in the evil day, when everything goes wrong.
In the Roman letter, the Apostle Paul puts it another way: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, it is the Lord Jesus Who is the armour.
Years ago, I heard of a man who used to stand every morning in front of a mirror and say, “Now I put on the helmet of salvation. Now I put on the shield of faith. Now I put on the breastplate.” Personally, I think this is the best way for Christians to become neurotic—and we have plenty of them.
It is not necessary to spend the day wondering, “Did I remember to put on such-and-such a piece? Where is the enemy going to get in here and there?” Just stay where God has placed you.
Where has God positioned you? In Christ. You are positioned in Christ.
Jesus never said, “Strive to get in Me. Fight to get in Me. Struggle to get in Me.” He said, “Remain in Me. Abide in Me.” In other words, that is your position, given to you by God the Father.
You are in Christ. While you remain there, you are absolutely safe and secure. There is nothing the enemy can do.
The whole aim of the enemy is to draw us out from the armour—to get us out of Christ, to bring us to arm ourselves with the flesh, with the wisdom of the flesh, with the philosophy of the world, with the mindset of the world, with all these things. As soon as we start along that line, we are casualties.
But if we abide in Christ, He abides in us, and greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world.
Do you really think God would save you and chuck you out into a world infested with demons and wicked spirits, principalities and powers and world-rulers of darkness, to fend for yourself?
Do you think the Father sent the Son into this world to save us sinners, bring us into Christ, and then leave us at the mercy of the enemy? What kind of God would that be? What kind of Father?
The whole Old Testament speaks of God as fortress, as stronghold, as high tower, as a covert in the storm, as a hiding place.
It is tremendous when you realise that all we have to do is make sure that we are putting on the whole armour of God. As Frances Ridley Havergal puts it beautifully in one of her hymns:
Those who trust Him wholly
Find Him wholly true.
The key in this whole great battle is to trust the Lord wholly.
Every time I start to worry—I am a worrier by nature—I say to myself:
Behold, God is my salvation;
I will trust, and not be afraid:
For the Lord, even the Lord, is my strength and song;
And He is become my salvation.
Then you can draw water from the wells of salvation. That is Isaiah 12. It is a wonderful antidote to worry.
Consider the enemies we face. Now, I have to put in a little word of warning here: I am not suggesting that some young believer—or any believer on their own—should face these enemies. But you should note them.
Principalities: very high, powerful beings. Powers: authorities, very powerful spiritual beings. This is not flesh and blood; this is something else.
Sometimes I go into prayer meetings—not suggesting yours is the same; one good characteristic about this fellowship is its prayer character—and the prayer meeting is not a wrestling match.
Wrestling is a contact sport. SmackDown. It is not pleasant; it is vulgar. Someone gets flung out of the ring, someone has an arm twisted up their back, or a leg nearly twisted off. It is contact sport, wrestling.
Tennis is so cultured, so sophisticated, even when played violently. It is still very sophisticated, an educated kind of sport. Of course, golf is even more so for many. All they do is beat a little tiny ball along the green—or bowls.
Why did not the Lord say to us, “For we do not have a bowling match against flesh and blood, but against principalities”? Why did He not say, “For we have a tennis championship, not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers”?
No. He said we are up against principalities and powers. We are wrestling with principalities and powers. Now, we cannot do that individually.
You cannot go far in some circles before some dear sister stands on her feet and says, “I bind the principalities and powers.” I think it is ridiculous. It is almost as if you hear a cackle from hell: “Who is she? Does she think she can bind us?”
Then they get angry with me afterwards and say, “Oh, you have taken away my faith.”
The question is very simple: this is corporate prayer. This is not individual prayer. To put on the armour of God is a corporate thing. We stand against principalities.
Only the church can stand against principalities and powers and world-rulers of darkness. What are these world-rulers of darkness?
Take Hinduism. There is a world-ruler of Hinduism. It is violent. However beautiful it may look, however marvellous its philosophy may appear in some ways, when you get inside it, it is violent.
Take Islam. There is a world-ruler of Islam. It is beautiful on the outside—so simple, so beautiful, the mosques that you see in different places. But you get inside and find there is violence in Islam, terrible violence.
It is true of so much. I could go through a whole lot of things, but those are just examples. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities.”
Who are these principalities? They are Satan’s highest princes in his great scheme to take over the world. Who are these powers? They are not quite as great as the principalities, but they are authorities within his whole scheme.
Who are these world-rulers of darkness? Humanism is one of the most attractive of all the cults in the world today, and humanism is destroying the church and the work of God.
That is why you never talk about hell, judgment, affliction, or tribulation any more—things which meant so much to our brothers and sisters of years gone by. We do not mention them any more. Humanism is doing its work in the church. It is a world-ruler of darkness.
It is the Hellenistic humanism that we are talking about.
And there are hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places. Is it possible for us to be safe facing these? We are just tiny little creatures, microbes almost, saved by the grace of God. How can we face these huge forces against us?
Only by this armour.
Here is an amazing thing: what the Apostle Paul says is really the key as to whether the eternal purpose of God will be fulfilled among us; whether there will be produced the gold, the precious stone, and the pearl, out of which the Bride herself is created—the New Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven, having the glory of God.
The key is whether we are able to stand, to withstand, and, having done all, to stand.
This is the strangest way to win a battle. Have you ever heard of a battle where people simply stood? They do not go forward, backward, sideways, up, or down. They simply stand. They stand, they withstand, and, having done all, they stand. Stand therefore.
That means this armour, if you get what I mean, is in one sense the Lord Jesus. Once we know how to hide in Him, remain in Him, dwell in Him, and abide in Him, He in us will be everything we need.
He said, “You cannot bear fruit except the branch abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.” Apart from Me, He said, you can do nothing.
That is a text you could put over many a so-called Christian place: “Apart from Me, ye can do nothing.”
So the key really here is to stand. What does that mean?
In a few moments I will talk about the weapons, but we are going to have to jump into that almost immediately. It is the purpose of the Father for the Son: we stand in it. It is the finished work of the Lord Jesus: we stand in it. It is the Word of God: we stand in it. It is the purpose of God: we stand in it.
We refuse to go back, and we will not be drawn out in any other way to meet the enemy. We stand in it.
The way to win in this warfare is simply to hear what the Holy Spirit will give us as weapons, and to stand on that truth and not depart. That is the way you win through.
We have absolute safety and security in our Lord Jesus. That is wonderful.
Where is the Lord Jesus this morning? He is at the right hand of God. Someone says, “Where two or three are gathered together, there is He in the midst.” He is here—here by the Holy Spirit.
He at the right hand of God is joined to us by the Holy Spirit. While we stand in Him, withstand in Him, and, having done all, stand, the victory is assured.
Now, what are these weapons? Think for a moment. Consider 2 Corinthians 10:3-5.
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.
The way to fight is not by pitting our intelligence against the intelligence of our enemies, or our strength against their strength, and all the rest of that. That is the flesh.
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh;
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God.
That is the operative phrase: mighty before God. Actually, it means operative in the presence of God.
You can take Scriptures and quote them, and it will not do anything. But when the Holy Spirit gives you something, it is operative in the presence of God by the Holy Spirit.
Does this come home to you? Do you understand what I am trying to say? It is not that you just take “the blood, the blood, the blood.” I have heard people say it, sometimes almost superstitiously.
What do they mean by “the blood, the blood, the blood”? They mean the finished work of Jesus Christ, the death of the Lord Jesus. But do they understand what they mean?
It is not just taking a Scripture, although the Scripture itself frightens the enemy. It is when the Holy Spirit breathes something from the Word of God into your heart. Every one of you must have had this experience, even if you do not think of yourselves as soldiers. When something is breathed into your heart from the Word of God, and you stand on that, you have the victory.
It is very amazing: mighty in the presence of God.
Again: “Casting down strongholds.” The Greek is so strong. Some modern versions have, “Hurling down strongholds.”
Do you mean that we can hurl down satanic strongholds? Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
We should not just be saying, “Oh, we are sweet little people. We cannot do anything like that.” We can hurl down satanic strongholds.
I can give you a few instances of this. I do not want to take too much time on it, but there was a lady in Hamburg, Germany, who built a whole string of sex boutiques across Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia. Finally, she decided she would come to Britain.
She chose Richmond in Surrey, England, as the first place for her sex boutique. We heard about it. Someone came in one day and said, “Do you realise that opposite the railway station there is a sex boutique?” “No,” we all said.
So we began to ask the Lord, “What shall we do about this sex boutique?” We had a marvellous time in prayer over it. The whole fellowship came together. We prayed again and again and again about this thing.
We understood that this woman was going to put a whole string of these sex boutiques through Britain, so we knew she had chosen Richmond as the beginning. We really got to prayer. We had days and evenings of prayer together on the whole matter, and God gave us certain Scriptures that we stood on.
I cannot remember them clearly now; my memory is not so good. But we stood on these Scriptures, and I have never forgotten it. We came to a certain night when we really felt the Lord had given us the victory, and we began to praise the Lord that the sex boutique was finished.
But it was not finished. It was still very much there.
Then Margaret went out shopping. She looked after Halford House. She was a very godly lady, and she came back in quite a state, laughing so much that we could not get anything out of her.
She stood leaning on the doorpost and laughing, and I said, “Margaret, you have not been in that—” She said, “The sex boutique! The sex boutique!”
So I said, “Margaret, have you been in the sex boutique?” She said, “No, I have not been in the sex boutique,” but then she could not get it out. I said, “Tell us what it is. What has happened to the sex boutique?”
She said, “It has blown up.”
The night before, many of the brothers—some of them young men who had been juvenile delinquents, but had been saved—had prayed their hearts out about this. Finally, I gathered it all up and said, “Lord, we take this sex boutique and we blow it up in the name of the Lord. Out. Completely gone.”
So Margaret said, “It is gone. All four floors collapsed in a heap.”
I said, “It is not a laughing matter, Margaret. The police will be around in no time.” We had written to the mayor, saying that we were disgusted that he had allowed a sex boutique to be opened in Richmond. He wrote back and said, “I cannot do anything about it. You must write to the superintendent of police.”
So we wrote to the superintendent of police, who wrote back and said, “I cannot do anything about it. You have to write to the mayor.” We knew we were going to get nowhere with this.
Then I thought, “The police will send someone, not to me, but to some of these boys whom they knew very well, and ask, ‘Is there anyone in this fellowship who would blow up a sex boutique?’ One of them is bound to say, ‘Oh yes, one of our leaders prayed, “Lord, blow up the sex boutique.”’”
I said, “We are going to be in trouble over this thing.”
But Margaret collected herself and said, “No. I went next door and spoke with them. They were very angry about it. They said it was the gas-fired heating. It blew up.”
She added, “They were not insured. She had not signed the insurance. That is the end of the sex boutique.”
Now, that is what God can do in a prayer meeting when we learn how to stand upon the Word of God—when it is a corporate thing, when there is relationship. It is an army. Do you understand what I am saying? It is something amazing.
Let me tell you another story. I remember, in the Yom Kippur War, we were having prayer meetings in the bunker in the Garden Tomb. The war was going very badly, and many thousands of boys had been killed in the first few days.
We were pleading with the Lord that He would do something. Then suddenly, a dear brother began to have a strange feeling.
He said, “I do not know whether I should divulge this.” He had grown up with the royal family in Holland, and he said the ambassador had told him that there was knowledge that the Russians had brought a warship from the Black Sea, from Odessa, across the eastern Mediterranean.
They had set up a missile system in Port Said, and Soviet personnel were wearing Egyptian soldiers’ uniforms. The plan was to fire a nuclear missile on Tel Aviv, and then Russia would disown it and say, “Oh, the Egyptians have done it. Now we had better have a peace conference.”
We believed this knowledge was really of God. We all got on our knees. There were two sisters with us who had gone through the whole war years with Rees Howells, and a number of others as well. I think there were about twelve of us.
We prayed, “Lord, have mercy upon us if this really is what they plan to do.” After much prayer, many hours, we came to the conclusion that the Lord had blocked the whole thing.
Within an hour, someone came in and said, “Have you heard the latest news?” We had not. “President Nixon has called a first-degree alert. He says he has picked up that certain troops are being geared in southern Russia to fly to Egypt.”
Some of you will remember that alert, and you will remember that the Russian warship packed up its nuclear facilities and sailed back across the eastern Mediterranean.
Do you believe that twelve people could be used by God? There must have been other people praying elsewhere, but do you really think that twelve people could be used by God? This is spiritual warfare.
I could give you many other examples in Israel. Last year, I told you about the clouding over the mountains of Moab that a dear military gentleman, a cousin of Orde Wingate, had seen.
He always used to say, “I see a picture.” He never said it was a vision. “I see a picture,” he said. “Three times I have seen it. The mountains of Moab are blotted out by cloud. Perhaps we could ask the Lord what this is all about.”
We all felt it was of the Lord because we knew he was not given to visions. We asked the Lord, “Help us, Lord, what does this all mean?” The Lord said to us, “Pray that Jordan does not enter this war.”
This was during the Yom Kippur War. If Jordan had entered, we would have been finished. She had the longest border with us. We were already fighting on the north and south.
We prayed and prayed, and God gave us an understanding that somehow the Lord would confuse them. That was how we understood the clouds: that the Lord would confuse the Jordanian government.
They never came in. Throughout the whole Yom Kippur War, King Hussein kept Jordan out of the battle.
Months afterwards, I was back home. My mother called up and said, “Lance, come quickly. King Hussein is on television. He is talking about the Yom Kippur War.”
I rushed downstairs and came in time to hear one of the famous interviewers saying, “But, Your Majesty, everyone blames you for the defeat of the Arabs in this war—that you never came in.”
King Hussein said, “We were coming in. We decided we would join Egypt and Syria. But we became confused—so confused about air cover that we did not feel we could commit ourselves.”
They felt they did not have enough in the air force to commit themselves. Thank God. That would have been the end of Israel.
I will give you one other example of these “mighty through God” experiences. We had a brother in the fellowship. He was the only older man among us. We were all youngsters—late teens and twenties, no older—a whole bunch of about sixty of us.
We loved the Lord, but he loved the Lord too. His sister-in-law said he was schizophrenic. One side he was poison; the other side he was great.
Oh, what trouble that brother caused. He would come to us, have tea with us—which is an English thing—and pour poison into us.
We did not know what to do. Should we get rid of him? Shut him up? Excommunicate him? Get rid of him?
A few of us sought the Lord privately. We did not make it public. The Lord said to us, “Wash his feet.” I never forget it, because it was as clear as a bell: “Wash his feet.”
“What? Wash this man’s feet?” Yes. The Lord said, “I washed Judas’s feet.”
So we decided among ourselves that we would love this man and do everything we could to help him.
Then I got German measles. I had had German measles when I was a boy, but I got it again. I was treated for it, and then Lady Ogle said, “Come and convalesce in my beautiful home.” Her home was absolutely magnificent.
One day she said to me, “Lance, I hear you have a very difficult man in the fellowship.” “Oh,” I said, “you have heard about it.” “Yes,” she said. “I have been praying about him. After lunch, let us have a time of prayer.”
The lunch was in a room as big as this, only with a much higher ceiling, all panelled. She was a tiny little lady and sat at the end of this huge table. I sat at the other side of it. We had a wonderful lunch, and then we had the prayer time.
She said, “Now I am going to pray for his removal. I have it clearly from the Lord. The enemy is going to use this man to destroy the fellowship.”
I said, “Oh dear, but the Lord has told us to wash his feet.”
“Well,” she said, “the Lord has not told me to wash his feet.”
“Well,” I said, “yes, I can see that. But I do not know whether I can say amen.”
“Well,” she said, “leave it to us,” and we got to prayer. I have never forgotten that prayer. It was just the two of us—this little lady, up to here on me.
She got so carried away in prayer that she stood up, put her hands on the table, and took authority over that man. She said, “In the name of the Lord, we remove him.”
I felt as if the whole place shook—that huge room with all its panelling. I felt it all went like that, to me anyway. I had never heard such prayer.
Then she praised the Lord that He had done it, and sat down. Within a month, he was dead. First his wife, and then him. It was Ananias and Sapphira all over again.
Such is the power of prayer.
I do not know whether that helps a little, gives some idea. What about imaginations, speculations? Evolution is an imagination, a speculation. So are half the other things that we face in our educational and social system. They are all actual speculations.
It is not that something has actually been found. They have never found the missing link to this day. It is speculation. Yet we are being saddled with something. Abortion, euthanasia, genocide—it all comes from evolutionary theory. It is unbelievable.
Anyway, I just mention it now. I must go on. The supreme weapon that God places in our hand is the Word of God: truth.
Satan is the father of lies. He is called by the Lord Jesus a liar and the father of lies.
The only thing that completely nullifies Satan, disarms him, brings him to zero, and strips him of all power is the truth.
Your shouting will not do it. Your prayer will not do it. Your quoting of Scripture, simply as a mechanical quoting of Scripture, will not do it.
But when the Holy Spirit takes the Word of God—as it is in Ephesians 6, the sword of the Spirit—and gives you the Word of God in prayer, then something can be done.
The Lord Jesus said:
Sanctify them in Thy truth:
Thy word is truth.
So the weakest saint, once the Holy Spirit has given that dear saint, that child of God, His Word in a given situation, that word becomes the sword of the Spirit.
It is the only single weapon in the armour that is offensive. Everything else is defensive, except for that sword. They use that to kill the enemy.
I do not know whether you are following me in all of this, but Satan and his hosts hate God’s truth. His whole kingdom is built on a lie.
Hath God said?
Ye shall be as God.
You will be able to distinguish for yourselves what is good and what is right, what is wrong. That is how he deceived Eve at the very beginning. It is all built on a lie. Only truth nullifies Satan.
Here is the Scripture I find I can use myself: Hebrews 2:14.
Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner partook of the same;
That through death He might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.
I take that word literally. The death of the Lord Jesus, the finished work of the Lord Jesus, nullifies every work of Satan. It brings it to zero.
What is zero? Zero is zero. It is not a little bit of one. It is zero.
Do you really believe that the death of the Lord Jesus can be such a covering for you that every single weapon the enemy uses against you is rendered powerless by the death of Christ?
Listen again: Revelation 12:11.
And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb,
And because of the word of their testimony;
And they loved not their life even unto death.
The blood of the Lamb is the finished work of Christ. There is the key to this whole situation.
There is another one in Colossians 2:14-15. He stripped principalities and powers naked. Can you believe such a word? He stripped them naked, triumphing over them through His cross. He has led captivity captive.
Is that not marvellous? Think of it. These are Scriptures; these are the weapons of our warfare. Do you know your Bible like this, or only just the little comforting ones?
Jesus taught us to pray this: “Thy will be done.” This is how it is in the Greek order: “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.”
That brings it home to us a little better than, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. This is spiritual warfare.
Jesus said this is the pattern prayer:
Our Father Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
In prayer warfare, we can actually see the will of God performed and fulfilled—not in the distant future only, but even in circumstances now: local circumstances, national circumstances, international circumstances, and those to do with the church.
Our greatest need is enlightenment as to how to pray. Once we begin to learn how to pray, something happens: the necessity of knowing His will in prayer.
I listed down a few things you might like to take with the Scriptures and go home and think about. These are things absolutely revealed as the purpose of God.
Here is the first: God desires all men to be saved. He does not desire the death of any man or the judgment of any man. He desires all men to be saved.
That is 1 Timothy 2:4.
Here comes the second:
Go ye into all the world, and make disciples of all nations,
Baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit;
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you:
And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.
The Lord had just said, “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth.” That includes this fallen earth.
That means that when Mao Zedong was Mao Zedong, he was there by the grace of God. It means these dictators are often there by the grace of God. It may be you do not feel very happy about your president, but he is there actually by God’s appointment.
When believers in the New Testament were told to pray first of all for those in authority and high places, those men believed they were God incarnate—the emperor. It was a shock to believers to be told, “Oh, we have got to pray for them.”
That is 1 Timothy 2:2, I think. Stay in those first verses: we should pray for those in authority.
Jesus said, “All authority is given unto Me in heaven and on this fallen earth,” and then He said, “Go ye therefore,” and, “Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end of the age.”
That means His authority as King of kings and Lord of lords, as King of Israel, and as Head of the church is with us the whole way. We have authority. He has given us the keys of the kingdom to be used to lock up things and unlock things. I think that is tremendous.
Here is the third thing: the gospel has to be preached in all nations as a testimony, and then the end shall come. That is Matthew 24:14.
That is a clear statement of the Lord Jesus. Therefore, we can stand behind this: the gospel has to be preached in all nations.
If there is anything we have a burden about, we can get behind it and pray that the Lord will open doors that no man can shut, and shut doors that no man can open.
Let me give you an example. When I was a kid, really just a kid—I was fourteen or fifteen—I joined a prayer meeting, and they were all white-haired old people.
That is why I was so interested in you being at the Wednesday prayer meeting. I was your age, fourteen, and I was part of this thing.
All the young people said to me, “What are you doing going with all those old fogies? They are all nearly tottering into the grave, and you are spending a whole evening with them in prayer. What are you praying about?”
“We are praying about Nepal.”
Nepal was a closed country, a closed kingdom. No one had yet got into Nepal. The gospel had not been preached in Nepal. But there were two sisters, Dr. O’Hanlon and Lucy Steele, who had from God that He would take them into Nepal.
They believed they would start a clinic and that, through the clinic, people would come to the Lord. They were on the hills near Nepal, on the border.
We prayed one evening every week for Nepal. I used to go along to this prayer meeting among all these dear older folk. I was younger than most of them by about forty years, at the least.
I shall never forget the day when the cable came. We did not have emails in those days, or international phones. The cable said, “Tomorrow morning we have been granted permission to go over the border into Nepal and to start the clinic.”
I was so proud. I thought, “Oh, I have been part of a prayer meeting that opened the door of a closed country to the gospel.”
They all stood on this Scripture: “The gospel has to be preached in all nations,” and Nepal is one of those nations. They prayed for an open door that no one could shut.
From that very simple beginning, everything that has happened in Nepal has taken place. The Nepal Christian Fellowship, and so much else, has grown out of that simple thing.
Here is the next one:
I will build My church;
And the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
If you want grist for your prayer warfare, here it is. What a battle there has been over the building of the church. What warfare.
Every time the Holy Spirit has moved, from Pentecost onwards, before long it has ebbed, crystallised, systematised, traditionalised, and denominationalised. It has happened in every single new initiative that the Lord has taken by the Holy Spirit.
But Jesus said, “I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
There is tremendous ground for us to take hold of. The Lord said it. It is not a matter of, “Well, maybe on a good day something will happen.” No, no, no. The Lord said it: “I will build.”
One day, when we are in glory, we shall find out just how much was tied to prayer in every great move forward by the Holy Spirit in the history of the church.
That is why I love the fact that Acts has no conclusion. It is open-ended. One day we shall all have seminars in glory about all that has followed those days.
Here is another thing: the growth of believers. This is a good one for this assembly—the growth of young believers.
Are there people here in the assembly—I know there are—who really travail in prayer for the young ones who have found the Lord in this fellowship? That is the key to their growth.
I thank God for Auntie Alexander and Auntie Kathleen in Egypt, who took me—an arrogant young man, full of his own ideas, always arguing with them—and took me on their hearts. They prayed me through.
Let me read you a Scripture: Galatians 4:19.
My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you.
The apostle Paul prayed for these people for their salvation, and now he is praying that Christ would be fully formed in them, that there would be a complete growth to maturity.
That does not just happen. We have an enemy, and this enemy is going to stop anyone from growing unless there are people behind the scenes who pray through, standing on the Word of God.
Philippians 1 says, “He Who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.” Could you not stand on that for some of these young people in difficulties?
It is a tremendous thing. Some of the old ones are pathetically in babyhood. They need prayer. Who is going to pray for that? That is what we need.
Here is the sixth—and I am nearly there at seven. The sixth is this: all Israel will be saved. Romans 11:25-26.
For I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this mystery, lest ye be wise in your own conceits,
That a hardening in part hath befallen Israel,
Until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in;
And so all Israel shall be saved.
That is why the enemy is trying to work another Holocaust. That is why he is trying to destroy Israel. That is why you need to stand on this kind of Scripture, that there may be deliverance from it.
You have ground here. It is not your ideas. You have actual scriptural ground for praying.
Here again is the last thing: that we should reach God’s end. It is the purpose of God that we should, so we can stand on this.
That is my lot—what I really wanted to say to you for today. Forgive me just a few minutes; I will tell you my own story on this.
I grew up in an interdenominational Baptist church. That is where I was saved through reading C. T. Studd. I went for the first time to this fellowship of believers, where Alan Redpath was the minister, and I grew up in a place that really believed in prayer.
My earliest memories of Alan Redpath are of his kneeling on the dirty church-hall floor for one and a quarter hours every Monday evening. He was always there. The deacons and elders always had business engagements or something else that kept them away, but he was always there.
I remember him always kneeling on his knees on the floor. That was the first thing I can remember.
Then there were other marvellous things. I remember Auntie Ella. Some in the church thought she was nuts anyway, but she was not. She really knew the Lord.
I remember the first time I realised that the Word of God was for us to use, rather than just letting it go in one ear and out the other.
I had gone to take my sister home, but someone else had already taken her back. Auntie Ella said to me, “Oh, dear boy, come in and have a cup of tea.” So I went in. In England, you always got a cup of tea in those days.
She was a very impractical lady. You could see everything was a mess. She said, “I have been all my life on the stage in opera. I was a famous opera singer. Now I have to do practical things, and I am no good at them.”
There was the sewing machine. She gave me the cup of tea, sat at the machine, and started sewing. Before long, she was talking about the Lord, how wonderful He was, and young man Zephaniah, and what he had said. She wanted to meet Isaiah, and as soon as she had seen the Lord, she was going to make a beeline to Isaiah because she had questions for him.
Then, all of a sudden, the machine jammed. Auntie Ella looked at it. She put the wheel backwards and forwards; it would not move. She looked at the needle and said, “Oh dear, dear, dear. Lance, do you understand anything about sewing machines?”
“No, Auntie,” I said. “I have not got the faintest idea about a sewing machine.”
“Oh,” she said, lifting her hand, “well then, we have to have a word with our heavenly Father. Kneel.”
So I went straight down on my knees. I was about fifteen, and Auntie Ella went on her knees beside the sewing machine. I have never forgotten the prayer going up to heaven.
“Heavenly Father,” she said, “we are in a little bit of a fix. I am a very impractical lady; You know it more than anyone else. I am trying to do this sewing, and I cannot get anywhere with it. There is something wrong with the machine.”
“Well,” she said, “dear Lord, I tried to do it myself. I had tried, and it would not move. Lance, dear boy, does not know a thing about sewing machines either. He has been over and had a look at it, but he cannot do anything.”
“So now,” she said, “Lance and I are here to stand on a promise. For You have said, ‘How many soever be the promises of God, in Christ is the yea, and through Him the amen.’”
“This is the first I knew about it. One promise in Hebrews 1:14: ‘Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?’ So,” she said, “on this promise, Lord, send an angel to touch this machine.”
My eyes were out on stalks. I was waiting to see what would happen—or whether she really was nuts. Then I whispered to her, “Auntie, try it.”
“Shush,” she said. “Give the angel time.”
After another minute, she got up, pulled the chair under her, and went straight on with the sewing.
It changed my life. I had heard all the great preachers at Duke Street Baptist Church—Billy Graham and all the others, friends of Alan Redpath—but you never thought what they said was practical.
Suddenly, I thought: this little old lady, whom everybody thought was a bit bonkers anyway, could actually take Scriptures and stand on them. So I began to stand on Scriptures myself. That changed my life.
That is the way you have to face prayer. The Word of God is the only weapon you have in there. You have no other weapon. Your devotion will not do. Your tears will not do. Your shouting will not do. Your emotion will not do.
It is the Word of God. When you stand on the Word of God, something happens.
It was not until I went to Egypt that I really saw prayer warfare in action. Until then, I saw things like Auntie Ella.
I remember a Swedish auntie who adopted us—not legally, but she felt we came from a pagan home and needed help. She was a millionaire and lived around the corner in a mansion. Her husband had died in his own aeroplane and left her a fortune, which she already had in abundance.
When my sister and I got saved, she adopted us in that sense. I used to go round to her home and join in the prayers. She was an extraordinary woman of prayer.
She had amazing jewellery in her bedroom—a large old necklace all in diamonds and rubies, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was stolen, and naturally the police were called in.
The police superintendent came around. I was told to be quiet and sit there without saying anything. He asked, “Madam, do you suspect anyone?”
“Oh, more than suspect,” she said. “I am a Christian. I am born of God. My whole staff are believers. We have all sought the Lord, and we believe the Lord has shown us who it is.”
“Who is it that you suspect?” he asked.
She gave the name: the window cleaner.
The superintendent said, “Well, we will follow him up. We will watch him and see whether he has a police record, a criminal record.”
He came back about three days later, and I happened to be there again. He said, “Madam, your suspect is absolutely clean as a whistle. He has never done anything wrong.”
“No,” Auntie Dagmar said, “absolutely not. He is the man. We have got it in prayer.”
As a young person, I could see the look in his eyes and on his face. He said, “Madam, I have to warn you: it is a very serious thing to make a charge against someone who has no criminal record. Be very careful what you are saying.”
The window cleaner was coming in the next few days, so Auntie Dagmar said to me and the maids, “Could you help me? I am going to go under the bed.”
Auntie Dagmar had a big enlarged heart. Everyone said, “No, you cannot do it.” “Oh yes, I am,” she said.
We went upstairs. It was a huge bed. We lifted it up, and she lay down under the bed. We put it down, and it actually came on her heart. Then she told us in a muffled voice from underneath, “Put down all the hangings.” So we put down all the hangings and went downstairs to pray.
The window cleaner came, whistling away. There were two of them. They cleaned the windows, opened the windows, and went outside. They were big sash windows.
After a while, she heard a whistle, and he thought it was clear. Then Auntie Dagmar thought, “Oh, what a mistake I have made. He really is the man.”
She heard doors opening and shouting. We did not know anything about this; we were downstairs praying.
Then he came around where the bed was, near a wardrobe or chest of drawers, and he sat on the bed. He was a big man. He sat down, and Auntie Dagmar let out a scream. We could hear it downstairs when he sat clean on her. It nearly killed her.
At that great scream from Auntie Dagmar, he shot out of the window so fast and fled down the street, leaving his ladder up against the house. The other man fled too.
Of course, the police came round immediately, and Auntie Dagmar told them this wonderful story.
You see, the Lord is never wrong.
I do not think he ever came to the Lord, but it must have been one of his stories anyway. That is the kind of prayer I knew. It worked. People prayed, and what they prayed for happened.
When I went to Egypt, it was something quite different. I had never in my life seen people pray like those two old, so-called retired missionaries.
It seemed to me that the whole Middle East was linked to them. They appeared to have an intelligence service that ran over the whole Middle East. There would be phone calls in the morning, and I would hear Auntie Kathleen say, “Yes, yes. Now tell me again, what is the problem?”
She wrote things down, one after another, and then said, “Okay, well, Alex and I will pray.” Sometimes that evening, or the next day, the phone would ring again. She would say, “Oh yes, we know. We got the victory. We knew that the Lord would touch that.”
It was amazing. But they never asked me to join them, because I had been very ill and was convalescing there.
Then came the day when they said to me, “Would you like to join us in prayer?” I had to be as English as I possibly could, so I said, “Oh yes, that would be very interesting. Thank you.” But I was dying to get in and see how they behaved.
When I got in, they told me the problem. They explained the letter and read the letter. Then they said, “Now, have you any Scripture?”
Me? A Scripture? I looked at them blankly.
Then Auntie Alexander said to Auntie Kathleen, “Do you?” Auntie Kathleen said, “Yes, Obadiah, and verse so-and-so.”
I thought, “Obadiah? I do not know that I have ever read Obadiah.”
Then they got on their knees, and I was on my knees. They went backwards and forwards in prayer. No long prayers, just short prayers—this prayer, that prayer, this prayer, that prayer—perhaps five or six sentences, then the other one, going back and forth, standing on that Scripture.
I got the impression of a warship, a battleship, and these two ladies were on the turret, shooting down aircraft.
Suddenly one would say, “Do you think we are there yet?” The other would say, “Not yet.” Then they would go back.
Until one of them said, “Praise the Lord,” and the other said, “Hallelujah.” That was it.
Not everything happened. But I remember saying to them, “How many people have you led to the Lord in Egypt?”
They said, “We can count them on one hand.”
I was so young and arrogant. I said, “You have been fifty years in Egypt, and you only have five people who have come to the Lord and stood. Do you think it is worth it?”
They said, “No, by worldly standards it is not worth it. But there will come a day when a huge harvest will come from the Islamic world.”
That day has arrived. You cannot keep up with the number of Muslims coming to the Lord—thousands upon thousands: Somalis, Kurds, Iraqis, Afghans. We see just a little channel of them in Athens. It is unbelievable.
We see it even in Israel, from the Sudan. There is a Muslim whose mother and father were hacked to death in front of his eyes, and the Lord reached him. It is absolutely amazing, the power of that.
Never despise this. I know you will not. But is there not a place for this assembly to move?
I do not want you all to get into taking potshots at Satan. That is not the way you are to be. You need to be hidden in Christ, but standing on His Word that it may be fulfilled.
There is no higher calling than intercession—higher than apostle, prophet, teacher, evangelist, and pastor. The calling to be an intercessor: there is nothing more powerful than corporate intercession.
May the Lord bless you.
Shall we pray?
Lord, will You take these poor words of mine and write them on our hearts? We need them. We need to realise that prayer is not just a kind of ritual or devotional exercise.
There is an aspect to corporate prayer that is all to do with Thy will being done, as in heaven, so on earth.
Lord, will You help us? Preserve us from in any way uncovering ourselves, but at the same time teach us how to be good soldiers of the Lord Jesus.
We ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.