Will you turn with me to Isaiah, chapter 40? I am going to read from verse 6.
The voice of one saying, Cry.
And one said, What shall I cry?
All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the breath of the Lord bloweth upon it;
Surely the people is grass.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand forever.
Then I would like to read in the first letter of Peter, chapter 1, verse 23.
Having been begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth.
For, All flesh is as grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower falleth:
But the word of the Lord abideth forever.
And this is the word of good tidings which was preached unto you.
To that, another verse in Hebrews, chapter 4, from verse 12.
For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
And there is no creature that is not manifest in His sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do.
Lastly, in Revelation, chapter 1, verses 8 and 9.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, Who is and Who was and Who is to come, the Almighty.
I John, your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience which are in Jesus, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
We just have a word of prayer.
Beloved Lord, we want to thank You this evening that You are here in our midst. We have been worshiping You together. We thank You for this sense of Your presence.
And now we come to the ministry of Your Word, Lord, and we know that without You we can do nothing, neither in the speaking of Your Word nor in the hearing of it.
But You have provided us with an anointing, and we ask for a double portion of that anointing for the speaking of Your Word and for the hearing of it.
Lord, that in some wonderful way You will touch our hearts as we consider being prepared for the coming of the Lord. Hear our prayer and answer it.
We ask it in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, as you well know, the theme of this conference is those words of our Lord Jesus in Revelation 22, where He says, “I come quickly.”
And my responsibility is in Revelation 22:17: “Let him that heareth say, Come. Lord Jesus.”
I want to speak particularly about the Word of God, and the need for us to be prepared by the Spirit of God through the Word of God.
You know, it is an amazing thing that Isaiah said all those thousands of years ago that the Word of the Lord shall stand forever. Everything else passes; everything else fades. But the Word of God is as alive and as powerful, as living and active, as it has ever been.
It is amazing to me, just to consider it. After all, think for a moment. Do you believe in God?
If you believe in the everlasting God—not some figment of your imagination, but you believe in the living God, Who has neither beginning nor end—is there anything He cannot do?
It is amazing to me that God has given us His Word, and through that Word we are born again.
It is not just theology. It is not just doctrine. The Word of God has within it the power of God, the ability of God to create something where there was no hunger for Him, no desire for Him. Somehow, through the Word of God, the Spirit of God can create a hunger and a thirst for God.
And by His grace, that hunger and thirst never leaves us. All through our life as a child of God, the Holy Spirit keeps alive that hunger.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those that hunger after God; they shall be filled.” It is wonderful just to think about it for a while.
Some people do not believe in God, and they do not believe in the Bible as the Word of God. They believe it is a collection of religious writings shoved together by someone—especially the Old Testament, they say—very poorly and very uncleverly by some editor who shoved together all these records in one big thing that we call the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible.
Then we have all other kinds of things, we are told. The Bible is full of discrepancies. The Bible is full of exaggerations. We are told that the Bible is full of faults and all these things.
I have heard it for years. I never read the Bible when I was a child. I had never, ever opened it, neither as a Jew nor as a Christian. I went to a Christian school, but I mean, I never actually myself opened the Bible.
But when the Word of God reached me and I was born of the Spirit of God, something happened. And from that moment onwards, I hungered to know the Word of God.
I believe that there is an enormous assault upon the Word of God in our generation.
All these Western nations, once called Christian nations, which have been the scene of awakening after awakening, and renewal after renewal, and revival after revival—which made them great—many of them became the home missions, as it were, to the end of the earth.
Certainly the United States, certainly Canada, certainly the United Kingdom, certainly the Scandinavian nations, certainly the Netherlands, certainly Germany, even before the Nazi period.
It is amazing to me that now there is a rapid collapse of everything that was Christian.
Whether it is social life, whether it is national life, whether it is society, the Word of God has been expunged, taken out of it.
It is easier to put up a totem pole than to put up a cross; easier to put up some picture of some idol than to have the Ten Commandments. It is extraordinary.
This rapidity with which this paganization is taking place is evidence that there are huge demonic forces behind it.
Those enormous and powerful demonic forces are preparing the nations of the world for the Antichrist.
And the removal of the Word of God—the assault on the inspiration of the Word of God, the authenticity of the Word of God, the relevance of the Word of God—is the evidence of this assault.
I do not believe that any child of God can be prepared for the coming of the Lord if we depart from the living Word of God.
In my estimation, this book we hold in our hands, from the first word of Genesis 1 to the last words of Revelation 22, is the Word of the living God.
We discover the most amazing thing in Genesis 1. It just puts it so simply: “In the beginning, God.”
And then, if you look—anyone who wants to, I can give you the verses, but you have only got to look in Genesis 1—and you will see about thirteen times it says, “And God said, and God said, and God said.” It is the Word of the living God.
Hebrews 11 tells us that by faith we understand that this world was created out of nothing by the Word of God.
Even we human beings were created in His likeness and after His image.
How can anyone be prepared for the coming of the Lord if this Word of God is not alive to us, if it is not doing something in us?
Let me try to explain myself a little more.
I think the apostle Peter—it is amazing what he said. He said, “We have been born by this Word which lives and abides forever.”
He says, “By the gospel that has been preached to us, we have been born of God.”
That is exactly what happened in all these once-called Christian countries. When the gospel was preached in all their paganism and heathenism, men and women were born of God and then transformed by the Word of God through the Spirit of the Lord.
There is no other way for a man or a woman to be transformed, to be truly converted, truly transformed, and conformed to the likeness of the Lord Jesus, but by the living Word of God.
Then there are people who tell me, “You do not believe that this book of sixty-six books and writings is really the Word of God. Surely you are a little more intelligent than that. You mean that after all these thousands of years, inaccuracies, exaggerations, and discrepancies have crept into this book?”
Listen to me. If it is God’s Word, and God knew that that Word was central to everything He would do in this world, He is well able to look after the transmission of that Word.
I do not have any problem at all. If you know the Lord, you know just how precise, how accurate, how on the ball He is.
My doctor said to me years ago, “You Jews have a problem, because the highest percentage of perfectionists are found amongst Jews.”
It all came from this belief in the Word of the living God. You do not just do things in a haphazard way. Those priests and Levites, every single thing about their life was ordered.
But that is just another matter. What I think is amazing is that the Holy Spirit, blessed be His name, has watched over the transmission of this text, so that sometimes some word that God spoke thousands of years ago leaps out of the page into my heart. Do you not find that?
The writer of the Hebrew letter, who was probably Apollos—I have often said, when I get to glory, I am going to ask his dear Jewish mother why she ever called him Apollos. Not a good Jewish name; that is a Greek name of a god. But that is a matter to wait until I get to glory for.
But the thing is, if it was Apollos, is it not amazing what he said? “The Word of God,” he said, “is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, dividing between soul and spirit.”
That spiritual surgery, dividing between soul and spirit, saves us from so much error that we can get into.
But this Word of the Lord is living. It is not inanimate. It is not just theology. It is not just a book. It is alive.
Every person who has been born of the Spirit of God surely knows that the Word of God is alive. I could give you example after example of people I have known, how suddenly, into their experience, the Holy Spirit has breathed something from this book.
And it has transformed them, brought them out of doubt and fear into a place of peace. This matter is tremendous.
I seriously wonder—listen, young people—I seriously wonder how near we are to the appearance of the Antichrist.
The scenery is now in place.
Thank God for what the Lord is doing in the Far East, in Asia, in Africa, and South America. Thank God that the Holy Spirit is saving multitudes of people, and they are being transformed in the same way that once these Western nations witnessed.
But the fact that it is the Western nations that are paganizing their life, paganizing society, paganizing education, paganizing national life—the biblical principles that were set at the heart of the Western nations, once called Christian, those nations’ constitutions—are now being removed.
Mark my words: with the removal of them will be also the removal of freedom of conscience and freedom of faith.
So, do we really believe the Lord is coming? I do. I do not know when.
I suspect that some of these things are much nearer than we think. But I am still a little hesitant to say the Lord will come next week, or in a month’s time, or two months’ time, or three months’ time, or two years’ time. We have got to be ready.
How can we be ready if the Holy Spirit has been unable, through the Word of God, to do something in our lives?
If we are not being transformed, if we are not being conformed to the likeness of the Lord Jesus, what is the point of this life? What is the point of the Lord coming suddenly, as He said, quickly?
Of course, He said that two thousand years ago. When I was first saved, I used to think, “How in the world can He say, ‘I come quickly’?”
Well, Brother Stephen gave us one answer this morning, and that is the church has never really been ready.
But the fact still remains: you and I need to know the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, because He saves us, He delivers us, He transforms us, and He makes us like the Lord Jesus.
This Word—John, in his inimitable way, said in the first chapter of his Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
So simple. And then he said this astounding thing. We know it as believers, but it is still astounding:
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us
(and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father),
full of grace and truth.
If you know the Lord, you know that is a fact. You know that He is full of grace and truth. You know that He was born in Bethlehem.
You know that, as the Messiah, He ministered for those years. You know that He died on the cross; we have been singing about it. He died to save us.
And it is that resurrection life and power of His that comes into us. But we need to know this book. I mean, it is one thing for me to stand here saying these things, but you and I, we need to know this Bible.
Some of you young people might feel that you have been forced to read your Scriptures, and the result is that you have got almost a kind of inner revulsion for the Bible. I understand that.
I mean, sometimes we have been made to read things. I remember this Christian school: we had to listen to the most boring recital of Scripture every morning. It was so lifeless, it was unbelievable. It was enough to put anyone off the Bible.
Far from being living and active, it was dead. Totally dead. And it is enough to put you off forever.
It is an amazing thing that Jesus should have said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.”
He used the first letter of the Greek alphabet, in which our New Testament was written, and the last letter of the Greek alphabet: Alpha and Omega.
And He meant that He is the alphabet. When God speaks and it is written, it is through Jesus. He is the alphabet of God.
This simply means that every time the Lord wants to reach you, it is through God’s language. It is through His Word.
Have you ever had that experience where you have been in distress and trouble, and everything is dark, and you do not know where to turn, and suddenly, almost out of the blue, has come a Scripture?
And that Scripture has leapt into you and brought you deliverance, and hope, and faith.
Ah, just wait. The apostle Paul puts it very simply:
So belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
That means living faith that unites you to the Lord Jesus—not only saving faith, not only beginning faith, but every time you need faith to go on with the Lord, faith to overcome, faith to endure—it comes through the Word of God.
Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of the Lord. Do you believe it? Think for a moment. Just think about this matter seriously.
You see, when you come to the book of Revelation—I mean, I always, well, I am glad I have got humour, because I think I would have passed out in a mental home long ago. I mean, really, being able to laugh at some things brings health to us.
You know, some Christians tell me that the whole Old Testament is the revelation of a God of judgment, severe, distant. I do not find that at all.
I find that the God of the Old Testament is a God of love and a God of grace.
I think it is amazing that when Moses gave the second giving of the law—Deuteronomy—he added these words:
The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all peoples:
but because the Lord loveth you.
And then listen to this also in Deuteronomy:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
The Pharisees came to Jesus shortly before He died with a trick question. They heard how He had turned the Sadducees upside down. They took courage and thought, “Well, He will not do this for us,” and they came with a question.
They said, “What is the greatest commandment in the Word of God?”
And Jesus said:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
And the second, He said, is like it, also from the law:
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
And then He said an incredible thing: “On these two hang the whole law and the prophets.” Everything is explained.
Anyway, people tell me that the God of the Old Testament is a God of severity, a God of judgment. I think they are nuts. Really, I think they are crazy.
Why do I think that? Because I think the Book of Revelation—nowhere in the whole sixty-six books and writings is there a book like the Book of Revelation—judgment after judgment after judgment of the most colossal kind.
So much for this idea that the New Testament has nothing about the judgments of God.
And now here is my point. In this Apocalypse, which means, from the Greek, unveiling—this revelation of the heart and mind of God—we hear this word:
I am the Alpha and the Omega.
This is Jesus. It is not just once; three or four times it comes. Why, at the very end of the book, in the last chapters, Jesus says it again: “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
In other words, it is the Lord Jesus; He is everything.
And right at the beginning of the Book of Revelation, John says, “I was in Patmos for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
Patmos was a kind of forced labour camp in the Roman Empire. They put there the people they wanted to take out of civilian life, whom they considered to be threats.
He worked in the copper mines. I can hardly think that that would be conducive to hearing the Lord or seeing the Lord. He worked from the early hours to the late hours.
People sometimes go to Patmos today, and they tell me how lovely it is. They say, “It is such a lovely green island.” But it was not lovely for John.
And in those conditions, God gave him revelation after revelation after revelation.
He understood that it was all to do with the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
You will find that through the Book of Revelation, this climax of the battle of the ages, this enormous final seeming breakthrough of Satan to finally tear the whole planet from the hands of the Lord Jesus, it is all to do with the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
How can you and I be prepared for the coming of the Lord if we do not understand this sentence: “The Word of God and the testimony of Jesus”?
This incredible book that I can hold in one hand has within it the whole love of God, the whole mercy of God, the whole grace of God, the whole purpose of God, and the aim and goal of everything. It is all in this book.
When people do not read it, do not live in it, it means they are unprepared for the coming of the Lord.
Can I put it as simply as possible? You need to let the Word of God get into you, and you need to get into the Word of God.
James puts it very simply in his letter, in a very typical Jewish way. Here he puts it—let me read it to you:
Wherefore putting away all filthiness and overflowing of wickedness, receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves.
For if any one is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a mirror:
for he beholdeth himself, and goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.
But he that looketh into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and so continueth, being not a hearer that forgetteth but a doer that worketh, this man shall be blessed in his doing.
Could not be simpler, could it? We have got James to thank for that. The Holy Spirit wrote that through dear James, who was the leader of the church in Jerusalem.
Or listen to this. Listen to the apostle. Am I boring you stiff? I hope not. I am very good at boring people.
Listen to the apostle Paul, Colossians 3:16:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; in all wisdom.
How can we let the Word of God dwell in us? This is not just reading, rushing through a little portion of the Scripture each day, through then out and on with life or business. This is something else.
It is as if this Word of the Lord is living in us. It is almost as if, because we are in Christ and Christ is in us, we are in the Word of God and the Word of God is in us.
And the Lord will use all the very normal problems and troubles of our routine life to bring that Word to life. It is tremendous, is it not, when you think of it?
Well, there are so many other things one could say. But if Christ is in us, the Word is in us.
And Jesus put it so beautifully in John 8:31. I will read it to you. It is so simply and beautifully put:
Jesus therefore said to those Jews that had believed Him, If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples;
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Is that not a wonderful word? If you abide in My Word, My Word abides in you. Tremendous. You shall be free.
Dear child of God, listen to me on this thing. I am coming to an end of this, but what I am trying to say is this: the Spirit of God would like to make you a walking Bible.
Oh, you say, “No, surely not.” I do not mean just theology and doctrine. I mean He wants to make you a marvellous example of the Word of God.
You know, Paul wrote somewhere that you are an epistle. He wrote to Christians; he said, “You are a letter written by the Spirit of God.”
That is what every child of God could be. Could you imagine the impact it would have upon society all around us if every single one of us here was a living letter written by the Spirit of God to those we work with, those we live with, to the nation we live in, to the community we are part of?
Would it not be tremendous? That is exactly what happened when the gospel was preached in all these parts, and the huge awakening followed it.
Men and women were transformed. They became like a letter that God had written.
I remember years ago speaking to two very old ladies in Western Wales. And I said to them, “Did you ever remember the Welsh revival that swept a hundred thousand people into the kingdom of God within a year?”
“Yes,” they said, “we were in it.”
I said, “Tell me, what was the most amazing thing?”
And they said, “Apart from coarse and vulgar lives absolutely transformed, so that a beauty came into them, the other thing that amazed us was everywhere we went in this town, everywhere we went, we heard music coming from under the ground.”
At first we could not understand it, but it turned out it was all the miners. So many of them had been saved by the grace of God that, as they, in that very difficult kind of work, were producing the coal, they sang, as only the Welsh can, hymns of praise to God.
And it came up through the ground everywhere. These two old ladies said, “You could not get away from it. Everywhere you went, you could hear these wonderful Welsh hymns coming out of the ground.”
They said, “Do you know that the pit mules and donkeys stopped working?”
“Really?” I said.
“Oh yes,” they said. “They were so used to being kicked and obscenities yelled at them to get them to move. And when these men got saved, they no longer kicked them, no longer used obscenities, and the mules and donkeys did not move.”
It is amazing when God does something.
The same with the Hebrides revival. When the Holy Spirit fell upon those fishermen out in their trawlers, as they were letting out the net, they fell on their faces before God. The holiness of God so touched them, crying out for His mercy.
And they pulled in the nets a little later with the fish and returned home, saved by the grace of God.
Shepherds fell on the wet heather in the hills around Stornoway and elsewhere in the Hebrides, and found the Lord. So great was the holiness of God.
There is something tremendous about the Word of God once the Holy Spirit begins to work.
Anyway, I say I must close. But we are not seeing, in our Christianity, the apostasy that is now very prevalent in Christianity around us.
What can we say? It is a listless, lifeless, religious type of Christianity.
But when the Word of God comes by the Spirit of God, and lives are changed and transformed, and they begin to love the Word of God, something happens.
Well, let me just say one other thing on this matter. People come sometimes to Israel, and they see Jews praying at the Western Wall and elsewhere. They find it a little bit strange.
Because they wrap this thing with this little box round the head. They wrap their hands with a little box here, a little box there, and they wonder, “What in the world are they doing?”
But that little box there—God told them to do it—because He said, “In that little box is the Word of the Lord.”
Which means your brain, your mind, has to be under the government of God and His Word.
Your hands, they must work for the Lord under the government of the Lord.
That is why on the doorposts and the lintels, you put a little mezuzah, and in that mezuzah is a little Scripture.
Religious Jews will touch it and kiss their hand, and people say, “Oh, they are just religious.” But originally, it was meant to speak of something.
Everything you do in business, in work, in education, in social life—you go in and out of those doors, and the Word of God is written on them.
I do not think you are meant to put things between your eyes or on your hands, but if you are a child of God, that is exactly what happens.
There is the Word of God, supreme over your mind, over your will, over your emotions, over your being—over everything you do.
Your hands that do everything, work; your feet that carry you backwards and forwards to do further things—everything under the will and mind and Word of God.
I must finish, but let me just say one other thing. In Psalm 119:105—you all know it, very well known—
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,
And light unto my path.
But in the same amazing Psalm 119, verse 11, it says—my version—
Thy word have I laid up in my heart,
That I might not sin against Thee.
You will see that in the New King James Version it says, “I have kept Your Word in my heart.” In the New American Standard Bible, it is, “I have treasured Your Word in my heart.”
Personally, I like it. The Hebrew just simply means to keep, to put in your heart. I like most of all this translation of the 1901 translation: “I have laid up in my heart Your Word. I have laid up Your Word in my heart, that I might not sin against You.”
Memorisation of Scripture is now a lost art. When I was saved over seventy years ago, young people used to memorise Scriptures.
Sometimes they used little cards, and they wrote it all out, and they looked at it, and then they tried to say it and found it was all wrong. They looked again and said it again, and it was wrong again, and finally they got it.
But, dear child of God, when you have laid up God’s Word in your heart, in a great time of tribulation or trouble, the Holy Spirit is able to bring back what you memorised.
I could give you many examples, not just from my own experience, from many others that I have known through my life, where suddenly, at a moment of tremendous crisis, the Scripture has waltzed back into their spirit.
The Holy Spirit brought something back they had memorised, and that Word of the living God became almost their food, their deliverance.
There is going to come, in my estimation, a famine in the Word of the Lord.
It is already in the atmosphere. We no longer have this feeling of an open, wonderful society, but of a heaviness somewhere.
When I was first saved, missionaries used to say to us when they came, “You are so fortunate”—it was in Britain—“you are so fortunate to live in a Christian country.”
“The atmosphere—we find we can pray here, but you cannot pray in this country or that country where they came from. There is something that stops us, makes it so hard to get through.”
All that has gone. But when you have memorised God’s Word, He can bring it back to you at a point of great need. And it can mean a tremendous amount.
And I remember dear Daisy, Lady Ogle. She had on the wall, when I stayed with her on one occasion, I was alone in this beautiful room, and I looked on the wall, and there was a piece of wood.
And on the wood was written, “My peace I give unto you.” And you know, I thought to myself, “Oh, how trite. So many Scriptures could have been put on the wall: ‘My peace I give unto you.’”
But only a few weeks later, when talking, Lady Ogle said to me, “You know, when I lost my husband in the flu epidemic in 1917, I did not know what to do.”
She said, “I was in terrible torment, and I did not know what to do. I was a child of God, but I was in such torment.”
And she said, “I had memorised that Scripture:
Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you.
“And she said, in a single moment, the Holy Spirit said to me, ‘The peace I leave with you is peace I did not need. It is peace for sin forgiven. I have left it to you through My work.
“‘But My peace I give to you is the peace I had in Gethsemane, when I said, “Not My will, but Thine, be done.”’”
And then she said, “When He was on the cross, at the moment of greatest desolation, He finally said, ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.’”
She said, “His peace. He never gives us a peace that He did not experience Himself. It is His peace.”
I felt so terrible. I never said to her, “I thought that was terribly trite.” I kept my big mouth shut for once.
But I thought to myself, you see, when you have memorised God’s Word, the Holy Spirit is able to bring it back suddenly, and it can be deliverance. It can bring peace, can even bring some kind of comfort and joy.
Dear child of God, you cannot be ready for the coming of the Lord—and if the Lord should tarry a little longer, you cannot be ready to face what we are going to face—if the man of sin appears, for however long before we are raptured, I do not know.
You and I need to know the Word of God. We need to live in it, and it to live in us.
May God touch your heart and make it real to us all. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus.