Del Fehnsenfeld got it right:

“Prayer for revival is a natural overflow of resurrection hope. The logic goes like this: the Bible is the story of how God is working in history to make everything new. Jesus is the central figure in the story. He dealt decisively with what is wrong with us and with the world on the cross, and proved it by rising from the dead and then pouring out his Spirit. And since the story ends with everything being put right or “summed up” in Jesus Eph. 1:9-10, we know that God’s plan is to move history forward from where things are to that final climax. Thus God is always working by his Spirit to manifest and extend Jesus’ presence, honor, and authority.But that process is not always incremental. We learn from both the Bible and church history that there are seasons when God’s Spirit works with extraordinary and undeniable power to rapidly move individuals, communities and even nations toward Jesus. This is revival. Knowing God’s final agenda helps me pray with confidence for the intensification, acceleration, and multiplication of the work of the Spirit right now!”

via TGC Asks: Why Do You Ask God to Send Revival? – The Gospel Coalition Blog.

We actually do have a few more places available for THIS SATURDAY’s 300 conference. Coming to us is Jack Hayford who is well known internationally for the level of anointing or “unction” that he has spent decades living in the good of (see my previous post on why we are excited that he is coming).

If you intend to come with an open heart, willing to receive from God, and to learn from a seasoned leader, I encourage you to clear your diary and snap up one of the few remaining tickets and come. Those who welcome a prophet can expect a prophets reward, the Bible tells us.

God changed the whole world through 120 men who were gathered in the Upper Room when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. God could quite literally change our whole nation through 300 men and women gathering eager to receive fresh anointing, fresh gifting, and fresh commissioning from the same Holy Spirit. Are you a pastor who is tired and weary and in need of a fresh touch from Jesus? Are you aspiring to some form of church leadership in the future? Are you desperate enough for more of God to go to a pentecostal and say, “I want what you’ve got”? If so then come this weekend, moments like these can often change the course of a person’s life. Perhaps this article is God’s gentle prompting for someone who will as a result decide to come and receive an impartation that will effect thousands of others.

My life is full of surprises and unusual experiences. One such experience recently was when I was asked to voice over a trailer for the same conference. Another first for me, but I thought I would share it here and let you be the judge of whether I have a possible future career as a presenter or shouldn’t give up the day job! Here is the video:

Jonathan Edward’s great work Religious Affections was introduced to us in yesterday’s quote.  In my mind there is probably no better book written to help us to grasp this vital subject (other than the Bible itself of course!)  We should by now be beginning to understand one of the most fascinating paradoxes, our feelings are meant to be a massive part of our Christian experience, and yet they are not always to be relied upon. This quote is vintage Edwards:

Some are ready to condemn all high affections: if persons appear to have their religious affections raised to an extraordinary pitch, they are prejudiced against them, and determine that they are delusions, without further inquiry. But if it be, as has been proved, that true religion lies very much in religious affections, then it follows, that if there be a great deal of true religion, there will be great religious affections; if true religion in the hearts of men be raised to a great height, divine and holy affections will be raised to a great height.

Love is an affection, but will any Christian say, men ought not to love God and Jesus Christ in a high degree? And will any say, we ought not to have a very great hatred of sin, and a very deep sorrow for it? Or that we ought not to exercise a high degree of gratitude to God for the mercies we receive of him, and the great things he has done for the salvation of fallen men? Or that we should not have very great and strong desires after God and holiness? Is there any who will profess, that his affections in religion are great enough; and will say, “I have no cause to be humbled, that I am no more affected with the things of religion than I am; I have no reason to be ashamed, that I have no greater exercises of love to God and sorrow for sin, and gratitude for the mercies which I have received?” Who is there that will bless God that he is affected enough with what he has read and heard of the wonderful love of God to worms and rebels, in giving his only begotten Son to die for them, and of the dying love of Christ; and will pray that he may not be affected with them in any higher degree, because high affections are improper and very unlovely in Christians, being enthusiastical, and ruinous to true religion?

Our text plainly speaks of great and high affections when it speaks of “repining with joy unspeakable, and full of glory:” here the most superlative expressions are used, which language will afford. And the Scriptures often require us to exercise very high affections: thus in the first and great commandment of the law, there is an accumulation of expressions, as though words were wanting to express the degree in which we ought to love God: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” So the saints are called upon to exercise high degrees of joy: “Rejoice,” says Christ to his disciples, “and be exceeding glad,” Matt. 5:12. So it is said, Psalm 68:3, “Let the righteous be glad: let them rejoice before God: yea, let them exceedingly rejoice.” So in the book of Psalms, the saints are often called upon to shout for joy; and in Luke 6:23, to leap for joy. So they are abundantly called upon to exercise high degrees of gratitude for mercies, to “praise God with all their hearts, with hearts lifted up in the ways of the Lord, and their souls magnifying the Lord, singing his praises, talking of his wondrous works, declaring his doings, &c.”

And we find the most eminent saints in Scripture often professing high affections. Thus the Psalmist speaks of his love, as if it were unspeakable; Psal. 119:97, “O how love I thy law!” So he expresses a great degree of hatred of sin, Psal. 139:21, 22: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with them that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred.” He also expresses a high degree of sorrow for sin: he speaks of his sins “going over his head as a heavy burden that was too heavy for him: and of his roaring all the day, and his moisture being turned into the drought of summer,” and his bones being as it were broken with sorrow. So he often expresses great degrees of spiritual desires, in a multitude of the strongest expressions which can be conceived of; such as “his longing, his soul’s thirsting as a dry and thirsty land, where no water is, his panting, his flesh and heart crying out, his soul’s breaking for the longing it hath,”

Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections : In Three Parts … (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).

Terry was prompted by the release of several new recordings of the Doctor’s preaching to blog about two times he met with Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones. It makes compelling reading.  He quoted the doctor as telling the young reformed charismatic,

“the greatest sin of the evangelical church is telling God what He could not do.”

Terry also spoke about a powerful moment when the Doctor had been preaching:

On another deeply memorable night at the Chapel, he started his sermon in Acts but was drawn into Romans 1 and concentrated on the three times where it is stated ‘God gave them up’. I haven’t heard such preaching before or since. I have never felt the sense of awe and fear of God as I felt during that amazing sermon.

As he concluded, we sang the inevitable closing hymn, but, having sung it, everyone sat in silence for long moments and no one rushed to leave the building. It was perhaps the most awesome moment I have ever known in church and an experience that was not simply personal to me but being felt across the whole hushed congregation.

via Terry Virgo’s Blog » Blog Archive » Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones preaching in Pensacola.

Mark Driscoll is at his very best in the following clip. Ever wondered how family and mission entwine, especially in a growing church where you don’t know anyone? Ever wished for more intimacy and a greater relational feel in your church? Ever felt neglected and rejected in your church? Ever felt like your church was not your home? Watch this clip and be prepared to be blown away. I love the way he begins: Family is a category of relationship that the world knows nothing about. What’s better than friends? Family. It’s a huge painful annoying mess, family is awkward, trying and hard, but you love the family, and you serve the family, and you don’t give up on family. This sermon speaks about our need to find a way to contribute to our church. commit to it, and connect to a small group. Christians must change from being consumers to being active participants in the mission of God. When you are contributing to something, you will feel connected to it.

The full sermon this clip comes from is available from the Mars Hill Website.

One fascinating thing that I quote in Raised With Christ is J. I. Packer’s assertion that Puritans were very unlike Christians today in that they liked to talk about their experiences of God. Today I want to share with you the record of a remarkable experience of God had by Pascal. The following quote is a translation of a document found sewn into his clothing after his death. The original French can be found at the link below.

The quote that follows is credited by John Piper with having totally changed his life decades ago, and he speaks about this in a sermon on the DGM site.

Pascal was determined to never forget this encounter with God and the effect that it had on him. Biographers call this “The Memorial” and describe the whole event as a “second conversion,” which came after months of depression and a near death experience (his carriage almost fell over a bridge). He never spoke about the experience to others. But it changed the whole direction of his life.

You will note that the quote mentions nothing about tongues, so do not dismiss it if you are a cessationist: many experienced God without any of the spiritual gifts. Also, do not assume you have experienced all that God has for you, even if you are a tongues-speaking charismatic.

Have you met God like this? If not, I do strongly believe it is entirely right for us to seek to know him like this, indeed it is commanded by the Bible for us to do so. When I read these kind of accounts, to be honest, there is a resonance in some of my memories of meeting with God, BUT they leave me with a hunger for more. Please pray for me as I am praying right now for you, my blog readers, that God will meet with us like this:

The year of grace 1654,

Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.

Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.

From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob

not of the philosophers and of the learned.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

GOD of Jesus Christ.

My God and your God.

Your GOD will be my God.

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.

He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul.

Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have departed from him:

They have forsaken me, the fount of living water.

My God, will you leave me?

Let me not be separated from him forever.

This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.

Let me never be separated from him.

He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:

Renunciation, total and sweet.

Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.

Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on the earth.

May I not forget your words. Amen.

via Pascal’s Memorial@Everything2.com.

Forerunner Foundations has posted the following, prompted by chapter 12 of Raised With Christ. Not everyone makes the connection between resurrection and revival, but I am convinced they are strongly associated. Here is how the post explains it:

By definition, a revival is a resurrection.

We can think of this life-giving miracle on two levels. First, individuals need to be revived. This happens as we are connected to the life-giving power of our risen Lord through the ministry of His Holy Spirit. It is by the Spirit, Paul says in Ephesians 1, that we come to know (meaning experience and encounter) the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead” (Eph 1:17-20). It is by the power of this Spirit that we have already been made alive together with Christ (Eph 2:5).

On a second level, revival can touch churches, cities, or whole nations. Qualitatively, this is not a different work than the first. Here only the expanse or scope of the work has changed, broadening now to include a group of individuals who are all making a vibrant connection to Christ’s resurrection power. As Adrian Warnock argues in his excellent book Raised with Christ:

A revival is something that happens to individual Christians first and only subsequently has implications for those outside. Once a significant number of God’s people are experiencing more of the change that the resurrection brings, a larger number of conversions seems almost inevitable. Such “awakened” Christians are infectious in their joy in God, delight in telling people about the love of God for them, and tremble at thinking about the eternal state of the unbeliever (164).

If we can see the connection between revival and resurrection, we can see that something powerful is being said about our access to revival. Namely, revival is not to be an anomaly for the Christian, just as the resurrection is not celebrated once a year but every Lord’s day, and every day! A revival is not be something “odd” or “extra” for the one who has been raised with Christ and whose life is sustained by the Spirit of the risen Lord!

. . .because of Easter, Warnock argues, a revival is “a powerful intensification by Jesus of the Holy Spirit’s normal activity” (161). Indeed, “the Spirit of revival is always available to us. Thus, when revival comes, we should recognize it as a greater manifestation of normal Christianity” (161).

So it is our Easter-people privilege to cry out, in the word of Psalm 85:6 “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” In other words, “send a resurrection, O Lord!” This is the hunger and this is the hope of those who have been shaped by the Easter gospel.

In his chapter of A God-Entranced Vision of All Things, J. I. Packer surveys both history and the Scriptures to discern a pattern for genuine revival. I am including his list of 10 elements here because they form excellent prayer points as we ask for the implications of Easter to be more completely and intensely released in our hearts, in our church, and in our city . . .

1. God comes down
2. God’s word pierces
3. Man’s sin is seen
4. Christ’s cross is valued
5. Change goes deep
6. Love breaks out
7. Joy fills hearts
8. Each church becomes itself – becomes, that is, the people of the divine presence in an experiential, as distinct from merely notional, sense.
9. The lost are found
10. Satan keeps pace. (It is often said that the first person to wake up during an awakening is the devil!)

READ MORE at  Send A Resurrection, O Lord! « Forerunner Foundations.

My Friend, Lex quotes Wesley as follows:

‘Mon. Jan. 1, 1739 – Mr. Hall, Kinchin, Ingham, Whitefield, Hutchins, and my brother Charles, were present at out love-feast in Fetter Lane, with about sixty of our brethren.

‘About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried our for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground.

‘As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of his Majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.’ (John Wesley Journal, Baker edition, p.170)

Whitefield, writing of the same occasion, said, ‘O that our despisers were partakers of our joys!’ (GW Journal, p.196) And looking back on that brief season after returning from America, as friends gathered in London to pray, he wrote:

New wine!

‘Sometimes whole nights were spent in prayer. Often have we been filled as with new wine. And often have we seen them overwhelmed with the divine presence and crying out, ‘Will God indeed dwell with men upon earth? How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven!’ (John Gillies, Memoirs of the Life of George Whitefield, Dilly, p.34)

This amazing season of prayer, and this company of sixty, mainly young men would usher in a new day for the British Isles.

READ MORE

“One evening, an old woman 84 years of age and blind, had a vision. Now don’t ask me to explain this vision because I cannot, but strange things happen when God begins to move. This dear old lady in the vision saw the church of her fathers crowded with young people, and she saw a strange minister in the pulpit. She was so impressed by this revelation, because a revelation it was, she sent for the minister and told her story. The parish minister was a God-fearing man, a man who longed to see God working. Oh, he had tried ever so many things to get the youth of the parish interested, but not one single teenager attended the church. That was the situation. Well, what did the old lady have to say to him? I’ll tell you what she said: “I am sure, Mr. McKay, that you are longing to see God working. What about calling your office bearers together and suggesting to them that you spend two nights a week waiting upon God? You have tried missions, you have tried special evangelists, Mr. Mckay, have you tried God?” Oh, I tell you this is a wonderful old woman. So he meekly obeyed and said, “Yes, I’ll call the session together and I will suggest that we meet on Tuesday night and Friday night, and we’ll spend the whole night in prayer.” I tell you, dear people, here were men who meant business. The dear old lady said, “Well, if you do that, my sister and I will get on our knees at ten o’clock on Tuesday and ten o’clock on Friday and pray until 4 a.m. . . .” And in the prayers, according to the minister, they would say again and again, “God, you are a covenant-keeping God and you must be true to your engagements . . .” One night a very remarkable thing happened. They were kneeliing amongst straw, the straw of a barn house. Suddenly one young man rose and read part of Psalm 24: “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord” (vv.3-5a). And then that young man closed his Bible. And looking down at the minister and the elders, he spoke these crude words (but perhaps not so crude in our Gaelic language): “It seems to me to be so much humbug to be praying as we are praying, to be waiting as we are waiting, if we ourselves are not rightly related to God.” And then he lifted his two hands and prayed, “God, are my hands clean? Is my heart pure?” That dear man got no further, he fell on his knees and then on his face on the straw. In a matter of minutes three of the elders fell into a trance . . . when that happened in the barn . . . a power was let loosed . . . that shook the whole of Lewis. God stepped down. The Holy Spirit began to move among the people . . . God seemed to be everywhere . . . “

— Duncan Campbell

This is continued from part one of my story, which I shared last week.

I wonder if my father thought that what had happened the night I said I wanted to become a Christian had been real. I was so young; could I really understand it? Could this short conversation which ended in me praying really make such a difference to me? Could it be true that I had accepted Christ at such a young age?

I do remember being in no doubt about it the next morning when I had an argument with a member of my family. I wanted us to tell my two year old sister, but this grown-up believed she couldn’t understand yet. “No one is too young,” I argued.

Arguing. Now there’s a theme for my life. For not only did I accept the gospel as true, I would spend much of my young adult life arguing about it, and about just what the Bible says, but more of that in another post.

I am sure my parents at times doubted the veracity of my conversion- what parent of a sometimes rebellious child wouldn’t? But I resolved that day to prove anyone who ever doubted my determination to follow Christ wrong.

There was something inside that was driving me towards and not away from God. It would never go away. Years later I would realize that it was God who had put it there.

From a young age, I was fortunate enough to attend a new church- part of what was eventually to be called Newfrontiers. Formed from a small group of people who had left an evangelical church because they spoke in tongues, the group originally met in Nigel Ring’s house. It was what was then called a house church.

Nigel had struck up a friendship with a man called Terry Virgo, who had trained at London Bible College and been exposed to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ teaching and the charismatic movement. We joined the group just as they started to meet in the same building they still meet at – Clare Hall in Haywards Heath.

As a young child that church made a massive impact on me. Nigel’s wife was my Sunday School teacher and I watched her prophesy on Sunday mornings. Soon I desired to prophesy also, and at one stage wrote my life’s goals on the back of a postcard- one was to prophesy, and another was to score a goal in football- the second of which I never did quite manage.

Around this time, and while still very young I started to ask to be baptized. I wanted to join the many that were regularly baptized in what was a burgeoning church. My parents and the elders were at first reluctant.

Then, one year, I am fairly sure at the first ever Downs Bible Week, I received the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. I remember the experience vividly to this day. With arms raised to God during the worship, I was surrendering to him, adoring him, and seeking him. I suddenly felt as though my arms had become a funnel. The love which had been flowing from me to God now returned much more strongly from him to me. My heart raced. I felt a warmth. I was enveloped by God. I was caught up in an incredible sense that he accepted me. I was being filled with the Spirit. I found myself feeling that the English words of the song we were singing just were not full enough to express what I was feeling back to God. I found myself sounding incoherent, but I didn’t care. The words themselves were not important any more. I just wanted to praise him, and found that sounds and words I did not understand were coming out of my mouth. I was overwhelmed. The “tongues” weren’t the most important bit- rather it was the sense of being loved by God and marked out as being one of his. Somehow I knew that at that moment he was putting a seal on me, and I would be his forever.

I believe that receiving the Spirit is always a conscious thing, and it always has this element of “now I really know God loves me.” Many have described this as a form of direct assurance, or empowering for service.

Although I will never forget my first experience of the Holy Spirit, I have been blessed to have many such experiences since. Even as I write this I feel a yearning in my heart to know more of God and a greater sense of his empowering. Send more of your Holy Spirit, Lord, to me and the readers of this blog. As William Booth wrote years ago:

God of Elijah hear our cry
send the fire
to make us fit to live or die
send the fire today.
To make our weak hearts strong and brave
send the fire today….
look down and see this waiting host
we need another Pentecost
the revolution now begin
send the fire today….

There is no doubt in my mind that the greatest need of the church today is for a true revival. Revival is, of course, primarily something God does. It brings great joy and delight. I fear that it has become so alien to us that we almost dare not pray for it. I would love to challenge us to realize that revival is merely the intensification of the Holy Spirit’s normal work in the church. As such, it is possible to experience even a local revival, or a revival in an individual. We should pray that God will wake us up, then try to stir ourselves, for a revival is ultimately about the church rising up to grasp all that God has for her.

I found these words inspiring, and they make great words to pray. But don’t merely pray and then be passive. Pray and then open your eyes to what God would have you do right now. It is interesting that the psalmist speaks of the need to go out to sow in tears in order to then reap in joy.

Psalm 126

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
we are glad.

Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like streams in the Negeb!
Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!
He who goes out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.

May God grant us a revival of the kind of Christianity the Doctor is talking about here:

“It is one thing to believe the truth, it is a very different thing to apply it. We did listen, and apply the truth, initially, otherwise we would not be Christians at all. But it is possible for us … to go on, content with just listening to, or reading the truth, and never applying it to ourselves, or examining ourselves in the light of it. Is this not one of the most alarming possibilities in the Christian life?

… read the life of any man who has ever been used of God … in connection with revival, and you will always find that he was a man who had examined himself, and had become alarmed about himself. It has always been the thing that has led him to God and to prayer — his astonishment at himself. But if we do not examine ourselves we will never truly pray, and our lives will be lived entirely on the surface. Now, how little we hear about self-examination! Oh, we believe in having a quiet time, a short reading of Scripture, a hurried prayer, and we have done everything. But where is self-examination? How much talk is there about mortification of the flesh? (Colossians 3:5, Romans 8:13)

… allow the truth to search you … apply it to yourself … preach to yourself … talk to yourself … meditate about these things … bring yourself under conviction …[do] not let yourself escape. But …do not stop at that … allow the Scriptures to lead you to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the cleansing of His blood. In other words, any Christian who is depressed and morbid and introspective is really failing to apply the doctrine of justification by faith only. If you stop in your sins, if you stop in the dust and the ashes and in the sackcloth, I say, you are not scriptural. You must go on from that and look to Him, and apply again the truth to yourself. You must be certain that you end in a condition of thanksgiving and praise, with a realisation that your sins are covered and blotted out, and that you are renewed, and that you are able to go forward.”

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Westchester, Illinois, Crossway Books, 1987), pp. 80-83.

UPDATE- I have found the original source and as it is only now availble on the wayback machine include a copy here.
———

The Doctor thinks we are crazy if we reject the notion of God intervenng directly in human history today. This quote makes me want to pray more for him to stretch out his hand and act:

‘What is being taught in Christendom today is this, that since we have got the New Testament canon, since we have got the Word now, we do not need these direct interventions, we do not need God to speak to us directly, as He spoke to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob and these patriarchs. We have got the Word now! Is this superior to the direct speech of God? I think we are mad! There is no other word for this. We are mad.

We are meant to be in a superior position to every Old Testament saint because of what has happened in our blessed Lord and Saviour! But this teaching would have us believe that we do not need this direct contact with God now, and that all that has come to an end since the formation of the New Testament canon…….remember that the great point of the whole teaching of the Bible, of all you can deduce from it, is to tell you that God is a God who acts. And our only hope this afternoon is that this is still true. He has not finished acting. He is going on….There is only one hope. That is that He is still the living and the acting God. Christ is at His right hand, and He is seated and waiting until His enemies should be made His footstool…….

I have been defending the faith – and people have praised me for doing it. Rubbish! What a miserable failure it has all been! From now on I am determined to do one thing only, and that is to give God no rest nor peace, until He does prove Himself and show Himself. I have expended so much energy in reasoning with the people about this faith. We have got to do that, it is part of preaching. But if we stop at that it will avail us nothing. But what I now am concerned about and I am concentrating on is this – asking God to show Himself, to do something,to give this touch, this manifestation of power. Nothing else will even make people listen to us. ….Nothing is going to call the attention of the masses of the people to the truth of this faith save a great phenomenon, such as the phenomenon of the day of Pentecost, the phenomenon of any one of the great revivals, the phenomenon of a single changed life. This is something that always arrests attention, maybe curiosity – what does it matter? The people come and listen……

We must not be content until we have had some manifestation of the activity of God. We must concentrate on this. This is my plea, that we concentrate on this, because it is the great message of the Bible……. Let us put it like this: Do we really believe that God can still act? That is the question; that is the ultimate challenge. Or have we, for theological or some other reasons, excluded the very possibility? Here is the crucial matter. Do we individually and personally really believe that God still acts, can act and will act – in individuals, in groups of individuals, in churches, localities, perhaps even in countries? Do we believe that He is as capable of doing that today as He was in ancient times – the Old Testament, the New Testament times, the book of Acts, Protestant Reformation, Puritans, Methodist Awakening, 1859, 1904-5? Do we really believe that He can still do it? You see, it is ultimately what you believe about God. If He is the great Jehovah – I am that I am, I am that I shall be, unchanged, unchanging, unchangeable, the everlasting and eternal God – well, He can still do it.

=====COPY OF ORIGINAL SOURCE AVAILABLE ONLINE HERE=============

The Evangelical Magazine of Wales April 1981

Magazine Index

THE LIVING GOD

D. MARTYN LLOYD-JONES

Each year since its inception in 1955 the Doctor attended the annual Ministers’ Conference unless prevented from so doing by ill-health or absence from the country. He would chair the open discussions and bring the Conference to a memorable conclusion with a closing address. Here is one such address, delivered in June 1971, but still relevant.

I THANK God for this privilege of being allowed to do this year by year. I always feel it is a great responsibility, and yet it is, as I say, a very great pleasure and I am deeply grateful.

The remark that I want to try to give to you is in many ways a continuation of what we were discussing together on Monday night. The emphasis was that our troubles are mainly due to the fact that there is a lack of life amongst us. Ultimately all our problems can more or less be traced back to that – a lack of life. Now I want to go on from there to ask the question, Why is there this lack of life? Or at any rate, what is the main cause? If I were asked to name one cause, what is it? And I for myself would not hesitate to answer that it is due to a lack of a realization that God is a living God. We are not only in trouble about life in ourselves; we seem at times to forget that there is life in God.

It is this neglect of the living God – the God who acts. That is why I asked our friend Mr. Swann to read that portion of Scripture to us (Acts 13:24-42), because it is one of the many summaries that you have in the Bible that brings out this great point. Have you noticed how that so frequently in the Old Testament and in the New, when there is a crisis, when there is trouble, what the man of God does is to give a review of history. The psalmist does it constantly. You have several instances of it here in this book: Stephen did it in his great defence; Paul does it here in Antioch in Pisidia. A review, a grand review! Why? Just because it brings out the main element.

I feel that, as in the secular world, our greatest danger in the spiritual world is to miss the wood because of the trees. This is a perpetual thing. We are obsessed by details, over-concerned about particulars, and our greatest danger of all is to miss this whole, this grand whole, because of our inordinate preoccupation with these particular trees. I feel that at a time like this, and especially in these conditions, this is perhaps our greatest need. Our discussion which has just finished is, I think, an instance of it. It is inevitable. We cannot help this because we are in the flesh still. But I believe we have to be very careful about it, especially because it ultimately leads to the position in which (though it sounds almost incredible) our greatest sin of all is to fail to realize that God is an acting God – He does act.

Our whole position depends upon that: God’s action in the past, God’s action in the present, God’s action in the future. Now I believe it is important that we should analyse for a moment the ways in which we have tended to forget that God is a God who acts. One, of course, is the danger always of religion. Religion is generally the greatest enemy of the Christian faith. To be a religious person is one of the greatest hindrances to becoming a Christian, because it gives certain satisfactions. And we know today that, speaking of the churches in general in this land, there are congregations with an alarming percentage of people who are religious but who are not Christians. Religion is dangerous, you see, for this reason, that it is always something that puts emphasis upon our activities, our practices – we practise religion. And thereby we tend to think that it is entirely a matter of our activities, our conduct and behaviour, with the result that God is nearly always forgotten – taken for granted, of course, but therefore forgotten.

Then another cause of this – which comes a little bit nearer to us, speaking as evangelical brethren – is that we become so immersed in our activities that we do not stop to think what we are doing, or why we are doing it. Professionalism is the greatest curse of the minister. And although we are born-again men, we are ever in danger of becoming professionals. We are involved in preparation of sermons and preaching them. We are announced to do it; it is a part of the machine. And we have pastoral duties, funerals to take and marriages. The pastor is a very busy man – and this has to go on and on and on. As I think I was saying on Monday night in that story about Wilberforce, one of the easiest things of all is for a man to forget his own soul and to forget God. Of course, he still gets on his knees mechanically and says his prayers, but sometimes he stops at that. Even praying is part of a routine, part of the thing to do, and there is no realization of the living God, this God who acts. So then, that is one of the causes why we are constantly falling into this particular error.

Another one, of course, and a very prolific one, is false evangelism. We are all familiar with this; we have all seen it, perhaps taken part in it. When I talk about false evangelism, I mean that type of evangelism which conceives of itself primarily as a matter of organizing a campaign. The church is losing numbers. What can we do? We can hold a campaign. You decide who to have as your missioner, and so on. The whole outlook is one of activity – what can we do? We must have a campaign. Or if you are eager young people, it is a part of the outlook and the routine, and certain students go on a campaign and decide which town to attack and to evangelize, and so on. That is the mentality. This is the way in which the thinking takes place.

NOW … AND THEN

Now, you know, we have dealt with this many times in this conference. But there has been a very great departure here from what used to be the custom and the habit of our fathers. I do not mean our immediate fathers; I mean our great-great-great-grandfathers. You have to go back a long time. You see, when things were not going well in the churches, they reacted in a very different way. What they did was to say: ‘What’s the matter? Why has God left us? Have we offended Him? There must be some cause for this.’ So the minister and deacons would talk together and they would decide to call a day of prayer and humiliation. Humiliation was the word used – prayer and humiliation, sometimes accompanied by fasting. And they would tell God. They felt that they had wounded Him and hurt Him, that He was obviously turning His back on them like a wayfaring man. They would acknowledge and confess their sins and they would plead with Him to come back. That was their way. But, you see, that has gone, and it has been missing from the background of most who are troubled here today. Many of us, most of us by now probably, have seen the error of all this. But that has been our background, and these things tend to go on influencing us even though we have seen they are wrong.

Well then, what makes it so terrible is this, that when these arrangements are made and the organizations are set up and they have their committees to deal with this and that, generally, towards the end of the meeting, somebody will say: ‘Ah well, of course, we must have some prayer backing.’ Prayer backing! God as an afterthought! So you set up a subcommittee for prayer. And it is generally an afterthought, the last thing. You see, the whole approach is in terms of what man can do and human activity. God is only remembered almost casually at the end, and in a perfunctory manner. Then in the actual carrying out of the evangelism, the same thing comes in. The controlling idea has been this. Here is a statement made of the gospel. The people are asked to believe this and to receive it. And if they do so, they are told they are Christians. They take a decision, or they sign a form or a book or do something else. The whole emphasis again is, you see, upon man, upon man’s response. A number of doctrines are put before him, and he is asked to receive them and to accept them and to believe them, and he is assured that if he does so he is a Christian. Now we know that that is Roman Catholic teaching. Their view is that what a man does is to accept the body of doctrine and of dogma that is put before him.

It seems to me that evangelicals in this country, speaking very generally, have been doing precisely the same thing. It is put not so much in terms of ‘coming into contact with the living God’, as of accepting a number of propositions. If you accept those, you are a Christian. ‘Do you believe these things? If you do, all is well.’ Now again, you see, the departure from the old evangelicalism is quite alarming. There you read, in biographies and church histories and so on, of men coming under conviction of sin, and perhaps it would last a long time. John Bunyan was eighteen months in tremendous agony of soul, searching for God. Now I have often heard evangelical people saying today that this was all wrong, that these people were ignorant. Why didn’t they show the man salvation? Why eighteen months of repentance? He could be put right quite simply. Some evangelical organizations could put this man right in a matter of a few seconds. There is a verse – and a verse – one, two, three, four, five – got it all! But you see, the point then was that men conceived of salvation as coming to a knowledge of the living God, not accepting a number of propositions. So while the emphasis is on accepting a number of propositions or a statement, God is really forgotten. I know they all believe in God, they may make statements about God. But what is never brought out is that the essence of this matter is a meeting with God – doing business with God.

The old preachers, you see, brought this out very well. I remember having a most excellent illustration of this in my first year in the ministry in 1927. I had the great privilege of preaching on that occasion with a great old preacher in South Wales, called W. E. Prytherch. We were preaching together at Pyle in Glamorgan, and I had to preach first. The old man went up after me. He would not preach, but he said that I had stated the gospel and that he had a function to perform. And he said that he was just a little agent representing a great master, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now what he told the people was this – he didn’t simply ask the people to believe what I had been saying-he put it like this: ‘This is what I am here for-to tell you that Jesus Christ is in the office now. Come and see Him – the Person – go to your office.’ With a break in his voice – and what an extraordinary voice it was – he said, ‘Go to your office.’ Well, it was the personal encounter. That is the thing that I am concerned to emphasize. We, in our false views of evangelism, tend to put our stress upon the acceptance of a number of statements, and we are then incidentally forgetting God, and forgetting that the main thing is the activity of God.

APOLOGETICS?

But then, coming still nearer to our subject, I have a terrible feeling – and it is terrible, because I am one of the chiefest of the sinners – that nothing has so caused us to forget God and to forget the living, acting God, as our concern about apologetics. We have regarded ourselves as the defenders, the guardians, the custodians of the faith. We are that of course, but I am afraid that we have often stopped at that, and we have given the whole of our time and energy to defending the faith, defending the propositions- and forgetting God. Now you see, it is all a question of balance. We have got to indulge in apologetics. But what worries me, as I look back across my life, is that I have probably given too much time and attention to apologetics. Thirty years ago it was still more necessary than now. It is always necessary, but then we were still fighting the old liberalism up to a point. And quite unconsciously one could be found a sort of an apologete and no more. God was really forgotten, and one got engaged in endless discussions and debates. You were defending the truth at this point and that point, and safeguarding the whole position, steadying the ark and putting your hands on it to steady it – forgetting God! I am quite sure of it, and I plead guilty to it myself. One often indulged in these apologetics in a more or less carnal manner, and one enjoyed scoring points off the other side. But the terrible thing was that God tended to be forgotten. So let us be very careful about this matter of apologetics. Let us keep it in its place. I am almost coming to the conclusion that the only place that apologetics should have is briefly in an introduction to a sermon. If you spend the whole of your time on apologetics, you are really not preaching the gospel. Start with it if you like and just do a little demolition work; but do not pat yourself on the back and go home and have a wonderful meal because you have just pulled down a rotten building! The question is: Have you put anything up? The danger of being negative! And the danger of feeling ‘It’s our gospel, my church I am protecting, my interests’ – and forgetting God!

Or then, still more recently, something else has been happening, which has aggravated this whole tendency to forget God. And this is the new and increasing preoccupation with what is called in general ‘the application of the gospel’. Now we are creatures, you see, of reaction. The charge that has been brought for many years against those of us who are evangelical is that we have taken no interest in social and political conditions. This has been the constant attack against us. All our interest was in our little personal souls and their salvation – forgetting the world. We have not had a social emphasis. This attack, of course, was made for years and years upon us. I remember very well in about 1947 reading a book by Dr. Carl Henry, soon afterwards the editor of Christianity Today. He wrote a book with the title of The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, and I read this with great interest. He tells us that the lost note in Fundamentalism was this lack of social interest. I remember feeling at the time what a serious misjudgment this was, what an utterly false diagnosis. He was dealing with American Fundamentalism; and he said the missing note in American Fundamentalism was this lack of a social interest. I remember writing to him at the time and discussing it with him afterwards and venturing to suggest to him that he had missed the point, and that the real trouble – the missing note in American Fundamentalism as I have met it and known it – was a lack of spirituality, a carnality, professional evangelism, professional apologetics. That was the thing that appalled me when I first met American Fundamentalism – the sheer carnality of the outlook. They were more like business men than Christian men.

Well now, you see, the more intellectual men began to react to this criticism, and they said: ‘We must bring in this note!’ And they have been doing so ever since. So that now it is almost the controlling idea – Christian philosophy! You know, it has been going for a long time in Holland. It was started there by Professors Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven. And this is a teaching which talks about Christian politics, Christian medicine, even Christian mathematics, Christian everything! It is this idea of law and of spheres, and so on. Well now, this has come down in many, many different ways, sometimes almost purely philosophically. I remember attending a conference in the South of France in 1953. And, to be honest and to be helpful, I have got to say this: I had to keep on reminding myself that I was in a Christian conference! I had to remind myself of it, because all the papers were entirely philosophical, and the arguments and disputations were almost entirely on that level. There was virtually no prayer at all. It was all a question of papers and of discussions, but it was a Calvinistic conference.

‘CHRISTIANITY AND………’

This is the thing that has now come in like a flood into evangelicalism, particularly in England. Everybody is talking about the Christian attitude towards this and that. I happened the other day casually to pick up the syllabus of a well-known Christian organization, and I noticed that the next two meetings are to be on these things. The first is to be on ‘The Christian attitude towards strikes’, and the other on ‘The Christian attitude towards art’. You see, this is the thing! We have been missing this. And some of them press it so far as to say that if you want to evangelize the modern world, you have got to know something about politics, you have got to know something about art, you have got to know something about literature, you have got to know something about novels, the modern drama, the modern films – and so on. The argument is that you cannot evangelize the modern man if you cannot speak to him in his own idiom, if you do not know how he thinks. So you have got to familiarize yourself with these things. I do not know that I have told you here of an experience I had about fifteen months ago. I was preaching in a certain place, and a young man and his wife, who were going to be missionaries, were very kindly driving me there and back. They belonged to the church where I was preaching. As we were going home that night, the wife, sitting at the back, suddenly burst upon me, ‘Could I ask you a question?’ I said, ‘Yes, what is it?’ ‘Now’, she said, ‘what’s your view about reading modern novels?’ I was somewhat taken aback, because I knew that she was in a well-known missionary training college. I said, ‘Why do you ask that question?’ She replied: ‘I am in great trouble about it in my college. I am actually being persecuted.’ ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Well’, she said, ‘one of our lecturers told us that if we want to evangelize the modern man, we really must know what he reads, what he is talking about, the way in which he thinks.’ So now, one of the first things she has to do is to read modern novels. The lecturer had commanded certain novels. ‘I read one of them’, said this candidate. ‘You know, it did me such harm, and it made me so unhappy and so miserable that I decided I should not read another one. I could see no purpose in it and it did me great harm. I refuse to read any more.’ She added ‘I am now being attacked by my fellow-students and by the lecturers. They say I am not doing my duty, and I cannot be an effective missionary’ – because she was not reading these modern novels! I said: ‘Didn’t they tell you that you ought to spend three to six months in a public house every night, so that you could evangelize drunkards? Did they tell you that?’ No, they had not told her that! I said: ‘They should have – to be logical – they should have!’ – But this is the attitude. What does it mean? It means that God is forgotten. You see, we do it all.

Now, the extraordinary thing about this is that this teaching has come from the Free University of Amsterdam, the great Calvinistic College, founded by Abraham Kuyper in 1880, the great bulwark of the Reformed Faith. That is where it has come from. This is what is so interesting. Calvinism, which has always exalted the sovereignty and the glory of God, has now become thoroughly Arminian in this matter! God is more or less forgotten. And that outlook I met in America two years ago, where even in well-known seminaries they on the whole did not believe in preaching any more. What you do is this: you go to people’s houses and you start talking politics to them, and you show the defects in their politics and try to introduce them to Christian politics. Or, if they are interested in art, you see paintings on the wall and you start talking about modern art; you expose the wrongfulness of modern art and its background, and then you tell them about Christian art – and so on. That is the way in which you evangelize. The declaration, such as Paul made in Athens – ‘whom ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you!’ – that is out. You do not declare Him with a dialogue! You hold a discussion. So you see, in this way God, I maintain, is being forgotten. The whole emphasis is upon our trying, our becoming well-versed in these various disciplines and interests and aspects of culture today. This is the way. Brethren, I maintain that this is a denial of God – the living, acting God and His sovereignty in all these matters!

THEOLOGICAL SCHOLASTICS

I must go one further step. I believe the same thing is happening in the realm of what I call a ‘theological scholasticism’ which is beginning to manifest itself amongst us – a ‘theological scholasticism’ in which we talk about the doctrines of grace instead of talking about God, the doctrines of salvation instead of Christ, the living Saviour. I believe that this is a new form of Deism. I could convict so many today of a new Deism. You know what that means. It took this form at the beginning of the eighteenth century: God was regarded as the great Creator, described as a great watch-maker. He made the watch, He wound it up, and then He put it down and He has no more to do with it. That was their way, you see, of denying miracles. Miracles are nonsense, they said. God does not interfere. He has made the watch, He has put it down, and on it goes; He does not interfere with it. Deism! Well, I suspect a new kind of Deism is with us. I was referring to it partly yesterday in talking about miraculous healing and miracles and things of that kind. On some sort of theological and biblical grounds, as they would claim, they say that miracles cannot happen today, because all this ended with the Apostles. As if to say, ‘Oh yes, God acted then; but He hasn’t acted like that since.’ He is shut out, on a priori grounds, on what they call biblical and theoretical grounds. They say, ‘God does not act like that now.’ They are shutting Him out. Is not that Deism? Who has given them the right to say this? The Scriptures do not say it, but they are saying it.

The fact is, of course, that there are many such people, who not only will not admit the possibility of miracles today, or at any time since the apostolic era, but equally reject the possibility of demon-possession today. They are dismissing it all as psychological. They will not grant that it is possible for a person to be demon-possessed today. They admit, of course, that it happened in New Testament times; but, they say, not now. I am not imagining all this. I have been involved in discussions about it, and I know that this is their standpoint. They will not accept the possibility of demon-possession today. It is all explained in terms of psychology. This is as if to say, you see, that because, on their understanding of it, God had decided at the end of the apostolic era that He would not interfere any more in a miraculous manner, the devil also very kindly and very politely said, ‘Well, I will not act either.’ That is what it comes to. You see, the thing is monstrous and ridiculous. In other words, these men have worked themselves into a theoretical and academical theological position in which God is not allowed to act, and the demons are not allowed to act; there is no spiritual activity. What is Christianity? Well, Christianity is an acceptance of a body of doctrine, and a discussion of this and a defence of this, and an attempt to understand it more and more.

Now I say that this shuts out God. The fact that men talk a lot about God does not mean that they really believe in the living God. They are talking about God; they are making statements about God; they are experts on the attributes of God; but they seem to shut out the living God, God Himself, the acting God. By their theories, He is not allowed to act. This is Deism; it is a kind of theological scholasticism. And this is the terrifying thing, that you can be talking about God and His attributes and so on, and yet have no contact with and no personal knowledge of this living God. I am not exaggerating, brethren, I am speaking solemn truths and facts. You can find some of the highest and most orthodox seminaries and collections of Christian men, reformed, Calvinistic, orthodox up to the latest dot, and the guardians of this faith, and some of them never have a prayer meeting and never talk about prayer. As I say, in their actual teaching they exclude the activity of the spiritual realm directly and immediately today, whether from the side of the Holy Spirit, or from the side of the evil spirits.

REVIVAL – DANGEROUS?

In the same way, of course, they are not interested in the whole notion of revival. They never talk about it; in fact, they dislike it. Revivals are regarded as enthusiasm, as something excessive, dangerous, ecstatic. They say this is not what is needed. We have received everything, we are born again, we have the Scriptures. What we need to do is just to go on to understand the Scriptures more deeply. They not only do not expect the Spirit to come upon them, but they do not like teaching which suggests that He can come, and that we should pray for Him to come. All this is disliked. Now I am not imagining this. I could prove this to you. Those of you who have the three volumes of Charles Hodge on Theology, observe the amount of space which he gives to the Holy Spirit in those three volumes; observe the amount of space he gives to revival. You can do the same with the works of Warfield. I say this with profound regret, because of my debt to these men. But I think that was the great weakness in their whole position, as it was still more in the case of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck of Holland. The result is that today institutions that were founded as bastions of orthodoxy have become hotbeds of modernism and liberalism. And I would attribute it entirely to this, that it had become theoretical, intellectual; it has become an intellectualism, God is shut out, even though they are always talking about God. This is the tragedy of the situation, and it reminds us of the subtlety of the devil.

This further shows itself in this way, in an antipietistic attitude. Pietism has become a term of abuse by now. When you talk about the subjective element and the experimental, it is dismissed as Pietism. It has been a word of taboo for years on the Continent, and in Holland in particular, where they call it either Pietism or Methodism. They dislike it; they show bitterness with respect to it. It is astounding that many who claim to be the most biblical of all men should react even with temper and with an element of violence against what they call Pietism. They dislike the eighteenth century, and so on.

GOD WHO ACTS

Well now, these are the ways, I think, in which unconsciously so many of us have been forgetting God, the living God. Why is this so wrong? There is only one answer: because it contradicts the main message of the Bible. The main message of the Bible is to tell us about the activity of God. What did the men filled with the Holy Spirit talk about on the day of Pentecost? Well, fortunately we have the evidence of the people who were there. These men ‘were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?’ Then the list of the people follows – ‘. . . Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues’ – speak what? the wonderful experiences we have had? No, – 0′the wonderful works of God.’ That is the theme of the whole Bible. The Bible is the record of the wonderful works of God. It is not a textbook of theology primarily; it is a history book, the history of the wonderful works of God. The Bible is really the history of the salvation of God. In order to be that, it has to start with the beginning: the creation and so on. But its real message is God’s activity in the redemption of a fallen human race. Is not that its message from beginning to end? ‘In the beginning God created.’ How can we possibly go wrong after that? But we do – we forget that it all begins with God.

Then the story goes on. Every time man acts, he always does something wrong, doesn’t he? He sins, he rebels, he goes astray in his cleverness, and so on. And the whole thing had ended, were it not that God comes in. Isn’t it amazing how we can miss this? Adam and Eve listen to the devil, you see, and they sin, and they immediately realize they have done wrong, and they are alarmed and they are troubled, and they go and hide. God comes down – God coming down! – in the cool of the evening, and He shouts, ‘Adam, where art thou?’ And out they come, trembling. God – God coming down! This is a summary of the whole message. I wish I had the time just to take you through the whole thing again. You say that we know all this. I know. The people to whom the psalmist recapitulated the history, they knew. And you remember what old Peter says in his second Epistle. He is going to die, he says. What is he going to do with them? Is he giving them a new message? No. He is reminding them of the things they already know. Why? Well, because although they knew them, they had forgotten them. The greatest need in the Church and the greatest need of ourselves is to be reminded of what we know. ‘Though you know them’, says Peter, ‘and are established in the present truth’ – and he keeps on repeating this. Yea, he says, while I am in this tabernacle I am to go on reminding you. Is it not tragic that we need to be reminded of the central thing? We are experts on details, but we have forgotten the centre. So we need to be reminded of all this.

The Bible is full of it. God did not stop acting when He came down to the garden of Eden. He went on acting. The tower of Babel, the flood before the tower of Babel, the call of Abraham – this is God acting, God interfering, God erupting into it all, choosing men, speaking, giving them a message – and on you could go. Go through it all. Those patriarchs: Jacob – that night and the ladder, the living God, the house of God, and the great vision. Are you asking me to believe that Jacob was in a superior position to us? Are you in the position in which you say, ‘I wish I was living in the times of Jacob, and that I could have a direct contact with God’? That is what is being taught, you know. What is being taught in Christendom today is this, that since we have got the New Testament canon, since we have got the Word now, we do not need these direct interventions, we do not need God to speak to us directly, as He spoke to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob and these patriarchs. We have got the Word now! Is this superior to the direct speech of God? I think we are mad! There is no other word for this. We are mad’ We are meant to be in a superior position to every Old Testament saint because of what has happened in our blessed Lord and Saviour! But this teaching would have us believe that we do not need this direct contact with God now, and that all that has come to an end since the formation of the New Testament canon.

Well, go on, read about Moses, read about Joshua and about David. Go and read about the messages as they came to the great prophets. And all is God raising up, God acting, God interfering. Then, ‘when the fulness of the time was come, God send forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.’ And the whole time we have the law, the finger of God. ‘The words I speak, I speak not of myself’. We see His utter dependence upon His Father. He is repeating the message that has been given to Him. He puts His whole emphasis upon the activity of God. This is a part of His self-humiliation. He does not empty Himself of His Godhead, but He empties Himself of some of the prerogatives, and He is living as a man, and He is dependent. That is why He used to pray so much. ‘Our Lord had a greater need of prayer than you and I. We can get on much better without prayer than our Lord could!’ That is our position! Why? ‘We have got the New Testament canon – work out the theology! We do not need this now! We have got the truth; it is understanding of the truth that matters’, we say! So we do not pray. So we do not know God!

Well, here it is. This is what I want to emphasize. Our Lord has given this teaching, and He returned to heaven. Has God stopped acting? Read the book of Acts. And it is a book of acts, as has been pointed out; not so much the acts of the Apostles, as the acts of the Holy Spirit, the acts of the risen Lord through these Apostles. That is what they keep on saying. When the people came to Peter and John in the temple and were ready to worship them, they said, ‘It is not we. It is His Name, – through the power that is in His Name – that has done this wonderful thing.’ All along they pointed people to Him. It is the activity of the risen Lord. Luke at the very introduction speaks of the things which ‘Jesus began to do’. He is still doing them! The same Jesus! He has gone back, but He has not stopped acting. They are the acts of the living Lord and on they go. You find it running right through this book of the Acts of the Apostles. Then you get your Epistles with their great expositions. But does this mean that because we have got it all recorded, He has stopped acting? I suggest that that is to deny the message of the Scriptures. He goes on acting. He has not stopped acting. As He did not stop when He rose from the dead, and He did not stop when the Spirit was sent, still less has He stopped because we have got the New Testament canon.

GOD’S METHOD

He has gone on acting subsequently throughout the running centuries. We would not be here this afternoon, if it were not for the living and the acting God. The study of the Scriptures alone would have finished the Church long ago. Your great experts your orthodox men – it was dead – and it would have died! And what has kept the Church alive has been God acting in revival. John the Baptist was not the last man that God called – of course not! The Apostles were not the last men that Christ called. He has been calling men ever since. Brethren, He has called us. It is because of the acting God that we are where we are and what we are. But you see it, of course, supremely in this matter of revival. Jonathan Edwards is surely right when he says, that God’s main method throughout the centuries of adding to the Church and adding to the number of the elect has been through revival. I think that this is true. I think the history of the Church proves this. That has been God’s main method: the hundreds, the thousands are brought in in revival. There are conversions in the intervening periods, but the great additions – the majority of the people when the final number of the elect is made up and they are counted – you will find that the vast majority have come in during periods of revival. And revival is nothing but the direct activity of God the Holy Spirit, the mighty rushing wind, the Spirit coming down, the Spirit being poured out. It is Christ who does this. He is the One who baptizes with the Spirit. He pours out His Spirit. And this, I say, is what is meant by revival.

Now it sounds as if I am discouraging the study of the Scriptures and theology, which I am not. All I am saying is that if we stop at that, we are excluding God. Do that for all you are worth, but on top of it all, remember that the great point of the whole teaching of the Bible, of all you can deduce from it, is to tell you that God is a God who acts. And our only hope this afternoon is that this is still true. He has not finished acting. He is going on. The number of the elect is going to be made up; all Israel is going to be gathered in. What comfort have you got as you face your modern humanism and materialism, and the various philosophies, and communism, and everything that is so much against us? Is your study in the Scriptures, is your apologetics going to deal with this? If you believe that, you are the biggest fool in Christendom! There is only one hope. That is that He is still the living and the acting God. Christ is at His right hand, and He is seated and waiting until His enemies should be made His footstool. God knows when the end is coming. He alone knows it, but it is coming. It is coming! There is a day coming when Christ will come back conquering and to conquer. Let the world do what it will. Let hell be let loose. It will make no difference; there is nothing that ‘can make Him His purpose forgo’ – thank God! -’nor sever my soul from His love.’

OUR SUPREME NEED

Very well, what I deduce from all this is this, that our supreme need is the realization of the fact that God is alive, and that God acts and is still acting. History, of course, is so full of this. We are not the first to be fools and to go astray. Remember what they did at the end of the seventeenth, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Things were very bad then much as they are now. Robert Boyle felt that something must be done about it. What did he do? Oh appoint a lectureship; we are going to do it, you see! Lectureship! We are going to defend the truth. Bishop Butler – Butler’s Analogy! What is he doing? Oh, defending the truth against the rationalists, Cambridge Platonists, the rationalists and the deists. Defending the truth! Wonderful – great men – great scholars! They are going to defend the truth of God! But do you remember the story of what happened? It was George 1, I think, who asked somebody one day about Bishop Butler: ‘Is Bishop Butler dead?’ ‘No, Sir’, said this man, ‘he is not dead, but he is buried somewhere in the country.’ What a good commentary that is on so much of our scholarship! Very learned, very wonderful, but buried in the country! It did not make the slightest difference. But something did make a difference. What was it? God laid His hand on George Whitefield and something happened. Is it not obvious? Now, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that we do not need apologetics; but it has a very small place – keep it there. This is the thing. What the Boyle lectures and Butler’s Analogy did not do and cannot do, nor any other such similar endeavour, God comes in and does. He acts – the living God. He is still the same. And He has done it even since that eighteenth century.

‘PROVE ME NOW’

And now it seems to me that it comes to this. I feel that the message that God is giving to us in this conference is in the words of Malachi. I believe He is saying this to us: ‘Prove me now’ – ‘Prove Me. I am there; you prove Me.’ This has become a tremendous conviction with me. Maybe because I am facing my last years and I have been defending the faith – and people have praised me for doing it. Rubbish! What a miserable failure it has all been! From now on I am determined to do one thing only, and that is to give God no rest nor peace, until He does prove Himself and show Himself. I have expended so much energy in reasoning with the people about this faith. We have got to do that, it is part of preaching. But if we stop at that it will avail us nothing. But what I now am concerned about and I am concentrating on is this – asking God to show Himself, to do something, to give this touch, this manifestation of power. Nothing else will even make people listen to us. See, you bring out your apologetics; the others will answer. Every time you say something, you may say ‘This is unanswerable; nobody can turn this back.’ The reviewers wholly dismiss you, say you are a fool, you are ignorant, you do not know what you are talking about. That is what they will say. I can tell you now. You write your books. That is what you will get. I have had it! You see, one scholar . . . and another answers him. And they are satisfied. No, no! Nothing is going to call the attention of the masses of the people to the truth of this faith save a great phenomenon, such as the phenomenon of the day of Pentecost, the phenomenon of any one of the great revivals, the phenomenon of a single changed life. This is something that always arrests attention, maybe curiosity – what does it matter? The people come and listen. And the preacher has his opportunity. Nothing will avail us save this manifestation of the activity of God.

My plea, therefore, is simply this – and with this I close – that we keep this ever in the forefront of all our thinking, all our preparation of sermons, and all our praying in particular. We must not be content until we have had some manifestation of the activity of God. We must concentrate on this. This is my plea, that we concentrate on this, because it is the great message of the Bible, so substantiated by the lessons of history. That is obviously today the only thing that gives us any hope as we face the future. And God seems to be saying that to us. ‘Prove Me now. Try Me. Risk your everything on Me. Be fools for My sake. Cast yourselves utterly upon this belief.’ Let us put it like this: Do we really believe that God can still act? That is the question; that is the ultimate challenge. Or have we, for theological or some other reasons, excluded the very possibility? Here is the crucial matter. Do we individually and personally really believe that God still acts, can act and will act – in individuals, in groups of individuals, in churches, localities, perhaps even in countries? Do we believe that He is as capable of doing that today as He was in ancient times – the Old Testament, the New Testament times, the book of Acts, Protestant Reformation, Puritans, Methodist Awakening, 1859, 1904-5? Do we really believe that He can still do it? You see, it is ultimately what you believe about God. If He is the great Jehovah – I am that I am, I am that I shall be, unchanged, unchanging, unchangeable, the everlasting and eternal God – well, He can still do it. And I believe He is saying to us. ‘Try Me. Prove Me. Cast your all upon Me. Go on until I have given you the proof you desire.’ Then we will forget the trees for a while, and we will see the grand power of our God, and God’s gracious and eternal purposes in His dear Son. We will first be humbled, and I think many of us will feel that we have never been Christians at all. It will not be true; we are. But what we will experience then will be so great and glorious, so overwhelming, that we will scarcely believe that we have ever known anything about these things at all. May that day soon come!

* The Evangelical Magazine of Wales

I will simply let “The Doctor” speak for himself today. This has to be one of the most challenging quotes from him I have ever read:

“. . . The secret of the early Christians, the early Protestants, Puritans and Methodists was that they were taught about the love of Christ, and they became filled with a knowledge of it. Once a man has the love of Christ in his heart you need not train him to witness; he will do it. He will know the power, the constraint, the motive; everything is already there. It is a plain lie to suggest that people who regard this knowledge of the love of Christ as the supreme thing are useless, unhealthy mystics. The servants of God who have most adorned the life and the history of the Christian Church have always been men who have realized that this is the most important thing of all, and they have spent hours in prayer seeking His face and enjoying His love. The man who knows the love of Christ in his heart can do more in one hour than the busy type of man can do in a century. God forbid that we should ever make of activity an end in itself. Let us realize that the motive must come first, and that the motive must ever be the love of Christ.

I end with the question which I asked at the beginning: To which of the circles do you belong? Are you pressing your way right into the centre? . . .

Are we pressing into the innermost circle? Are we seeking the Lord’s face? Are we coveting the knowledge of His love? The Apostle prayed for every single member of the Church at Ephesus that he or she ‘might be able to comprehend with all saints what is the length and breadth and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.’ How tragic it is that any of us should be living as paupers, out on the cold street, while the banqueting chamber is open and the feast prepared. Let us search for the knowledge of the Lord in the Scriptures and read about it in the lives of the saints throughout the centuries. As we do so, we shall never be content until we are in the innermost circle and looking into His blessed face.”

Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. An Exposition of Ephesians 3: The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979, pp.247-253.

No, I am not back from my blogging semi-retirement! This blog is still on automatic pilot and is on a STRICT rev-limiter. Until such time as the complete draft of my book is in the hands of my publisher (which should be in 1 months time), I will not be posting more than Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Please pray for me as there is still much to accomplish although I do have a complete draft and am currently honing it in my spare time. Its time to share another quote from Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

If you look back across the history of the Christian Church, you immediately find that the story of the Church has not been a straight line, a level record of achievement. The history of the Church has been a history of ups and downs. It is there to be seen on the very surface. When you read the history of the past you find that there have been periods in the history of the Church when she has been full of life, and vigour, and power. The statistics prove that people crowded to the house of God, whole numbers of people who were anxious and eager to belong to the Christian Church.

Then the Church was filled with life, and she had great power; the Gospel was preached with authority, large numbers of people were converted regularly, day by day, and week by week. Christian people delighted in prayer. You did not have to whip them up to prayer meetings, you could not keep them away. They did not want to go home, they would stay all night praying. The whole Church was alive and full of power, and of vigour, and of might. And men and women were able to tell of rich experiences of the grace of God, visitations of his Spirit, a knowledge of the love of God that thrilled them, and moved them, and made them feel that it was more precious than the whole world. And, as a consequence of all that, the whole life of the country was affected and changed.”

Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1987). Revival (26). Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books

I wonder—when was the last time you heard another Christian preach or speak about conviction of sin? When was the last time you saw someone on the brink of salvation in tears of anxiety and burden because of a distinct awareness of their sinfulness? It seems to me that true conviction is not present as much as it should be today. If Spurgeon is right, if anyone has not experienced it, we should be very concerned about the validity of their salvation.

“First, regeneration will be shown in conviction of sin. This we believe to be an indispensable mark of the Spirit’s work; the new life as it enters the heart causes intense inward pain as one of its first effects. Though nowadays we hear of persons being healed before they have been wounded, and brought into a certainty of justification without ever having lamented their condemnation, we are very dubious as to the value of such healings and justifyings. This style of things is not according to the truth. God never clothes men until He has first stripped them, nor does He quicken them by the gospel till first they are slain by the law.

When you meet with persons in whom there is no trace of conviction of sin, you may be quite sure that they have not been wrought upon by the Holy Spirit; for “when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” When the Spirit of the Lord breathes on us, He withers all the glory of man, which is but as the flower of grass, and then He reveals a higher and abiding glory. Do not be astonished if you find this conviction of sin to be very acute and alarming; but, on the other hand, do not condemn those in whom it is less intense, for so long as sin is mourned over, confessed, forsaken, and abhorred, you have an evident fruit of the Spirit. Much of the horror and unbelief which goes with conviction is not of the Spirit of God, but comes of Satan or corrupt nature; yet there must be true and deep conviction of sin, and this the preacher must labour to produce, for where this is not felt the new birth has not taken place.”

— C. H. Spurgeon

I have been quoting from Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner a fair bit lately. He is like a breath of fresh air. O for God to raise an army of preachers who truly understand the point he makes in the following quote:

“… to win a soul, it is necessary, not only to instruct our hearer, and make him know the truth, but to impress him so that he may feel it. A purely didactic ministry, which should always appeal to the understanding, and should leave the emotions untouched, would certainly be a limping ministry. “The legs of the lame are not equal,” says Solomon; and the unequal legs of some ministries cripple them. We have seen such an one limping about with a long doctrinal leg, but a very short emotional leg. It is a horrible thing for a man to be so doctrinal that he can speak coolly of the doom of the wicked, so that, if he does not actually praise God for it, it costs him no anguish of heart to think of the ruin of millions of our race. This is horrible!

I hate to hear the terrors of the Lord proclaimed by men whose hard visages, harsh tones, and unfeeling spirit betray a sort of doctrinal desiccation: all the milk of human kindness is dried out of them. Having no feeling himself, such a preacher creates none, and the people sit and listen while he keeps to dry, lifeless statements, until they come to value him for being “sound”, and they themselves come to be sound, too; and I need not add, sound asleep also, or what life they have is spent in sniffing out heresy, and making earnest men offenders for a word. Into this spirit may we never be baptized!

Whatever I believe, or do not believe, the command to love my neighbour as myself still retains its claim upon me, and God forbid that any views or opinions should so contract my soul, and harden my heart as to make me forget this law of love! The love of God is first, but this by no means lessens the obligation of love to man; in fact, the first command includes the second.

We are to seek our neighbour’s conversion because we love him, and we are to speak to him in loving terms God’s loving gospel, because our heart desires his eternal good.

A sinner has a heart as well as a head; a sinner has emotions as well as thoughts; and we must appeal to both. A sinner will never be converted until his emotions are stirred. Unless he feels sorrow for sin, and unless he has some measure of joy in the reception of the Word, you cannot have much hope of him. The Truth must soak into the soul, and dye it with its own colour. The Word must be like a strong wind sweeping through the whole heart, and swaying the whole man, even as a field of ripening corn waves in the summer breeze. Religion without emotion is religion without life.”

— C. H. Spurgeon

Last Monday I shared some of the things that Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones believed we should not do when weighing whether what appear to be gifts of the Spirit are genuinely from God. This week I am sharing his view on the positive ways of testing and examining these gifts. My paraphrase of his tests is as follows:

1. We should use our human reasoning and understanding.

It’s interesting to see his stress on wisdom, led, of course, by the Scriptures, but the use of our brains nonetheless. It’s a sad indictment on much of the charismatic church, where Christians have often been encouraged to hang their brains on a hook on the way into church. To MLJ, the use of this reason is enabled and enlightened by the Spirit. He says, “It happens like this: the Holy Spirit enlightens the understanding. He does not make us Christians apart from the understanding. What he does is to lift the understanding up to a higher level. There is nothing wrong with reason except that it is governed by a sinful disposition, and that is why it can never bring us into Christianity or into the kingdom. But the Spirit can lift up the mind and the reason. A man is never saved against his reason and his understanding—never! What happens is that his understanding and his reason are enabled to see the truth which he formerly rejected.”

2. We should test by comparing what is being said with the Bible.

MLJ made the excellent point that if the end result of any movement is to move away from what the Bible says, or even to study it less, that movement is clearly in error.

Here is a direct quote from him on this subject:

“. . . the answer is not to commit intellectual suicide, nor to stop thinking, nor deliberately to let yourself go and abandon the powers that God has given you. The answer is to trust yourself to the illumination and the guidance of the Spirit. . . .

It is to me one of the most wonderful aspects of this truth—how at one and the same time you can be gripped and lifted up by the Spirit and still be in control. But that is the glory of Christianity, that is what differentiates it from everything that is false and spurious. So I argue that the first thing we have to do is to use our reason and understanding, the very powers that God has given us. Indeed I want to put this as a positive assertion, that it is the very central glory of the Christian salvation that takes up the whole man. It takes up his mind, his heart, and his will.

. . . These, then, are the two main principles involved in testing the spirits. We must use our minds and our understanding, and must never ‘let ourselves go’. We must not abandon ourselves for in doing so we lose the ability to be critical, to evaluate, to prove, and to control. Above all, we must apply the Scriptures. We have the Spirit in us, our mind is enlightened, and we have the Scriptures. We must put these things together. Nothing is more dangerous than to put a wedge between the word and the Spirit, to emphasize either one at the expense of the other. It is the Spirit and the word, the Spirit upon the word, and the Spirit in us as we read the word.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, (Eastbourne UK: Kingsway Communications, 1995) 199, 201, 205.

A few days ago, I quoted from Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner. I thought I would share another quote from that first chapter again today. It is interesting in the context of today that some argue against emotionalism in preaching, while others try and by human effort create an atmosphere. Spurgeon would disagree with both approaches:

“Nor is it soul-winning, dear friends, merely to create excitement. Excitement will accompany every great movement. We might justly question whether the movement was earnest and powerful if it was quite as serene as a drawing-room Bible-reading. You cannot very well blast great rocks without the sound of explosions, nor fight a battle and keep everybody as quiet as a mouse. On a dry day, a carriage is not moving much along the road unless there is some noise and dust; friction and stir are the natural result of force in motion. So, when the Spirit of God is abroad, and men’s minds are stirred, there must and will be certain visible signs of the movement, although these must never be confounded with the movement itself. If people imagine that to make a dust is the object aimed at by the rolling of a carriage, they can take a broom, and very soon raise as much dust as fifty coaches; but they will be committing a nuisance rather than conferring a benefit. Excitement is as incidental as the dust, but it is not for one moment to be aimed at. When the woman swept her house, she did it to find her money, and not for the sake of raising a cloud.

Do not aim at sensation and “effect.” Flowing tears and streaming eyes, sobs and outcries, crowded after-meetings and all kinds of confusions may occur, and may be borne with as concomitants of genuine feeling; but pray do not plan their production.”

— C. H. Spurgeon

As a believer living in the West, I’m constantly reminded of the need to exercise discernment, especially when it comes to matters such as claims of spiritual gifts and the activity of the Holy Spirit. I thought today I would go to one of my favorite works by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable.

Directly before this quote, the Doctor points out that in all ages there are two main dangers confronting Christians when they need to evaluate claims regarding the reappearance or revival of gifts in the church. The first danger, he says, is to immediately reject such reports, which he is not afraid to call “quenching the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). He goes so far as to call that the more common danger. The second risk is, of course, the opposite to this—uncritical acceptance of everything, which leads to extremism.

He is always very systematic in his thinking, so he goes on to list why we need to be careful to weigh and test everything we hear about. My paraphrased version of his reasons why we need to be discerning are as follows:

1. The Bible tells us to. (See, for example, 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22.)

2. Studying Church history throughout the ages should strongly warn us of the consequences of being naive and accepting everything that is reported to be a “work of God’s Spirit.”
3. Clear evidence we hear of demonic activity in the occult. He argues that it is even possible for evil spirits to “heal” people.
4. The amazing things that hypnotists can make their subjects do.
5. The clear weakness and suggestability of people as demonstrated to us through modern psychology and what is called “hysteria.”
6. The fact that there is a real devil whose goal is to destroy us, and as a result inspires and empowers his servants.

Matthew 24:24: For false christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect—if that were possible.

He then stresses that he is concerned to warn those who are passionate about God, and open to him acting today in dramatic ways. He is clear in the context that he would count himself among that number. The Doctor was clearly not an extreme cessationist.

In this quote he explains what we should not rely on to enable us to make appropriate judgments. Next week we will examine the tests that the Doctor believes should be applied.

I am speaking particularly to those good, honest, spiritually-minded men and women of any age whatsoever who are longing for revival and reawakening . . . For it is your very anxiety to know the fullness and the baptism of the Spirit that constitutes your danger and exposes you to this possibility of not using your critical faculties as you should. . . .

Do not rely only upon your inward feelings . . . that is entirely subjective, and while I do not discount the subjective altogether, I say it is not enough. You must not rely solely upon some inner inward sense, because that is the very thing the devil wants you to do. That means you are not using your full critical faculties; deciding in a purely emotional and subjective manner.

. . . do not be swayed even by the fact that something reported to you makes you feel wonderful . . .You may say, ‘I have never known such love, I have never known such peace, I have never known such joy’ . . . Do not say ‘I feel this is right, everything in me says this is right . . .’ It is not enough. The devil is as subtle as that . . .

Lastly, do not base your judgment on the people who are . . . making their report to you . . . It is often some of the best, most honest and sincere people who can be most seriously led astray . . . The devil does not waste any of his time and energy with your smug formalist — he is safely asleep, already under the drug of the devil, though he is sitting in a Christian church.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, (Eastbourne UK: Kingsway Communications, 1995) 193-195. Emphasis mine.

For more information on Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones see this summary post, my Lloyd-Jones page, or the MLJ Recording Trust.