Would you turn with me to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12? I am going to read from verse 28.
And one of the scribes came, and heard them questioning together, and knowing that He had answered them well, asked Him, What commandment is the first of all?
Jesus answered, The first is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God, the Lord is one:
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.
The second is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
And the scribe said unto Him, Of a truth, Teacher, Thou hast well said that He is one; and there is none other but He:
and to love Him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbor as himself, is much more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.
And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, He said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.
Then I would like to add to that from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10. I am going to read from verse 29.
But he, desiring to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor?
Jesus made answer and said, A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho; and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
And by chance a certain priest was going down that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
And in like manner a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he was moved with compassion,
and came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on them oil and wine; and he set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
And on the morrow he took out two shillings, and gave them to the host, and said, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, I, when I come back again, will repay thee.
Which of these three, thinkest thou, proved neighbor unto him that fell among the robbers?
And he said, He that showed mercy on him. And Jesus said unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.
And lastly, I want to read in the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Philippians, Philippians chapter 2, from verse 1.
If there is therefore any exhortation in Christ, if any consolation of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any tender mercies and compassion,
make full my joy, that ye be of the same mind, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind;
doing nothing through faction or through vainglory, but in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself;
not looking each of you to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others.
Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men;
and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.
Wherefore also God highly exalted Him, and gave unto Him the name which is above every name;
that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth,
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Just a word of prayer.
Beloved Lord, You see we are all gathered here this morning in Your presence. We have been worshipping You. Lord, our prayer now is that You will meet with us. You alone can touch our hearts. Lord, reach us. We have heard a lot in these days.
Lord, this morning we pray that You will take this matter of the character of the kingdom and reach our hearts. Where we fall short, we pray, Lord, speak to us.
We thank You, dear Lord, that there is an anointing both for the speaking, for the translating, and for the hearing. We stand into that anointing, grace, and power which our Lord Jesus, You Yourself won for us at Calvary.
Let it be a reality for us this morning: I speaking, those who translate into Portuguese or Chinese, and all of us in our hearing. And we shall be careful to give You all the praise and all the worship of our hearts for answering this our prayer, which we ask in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, as I think you all know by now, my part in this conference has been the character of the kingdom. We have repeatedly said—not I only, but also the others who have ministered to us—the character of the King is the character of the kingdom.
There are many other characteristics I ought to talk about, but we have not time for that. We would be here all day and all tomorrow if we were to cover all the characteristics of the kingdom. But I want to take three more essential characteristics:
May the Lord help us as we consider these.
It is very interesting: in Colossians 1:13 it says that He has delivered us from the power, or domain, of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of His love. Did you hear that? We have been delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the Son of His love.
The Lord Jesus is supremely the King of love. You would not be here this morning but for that love of God the Father, that love of God the Son, and that love of the Holy Spirit, combining together to bring you into the salvation of God.
How incredible it is that Jesus loves me, and that Jesus loves you. I do not know about you, but I am amazed every time I think about it. Why should the Lord love me? He could do much better without me. I am a moaner, a troubler. I am all the time going to the Lord and bothering Him, sometimes with the most ridiculous things, when He has so many other things to bother about.
But Charles Wesley wrote a number of hymns in which he used the phrase, “Jesu, Lover of My Soul.” Why does the Lord persevere with us? Why did He persevere with a fallen race? Why did He persevere with Adam and Eve when they fell and brought into our constitution not only sin, but a rampant self-life?
Why did He persevere? It was the love of God—inexplicable. Inexplicable—underline it—the love of God.
Of course, maybe you think you are the sweetest, most modest, dearest little thing that ever walked on the face of this earth, and the Lord nearly fell over Himself because you were so beautiful, so loving, and so pure. It was not so.
As far as God is concerned, you are ugly, immodest, self-centred, and sinful. But He never gave up on you. This kingdom of God is a kingdom of inexplicable love.
This love gives rise to all the mercies of God. This love gives rise to the compassion of God. This love gives rise to the faithfulness of God. This kingdom is nothing if it is not a kingdom of divine love.
It began in the heart of God, in the love of God. It was won through the love of the Son, and it has been the Holy Spirit who has managed and supervised it all.
I cannot think of the word—supervisor. Thank you. She is not only eligible for marriage; she is very helpful at times. When I lose a word, she finds it for me.
The Holy Spirit is the manager and supervisor. This whole earth was created through the Son and for the Son, and in Him the whole creation holds together.
But you will remember that in the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis, it was the Holy Spirit who hovered upon the wreckage, upon the voidness, the emptiness, and the darkness. It was the Holy Spirit who brought everything into being.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: all through the old covenant, it was the Holy Spirit who managed and supervised the purpose of God—the purpose of God in the Lord Jesus and for the Lord Jesus. He filled the tabernacle with the glory of God. He filled the temple with the glory of God. He came upon prophet, patriarch, and king to speak His word. But He never abode in any of them. He used them.
It was the Holy Spirit who conceived the Lord Jesus in the womb of Mary. It was the Holy Spirit who came upon the Lord Jesus as a dove at His baptism and remained upon Him. The dove was a picture of sacrifice—two turtle doves, the most common form of sacrifice among the Jewish people.
John got the meaning. He said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.”
It was the Holy Spirit who enabled Jesus on the cross to offer Himself up without blemish for your sin and for my sin. It was the Holy Spirit who raised Him on the third day from the dead. And it was that Holy Spirit whom the ascended, risen, glorified Messiah poured out on that first day of Shavuot—Pentecost.
Well, all I am trying to say to you is this: it is the Holy Spirit who fans the love of God in our hearts. It is the Holy Spirit who is a fire in our bones. Where there is no fire, where there is no passion, there is also no determination to go through with the Lord.
This love of the King is the beginning of the kingdom and the end.
He was a clever scribe who had noticed Jesus. He was in the crowd. He watched Him. He thought, “He is answering incredibly well.” And he asked Him this question: “What is the greatest commandment?”
Now, we who are Jews know very well that there are hundreds of commandments, and you have to keep them all if you are going to be saved. Six hundred, I believe, by rabbinical counting—perhaps 684, if I am exactly right. He said to the Lord Jesus, “What is the greatest?”
Jesus answered him with what we call the Shema. It is on the lips of an orthodox Jew every day:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one:
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind,
and with all thy strength.
You cannot get out of that. It is tremendous. Love requires love.
Why the Lord ever loved Israel, I will never understand. Probably many of you have had the same query: why did He love them? It says in the book of Deuteronomy—Moses said, by revelation, I think—that the Lord chose them from among all the peoples of the world, not because they were great, wealthy, or powerful, but because He loved them.
That is why the Lord chose you: because He loved you. Do not ask me to explain love. Sometimes I see people falling in love with each other, and I wonder, “What in the world does so-and-so see in her?” Or, “What does she see in him?” Of course, now and again I can see what they see in each other. But I wonder.
Love is an extraordinary thing. You cannot put it under a magnifying glass or dissect it. God loves because He loves.
Then the Lord Jesus added something which is not in the Shema. He said, “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Actually, that is a commandment in Leviticus. Jesus brought the two together.
You love the Lord with everything in your being, and you love your neighbour as yourself. Well, we all love ourselves. That is why we preserve ourselves. That is why we build ourselves up. It is why we have half the problems in the church: too many people love themselves.
They love themselves so much that if they feel slighted, or their reputation tarnished by somebody else, or by gossip or backbiting, they get all bitter and twisted. We all love ourselves.
I think the Lord was an amazing psychologist. It is incredible that He did not merely say, “You shall love your neighbour.” He said, “You shall love your neighbour as you love yourself.” That is a quality in the kingdom of God.
Wherever you look, you find this love for the Lord and this love for your neighbour. Now, we ask the same question the scribe asked, which is recorded in Luke’s Gospel: “Who is my neighbour?” He said it because he thought the Lord was going to have difficulty answering this one.
And then Jesus told a story. A certain man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, which is four thousand feet below Jerusalem. On the way, he fell among robbers. They left him for dead. They stole everything he had, including the animal he was riding on, and left him bleeding and dying.
A certain priest came by, and when he saw him, he shuddered and moved further away, passed round, and went on his journey. Then the Levite came. He saw the dying man and went round him. He would not touch anyone—you do not know, you could become unclean. Then you would need a Jewish baptism, a mikveh, to restore your purity.
Why be bothered with looking after him? He is dying anyway. Lots of people die anyway, so what is the problem?
Then only Jesus could have said it: He took the people most despised in the whole of Israel—a Samaritan.
He said that when the Samaritan saw the man in a terrible condition, he got off his horse or donkey, went across, and tried to comfort him. He washed his wounds, set him on his own donkey or mule, and, with his arm around him so he would not fall off, helped him to the inn.
He cared for him a whole night. Apparently, he slept in the same room. The next day he said to the innkeeper, “Here is the money to look after him until he is well. When I next come, I will settle up if there is any more to pay.”
And Jesus said, “What do you think? Of these three, who do you think was the neighbour?” The scribe said, “The Samaritan.” It took something for the scribe to say it—to articulate it. And Jesus said, “You are right. Go thou, and do likewise.”
In other words, the love of God has to have an expression. Now, is it not amazing? We find it hard enough sometimes to love one another, but here we are to love the world—the unsaved people in the world, the people who are dying all around us, the people who are in pain, sorrow, bereavement, and crushing circumstances. These are our neighbours.
Can I go further? I have been in places where there were enormous mounds of rubbish that stank to high heaven, and thousands of people living in the rubbish.
I have never been able to understand how believers can meet together around the Lord’s table and worship the Lord, yet never visit those people once. No outreach, no concern, nothing. But according to the Lord Jesus, they are the neighbour we should love.
Whatever is wrong with us that we think we are pleasing the Lord and loving the Lord when we are huddled around some doctrine? Do we really believe that this satisfies the Lord?
If you look at the history of the church, you will see that every single time the Lord has launched an initiative to bring the people of God back to the centre of His will, it has included an enormous impact upon the unsaved—the most derelict, the most hopeless, the poorest, and the most uneducated.
Look everywhere: you will find this truth written. The moment the church has lost its goal and started to degenerate into religion, there has been no concern for the lost. This is the character of the kingdom.
I could say very much more, but I do not want to go on and on and on. I must leave it to the Holy Spirit to speak to us.
But Jesus said in John 15:9, I think, “Abide in My love.” That love that brought you to salvation—abide in it.
If you abide in that love, it will not be long before you are concerned for those who do not know the Lord. It is not for every child of God to go to the ends of the earth, but we can make a trip across the road to someone unsaved and in terrible need. We can pray for them. We can love them. We can show our love in simple ways.
You know, I must go on to the second point, but let me just say this. I sometimes hear the most incredible things said about the Pharisees. I mean, I am Jewish, so I know all about Pharisees.
Sometimes the Pharisees are described as hard, religious, heartless people. Do you know how the Pharisees began? Do you know what the word means in Hebrew? It means “Puritan.”
The Pharisees began as a great movement of the Spirit of God in the silent four hundred years. If it had not been for Simon the Just—Simeon ha-Tzaddik—Israel would have been lost. But God raised up this man, and he was the founder of the Puritan party in Israel.
Now, of course, a hundred years later it had become a question of little, tiny matters: where you sat, how you sat in the synagogue, how you dressed, whether you fasted properly, whether you kept the kosher law. Jesus said they worried their heads about the smallest little thing and swallowed a camel.
This Phariseeism you will find in every single age of the church, all the way through it. It gave rise in Norway to a saying: “It is easier to wear black stockings than to have a pure heart.” In other words, you can look godly and dress godly, yet not have a pure heart.
Oh, how we should seek the Lord for a new baptism of love. What did Jesus say to the best church—the church that got nearest to the heart of God in the New Testament, the church in Ephesus? He said, “I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love.”
Then He did not say, “Wake up.” He said, “Repent, or else I will come to thee and remove thy lampstand.” It is precisely what happened with the church at Ephesus. It is the story of the church. Again and again, the Lord has had to move the lampstand, and it all began with losing first love.
First love is not puppy love, as I have often said, I think, to you. It is that love you had at the beginning when you first met the person you loved. You could go miles to see them and never complain. You never came twenty miles and said, “I hope you realise I have come twenty miles to see you.”
It meant nothing to travel twenty miles. It meant nothing to do a lot of other things. That is first love. Nothing is too laborious. Nothing is too difficult. Love makes it easy.
The duties you have to perform, when they are done in love, are done with a song in the heart. But when the first love has gone, all we can think about is how difficult it is to serve the Lord, how difficult it is to build up the church, and how difficult it is to contribute anything. The love has gone.
Well, let me move on. I want to speak about a spirit of compassion.
Is that not interesting? To love thy neighbour as thyself. Can you believe that a priest went by without any compassion whatsoever? Can you believe that a Levite went by without any compassion whatsoever—only concerned about being religiously clean?
Compassion. Jeremiah said:
It is of the Lord’s lovingkindnesses that we are not consumed,
because His compassions fail not.
They are new every morning;
great is Thy faithfulness.
Dear child of God, if these compassions are in the King, what about us? Have we got compassion in our hearts? Are we touched by the problems of those who do not know the Lord? Think. This is a tremendous matter.
I do not know how best to put it. I will try to put it like this: my beloved Lord, your beloved Lord, was filled with compassion.
Let me tell you just one or two things. That is all I can do. Do you remember that leper? That poor man, who through no fault of his own had contracted leprosy? At that point, he was thrown out of his home and family, segregated from all society.
I live in a place in Jerusalem on the slopes of the Valley of Hinnom, from which you get Gehenna—the Valley of Hinnom, hell. It was the place of prostitutes, social outcasts, and lepers.
I often think, how many times did Jesus walk that valley? Those lepers who came to Him could not have come to Him in normal society, when He was in the city or in the temple. No, no, no: no leper was allowed within the gate.
So did He go down into where all the rubbish was poured, stinking? Did He go looking for lepers? I do not know. But this man was a leper. He had been thrown out of his home and probably out of his job, even if he had once had high standing.
No one ever touched him again from the moment he contracted leprosy. Then Jesus met him, and this is what the record says: “If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean.” And Jesus touched him, and he was healed.
Now, the word of God is very clear about leprosy: we should not touch it, lest we contract it. But the Lord Jesus, moved with compassion, touched that leper. It was the first time someone had touched him in all the years he had been a leper.
What about the woman who came into the Pharisee’s house and anointed the Lord Jesus with her tears and wiped His feet with her hair? The Pharisee, the host of the home, said, “How can this man be a prophet if He allows a prostitute to touch Him?”
He had not kissed Jesus because he did not want to contract any defilement. He could not understand this woman of the street. But somehow she had heard Jesus, and it touched her. She was saved.
The Pharisees said that the trouble with the Lord Jesus was that He drank with publicans and sinners. I always think that shows a side of Jesus which we as Christians often like to forget.
There was something so wonderful about Jesus that the world could sit with Him. I know many Christians whom the world flees from. They would not speak to them. No sinner would ever come near that person, and some people think that is very good. “That is what it should be like. You are so pure, so holy, that you put fear into the hearts of sinners.”
Not Jesus. They sat with Him, and the Pharisees said, “It is disgusting. How can He be a prophet and sit with all these people, laughing and joking with them?”
When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. He knew very well He was going to raise him from the dead, so why did He weep? He wept because of the misery of all those related to Lazarus—the whole misery of death. It so touched Jesus that He wept. Or do you, dear Christian, think He was being theatrical and putting out a few tears so that everyone would remember the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept”?
But when Jesus saw Jerusalem on another occasion, He said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thee, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” And He wept.
If there were a little more weeping on the part of believers for the world of sin in which we live, maybe something more would happen.
You know, the Lord did some amazing things in the history of the church through the initiatives He launched. I think of the Quakers, so despised. Of course, modern-day Quakers bear no resemblance to the Quakers of George Fox and others like him.
At one time, two-thirds of the Quaker preachers in Britain were in prison. What did they do? They lived the gospel in prison, preached the gospel in prison, and led hundreds of criminals to the Lord.
Then they did another thing: they started a Bible school in the prison, so that out of the prisons came new preachers and teachers. The Quakers were filled with compassion.
Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, was a Quaker. She went and saw with her own eyes the terrible way soldiers were left dying. As a believer, she could not bear it. Her compassion consumed her, and she started nursing.
It was the Quakers who finally managed to get the prisons reformed from being death holes. Compassion.
It was Wesley who preached to the miners. He was like the offscouring as far as the church was concerned. “How could you preach in the open air? Disgusting! To preach in the open air—disgusting!”
On one occasion, he stood on his own father’s grave when the vicar turned him and the whole congregation out of the church. He had been preaching from the pulpit, but the vicar did not like what he was saying. The churchwarden put them all out, and Wesley stood on his father’s grave and said, “This is family property. Nobody can push me from here.” Thus began the open-air preaching of John Wesley and the other great preachers.
On one occasion, Wesley preached to miners. You know, they were thought to be subhuman by society in Britain. They were nearly always covered in grime, uneducated, living in holes under the earth, digging out coal.
When Wesley preached on one occasion to over three thousand miners, he was tempted to think, “Nothing is happening. I had better shut up.” But he went on, and then he saw an extraordinary thing.
Suddenly, he saw that all the faces were black and white. He wondered what it was. Was he ill? Was he seeing some strange thing? But it was the grime of the miners, marked by the tears running down their faces.
It is generally thought by historians today that if it had not been for the first great evangelical awakening in Britain, the French Revolution would have come to Britain. But it was the saving of people like miners—uneducated, offscouring of the world, looked upon as hardly having souls.
Charles Wesley wrote those wonderful hymns, and they learned them by rote—sentence after sentence, then sang the whole sentence, then went on to the next line—to get the word of God into them. It changed the face of Britain. I can go on and on. I mean—compassion.
I saw it myself. I have mentioned the Moravians, but I saw the Moravian spirit of compassion with my own eyes.
Gladys Roberts, who had been with the Husseini household through the war years, was living in Ramallah. She said to me, “Lance, there are three old missionaries who live on a mountain a little way from Ramallah. They would love to see you. It would be such a blessing if you could find time to go to them.”
So I made a little time. I did not think about it in any particular way. I was going to be in Ramallah, so why not go? They put me in a car. I had seen this little cluster of white houses on the mountainside a number of times. I was not prepared for what I felt.
I found a little leper colony, and three eighty-year-old sisters, cut off from their home in Moravia by the Iron Curtain and cut off from their sources of supply, as well as prayer.
Three old eighty-year-old sisters had a whole little group of lepers. They carried them to the bathroom, washed them, dried them, and brought them back. They fed them because they had no hands. In some cases, they had no noses. Their ears had fallen off.
I could not believe it. They treated those lepers as if they were the Lord Jesus. They loved them. They cared for them. And I felt as if Jesus Himself was present.
This compassion—I could not believe that hundreds of years after the great Moravian revival, there were still Moravians with that spirit of love and compassion.
I think of Lord Shaftesbury, a British aristocrat, who was so filled with compassion for the little boys sent up chimneys to clean them, who often died from infection.
They were bought from poor families. No one cared for them. They were uneducated and unsophisticated—little boys this high, who could climb with the help of an adult up into the chimney and clean it.
It was Lord Shaftesbury, of the Brethren, who introduced a law to the Houses of Parliament that no child could be used again for chimney sweeping. Compassion.
What more can I say on this? I think we lack it so much.
I remember the story of the Salvation Army. Now, I am not very keen on brass bands and all that kind of thing, so I never had much time for the Salvation Army. But I discovered the most amazing thing: William and Catherine Booth were Methodists.
They were so filled with the love of God and the compassion of God that they tried to bring people into the Methodist Church. The Methodist Church had been born, as I have already described, through these miners and so many other uneducated people. The saving of these people was the beginning of the great evangelical awakening.
But now, a couple of hundred years had passed by, and Methodism had become very respectable. They had family pews and comfortable, padded seats. Into their midst William Booth would bring bums, tramps, and derelicts.
It caused a terrible fuss, because people said, “Maybe they have fleas. Maybe they have bugs. What else is he bringing into the church? Disgusting!”
It got to such a pitch that it went to the conference of Methodist ministers. William Booth and Catherine were asked to present themselves. They heard the whole discussion, minister after minister saying it was disgraceful, that they were disturbing the church and causing great problems.
William Booth heard it and thought to himself, “What a terrible thing. I am dividing the church.” So he put forward an idea—a compromise—that would have meant no more derelicts, tramps, and bums being brought in.
But it did not look as though it was going to work. Then Catherine, God bless her—these ladies are sometimes incredible when the Spirit of God gets into them—stood up in the gallery and said only one word: “William.”
William Booth shook himself and said, “Everything is okay. I will withdraw.” Thus began the Salvation Army.
The last martyrs in Britain were in 1916. Three Salvation Army lasses were lynched and murdered by a drunken mob in Kent.
Is there more? I think of C. T. Studd, who was always writing things to upset everybody. He wrote this dreadful ditty:
Some like to live within the sound
of chapel chime and bell;
I’d rather run a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.
That was C. T. Studd on this matter of compassion.
Let me tell you a story. I must watch myself on time. It has to do with Lady Ogle. It was a great blessing for me ever to have got to know Lady Ogle.
I remember a story she told me which, at the beginning, I found very funny, but which ended with me deeply moved.
She applied to be a missionary with the Egypt General Mission. Lady Ogle was incredibly wealthy, and the board of the mission met her, all in bow ties and stiff collars, and questioned her. She answered very well.
Then one of them said, “Do you love the Egyptians?” She startled the whole board by saying, “No, I do not.”
There was consternation. Another one said, “But pray tell, how can you be going to Egypt when you do not love them?” Lady Ogle said, “Well, I do not love them, but I believe God will give me love for them if I obey His call.”
Well, of course, I am not being mean, but the fact that she had a colossal amount of money, and that could mean help for the mission, meant that they passed her. She was in.
She went to Egypt and said, “The more I saw of Egypt, the more I could not love them.” The condition of the women, the way they were treated, the unhygienic levels of their lives—it appalled her.
One day she was in the mission station in a place called Bilbeis, a walled city in the Nile Delta. The doctor missionary said, “Sister, you must come with me. We have just had news that Mrs. So-and-so has collapsed at the city gate. I need you to hold her. I shall have to give her an injection.”
On the way there, as quickly as they could go, the other missionary doctor said, “This lady is a prostitute. She will be in a terrible condition. You will need to hold her shoulders while I inject her.”
They came and found her lying by the wall on the side of the gate. The doctor said to Lady Ogle, “Sister, hold her, because she will be terrified by the injection.”
Lady Ogle knelt down and held her shoulders. The smell and stench that came up from this poor soul made Lady Ogle want to vomit. She felt sick, and in her heart she said, “Lord”—she never said it out loud—“how can You love these people, that they could get into such a state through sin?”
And the Lord said to her, “Kiss her.”
Lady Ogle bent over and kissed the woman on the forehead. In that moment, her heart was flooded with love for the Egyptian people. Compassion.
Well, I must finish. What about humility? Yes, what about it? It is the missing quality. Do you know anybody who is really humble?
I read that passage in Philippians: “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who did not think being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled Himself and became a bondservant. Then He humbled Himself further, to the death of the cross.”
The last characteristic of the kingdom is humility, and it is the least-found quality among believers.
Is it not interesting that when the Lord speaks to us about this matter, He says, “Humble yourselves”? But we sort of say, “How can I humble myself?” Yet the Lord says, “Humble yourselves, and ye shall be exalted.”
We can give ourselves all kinds of airs and graces, but it does not mean much. It is when we know that we are sinners saved by grace that, for the first time, humility comes into our being.
There is a colossal amount of self-righteousness with Christians. I grew up in a church which believed in separation from the world. This meant no cosmetics, no lipstick, no sport, no opera, no theatre, no television, no smoking, and, of course, no alcohol.
In that fellowship, I saw more of the world than I saw in the world: bitterness with one another, jealousies, backbiting, gossip. It was the world. The bottom fell out of my Christian life as a result of it.
I was so horrified. When I first saw these shining faces singing wonderful Wesleyan hymns and others, I used to think, “Oh, how wonderful. All these saved people, changed by the Spirit of God.” But I found out that their shining faces were only when they were singing.
When it came to it, they had ding-dong battles with one another. Some of them were so separated from the world that they did not even know what cigarette smoke smelled like. Now, I am not advocating smoking cigarettes.
But is there not something strange if we are so separated from the world that we cannot touch the world or move among worldly people?
Humility is to know that you are a sinner saved by God. How did the Lord receive you? He received you as a sinner with no hope. That is how we are to receive one another.
Well, I find this question of humility tremendous. It seems that as soon as we get a position in the church, a ministry, or any sort of responsibility, immediately we begin to preen ourselves and say, “You know, I am something. I have arrived.”
Humility is when you know that it is the Lord who is gifting you, and the Lord who is enabling you. Then you will say, “I am just a vessel.” He has called me, and He will be the grace and the power for the fulfilment of whatever is my responsibility.
Dear child of God, there is a “wherefore” in that passage I read in Philippians. He humbled Himself to death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore also God highly exalted Him and gave Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue should confess.
This is the character of the kingdom: we have to go down to go up. The more we go down, the more the Lord can take us up.
May the Lord speak to our hearts about this character of the kingdom into which, by His grace, He has brought us. May it be so with every one of us.
Let us pray. Beloved Lord, blot out anything that should not have been said, and keep within our hearts everything that You have said. Grant, Lord, that we shall be those who serve You in love, with compassion and humility.
We ask it in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.