I am very glad to be able to be with you this morning, to worship the Lord, and to have fellowship together.
I would like to turn you to a Scripture in the prophecy of Isaiah—Isaiah Chapter 12.
And in that day thou shalt say, I will give thanks unto Thee, O Lord;
for though Thou wast angry with me, Thine anger is turned away, and Thou comfortest me.
Behold, God is my salvation;
I will trust, and will not be afraid:
for the Lord, even the Lord, is my strength and song;
and He is become my salvation.
Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.
And in that day shall ye say, Give thanks unto the Lord, call upon His name,
declare His doings among the peoples,
make mention that His name is exalted.
I would like to add just a couple of verses from the New Testament to these verses in Isaiah: Romans Chapter 1, verses 16 and 17.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth;
to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.
For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith:
as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith.
J. N. Darby puts it: “The just shall live on the principle of faith.”
Beloved Lord, we are so thankful that we are here this morning together, that we have been worshipping You and remembering what it cost You to save us. This salvation was no cheap and easy thing for You. Though You were God the Son, it cost everything to the Father, everything to the Son, and everything to the Holy Spirit.
We are the fruit of Your suffering on Calvary. You plumbed the depths for us, and You won us. We are so sorry, Lord, that we sometimes live cheaply, as it were, in a kind of worldly manner, when it cost You everything to save us.
We thank You for Your Word, and we thank You for the anointing that You have already provided for the speaking of Your Word and for the hearing of it. Now, by faith, we stand in that anointing for the speaking and for the hearing.
Lord, will You help me, that it may not just be the human voice, but that beyond the human voice there may be the voice of the Lord? We pray that You will open our ears to hear what the Lord is saying. We ask this in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
I do not have to tell you that we are living in days of growing darkness.
On every side, it is not just economic or financial instability. The climate is being touched by God, so that, for the first time, all kinds of strange things seem to be happening in different parts of the world—not just in the States or in Europe, but all over. It is extraordinary. Of course, it is going to affect the crops and agriculture in many places.
It is a growing darkness. Added to that is the paganisation of the nations. Those nations that once were built upon the principles of God’s Word are literally jettisoning everything that made them great.
It is easier to put a totem pole up here in the United States than a cross—or the tablets of stone upon which were written the Ten Commandments. It is a growing paganisation: same-sex marriages, the rights of gays, and all the other things.
It is not just the United States. In many ways, the United States was the last great bulwark of biblical truth, and it is amazing to me to see the nose-dive that the States is taking.
The tragedy is that, for a large part of the church in North America, there is no repentance and no prayer. It seems as if they themselves are beginning to adjust themselves to the paganisation.
Europe is even worse. I am no supporter, of course, of Catholicism, but Pope John Paul II pleaded with the European Commission that, in their introduction to European civilisation—which actually affects the States as well—they should at least mention that one of its main sources was the gospel and the Bible.
The European Commission answered Pope John Paul with very firm words. They said, “Our source, the source of European civilisation, is not the gospel or the Bible, but Hellenism”—in other words, paganism.
Pope Benedict XVI renewed that call to the European Commission. He said, “At least say that it is a source of European civilisation.” They replied that it is not even a source of European civilisation. That is the extent of the darkness that is coming upon us.
We are meant to be a light shining in the world. An assembly like this is meant to be a place of divine light shining in the midst of the darkness, so that any man or woman who wants to turn to the Lord can at least find an assembly like this, or other assemblies in the United States and in Europe, where they can come to the Lord.
In that great prophecy of Joel about the Pentecostal age in which we are found—it began on that Shavuot, that Pentecost, that Day of Pentecost thousands of years ago in Jerusalem—Joel Chapter 2, from verse 28 to verse 32, makes it quite clear that this is not just a prophecy of what happened on that Pentecostal day.
It speaks of signs in sun, moon, and stars before the end comes. It speaks of pillars of cloud and fire and blood on the earth. Then you have this wonderful word:
Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
In other words, there will be a saving of men and women right through the darkness that is coming upon us.
I do not know how much this registers with you. Some years ago, I think I actually said here that I thought once the enemy could breach the bulwark that was here for biblical truth, it would be a nose-dive that the United States would take.
This is true of all what used to be called the homelands—the missionary homelands. We were very proud of it, were we not all? The United States was a homeland; North America and Canada were homelands. Britain was a homeland. The Netherlands was a homeland. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany were homelands—forgetting Hitler for a moment.
They were homelands out of which the light of God shone all over the world. Today we have an extraordinary situation in which there is more biblical truth in African nations and Asian nations than there is in the so-called homelands. That is what has happened almost unbeknown to the church.
The enemy has worked so incredibly to shift the church from its real foundation, its real basis, to a kind of compromised basis. There has been a blindness, in so many churches, whatever label or name they may be called.
How can anyone call upon the name of the Lord if they have never heard the name of the Lord? Someone said to me the other day that there are young people here in the States who, when the name Jesus is mentioned, say, “Who is Jesus?”
How can anyone be saved unless there is a company like this, or companies like this—people who know the Lord, for whom Jesus is everything? He is the centre and circumference of their life. They live Jesus.
How far off is the advent of the Antichrist?
If I look at the economic mess that is not just in the States and in Europe, but is now affecting India and even China—these growing superpowers—it is part of God’s judgment. The nations that were once made great by God because of their living faith in the Word of God are now being overtaken by new superpowers that are pagan.
How far off is the coming of the end? I do not want to frighten you, demoralise you, or upset you. I know many Christians who do not want to see Antichrist. They particularly want to be raptured before Antichrist appears.
If I read Thessalonians properly, I understand that there will be no rapture until he appears. I believe in the rapture, but I believe in the rapture of those who are ready. Those who are not ready will be purified in the tribulation. They will not lose their salvation, but they will have to choose between the world and the Lord Jesus—by force.
How far off is the advent of the Antichrist? If I look at the economic ruin everywhere, we are being told all the time that just around the corner something better is going to happen. The fact of the matter is that it is a growing recession.
Nobody in Anglo-America, along the whole front—whether it is David Cameron of Britain or your own President Barack Obama—has the answer.
When this brilliant, demonised person appears, he will have the answer, and the whole world will go after him. But he will be no man of faith. He will believe in a kind of paganised society in which Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism will all be mixed together.
How far off are we? I think we are very near to it, because the financial experts of the world are racking their brains as to what can possibly be done. The nations are in such debt that there is no easy answer.
This 2012 has been, for me personally—I do not know about you—a very difficult year.
When one reaches the age that I am—of course, Stephen is; I am a chicken to Stephen—you think that we should retire, that we should be able to take it easy now. It should all be twittering birds, sunsets, sunrises, and all beautiful.
It has not been that for me. This last year has been a terrible year, a nightmare. Then there came into my heart, breathed, I think, by the Holy Spirit, these words:
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.
Now here is something incredible. I should recite it to you in Hebrew, because then you will get what I am trying to explain.
You good Christians of Gentile background know very well that the angel said to Joseph and Mary, “You shall call His name Yeshua—Jesus—for He shall save His people from their sins.” Yeshua means salvation. It is the Hebrew word for salvation.
When you read this in Hebrew, it says, “Behold”—hineh. Come for a moment. Stop for a moment. Come to this point: God is my Yeshua.
Then it goes on: “For the Lord”—and here you have two names of God that you have to be very careful about articulating. One is Yah, and the other is the unmentionable name of the Lord. In Hebrew we say HaShem, “the Name.”
The Lord is my strength and song. Actually, “my” is not in the Hebrew: “strength and song,” as if linking the fact that the Lord has become your strength to the fact that He is also your song. If you are strong in the Lord, you will have a song. You will have a song that bubbles up in your heart at the most extraordinary time, when you least expect it, when the Lord is your strength.
Let me say it again:
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.
In other words, these dear prophetic words of Isaiah are all about Jesus—Jesus, Yeshua. God is my salvation, and He has become my salvation.
Now, does not the Lord know what He is saying? It seems a bit odd. If God is my salvation, then He does not need to become my salvation; He is already my salvation. Here is an amazing process.
First, there is the declaration of living faith. Only a person who has been gifted with living faith can declare this. “By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.” What is the gift of God? Your faith.
Those who have living faith can declare: “God is my salvation in Jesus.” There is no salvation outside of Jesus—none whatsoever. Only in the Lord Jesus is salvation.
There you discover that the Lord—Yah, HaShem, the unmentionable revealed name of God, articulated only three times on the Day of Atonement before the house of Israel—is your strength and song. Otherwise, always, HaShem: “the Name.”
That is what the Lord meant when He taught us in the pattern prayer:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name.
The Lord becomes our strength and song. But more than that, here is the consequence of a declaration of living faith: He becomes my salvation.
So there is a process. The first thing is an initial entrance into the salvation of God. How does that happen? By receiving Jesus. He is the salvation of God. When you receive the Lord Jesus, the salvation of God comes into you.
Then there is a process: “He becomes my salvation.”
Now, again, I do not want to depress you, but how does He become your salvation? I am sorry to tell you: it is nearly always in tribulation, affliction, problems, insoluble problems—all the things that get us down in life.
There we are faced with this: Can we trust the Lord? Can we know Him as our salvation? You know, in Hebrew, Yeshua not only means salvation; it means wholeness. Not only does it mean wholeness; it means deliverance.
When it says, “He has become my salvation,” it means, “He has become my Deliverer.”
That reminds me of a wonderful Scripture in Psalm 68, which the saints in Port Said used to glory in. I could not find it in my old Authorised Version, but they had the American Standard Version:
God is unto us a God of deliverances;
and unto the Lord belongeth escape from death.
I used to hear them say, “Lord, we need escape from death here—in this situation, this and that and the other.”
You see, we are so lazy, are we not? Would it not be lovely if we could just go on with the Lord in a lovely, laid-back way? “Well, I will have my little Bible reading for five minutes in the morning, my little Bible reading for a few minutes, and I think I am going to grow.”
But you do not normally grow just through your little time of prayer. It is often through the problems you have in business life, the problems you have in the home, and the problems you have in the church. That is the way we grow.
Otherwise, how do you need salvation? For some people, salvation is an initial thing that happened ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, forty years ago, fifty years ago, sixty years ago—or one year ago. It is always just somewhere, at some point, “I got saved.”
But to be a living witness of the Lord Jesus, to really know Him, to become an avenue—a means through which He can speak to other people, reach other people, and impact other people—you have to have these experiences in which you discover that He is your deliverance. He is your salvation.
Each time that happens, there is something more of the Lord Jesus in your life, never to be taken away.
You know that rather dismal little book in the Old Testament—which I think is a wonderful book, though for many people it is dreadfully dismal—Ecclesiastes:
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Well, Solomon should have known. I mean, he had eight hundred wives, he built these great parks, and I do not know what else he did. He did everything that anyone could do. It was glorious.
But when he wrote it, he said, “When I sum it all up, it is vanity.” The Hebrew word for vanity is simply vapour, mist—something you cannot get hold of. It never lasts.
Life without the Lord Jesus is a mist.
Nothing eternal is ever happening in our lives until the Lord gets hold of us. When the Lord becomes our strength and song, somehow we are in a process—a consequential process consequent upon “God is my salvation.”
Did not Paul say a wonderful thing when he said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth—to the Jew first,” which is often forgotten, “and then to the Gentile”?
If we get the order right, we find that we are in a blessing. Anti-Semitism is a problem in the church. But now, to come back to this, listen to what he said: “As it is written.” This is something from faith to faith. Nothing is apart from faith.
Living faith is not something merely to convert you. Living faith makes you a disciple.
There is a huge difference between a convert and a disciple. A convert is there for what he gets, what she gets. It is all, “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” The Lord is there; He clears up my messes. He stands behind me. I do the work; He is behind me.
But a disciple—ah, the Lord Jesus is Lord. That is the difference. He is Lord. Your will has been surrendered to Him.
The problem, as C. T. Studd used to say, is always to do with the human will. That is our biggest problem: to surrender our will to the Lord.
But this gospel is from faith to faith, which means that every single new step forward, every new advance, is by faith. Like the living faith that brought you into the salvation of God, every single step you take forward is by living faith.
Then there is this wonderful word: “The righteous.” Well, are you righteous? Am I righteous? Let us be honest. There is an awful lot of self-righteousness amongst Christians.
The only righteousness I know is the Lord Jesus: that He died for me, and that God the Father declared me justified. As the old saints used to say, “Just as if you never sinned.” That is the only righteousness you and I have.
Now think for a moment: the justified shall live on the principle of faith.
Now, the Lord can put you to the test on this. Going back to that pattern prayer the Lord taught us, do you realise how we end?
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
What did He mean? Does God tempt us? The Greek word means testing. “Lead me not into testing, but deliver me from the evil one.” Why the evil one? Because the evil one is the one God uses to test us.
C. T. Studd was always upsetting people. He was always upsetting Christians in Britain. I always remember his little ditties. He said:
Backward, Christian soldiers,
backward marching as to war,
with the Cross of Jesus
neatly hidden from before.
That absolutely shocked the Christian world. They thought it was disgraceful.
Then he wrote another little thing:
Some Christians want to live within the sound of chapel bell;
I’d rather run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.
That was C. T. Studd. You have it here: live on the principle of faith. C. T. once said something else that upset the evangelical world: “Satan is God’s greatest servant,” because, he said, God is always using him.
Everything Satan does, God turns to blessing—to a fresh discovery of the Lord Jesus. Have you ever found that?
You are in a terrible darkness or an insoluble problem. You do not know what to do. You are tempted to despair, tempted to unbelief, tempted to give up. Then into your heart is born living faith, and you trust the Lord:
I will trust, and not be afraid.
It is marvellous when you think about it.
So the Lord taught us to pray, “Lead us not into testing, but deliver us from the evil one,” because he is the one who tests us.
I always love what the Apostle Peter said in his first letter: “The testing of your faith.” Actually, it is more the proving of your faith. It is more positive than negative. God never tests what He knows is not there.
In other words, when He tests your faith, He knows you have faith. When you are in a terrible problem and you trust the Lord and are not afraid, you come through with something more of the Lord than you had before.
As it says in Ecclesiastes:
Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever.
When the Lord brings you through that problem, difficulty, or affliction, you have something that can never be taken away—not in the whole of eternity. It is something God has done in your heart, and it is there forever. It is the work of God’s salvation. It is the work of Yeshua—Jesus.
You know, the Lord is training us for something. I know we sometimes say that just to try to help ourselves, but He is preparing us for something. What a ridiculous thing this little life is!
I heard a little while ago that Billy Graham was asked in a television interview, when he was ninety, “Have you anything to say about your life?” He said, “Yes: its brevity.”
It is absolutely true. You young people, listen to me. You will discover, if the Lord gives you grace, that before you know where you are, you are seventy, eighty. All these things you said you were going to do with the Lord—you were going to put this right, that right, the other thing right; you were going to sacrifice this; you were going to follow the Lord in that—you never did.
Suddenly you are seventy. You can hardly see; you have to wear glasses. You have hearing aids in both ears. You totter around; you have to have a stick. Poor old thing! Why did you not listen to the Lord when you were young? Why did you not let the Lord do the work in you when you were young?
Then you will stand in whatever lies ahead for us.
Well, folks, I hope I have not bored you, but, “I will trust, and not be afraid.” What a wonderful little word that is. It comes to me again and again when all these problems confront us: “I will trust, and not be afraid.”
Remember the word given to me on the day I was saved, when I was thirteen years of age—twelve and a half, thirteen:
The Lord, He it is that doth go before thee;
He will be with thee,
He will not fail thee, neither forsake thee:
fear not, neither be dismayed.
How faithful the Lord is if we live on the principle of faith. If we live on the principle of emotional feeling or circumstance, we fail. But if we live on the principle of faith, we will come through. It is the path of the overcomer.
I must finish, but there is a little bit more to say on this. I think of the Scripture in Philippians. Let me read it to you: Philippians Chapter 2, verse 12.
So then, my beloved, even as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only,
but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;
for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for His good pleasure.
I find this little statement the most extraordinary thing in the Bible: “Work out your own salvation.” It is almost as if God is saying, “Well, you have got to work it out.” But we know we cannot save ourselves, so what does He mean?
He means: work out the salvation that is in Jesus. Do not let the enemy get you down into unbelief. Work out your own salvation.
I like that phrase, “your own salvation.” It means that it is, in one sense, tailor-made to the conditions of your life. You may have problems that I have not got. You may have grandparents or great-grandparents; you may have inherited things that I have not got. Or I may have such things that you have not got. You understand what I mean?
But this salvation is incredible. It does not matter who you are: work it out. “Oh,” you say, “the Holy Spirit has to do that.” Well, the problem is, the Holy Spirit will not do anything without you. God does not believe in passivity.
You cannot just sit there like a lump and wait for Him to carry you the whole way. It will never happen. You have to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Listen:
For it is God who worketh in you
both to will and to work.
What an extraordinary word. Once you begin to work out your own salvation—how it applies to you, how you can experience it in your circumstances—you will discover that the Lord is working in you, not only to work, but to will and to work.
Now, some of us have a real problem with the will. We are often so unwilling about things. But as we work out our salvation, it is God who works in us both to will and to work.
You have heard this before, but let me say it very clearly: if you do not work out your salvation, God will not work anything in you. You will be one of those wonderful lumps we have in Christian circles, who are precisely the same twenty years later, forty years later, until they finally go to be with the Lord.
They never touched what God gave them—never, never. They buried it. Remember the parable.
I will say one more thing about working out salvation. I am a great moaner. I often think the Lord must say, “What a moaner!”
I am always saying, “Lord, help me, help me, help me. I cannot stand up. I cannot face this. Help me.” I feel the Lord sometimes says, “You are such a moaner. Always you say, ‘Help me, help me,’ as if the Lord were some kind of charlady who cleans up things and helps—the lady who cleans the house, sort of thing.”
Then I came across this verse of the Apostle Paul:
I have learned how to be abased, and I know also how to abound.
In everything and in all things have I learned the secret both to be filled and to be hungry,
both to abound and to be in want.
I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.
Ah, it works. That is all I can tell you: it works. Stop saying, “Help, help, help,” and say, “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.”
I find it in the most extraordinary things now as I get older: getting into a bath and getting out of a bath, especially when it has a high side. I have heard of so many people who fall over and break legs and arms and I do not know what else. So when I go, I say, “I can do all things in Him.” Would you believe that you can use the Scripture to get into a bath and out of a bath? But I do.
Again, when I get a woozy feeling and my head is all over the place and I am likely to fall down, I say, “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.” Every now and then I go back to “Help me, help me, help me,” and then the Lord brings me back to this: “I can do all things.” It works.
Why does it work? Because it is the expression of living faith. When you are saying, “Help me,” it may not be faith. But when you say, “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me,” that is a position of faith.
Here is the last little thing. I have just a few minutes before we must finish—not that anyone has given me a time, but I can see that they are going to go to sleep.
Here it is:
Therefore with joy shall ye draw water
out of the wells of salvation.
Now, this word “salvation” in Hebrew is Yeshua. The same thing again. Where are these wells? They are in Him. He is the source of everything.
The biggest problem we Christians have is that we find sources outside of Jesus—whether psychology, psychiatry, human philosophy, wisdom, or whatever it is. We find things somehow outside of the Lord Jesus, and those things can be our undoing, because the enemy compromises us.
Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones used to say—I knew him as a boy, and even later on he always kept in touch with us and was always like a father in the Lord—“Always take note of very small words in the Bible: therefore, wherefore, but, and so on.”
Here you have “therefore.” How can you draw water out of the wells of salvation unless God is your salvation and unless He is becoming your salvation? Then you have a living union with the Lord, a working union with the Lord—not just words. It is actual fact; it is factual.
Water is life. Here you have water everywhere. I am always amazed in America. Everywhere I go, I go over rivers, and I say to people, “What is the name of this river?” They do not even know it. Huge rivers.
When I think of the poor little River Jordan—it is a little sort of stream, really—and the River Thames, which everyone has been talking about since the Queen’s Jubilee, I mean, really, it is just a little stream, a little river. When I come here, I go over rivers that are huge, like the James. You have bigger rivers than that. I ask, “What is the name of this river?” They cannot even tell me.
Rivers mean life. Water is life. When you draw water out of the wells of salvation, you are able to live. You are able to function.
These wells of salvation are in Jesus. When was the last time the Lord Jesus spoke to you? When was the last time He unveiled something in His Word to you?
When you know the Lord is your salvation and the process is there, He will talk with you.
People sometimes say to me, “You should never expect the Lord to speak to you. That is excitable Pentecostalism. Do you really expect the Lord to speak to you? It is all in the Book.”
Then it can just become dusty old theology. Theology is important, but what does it do with your life? When the Lord Jesus speaks to you, what did He say?
My sheep hear My voice,
and I know them,
and they follow Me.
If you do not hear the Lord’s voice, how can you follow Him? It is tremendous to really know the Lord.
Whatever faces us in these next years, the greatest need for you and me, as those who have been born of God, is that we should know God as our salvation. We should know God in Jesus, and we should learn how He can become our salvation.
That is a process. It means you grow. You grow up. You go through kindergarten, into childhood, into teenage years, and into adulthood. You grow.
There is no reason why you and I should not go on in this gathering darkness. The Lord is in it. His Word is the same. He is on the throne, not Satan.
There is absolutely no reason at all that we should fail or be defeated. God has done everything necessary to take us from our birth to our glorification.
May the Lord use this simple little word in each one of our hearts. Shall we pray?
Beloved Lord, we pray that every one of us may know You in a living way as the God of our salvation. Help us, Lord, in all the problems we face, to be able to say, “We will trust the Lord and not be afraid.”
Become our salvation, Lord. We pray that we may discover Jesus in a new, deeper, and more living way than we have ever known Him before, that we may be living witnesses to the Lord Jesus.
After all, He said to us:
Ye shall be witnesses unto Me.
We pray that You will make us witnesses—living witnesses—to the salvation of God in the Lord Jesus, and to the calling to be His body, His house. May it be so. We ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.