Well, I think we triumphed over that technological—what’s it. I always sometimes think, when the computer goes down, the internet goes down, the iPads do not work, the cell phones do not work, it would be better if we went back to pigeons. At least they were faithful.
I want to read to you from the Word of God this evening, in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter 12—the twelfth chapter of the Roman letter of the apostle Paul—from verse 1.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritually intelligent service and worship.
And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
For I say, through the grace that was given me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but so to think as to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith.
For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members have not the same office, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another.
To this I would like to add Mark 8, reading from verse 31.
And Jesus began to teach them, that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
And He spake the saying openly. And Peter took Him, and began to rebuke Him.
But He, turning about, and seeing His disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind Me, Satan: for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men.
And He called unto Him the multitude with His disciples, and said unto them, If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
For whosoever would save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall find it.
Shall we just have a further word of prayer?
Beloved Lord, we just thank You that we have been here in Your presence, worshipping You, sensing that You are indeed present. And, Lord, we now want to ask You, as we come to the ministry of Your Word, that, Lord, we shall know in the speaking of that Word and in the hearing of it, Your anointing.
You have dearly won that anointing for us. You have made that anointing a living reality in the person of the outpoured Holy Spirit. Into that anointing we stand by faith, that, Lord, this time may not just be a natural time, a physical time of our gathering together, but may be truly a meeting with Yourself.
Lord, speak to us. Touch us, Lord. We pray especially in the light of these days that we are considering. And this we ask in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, I do not think, halfway through the conference, it needs to be said that the theme of this conference is taken from those words of our Lord Jesus: “Behold, I come quickly.” The responsibility that I have been given is the other wonderful little word: “And let him that hears say, Come.” The individual’s response is what I am to deal with.
Yesterday evening, I spoke about the fact that there is absolutely no way that you and I can have a heart that longs for the coming of the Lord unless we recognize that the Bible is the Word of God. Somehow it has to sink into us that this extraordinary volume that we have—sixty-six books and writings—is actually the Word of God.
It has come to us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And, in the most wonderful way, it is through this living Word that we are saved through the finished work of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus.
The only way we can be ready and prepared for the coming of the Lord is if this Word of Christ dwells in us—not visits us, not uses us, not blesses us at some point and then leaves us—but this Word of Christ dwells in us.
James put it: “Receiving the implanted Word.” That gives all the idea that this Word of God is alive. It is almost like a living organism. It takes root in the soil of our spirit, and then it begins to grow; and not only grow, but there is fruit as a result of it.
This whole matter of the Word is especially important in the days in which we are living, when a colossal assault is made upon the authenticity of the Word of God, the inspiration of the Word of God, and the relevance of the Word of God.
It would not surprise me if, in the next months or certainly years, they discover something that proves, in their eyes, that we all came from primeval slime, and that in some huge cosmic explosion—nothing to do with God—somehow or other, we all, the planets, the universes, everything, appeared.
I find it much more simple to believe in the almighty God, and that from Him everything has come that we see and touch and taste. But, in the end, it is not the physical that matters. Behind the physical is the essential world, the eternal world.
You cannot see the Lord Jesus at present with these eyes, enthroned at the Father’s right hand; yet that is the fact at this present moment in time. And the wonderful thing is that God Himself is watching over history and determining its course until, finally, He fulfils His original purpose.
Now, this evening, I would like to take another aspect of being prepared for the coming of the Lord. I find it amazing that, in Romans 12:1, Paul gathers up everything he has been saying in the preceding chapters with these words:
I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritually intelligent worship and service.
You know, we can be carried away by emotion and by the feeling of things and so on, and worship the Lord. There is nothing wrong with that; we are human beings. But spiritually intelligent worship and service is when you and I become a living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God.
Did you notice I left out one word in that? “I beseech you, therefore, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.” I always remember, many years ago, Dr. Lloyd-Jones saying, “Always take note of the therefores, and the wherefores, and the buts, and the hows, in the Word of God.”
Why did he say, “therefore”? Because behind this statement of his, this beseeching appeal to us all to be ready for the end—for whatever is coming—are these eleven chapters of this incredible letter, this letter, as indeed all these books and letters, inspired of God.
This is total and all-consuming. Listen again: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God.” That is all that the Lord Jesus has done for us at Calvary, the work He has finished, the salvation He has wrought for us, and the mercy that He continuously shows to us.
By these mercies, present your bodies a living sacrifice. He uses the word bodies. That encompasses everything: your spirit, your soul, and your body.
The only way you and I can be prepared for what is coming on the face of the earth, and above all for the coming of our Lord Jesus, is to be a living sacrifice. But sadly, there are very few Christians, saved by the grace of God and born of the Spirit of God, who are living sacrifices by His mercies.
This letter, as I think you all know, is the greatest exposition of the gospel in the sixty-six books and writings of the Bible. There is nothing else that touches this extraordinarily inspired exposition of the gospel.
From Romans 1 through Romans 8, the apostle, by the Holy Spirit, expounds the gospel—the good news concerning the salvation of God to us. To put it in simple words, he explains the wonderful way in which the Spirit of God brings us to a spiritual birth.
Now, when you are born, if you are normal—which most of us are—you have eyes, you have ears, you have a heart, you have a body; you have spirit, soul, and body. And you are that size. Can you believe it? Every one of you sitting in all these seats, you were at the beginning that size—some of you a little larger.
Yet, in some marvellous way, you have grown to what you are now. You could not walk then. You could not speak then. You could just about focus your eyes. You could hear. After a while, you could tell your mother’s voice, your father’s voice, and the voices of relatives and friends.
But is it not amazing to think that you and I, when we are born of the Spirit, have a spiritual hearing mechanism in our spirit? We have something that can receive from the Lord. Through this Book, He can reveal something to us. We hear, and we see.
Someone says, “Well, I think you are getting too spiritual.” But just wait. What did the Lord Jesus say? He said, “My sheep hear My voice, and they follow Me.” There is no way you can follow the Lord without hearing Him.
And this may explain why so many of us get into a mess: we do not hear the Lord. It is amazing to me that the Lord Jesus said to those seven churches, to every one of them, “He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”
Do you really believe that you can hear the Spirit of God saying something to the church? And if the Lord has gone to such lengths to reach us, should we not have good spiritual hearing instead of suffering from what the Bible calls dullness of hearing? It just means your ears are clogged. You have got so much wax in your ears that you cannot hear properly.
This appeal of the apostle Paul, in his expounding by the Holy Spirit of the gospel, is so amazing to me. He very simply says that the goal, the aim—if I could put it this way, the climax of the gospel—is that you should become a living sacrifice.
Now, that falls sometimes on very deaf ears because we have this kind of gospel that is so often preached: that we are just going to have a lovely cosy life and a very happy life—no suffering, no tribulations, no problems, no nothing at all. No, no, no. Something is wrong when all that happens.
But, in actual fact, we are meant to come through all these problems and difficulties and tribulations, and grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus. Every time you come through a period of problem and confusion, and you hear the Lord, you have grown. You are not the same. You have actually grown.
So this question is of tremendous importance. Did the apostle really mean that being a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, is the aim and goal of our salvation? That really, if we are not a living sacrifice, our Christian life—our church life—does not work?
We become listless, lifeless, heavy, instead of being alive to the Lord and moving with Him. We are stationary. Can I put it very simply, in a nutshell? The Christian life does not work until you are a living sacrifice.
When you are not a living sacrifice, you have blocked everything the Lord has for you. Some people will say, “This is dreadful, what you are saying—absolutely awful.” But without this strategic and necessary sacrifice, our Christian life is stationary. There is no growth. There is no moving on. There is nothing.
We have only to look at church history to see how the Lord has launched initiative after initiative, as the Builder of the church, to overcome this problem: so many believers not moving, not growing, not coming into a full understanding of the purpose of God.
Then the Builder of the church—the Lord, the glorified and risen Messiah Jesus—launches a new initiative. Sometimes it was the Puritans; sometimes it was the Donatists; sometimes it was the Montanists; sometimes it was the Bogomils; sometimes the Paulicians; sometimes the Waldenses, or the Vaudois, as the people called them in French, or Valdesi in Italian.
He launched all these initiatives, and suddenly, once again, men and women became living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, and the whole world was changed by the testimony they had. Their lives were changed. Society was changed. Nations were changed.
The Word of God was put at the heart of those nations, and then, gradually, as always, things died, became denominational or organisational, and the Lord had to do it all over again. The first great evangelical awakening swept millions into the kingdom of God. The Moravian revival spread through the whole of Central Europe and, indeed, was in a very real way connected with that first great evangelical awakening.
We could speak of so much in the history of the church. But it is this desire of the Lord—that we should grow in Him, that we should come to maturity, that we should have a spiritual understanding of His mind and of His heart. It all goes back to these words of the apostle Paul:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice.
Will you notice that I have used the words “your spiritually intelligent service and worship”? Years ago, when I was looking at this and looking at the Greek, I could not understand the translation I had at the time, which was “your reasonable service.” Some people call it “your rational service.”
But the more I looked at it, the more I came to the conclusion that the Lord was saying something a little more full than that. We had in the fellowship a Cambridge don in classical Greek and New Testament Greek—Koine Greek. I went to him and said, “Brother, if I were to say, ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God,’ and I was to say, ‘which is your spiritually intelligent worship and service’—would that be right?”
I actually said only “worship,” and he said, “That would exactly say what it means. But you must add one word: your spiritually intelligent worship and service.”
If that is true, it means that spiritually intelligent worship and spiritually intelligent service to the Lord begin when you and I are the living sacrifice—when we present our bodies, our whole being, as a living sacrifice.
I do not know if I am making myself clear and plain, but you see there are other things here. He goes on and says, “Be not fashioned according to this world.” Well, most of us naturally are fashioned according to this world. But it is: “Be not fashioned according to this world, but be ye transformed.” How? “By the renewing of your mind.”
In other words, when you are prepared to be a living sacrifice, there is the possibility of a transformation taking place—a deliverance from the fashion of this world, the ways of this world, and the philosophy of this world. You are, in some marvellous way, being brought into a deep inward experience and knowledge of the Lord.
You know, we need the renewing of our mind. Everything starts with our mind. It is no wonder that, in the Old Testament, as I said yesterday evening, God told the Jews, “Put that Word of God between your eyes.” Let your brain, your thinking process, and all that side of you be under and ruled by the Word of God.
We are naturally fashioned by this world. It is the philosophies. We get it all day, every day, in the media, television, everything. It is coming at us all. Now it is inside our educational system: out with anything biblical and Christian, and in with everything that is the fashion of this world.
Then Paul says something just as remarkable: “That ye may prove what is the good and acceptable will of God.” I am not sure that anyone can prove that God’s will is acceptable until they are a living sacrifice.
Before you go to sleep, just keep awake for a little longer on this one. It is important, especially you younger people. You are being absolutely bamboozled by the world around you. It comes at you, not only in what you read and what you see on television, but even in the music. It is all the fashion of this world, the philosophy of this world.
To be ready and prepared for the coming of the Lord, you have got to take a new step. You have got to come to the conclusion that we have to be living sacrifices. Out of that comes a transformation, a renewing of our minds, and the ability to discover that the will of God, far from being fearful and dreadful, is marvellous. It is good and acceptable.
After all, to do the will of God is the most vital thing that any person in this audience this evening could do. When you read your Bible, think of those who did the will of God: Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, John the Baptist—even the Messiah Himself, who said, “I am come to do Thy will, O God.”
That will meant Gethsemane. That will of God for the Messiah meant His rejection. That will of God for Him was to die on the cross and to be made our sin. But the Lord Jesus endured the cross and is seated at the right hand of God.
The will of God is not always wonderful in the sense that it is easy. I do not want to give you the idea that the will of God is dreadful, heavy, full of trouble, full of tribulation, problem, and everything else. There are times when the will of God is joy. It is wonderful. It is like a wonderful summer’s morning, full of blue sky and sun, and everything enjoying the world around.
But there are also times when we enter into great periods of distress and trouble. When we are not a living sacrifice, then the enemy comes and breathes into us all kinds of things. As I said last night, “Hath God said? Can you not see that He is trying to imprison you, to make you miserable?”
It is a wonderful deliverance from the prison of our self-life when we make a decision: “I will present my body a living sacrifice.”
If I could take you a step further this evening, if you are still with me, let me say that there is a twofold commitment. It is very simple.
The first is utterly simple: it is a total surrender of our all to Christ, to His absolute lordship. Let me repeat it: it is a total surrender of our all to Christ—to His absolute lordship.
Some people want the Lord Jesus to be like a cleaning lady, coming up behind them, cleaning up the mess they make, making them happy. It is still short of His lordship. The Lord is like a kind of house cleaner—or, even more than that, someone who gets you through when you are in trouble—and that is all you want.
You do not want to be under the lordship of Jesus. You want Him to be behind you, pushing you.
I said to the conference in Franklin the other day: the whole trouble is that Moses once said to the Lord, “If Thy presence go not with us, carry us not up hence.” And the Lord said to him, “My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.”
Now, in Hebrew, there is no “with us.” But our translators could not understand how it could make sense that Moses should say to God, “If You do not carry us up, we will not go.” So they put in “with us.” And when the Lord said, “My presence shall go,” they added “with thee.”
But in the Hebrew there is no “with thee.” What the Lord was simply saying—and this goes to the very heart of this matter about being a living sacrifice—is this: it is not that I am going to go and you are going to attach yourself to Me, or that I am going to be your helper, your supporter, your this, your that, and your other.
Rather, you are going to be with Me. My presence will go, and you go with Me. When I go, you go. When I stop, you stop. Do you remember the pillar of cloud and fire? Whenever it stopped, they stopped. Whenever it moved, they moved. It is the same idea.
You see, the idea in modern Christianity is that somehow or other we are the real centre of everything, and the Lord is behind us to help us, clean up the messes, bless us, support us financially, take care of us, and all the rest of it.
Actually, the Word of God is very different. What it really says is this: you must be with the Lord. He is the worker; you are the co-worker. He is the Builder; you are the co-builder. You are under His direction, under His lordship. This matter of a total commitment to the Lord lies at the very heart of everything.
I came to the Lord through C. T. Studd. I have said this to you before. C. T. Studd was the first Christian I had ever read about who was one hundred per cent a living sacrifice. I could not believe it. Everyone who called themselves Christian at school and elsewhere that I knew seemed to have a lord who was a kind of helper behind them, a supporter of them, cleaning up the mess and everything else.
To me, it was a revelation. I found someone who was a total sacrifice. It was no wonder God was with him. I wrote it in the front of my Bible. He said on one occasion:
If Jesus Christ be God, and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
Did you hear it? No sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
When Nicholas, Count Zinzendorf, who had known the Lord Jesus from childhood and loved Him, went into that German museum and saw that oil painting of Jesus, he stood a couple of hours before it, transfixed.
There was Jesus, with blood trickling down His face from the crown of thorns, and underneath were the words in German:
I have done all this for thee.
What hast thou done for Me?
It was at that moment that Nicholas, Count Zinzendorf, gave himself totally to the Lord Jesus. From that came the great Moravian revival: the hundred-year prayer meeting, the two hundred and twenty-six mission stations all over the world.
Believers went where believers had not gone before: in the Arctic, to the Eskimos and the Lapps; to the roof of the world in Tibet; to lepers whom no Christian would touch for fear of contracting leprosy; to slaves being taken from Africa to the New World and to Britain—everywhere.
You see, in the end, it is this being a living sacrifice that is the key to genuine service. It is the key to genuine worship—not merely emotional worship, but genuine worship.
What is the second commitment? It also is total: a total surrender of our will to His will.
Do you remember what Satan said to Eve? “Hath God said, Ye shall surely die? You will not die. But you will be as gods.” In the Hebrew, it is in the plural: “You will be as God, knowing good from evil.” In other words, you will not have to be dependent upon the Lord. You will have within yourself your own power, your own government. In other words, your will will be enthroned.
That was the beginning of the fall of mankind. And ever since, we look all through history and find this question of the will everywhere: dictators, ghostly kings, great theories that have enslaved millions of people. Behind it all is the human will.
To be a living sacrifice is not only to be surrendered to His total lordship. It means that, for the first time, you are ready to do anything He asks of you, to go anywhere where He sends you.
It is also that will of yours. May I go further and tell you that I think this question of the will lies at the root of all our problem as believers? We do not really want the will of the Lord. We have even got an idea that the will of the Lord is dreadful—that He will just make us miserable, that He loves to make us miserable, that God has a kind of factory for making people unhappy and miserable.
It is all a lie—a terrible lie from the pit itself. Your will is the problem that stops you from growing in the Lord. Listen, you young people: it is your will that is the problem, because you want to be the boss. You want to be the one who decides. Oh, you will go somewhere here, there, and everywhere in the world, but you want to decide.
To surrender our will to His will is one of the hardest things that we, as human beings, can do. When you are saved by the grace of God, born of the Holy Spirit of God, your will can be the destruction of your spiritual growth to maturity—until you make a decision: “I am going to will His will.”
Without these two commitments, there can be no real worship, no real service, no real overcoming, and no being transformed by the renewing of your mind.
I suppose especially young people probably think, “What a dreadful preacher. All this thing about surrendering to the Lord, letting go of our will, and doing His will. What does he want us to do—go to the ends of the earth, do this, do that, or do the other?”
Listen. The problem is not only sin. The problem is self. Most people who read their New Testament in English do not realise this problem.
You see, I read to you from Mark 8. When the Lord Jesus said, “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself,” the word in Greek really means, “Deny himself; disown himself.”
Let me put it another way, the way I like to put it: “If any man would come after Me, let him give up all right to himself, and follow Me. Take up his cross, and follow Me.”
Then He said, “If you try to save your life, you will lose it. If you lose your life for My sake and the gospel’s, you will find it.” Unfortunately, this word life in Greek, psyche, is the word from which we get psychology and psychiatry, and it just means soul.
I find the easiest way to understand it is simply to put it this way. Now listen carefully to me. The Lord said, “If any man tries to preserve his self-life, he will lose it. But if a man lets go of his self-life for My sake and the gospel, he will discover his self-life under new management.”
It is not that God destroys your self-life. Rather, He gives it back to you under new management. As simple as that.
This was the first time that the Lord Jesus actually said to the disciples, “I am going to die. I am going to be taken by the chief priests and the scribes, and they will kill Me. And on the third day I will rise again.” They had never heard such a thing before.
Now Peter was always saying what the others thought. They were very clever because they kept their big mouths shut. But Peter was the kind of person who always blurted out exactly what he felt.
He took Jesus aside and rebuked Him, saying, “Never. You are the Messiah. You cannot say that You are going to be killed. I will not allow it. Whilst I am here, it will not happen.”
And Jesus looked into his eyes and said, “Get thee behind Me, Satan: for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men.”
Now, I have often said that if I were to look straight into your eyes and say, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” you would go straight to Brother Stephen, or to these other brothers here on the front row, and say, “Never ask that brother back again.”
“But what the Lord Jesus was really saying was this: ‘There is a self-life in you, Peter, and that self-life will not allow Me to go to the cross. The very reason I have come into this world for, you would stop. You mind the things of men, not the things of God.’”
Does it begin to make a little bit of sense in you? Listen, that self-life of yours—I am old enough now to have seen all kinds of things happen to Christians, servants of the Lord, workers, churches, assemblies, and fellowships.
And shall I tell you something? The thing that destroys not only individual Christians, but destroys whole works of God, churches, and fellowships, is the self-life: rivalries, jealousies, factions, divisions. It all comes from that self-life.
We think the gospel is only to do with sin. Jesus died for our sins; of course He died for our sins. God forgives us because He became sin in our place. He bore our sins in His body on the tree.
But what we do not realise is that, when the Lord Jesus was crucified, our self-life was crucified with Him. You can have all your sins forgiven, but your self-life can wreck a fellowship, wreck a work of God, and wreck a ministry. That is why many begin in the Spirit and end in the flesh.
This is the other half of the gospel. The Lord Jesus gathered the disciples together, and He called the whole multitude together, as if this was to do with the central theme of the gospel. He said, “If any man clings to, or proceeds to preserve, his self-life, he will lose it. It will rot. It will decompose. And others will be diseased.”
“But if he loses his self-life for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall find it. It will be given back under new management—the management of God.”
The point is this: when Jesus died, He not only died for our sins; He died and carried our self-life with Him to the cross. Do you believe me?
Listen to the apostle Paul:
I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live.
And the life which I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself for me.
That is the gospel: the Son of God Who loved me and gave Himself for me. But here you have the other side of it: “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” My self-life is under new management.
Years ago, I used to say this, but I want to say it again to you, especially you younger ones. Listen to me. Even if you have been asleep a little, wake up now and just listen to these last words of mine.
I have been all over the world, and when I was younger I had to speak to young people. Everywhere I went, the most common question that was asked was this: “How can I live the Christian life?” I heard it in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and in every country in Europe.
“How can I live the Christian life?” I was told again and again, “It is so hard. It is so impossible. How can I live it?”
And I always answered in the same manner: “You are asking the wrong question. It is not, ‘How can you live the Christian life?’ It is, ‘How can you die?’”
If you learn how to die, the Christian life will take care of itself. What do I mean? You die; that life of the Lord Jesus will come to you. How do you get resurrection life and power? Everyone wants resurrection life and power. Where does it come from? Death.
The death of the Lord Jesus. But when He died, He took you with Him. So that resurrection life and power that comes to us is so amazing because it stems from the death of the Lord Jesus—and my death.
Let me explain. Two of you are having an argument, a bitter argument. One says dreadful things about the other, and the other repeats the things and goes round everywhere criticising that person, running them down. How can you get over that? You get more and more bitter, more and more trying to find reasons why you are right and so-and-so is wrong.
Why do you not die?
I always tell people, when they have a big argument going, especially between two men, “You die, and the Lord will take your place.” The Lord will deal with this other brother who is ruining your reputation and your name. And that is exactly what has happened. I have seen it in countless brothers.
Do you realise that half the problem in fellowships and assemblies is backbiting, gossip, faction, rumblings, criticisms, and I do not know what else—character assassination?
I remember the old Puritan divine who said:
You take care of a good conscience; God will take care of your good name.
That is why you can die. If the Lord loves you so much, you can just go down—boom, you are gone. Now the Lord takes your place. Woe betide that other person. They will hit the Lord this time.
Well, I think it is really time for me to finish. But I wonder if you really understood what I have been trying to say.
The Christian life only works when we are prepared to die. Sounds strange, does it not? But it is the principle of Calvary. When you are prepared to die, the Christian life blossoms.
How can we be prepared for the coming of the Lord? Very simply: by giving up all right to ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Him; by a total surrender of our life to Him; by a total surrender of our will to His will.
If these words of mine sink into you, however young you are, you will begin a journey today that will end in the soul of God. Hear me: however old you are.
Because, as we get older, we often become—I speak it from experience—more crabby. We get more irritated with people. We do not put up so easily with them as when we were younger. When we were younger, we would smack them in the face. But when we are older, we just get irritable and run them down.
No matter how old you are, if you have never learnt this lesson—that the only way the Christian life can grow is when you, in one sense, are out of the way—your self-life is the problem.
I always say this to those who speak English, even American English: S-I-N—I in the centre. Sin: I in the centre. Let that “I” be crucified, just as He has borne your sin. Let that “I” be taken out, and let the Lord begin to reveal Himself to you and in you.
May He make you the kind of child of God that you should be, the servant of God that you should be, and the worshipper that you should be.
Is there any other way to be prepared for the coming of the Lord? When He comes and finds that we were all interested only in ourselves, in our own well-being, with no idea of service—no idea at all—the church was there for us, not us for the church.
It is very interesting. When you look at this again, you discover that if you are ready to present your body a living sacrifice, before long you discover that you are in the body of the Lord Jesus: many members, but one body.
Then you begin to discover your place in the family of God. You will begin to discover what may be the gift that God would give you. It is all here in this twelfth chapter. It begins with, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice.”
And a little further on we find that we are many members, but one body. That is fellowship. The Greek word for fellowship is koinonia, and koinonia just means what we have in common.
What do we have in common? Not race. Not social class. Not colour. Not education. What do we have in common? It is the Lord Jesus.
Every one of us who is born of God: the Lord Jesus lives in us, and we live in Him. Then I discover that the same Lord Jesus in me is the same Lord Jesus in you.
Well, I am Jewish and you are a Gentile. But suddenly I discover the Jewish side is gone and the Gentile side is gone. I find Christ in you; you find Christ in me. You may be as black as coal, and someone else might be as white as milk, but there is only one Christ. Whether you are black, or yellow, or white, there is only one Christ.
How do we find this amazing fellowship? Only when we become living sacrifices.
You know, that sacrifice in the old days—they burnt it to a cinder. That was it: a burnt offering.
Are you prepared for that challenge? However young you are, however old you are, are you ready for that challenge?
Settle it this day. Settle it in your heart, because we may not have so much more time. Settle it, and let the Lord touch you and do something in you, and in me, and in us all.
Why should there not be another awakening that could sweep through these once-called Christian countries? It happened before. It could happen again. But where are the believers prepared to pay the price?
The price is your self-life. The price is your well-being. That is the price.
May God help you to make the right decision. You will not regret it if you, however young you are—or, for that matter, however old—you say to the Lord, “Lord, I want to present my body a living sacrifice. Fill me with Your Holy Spirit. Help me, Lord.”
And He will. May God bless you.