Good morning. For those of you who do not know me, I am Jimbo Janowitz, and I am computer illiterate. Okay.
Anyway, for those who have never seen me before, this is what I look like. My name means something really wonderful in Polish, but in Chinese, it just means a big, ugly man.
I am grateful to be back here. Every time I have been invited here, the Lord has never ceased to bless me, and I am grateful for this opportunity.
Let us go ahead and look at our theme passage, and we will pray. Then we will get into what we want to do. Okay. There we go.
In your Bibles, this was read last night from Revelation 17:14:
These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them:
for He is Lord of lords, and King of kings;
and they also shall overcome that are with Him, called and chosen and faithful.
Let us pray.
Our heavenly Father, we want to bow before You this morning and tell You how grateful we are that You have called us to Yourself. Lord, there can be no greater thing in this world than that You have called us to Yourself. You love us in this way, that You would not have us perish.
We come to You, Lord, because You have called us and because You have made that way for us through the blood of Your Son, Jesus Christ. We lift Him up today. We thank You for the blood He poured out for us. It was unto You for us, and we come under that blood.
We thank You, Lord, that He did not just forgive our sins, but He came to You and said, “Lord, give them My Spirit.” Lord, we trust in that Spirit this morning. We ask for Him to handle everything in this time, to translate things to our hearts, to draw us to Jesus, and to draw us to the Father.
Lord, all these things are impossible for us, but with You all things are possible. You have already proved that You loved us and desired us by sending Your Son, by His dying, and by His being raised from the dead.
Oh, Lord, we worship You. We give this time into Your hands for Your will, in Jesus Christ’s name.
This is an interesting verse. Actually, some verses say, “are the called,” even though the translation I use here says simply, “called.”
In the three days that we are here, we have been called to focus on three words in this verse. We want to look at called. We want to look at the word chosen. We want to look at the idea of being faithful.
All of these things are what the Lord is telling us. He is telling us that we are called. He is telling us that we are chosen. He is asking us to be faithful. That is what Alistair said last night when he was sharing in worship time. He said, “That is the response.”
But the first two, before we were even asked to respond, are what the Lord has done and what the Lord has said. That is the basis of everything. That is what we stand on. That is the foundation.
So we want to build a good foundation this morning, and we want to look at this idea of being called.
A lot of us, when we think of being called, think of being called to a vocation—something we are going to do. There is that within a calling, but that is not really it.
God is not so mercenary that He just says, “Hey, the only reason I am calling you is that I want you to do something.” He is not like that. He is not mercenary, saying, “You have got to do this.”
But He always calls us to Himself—always to Himself first. Then, when we have been founded on that love and in the grace of that call, He can send us out. Not until then.
Now, I know for you Canadians, you are wondering who this guy is. Okay. This is the United States government. That is what the government looks like. I know you thought it was Obama, but no, that is it.
But this is just a great thing: “I want you.” “I want you.” In this poster, he is calling you into service. That is what Uncle Sam is doing.
But we want to see: What does God mean by “called”? He is calling us. There are two words I want to look at: a Hebrew word and a Greek word.
The Hebrew word that has to do with call is qara. They have long marks over this, but I have never heard a long “a” in Hebrew. We say Jacob, but really it is Ya‘aqob. If I pronounce this according to English, it would be “Kira” or “K-ray,” but I would think it is qara. But whatever it is, that is the word.
It does not matter whether it is Cantonese or Mandarin; it is the same word. And what this Hebrew word means is simple: “I am summoning you.” It is a summons.
Just like some of us, as we get older, get summoned to jury duty. All of a sudden, it is nothing that we have thought about. Somebody has summoned us, and we go. This is the idea in Hebrew of the word qara: a summons.
Now, in Greek there are a whole bunch of words that mean “call,” but the one I want to focus on is klēsis. Klēsis is the word used where Paul says that you may know what is the hope of your calling.
All these times Paul talks about calling—“consider your calling”—this is the word klēsis. It means calling, but behind it is the idea that this calling is something heavenly, something holy, and something upward.
I think Paul, in Philippians 3, calls it the high calling, which in other words is translated upward. What I mean by this upward and heavenly calling is not that you are called to a higher position, like you go from teacher to principal. That is not what it means.
What it means is that you are being called away from the earth. Like Abraham: he was called out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was called away from something and to something else.
The Lord said, “I am calling you away from this, but I am calling you to something”—and this is really key—“that you do not even know.”
Remember, it says about Abraham that he was called to go to a place that he did not know, but he went out anyway. So that is what we are talking about when we speak of being called and being the called: being summoned to a higher plane of knowing the Lord and seeing Him.
Peter read Matthew 22:14 last night, I think: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” If you read before that, there is a whole parable of the Lord calling people to a banquet, to a wedding feast.
Everybody is making excuses not to come. “I would come, but I have got a new yoke of oxen and I want to try them out.” Or, “I would come, but I just got married.” The whole thing is that everybody is making excuses not to come.
When we think about the heavenly calling, all of a sudden we start having excuses as to why we cannot be those ones who are called. A lot of us want to say, “Oh, Lord, call me, call me,” and then the Lord would say, “Oh, yeah, but you can’t.”
So I want to deal first with excuses, and then I want to go to what the call is. I am going to give you five excuses, although I know there are many more. There are as many excuses as there are people here.
Here is the first one: “Well, I am nobody special,” or, “I am nobody. I am just nobody. What do You want to call me for?”
Let us look at some nobodies. Here is a nobody: Gideon. He is wringing out the fleece there. If you read about Gideon in Judges, it says that he was from the least family of the least tribe. Well, there is a good nobody. Least family from the least tribe—that is Gideon.
That is James and John. Hey, do not laugh at them. They are really sensitive. But they are just fishermen—just fishermen.
Yet James would be the first apostle martyred. Here is a nobody who could stand up for the Lord and, in a sense, give up his life. John wrote the Gospel, went out with Peter during the book of Acts, and did all these things. But they were just fishermen. They were nobody special.
This one, nobody is going to know except a few. This person right here—no, this is not Amy Carmichael. Well, it is not really her, but I am saying it is. That is Mimosa.
I do not know how many of you guys have read the little book Mimosa, but I recommend it—not just to the girls, but to the guys. It is the story of a little illiterate Indian girl who gets saved, unbeknownst to anybody, and how the Lord really kept her.
It is only about 120 pages. I even suggest reading it as a devotional: read a chapter a day. It is awesome what the Lord does. Here we have this little illiterate girl—nobodies. These are just nobodies.
Yet the answer that God has to that is in 1 Corinthians 1, beginning with verse 26. “Consider your calling, brethren” does not mean your vocation. It means, consider where you were when the Lord called you to salvation.
For behold your calling, brethren, that not many wise after the flesh,
not many mighty, not many noble, are called:
but God chose the foolish things of the world,
that He might put to shame them that are wise;
and God chose the weak things of the world,
that He might put to shame the things that are strong;
and the base things of the world, and the things that are despised,
did God choose, yea and the things that are not,
that He might bring to nought the things that are:
that no flesh should glory before God.
But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus,
who was made unto us wisdom from God,
and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption:
that, as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.
So if your excuse is, “Well, I am nobody,” God says, “Amen. I know it.” Okay? And that does not stop Him from calling you at all. So that excuse is gone now.
How about this: “I am flawed.” Here is a flawed person right here: Moses. No, I thought, Charlton Heston. Well, it is, but he is supposed to be Moses here.
Moses was flawed. Remember, after—or during—his experience with the burning bush, he said, “I am just not it. I am just not the guy You are looking for, because I cannot speak right.” He had a flaw. “You cannot send me. I am flawed.”
Here is another flawed person: Fanny Crosby. Blind. Come on. God cannot use her; she is blind. How many hymns has Fanny Crosby written? A tremendous amount of hymns.
She was not saved right away. She did not come out of the womb saved. She lived in a Christian home, but she got converted later in life. Out of that conversion, a person who would never see could sing, “I am waiting to see You, Lord.”
The Lord used her and her hymns to bring people into great times of worship. It is an amazing thing what the Lord does.
Daniel was reading a book before we went to bed last night about Anthony Groves, who was a missionary. He brought up a man named John Kitto.
John Kitto was not only deaf, but he had a really cantankerous personality. Nobody wanted to be around him because nobody could stand him. Yet he produced these picture books of the Bible, and Spurgeon said that they were among the greatest things. As far as the theology in them, they were matchless.
Here you have a guy who was flawed. He was deaf and cantankerous. I mean, it was not just that he was deaf; he was deaf and cantankerous. It was not enough that he was one or the other.
We could say, “He is deaf; he cannot even hear the Lord.” You can say all those things. But the answer is found when Moses was before the Lord in Exodus 4:10.
And Moses said unto the Lord, Oh Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore,
nor since Thou hast spoken unto Thy servant;
for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.
Before he spoke to the Lord, remember, Moses was in Pharaoh’s court. He was like a top student. He was schooled in all the Egyptian arts, military matters, and everything. He is saying, “Even then, when I was in those schools, I was not eloquent. So if I was not eloquent then, and I am not eloquent now, You have got the wrong guy.”
“How can I lead Your people? You need an eloquent person to lead Your people.” But this is what the Lord said:
And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth?
or who maketh a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind?
is it not I, the Lord?
Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth,
and teach thee what thou shalt speak.
When you say, “Oh, well, gee, I am flawed,” the Lord says, “Amen. But that does not matter to Me, because I have called you.”
How about this one? “Oh, Lord, I am too sinful.” Peter—this is an actual photograph. This is his good side.
The Lord called Peter. “You are Peter. You are the rock. You are this little stone. You are Cephas.” He named him that. Then He called him out of his boat, and Peter was there for a little while. Then he went back home.
In Luke 5, the Lord saw him in his boat again and said, “Okay, push your boat out.” Remember, after the big catch of fish, Peter looked at the Lord and said, “You need to leave. You do not know who I am. I am such a sinful man. You just need to go.”
I think Peter saw that Jesus was so other than him. Peter was the big fisherman saying, “Hey, we have been out all night. You are not going to catch anything.” And Jesus knew more than he did, because He is the Lord.
Or how about John Newton? John Newton, for those of you who do not know, wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” The movie Amazing Grace was about William Wilberforce and John Newton.
John Newton was a slave trader, a slave ship captain. He brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies. If you have studied the middle passage and seen how the slaves were packed in there—“This one is sick; just cast him overboard”—what a heartless thing it was to be involved in that type of traffic.
Yet John Newton was shipwrecked, and out of that shipwreck he came to know the Lord. Most people could say, “Such a wretch as I.” Is that not what it says in “Amazing Grace”? “That saved a wretch like me.”
Or you can go even further. This is not meant to be funny, but as you get older, the Lord starts to show you what is in your heart. I am not talking about adulteries and all those other things, but you see the rebellion in your heart. You say, “Lord, I just want to do it my way.”
You see the hardness that is there. You have to say, “Just go away. I am of no use to You.”
But this is what the Lord spoke to Peter in Luke 5, beginning in verse 8:
But Simon Peter, when he saw it, fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying,
Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.
For he was amazed, and all that were with him,
at the draught of the fishes which they had taken;
and so were also James and John, sons of Zebedee,
who were partners with Simon.
And Jesus said unto Simon, Fear not;
from henceforth thou shalt catch men.
Is that not amazing? James and John were astonished at the same thing, perhaps in the same way Peter was, saying, “We are sinful.” But look at what Jesus says: “Do not be afraid.”
You might say, “Oh, Lord, You do not know me. I am so sinful.” The Lord says, “Amen. I do know. But do not be afraid.”
How about this one? “I am too young.” I know some of you guys are in middle school or starting high school, so that may seem pretty legitimate. But some of you who are in your twenties and getting on toward your thirties are saying, “Yeah, I am still too young.”
You are not too young to be called. You are thinking, “Well, I still want to do these things before I am called. Being called is for older people.” Look, Moses was eighty when he was called. Peter was probably thirty or forty when he was called.
But look at Samuel. Samuel was given to the Lord by his mother, but just being given to the Lord by your mother is not enough. When he was a young boy doing the work of the temple, the Lord called him.
I think he was preteen when Samuel really heard His voice. He did not even know what was happening. He went off to Eli and said, “Hey, you called me. What is the deal?” Finally Eli said, “It is the Lord. Next time, say, ‘Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.’”
How about David? You can probably tell by the harp. David was probably a teenager when Samuel called him. Samuel said, “Jesse, have you got any more sons here?” Jesse said, “Oh yeah, we have one that really does not count. He is out in the field.” They brought him in.
What about Daniel? When he was taken away to Babylon, he was about a teenager when he was called out.
What about Timothy, a New Testament kind? Timothy was probably a young man in his teens when Paul began taking him under his wing. I think Timothy was in his early twenties then, and when Paul passed the torch, Timothy was perhaps in his thirties. But when did Paul start training him? When he was young.
So you might say, “I am too young,” and the Lord says, “Amen. I know. I know how young you are.” Did He not say to Jeremiah, “I called you from your mother’s womb”? That is pretty early.
So this idea of saying, “I am too young,” is not an excuse.
There is one other excuse I want to cover that I did not put up here: fear. “I am afraid of what the Lord might have me do.”
That is a really big one. “If I answer the Lord’s call, He is probably going to have me be a checker in a grocery store. I do not know if I can do that. I know my parents would not like it.” Or, “I am going to have to marry somebody ugly.”
We have these fears. They might seem stupid, but some of them are very real. They are things that keep us from the Lord.
The Lord has called, and because He has called, none of these excuses matter. The reason they do not matter is because His calling is not based on the one who is being called. His calling is based on Him.
You see, He is sovereign. It is the call of the Sovereign.
You see Uncle Sam here again. When people got drafted into the military, they went with nothing. You leave home, and you do not take anything with you when you get called into the military.
But the military, the government, our friend Uncle Sam, is the one who provides everything needed for you to fulfill his calling. So all your excuses are of no account, because the one who is calling you is the one who has the wealth, the resources, and who equips you for the calling.
You just respond positively to the call. You do not need anything else. It is all based on who He is. That is an important thing.
The Lord who calls you is the Lord of lords and King of kings in Revelation. He is the One who equips you.
In earlier days, if you wanted to be an officer in the army, you had to have enough money to equip your soldiers. Well, the Lord has enough to equip you. He has everything that is needed for you in your calling.
Now let us look at the calling. What have you been called to?
Remember, I said He is not calling you to a vocation, so to speak. That is something further down the line. He is calling you first just to know Him. That is what He wants.
He does not want your service, so to speak. He wants to call you into His presence. He wants you in His presence.
The Lord Jesus Himself said, when He prayed before He died:
And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee the only true God,
and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ portrays who the Father is. So if you know Jesus Christ, then you know the Father. To know Him is eternal life.
When we talk about knowing Him, we get so academic. I am not talking just about Asian people, okay? We stereotype too. We know you are all engineers and doctors.
Let us have a raise of hands: how many Chinese have majored in language or history? There we go. It is the remnant right there—the overcomer who has overcome all parental things like that.
But this knowledge is not academic knowledge. We like to go to a Bible study or a conference and learn stuff. Notice I said “learn stuff.” We like that. We like to have things to talk about, and when we talk about what we learn, people think we are smart.
We love to learn. We are in an information age. Google, man. Who needs to read the textbook? “I am Googling.”
But the Lord has not called us, in a sense, to a lecture class. He has called us to a laboratory science.
There is a lecture part. You have to go to the Book. But that is not it. You go to the lab. The lab is where you test things out to see whether they are real.
I was talking in Richmond at one of the kids’ summer conferences. I am not a science person. I really cannot stand science. I am not that keen on math either, although I love numbers. I do not like the theory: “N equals this.” That is letters, not numbers.
I had to take two lab sciences in college. I took the easy one, biology, because I took it in high school and knew what was coming. But then I had to take another one. What did they offer? Physics? Well, math skills—that does not work out. Kinesiology? No. Chemistry? Oh no. Geology.
Rocks. You might think about dead rocks. Dr. Bender was about seventy-five years old, and he was still teaching just because he loved it. He was from Kansas and had this little twang in his voice.
His lectures were terrible, but when we got into the lab—oh! Did you know rocks have softness? They have breaking points and not-breaking points. They crack, they smash, and all that, but they are called cleavage points.
If you hit them in a certain way, they split. Oh, it is just amazing. Then he would take us on field trips and say, “You know what you read about in your book? This is it.” Oh man, that is so cool.
The whole thing is that when we say we are called to know Him, we are not called to intellectually know about Him. He says, “I want you to experience who I am.”
Micah 6:8 says:
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with thy God?
That is what He wants. He wants us to walk.
If you look at the disciples, when they were called, they were with Jesus for two and a half or three years. They lived with Jesus.
It was not just that they saw Him calm the sea or heal people. They saw those things and were thrilled by them, but I think the things that made the biggest impact on them were simply Him being with them and ministering to them on their level.
Can you imagine? They had seen Him do all these things, and then there was the feeding of the five thousand. The people were hungry. “Where are we going to send them?” Jesus said, “You feed them.”
I think Jesus was kind of laughing under His breath to see what the reaction would be, because He knew what He was going to do. If you read John 6, He knew. They were in a quandary, but He said, “You know something? I know you have nothing. I know you have only these little fish and stuff, and they are not even yours. Just give them to Me.”
What a lesson that was for them: to find out that they were bankrupt in all these things, and yet He could take the little they had, multiply it, and feed five thousand.
Or how about the washing of feet? Or how about this? This has always struck me. When He came to the Passover, His last Passover, He looked at them and said, “I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you.”
Wow. To know that He was saying that to them—that personal thing: “I desire to be with you on this night.” This was His last night. You think, “Why did He not go home and spend it with His mother?”
But no. He said of these twelve, “I desire to be with you more than anything.” He told them of the things that were going to come. He told them how they would scatter and all these other things.
Even though He knew all their flaws and everything, it did not make Him say, “I know you guys are going to run off, so if you get around for Me, I am splitting now.” No. He said, “I want to be with you.”
I think those are the things that meant more to the disciples than anything.
We might say, “Well, they were with Jesus physically for three years. After that, He rose from the dead and He is in heaven.”
But what about the time after the resurrection? They were just like us. They had no visible thing. They just had the experience of what they knew before, and then they had to trust Him.
“This is what He was like. He is not going to change.” For us, as we get to know Him in the Word, we see what He is like. Then we have to step out and say, “Lord, this is what You are like. Then I should be able to trust that when I go out and do this, You are going to be with me.”
It is the same type of thing: to know Him, but not just to know Him in our heads. He wants us to know Him experientially.
It is not just, “Okay, Lord, I want to experience You,” and all of a sudden you have experiences. No. You will find out that there are a lot of things you have to handle and test out on your own.
It is like that lab science. You have to test these things out. That is how you find out, and that is how you get to really know Him.
So there is nothing you can say like, “Well, Jim said this.” No, sorry. What have you found? Maybe Jim said this, but is it true? You have got to go to the lab. You have got to wear those funky little white coats and find out that He is true.
We are called into a new realm. I have three verses I would like to read.
In 1 Thessalonians 2:12, Paul says:
To the end that ye should walk worthily of God,
who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory.
He calls you into His own kingdom. Then you go back a few pages to Colossians 1:13:
Who delivered us out of the power of darkness,
and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love;
in whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins.
Then in 1 Peter 2:9:
But ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
a people for God’s own possession,
that ye may show forth the excellencies of Him
who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light.
When we think of darkness, sometimes we think someone merely turned out the lights. But in darkness we can grope around somewhat; we get our night vision.
I think we need to think of darkness as being blind. If you are blind, you do not see anything. You do not even get that night vision. There is nothing.
A lot of us as Christians are blind to what we have been called into. Yet the Lord is saying, “I am calling you into a different realm,” because we are so used to living in the material realm.
We are so used to everything being material that if something is not material, then we just do not get it. I cannot understand how Einstein could come to the conclusion that parallel lines meet somewhere in space. He says, “Well, that is easy, because space is warped.” How did you come to that? It beats me. That is why I was a history major.
The whole thing is that we have been called into a different realm. A lot of us say, “Well, we have been called into the kingdom of God,” and that is true. But we have weird ideas about the kingdom of God.
We look at the kingdom of God as something with borders, a place, something fanciful. But we have not been brought into a place. We have been brought into a realm.
A realm is the extent of a ruler’s authority. We have been brought into this realm.
How far does the authority of God go? This is not something quantitative, where you can do quantum physics and say, “Okay, this is how far it goes, this is where it works, and it fits in that box.”
How far does His authority go? How far does His power go?
We are called into knowing that He rules over circumstances. Does not Romans 8:28 say that? We all quote that, right? “All things work together for good.”
But it does not stop there. “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.” There is our word again: called.
It is for us to find that out. In the realm, when God brings us into circumstances, does He have authority over our circumstances? That is something we have to find out in the laboratory again.
God rules over the hearts of men. Some people have power and sway over things: your boss, your teachers, your parents, and the government. They have sway over you and all these different things.
But how far does it go? God rules over the hearts of men. Read Daniel.
In Daniel 1, Daniel says, “Gee, I really do not want to eat this food.” It was not merely culture; it was what God had forbidden. So what did he do? He took it to the chief steward.
The chief steward said, “I do not know. The king will have my head.” Yet it says Daniel found favor in his sight. Who did that? That was God.
God made him have favor, just like Joseph when he went to the jailer’s house. Joseph found favor. Why? Because God rules over the hearts of men.
It does not matter what circumstances you are in or who is over you. We are called to find out how far God’s authority goes in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
How about this: God rules over the earth. That is pretty big, is it not? But we find that He rules over the earth. The disciples found that He ruled even the wind and the sea.
Remember when Jesus calmed the sea? The disciples said, “Who is this man?” Brothers and sisters, that is the same response we have: “Who is this God who is like this?”
Not only do we see the extent of His power, but we see it working on our behalf. It changes us into worshipers—not just in our heads anymore, but all of a sudden it has gone beyond our heads into our spirits and into worship.
How about this: He rules over the heavens. You read Revelation, and Satan is cast down out of heaven. He rules over the heavens.
When Daniel was praying, remember, his prayer was held up for a few weeks. Gabriel said, “I was fighting with the prince of Persia,” the one in the heavenlies. But God rules over the heavens.
God rules over those sinister beings. If any of you ever come into those places, to find out the power of God over those sinister spirits is a marvelous thing.
Beyond this, sometimes we think we are just called to excitement. “We are going to know the Lord. Oh, how exciting. We are going to see how powerful He is. How exciting.”
It is exciting, but we are not called just to excitement, as though the Lord is simply going to make things exciting for us. I am a teacher. My life is not that exciting. Grade papers, plan lessons. Victory knows I have a two-month vacation, so that is okay, right? That is a side joke; we had dinner yesterday.
But really, in showing us Himself, in getting us to know Him, and in getting us to see that we are called into this realm, the crux of all this—what all this is leading up to—is this:
He has called us to this place of surrendering ourselves to Him.
This is utmost in His heart when He calls us. He wants us to turn our destiny over to Him.
That is a heavy thing, but this is really what He is saying: “I want your destiny. Give Me your destiny.” But really, it is not the thing; He wants us.
This guy here looks like he works in an ice cream store, does he not? This is C. T. Studd. I know you guys do not know who he is because he lived in the 1800s.
He played cricket. I played with crickets; he played cricket. For those of you from the British Empire—maybe your parents were from Hong Kong, or you lived in India or somewhere like that—cricket is kind of weird English baseball.
He was like the top cricketer of his time. Not only that, he was a Christian, and he had a great personality. People loved him. He was a nominal Christian. He went to meetings, liked talking about the Lord, and would go to conferences and talk about the Lord.
Then he would go out and live his own life. I am not saying he was decadent, drinking and doing all sorts of bad things. But as far as his life was concerned, his life was his.
He went to church, and that was the Lord’s time. The rest of the time was his.
When he went to Cambridge University, he met with some other people. There was a book called The Cambridge Seven. I am so glad I picked that up; it was a good book.
There had been a man who was a missionary in China who had prayed, “Lord, give us seventy men”—upstanding college graduates, that kind of thing. Then the man died, and the Lord had not done it, but the Lord was working.
People say that out of this prayer, C. T. Studd and these others came to know the Lord. Someone invited him to Moody and Sankey’s revival meetings in England. This was in the 1870s or early 1880s.
It was not that he got convicted or anything. But he saw something. All of a sudden, the Lord captured his heart in a way that said, “Cricket is nothing compared to this One that I see. It is nothing.”
His heart was captured. Out of that, he became a missionary. He first went to China with Hudson Taylor, then got kicked out of China and went to India. When he finished with India, he went to Africa.
Lance Lambert was telling a story—I think it was Lance Lambert—and he said that F. B. Meyer came to C. T. Studd one time after Studd had been preaching.
F. B. Meyer was wonderful. I love F. B. Meyer. I do not know whether you would like him because of his flowery language, but if you read his books, he writes about characters in the Bible, especially Old Testament characters, their experiences, and how they relate to us.
If you ever have a chance to read F. B. Meyer, pick him up. You can get by the flowery language.
F. B. Meyer went to C. T. Studd after he had given a powerful message. Here was just a young man in his twenties, and F. B. Meyer, who had this big tabernacle and was a known preacher, went up to him and said, “How did you get such power?”
C. T. Studd did not just blurt out an answer. He thought for a minute. Then, after thinking about it, he said, “Because I have given all to Him. Because I have surrendered all to Him.”
Out of that, F. B. Meyer had his own experience, where he gave all to Him and found something new in the Lord Himself.
It is not just that the Lord is after our career, saying, “This is what I want you to do.” If you look at Jacob, he had all these wonderful things happen to him.
He had this desire for the Lord’s blessing: “I want Your inheritance.” He got the inheritance, though through trickery. Then he had that wonderful dream, a wonderful vision about the ladder going up to heaven and the angels ascending and descending.
Oh, it was wonderful. But he was still Jacob—still conniving here, there, and the other way.
Then he came back and wrestled with God. He had this wonderful experience, and God touched him in a way that marked him for life. God renamed him Israel. Yet the next chapter starts out with Jacob. It is just like us.
Then God called him back: “I want you to come back to Bethel.” Jacob said, “Okay, we need to put away our idols.” So he put away idols and did these things.
Finally, in his life, after Joseph was taken into captivity and Jacob thought Joseph was dead, a famine came into the land. His sons went once and got food, then the food ran out while the famine remained.
The brothers said, “We told the man we had a younger brother. If we do not bring him back, we do not get any food.” Jacob’s heart was wrapped up in Benjamin. “Why did you tell him Benjamin was there?” “He asked us. We did not know.”
Jacob came to this place. I think this was even more so than Abraham. When Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son, Hebrews says that he believed God would raise him up because he was the promised one.
I am not saying it was easy for Abraham, but at least he said, “I am going to get him back.” But when Jacob sent Benjamin, there was no guarantee to him. It was just, “You have got to give him up.”
In Genesis 43:14, Jacob finally said, “Okay, you can take Benjamin.”
And God Almighty give you mercy before the man,
that he may release unto you your other brother and Benjamin.
And if I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.
Sometimes we give, thinking that we are going to get something back—no cost to us. Self-surrender costs. It costs you. It costs your very heart.
The very thing that Jacob loved the most was asked for: “Give Me Benjamin.” Jacob had to come to that place of saying not just, “Here is Benjamin,” but, “If I am bereaved, I am bereaved.” That is self-surrender.
In closing, there is a verse in Isaiah 43. Actually, there are three verses. When we think of self-surrender, it is surrender in faith, but surrender in faith is not a blind thing.
In Isaiah 43, the Lord says:
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
and He that formed thee, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee;
I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine.
This is how the Lord sees us. He sees us as the ones He has called, and He has called us by name.
The idea of name means He knows your character. He knows everything about you. There is nothing hidden from Him. He knows your name.
“Jacob, I know it. But I have called you.”
Then verses 2 and 3 say:
When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned;
neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.
For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.
In other words, there is a call, and the Lord says, “The calling is not to destroy you.” But it is not to keep you from going through the flood or the fire.
This is His promise: if you lay down, when you go through the flood, He will be with you. When you go through the fire, you will not be scorched; you will not be destroyed by it.
The response He is seeking is this. There was a song in the 1970s done by a little group of Catholics in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Yes, some Catholics are real Christians.
They loved the Lord, and they took this verse and made it into a response to the Lord. The Lord is calling you. “This is who I see you are.” Because I see the Lord as seeing me like that, the response is this:
Yahweh, You have created me.
You have called me by name.
And I am Yours.
That is the response the Lord wants from His calling us: the acknowledgment, first of all, that He has created me; the acknowledgment that He knows me better than I know myself; and then the simple surrender: “I am Yours.”
Then it says, “Forever I will sing of Your goodness.” This is the laboratory. This is the lab. This is what you find in the lab: the goodness of God.
It is the goodness of God that leads to repentance. It is not fire and brimstone—although some people need to hear fire and brimstone. But I will tell you the thing that makes you bow the knee more than anything: when you see how good the Lord is.
I know I have used this before, but if you read the book Les Misérables, the thing that changes Jean Valjean is after he is caught stealing the silverware.
When the bishop says, “Yeah, I gave them to him,” and the police leave, he gives him the candlesticks. The bishop says to Jean Valjean, “I give you back your life. Now give it to God.”
That is what changed Jean Valjean. We all think everything is going to be perfect from there, but if you read the book, the next time Jean Valjean goes out, he beats up a little kid and takes his gold coin.
Does that mean that is the end of it? No. You read the rest of the book, and you find out that he has truly been redeemed.
That is what the Lord is after. It is not merely that He wants our heart. In having our heart, this is where we are redeemed. This is where we are changed into His likeness.
This is where we are given back to God, except it is not just that we are given back by His Son. We find ourselves giving ourselves back to God because of His goodness.
“Forever I will sing of Your goodness.” This verse means more than, “I will walk now in freedom.”
You do not know freedom until you have surrendered. You will not know it until you have really surrendered. Then, when you have, it will be like, “I am free to serve God.”
I will tell you something. It is a funny story, but it fits. When I was a young man, I was young and single into my thirties, and people were always trying to set me up. “Oh, there is a nice girl. You should, you know, do that.”
Because of that, I would not talk to a lot of girls. When you start talking to girls who are older, they are really looking for husbands. I am sorry to reveal that.
I was afraid they would think I was interested, and then I did not want to lead them on. My wife later said, “You were so weird. You would be really friendly and talk to me one day, and then you would not talk to me for two weeks. I did not know what to make of you.”
But when I finally asked my wife to marry me and she said yes, we went to Dan Bates’s wedding in San Diego.
There were all these young single ladies in San Diego at that time. During that wedding, I am embarrassed to say this, but my wife will back me up: I was out talking to all those single girls.
You know why? Because I was free to. I knew I had already settled this, and I did not have to do anything. I was so free.
Now, my poor wife—good thing Jerry Leniver was there because he stood by her and talked with her. But I was out, and I was free. I was able to have fellowship.
You know what I am saying? Before, you are bound up. But once you surrender, once I said, “Oh, this is the one I am marrying,” I was free.
Not free to go out and pursue these women, but free to have fellowship with them for the first time, without saying, “Well, I wonder what they are going to think about that.” I did not have to shun them the next day because I did not want them to get interested.
But once you give up, that is what I am saying. There is a freedom where all of a sudden you say, “I do not have to worry about being good enough or doing anything. I am free to serve the Lord.”
I am just free, as if I am dead to all those other things, and now I am free. It is like when Paul says, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Then he says, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
So then, who are the called? Brothers and sisters, it is us. We are the called.
Some of us say, “Well, I do not know if I am called. I do not hear anything.” Sometimes you just need to look back in your life and see what the Lord has been doing in your life. You recognize that He has been working to bring you to certain places.
Some of you do not even know the Lord. If you are here, it is because the Lord is saying to you, “I want you. I sent My Son to come and die for you that you might have Me, because I want you.”
God desires us more than anything because of what He has for us and who He wants to be for us. We are the called.
Let us pray.
Oh, heavenly Father, we thank You that nothing is up to us except to respond. No matter what we have, no matter what baggage we have, no matter all our failures, no matter the things that may be lined up against us, Lord, those things are nothing to You.
To think, Lord, that You would still call us despite Your knowing us—oh Lord, how we thank You. We thank You for Your goodness and Your great grace to us through Jesus Christ.
Lord, we want to respond. Yet we feel, “I cannot. I cannot ever see myself as responding and saying, ‘Lord, take all of me,’ because I find myself holding back so much.”
Lord, we thank You that You even know that in our own hearts. You know our inabilities to give You the things that You really desire.
But even though we are like that, we say, “Lord, I still want to give You all. I want to respond to You in a way that I see Your goodness, in a way that I am free.”
Lord, grant this, we ask, in Jesus Christ’s name.