Have you ever sat down and worked your way through the years of the first few generations of mankind (Genesis 5)? It’s a few minutes work, but it is worth it. There are a few surprises that grab your attention straight away.

And one of them is a particularly sobering one – Methuselah.

Biography
Methuselah comes onto the scene in world history with what seems at first to be an outrageous claim by Moses that Methuselah lived to the ripe old age of 969 years, the oldest man in history by a long margin. The remaining information about his life in the Scriptures is that at the age of 178 he became the father of Lamech and then later, had a few more nameless, sons and daughters.

And that seems to be it. Not much to say for such a long life – and not much to inspire the generations that would follow.

But there is more that can be read between the lines without going into spurious claims and myths.

A great name to live with?

My name, Jonathan, means “Gift of God”. I don’t always feel like that, but essentially as far as a name goes that is what it means. Imagine then the pressure of living with the name given by Enoch to his first son, Methuselah. Methuselah has 2 variations of meaning; “Man of the spear”, or alternatively “when he dies it shall be sent”.

Imagine life as the years roll on and on, and the promise overshadowing you, but yet passing others by as they also grow old and die, that when you die, it shall come. But not knowing what was to come.

Methuselah would be 250 years of age when Adam dies. Methuselah has walked with Adam and no doubt knows all about the Garden of Eden and what life was like having uninterrupted access to God before the days of the fall. He’s also privy to the mystery concerning Enoch. He knows all the stories, he’s met all the main characters of history, and yet, it hasn’t deeply and profoundly affected his walk before God.

The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. Genesis 6:5-8

Methuselah receives no commendation by God, and it is his grand-son alone that finds favour in the eyes of God.

And so for Noah, a 100 year project gets under way to build the most important ship in history, and painfully, Methuselah is never mentioned once as standing beside Noah and his family as they obey the command of God. And all the time, the man called “When he dies, it shall be sent”, carries a prophetic message, but does not benefit from it.

Jewish teaching has it that Methuselah died 7 days before the beginning of the great Flood, and the 7 days were given by God to allow for Noah to mourn his departure. Whether or not that is true, is of no real account to us. What we do know is that as the great flood arrives, maybe days before, Methuselah dies.

And as Methuselah dies and the waters of the earth begin to rise, a new day dawns on the earth that is going to be a transition to new discoveries. The day of Adam and those who knew him has passed, and history moves quickly to a new set of characters, Noah and Abraham.

Sounds of silence
The weakness in all of this is that we are arguing from silence here – it may be that Methuselah turned to God during the days that Noah was building the Ark. we just do not know, but we do know what God had said in the above verses.

There are many in our generation that know all about God, they have heard the stories of revival, they have listened excitedly to the tales of dynamic stories of signs and wonders and miracles – but yet deep down, are untouched and unaffected by those encounters.

It is to them that God again and again, comes with the message of the gospel. I urge you that if you feel that you have heard all these things before and feel unmoved, to be wise. Ask God to help you not to be like Methuselah, but to turn your heart to Him.

God is always very, very gracious to all who call on Him.

Jon Cressey is a part of City Church Sheffield. You can visit his blog here: joncressey.com

Reformed people often forget that Piper is almost as much of a charismatic as I am! He is no doubt a bit more cautious than me about gifts, but he does believe in them. In this video clip he shares what he describes as a prophetic word that has a warning for the reformed movement today. You can read the transcript or watch it here:

This video might surprise some of my readers. Wayne is well known as a reformed theologian. Arguably he and Piper have between them, with some help from Keller and Carson, led to this resurgence of “Young Restless and Reformed” that so many people talk about. So when a man like that argues that God has not stopped speaking since completing the Bible, it is worth listening to what he has to say. Wayne is theologically charismatic (believing that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today) and argues that prophecy is still available today, representing what God is saying to individual Christians rather than the whole world:

Wayne Grudem on whether God’s revelation has really stopped or not from Adrian Warnock on Vimeo. ]]> http://adrianwarnock.com/2010/05/wayne-grudem-on-whether-gods-revelation-has-really-stopped/feed/ 0 http://adrianwarnock.com/2009/06/prophecy-told-me-i-should-marry/ http://adrianwarnock.com/2009/06/prophecy-told-me-i-should-marry/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:46:00 +0000 hostmaster http://adrianwarnock.com/2009/06/a-prophecy-told-me-i-should-marry-%e2%80%93-spiritual-gifts-q-and-a-3/

The details of the following situation have been changed to protect the anonymity of those involved.

Q. A friend of mine has come to me for advice. His girlfriend has told him that one of her close friends told her that God wanted them to hurry up and get married. He is not so sure as they have only been going out for three weeks.

A. The first thing to say is that your friend needs to be reminded that modern prophecy is not authoritative. When it comes to affairs of the heart, in my opinion, wisdom and common sense trump so-called prophecy every day. There is massive potential for major damage and destruction on this. Even genuine prophecy can often be misinterpreted. It is a good idea to find out exactly what this person shared (preferably first-hand) and try to establish exactly what it was they felt God said, and how much of what they said to the girlfriend was actually their interpretation of what they thought they heard or saw.

It is just possible that the “word” itself may have been right, but the interpretation wrong. Is it possible, for example, that your friend was being too casual about the relationship? This word may have actually been intended as a wake-up call to him to be more intentional—that he should decide in his mind whether he could ever see himself marrying this girl. If the answer is a definite “no,” he should finish it, but if it is a distinct possibility, he should commit himself to intentionally pursuing a relationship with her in such a way that the goal of that relationship is to determine whether or not they will be married (even if that takes a few months or even years to decide), rather than to merely be in it for fun.

This kind of prophecy, however, is a “match” prophecy and one that I strongly discourage in almost every case. In this instance, the word was shared by someone very close to the girl, which would immediately further add to my suspicion that this might be wishful thinking rather than a true word. There are dangers in people who know each other too well prophesying for each other. The heart is very deceitful, and too often we hear what we would want God to say to our friend rather than what he is actually saying. You may want to think about having a conversation with the person who shared this “word.”

So, starting from a position of caution, let’s go through the checklist I shared in my sermon:

1. I wonder how this prophecy has left the girlfriend and your friend feeling? If they are feeling anxious, stressed, and not encouraged, then I would immediately tell them this word can’t be from God as it is not fulfilling the purposes of New Testament prophecy listed in the Bible.

2. How does this word make them feel about Jesus? Is the Jesus we see in the Bible impatient? I don’t think so! Jesus says that to him one day is like a thousand years. So the way this prophecy portrays Jesus is not glorifying to him at all!
3. I have already said that this prophecy is not really consistent with the Bible. The only possible link to biblical commands would be when Paul said we should marry rather than burn with lust. But, Paul was speaking about people who were already engaged, and surely your friends can exercise some self-control for a bit longer. I would take this opportunity to speak with them about keeping pure, however.
4. What about other ways God speaks to people? Firstly, would YOU, as their spiritual counselor, advise these people to marry just yet? I think not. The fact they have come to you is a good opportunity for you to show them that wise advice from a spiritual leader is far more valuable to us than any prophetic direction. What about their circumstances? Are they in a position financially to marry?
5. Wisdom speaks to us very clearly about marriage. It is not for nothing that the old words of the marriage service said that it should not be entered into hastily or carelessly. The string of divorces, even among Christians, warn us to be slow to jump into this life-long serious commitment. To vow to marry when you haven’t already at least gone through all four seasons together is usually very unwise.
6. The fact that this word has not left your friend with a clear sense of direction and desire to act in a certain way again makes me feel this is unlikely to have come from God.
7. Even if your friend’s girlfriend is full of faith for this, your friend is fully within his rights to simply tell her he is not ready to make that step. He should do that gently and kindly, and this whole process, which is perhaps difficult, can be used to help strengthen their still young relationship, and certainly teach them to trust in God and the fullness of all the different the ways in which he can speak to us today.

In today’s post I continue to share an edited transcript of my sermon on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The following is a list of questions to ask yourself as you test a prophecy:

1. Is it upbuilding and encouraging? Does it leave you feeling positive? Even if there is an element of rebuke in it (sometimes that does happen), there should be a positive feel to it.

2. Does it lift Jesus up? Is it honoring and glorifying to Jesus?

3. Is it consistent with the Bible? Is it in line with biblical teaching? Does it contradict the Bible, or does it resonate with the Bible? The Bible is the main way we hear from God, and the only authoritative way.

4. Is it consistent with the other ways in which we hear from God? We don’t just hear from God through prophecy. We hear from:
   • The counsel of others.
     You need a wise, mature, spiritual Christian who is going on with God, who is growing, who knows God, who believes in the gifts, and yet is also wise so he can help you to weigh it. This is so important sometimes. If a prophetic word has been given to you, before you allow that to dominate your life and become a weight on your back, find someone like that you can speak to about this.

   • Our circumstances
     Now that sounds very unspiritual, doesn’t it? Let me give you an example. If someone feels that God wants them to move, but then they can’t buy or sell a house, it just doesn’t work, does it? It’s not wrong sometimes to use circumstance as a kind of “fleece,” although we must be careful not to test God. Another example of how God uses circumstances is in our own gifting and abilities. If anyone came up to me and said , “Adrian, I really feel God is saying to you that you’re supposed to be a craftsman and you’ve got to build houses for Jesus, I would laugh at them. I can’t even put shelves up, okay? You can ask my wife about that. So I would know that was wrong because the circumstances told me so. This might sound very unspiritual. But it’s actually a vital way in which God directs us. Proverbs 3 gives us some conditions to fulfill, which promise us that God will make our paths straight or direct us. Interestingly, our ability to hear God in prophecy is not one of those conditions.

5. Is it wise? Is it consistent with wisdom? Sometimes what sounds like a great prophecy will come, and then we realize that there’s no wisdom in following it. It doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t feel right in our hearts. The consequences of a particular course of action may be very obviously such that it would be foolish to follow that word.

6. Does it give you a sense of direction, or does it leave you in no man’s land? Does it leave you feeling free and inspired and uplifted and driven on, or does it leave you feeling bound and condemned and fearful?

7. Do you have faith for it? If you have no inward witness that it’s right, then it is very unlikely that the word is correct. Go, pray about it, talk to others, and then if you still feel the same way, release yourself from any sense of obligation.

Some people reading this may need to be set free from previous words that have become a chain around their necks. If you are one such person, what God wants to do for you right now is to set you free from wrong prophecy that has come to you. Maybe it’s something you think God spoke to you, or maybe it’s something a well-meaning brother or sister came and shared with you, but actually the fruit in your life has been that you have been bound up by it. And maybe you’ve even made wrong decisions as a result of it. This general principle applies to many people, but one specific example that seems to repeat itself all too often is that a prophecy, whether or not the prophecy has actually said this, is interpreted as saying that God wanted you to be a so-called “number one” leader of a church. If that word is not a correct one, and you have tried to pursue that, you might have had very troubling consequences. Maybe you even were a leader for awhile, or perhaps you tried to pursue that and it’s just gone horribly wrong. Sometimes we need to realize that the word we thought was from God was not, and we need to be set free from living under false expectations. In that case, God would want to take that pressure off you and would actually want to say, “Not everybody is called to be the number one guy.” Speaking personally, I’m very grateful that I don’t believe God wants me to be a “number one” guy. It doesn’t mean I can’t serve God. It doesn’t mean I can’t have a ministry. It doesn’t mean I can’t do all kinds of things for God, but it does mean I know what my role really is. Prophecy is intended to help us find the role in which we are most suitable, not tie us up in knots pursuing something for which we are unsuited!

There are true prophesies that can take years to be fulfilled, and that’s okay. We believe in promises that are yet to come. We don’t want to lose the hope real prophecies, but we need wisdom to distinguish true words that we should cling to from words that have bound people up and condemned themand made them define their lives in the wrong way.

In the next post I will conclude this series, but I am aware that this post has focused a bit on the “negative” side of prophecy. I want to end, therefore, by saying that the capacity of prophecy to bring real hope, direction, faith, and strengthening is so huge that we must not let the dangers of prophecy stop us from eagerly pursuing this wonderful gift.

This post is a continuation of an edited transcript of my sermon on the gifts of the Spirit.

There are many dangers of prophecy. One example of this is foolish prophecy, which is really nothing more than wishful thinking. It might surprise you to hear me say this, but sometimes it can be a bad idea for a small group of friends to gather and try to hear God for each other. Unfortunately, what often happens is what you wish God would say to that person is then what you think you hear God saying to that person. So we need to be careful about this.

Prophecy is particularly dangerous in the key areas of life. There is so much risk in and so much damage has been done in God’s name by unwise, unsafe prophecy. We should avoid, in almost every case, what I call “hatch, match, or dispatch” prophesies. What’s a “hatch” prophesy? A “hatch” prophesy is when you go up to a lady and say, “I really believe God is going to give you a baby.” Not wise. A “match” prophesy is, “I think you two should get married,” or worse still, when a guy goes to a girl and says, “God has told me that we’re going to get married.” Not wise. The girl might well reply, “Well, he hasn’t told me!” “Dispatch” prophesies are about predicting death—not good. But just as dangerous also are those prophecies where someone has a fatal illness and a foolish person says, “I really feel God has said you’re going to be healed.” Not helpful—it can be very dangerous. Avoid sharing these kinds of prophecy like the plague.

Prophecy can be misleading, and very damaging in foolish hands. Lives can be destroyed by the response of someone to a careless word. In fact, because of this risk, I can understand why at various points throughout history the cry has gone up, “Ban it!” But the Bible does not allow us to do that.

Because of the dangers of prophecy, I would encourage you, if you do have a prophetic word for someone, have a witness present to confirm or correct what is being said, and to relieve any pressure that the person might feel. It’s very wise to say things like, “Well, I need you to weight this.” “Please check this with your pastor.” “Does this make any sense to you?” Sometimes people deliver a prophetic word and they say, “Does that make any sense?” And the answer is “No.” “What do you mean, it doesn’t make any sense? It was God, wasn’t it?” Well, not necessarily.

How do we recognize true prophecy then? 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 says this: “Do not despise prophesying.” Unfortunately, many of us, having seen some of the excesses and some of the craziness that has gone on in the name of a so-called prophet, despise prophesying. Don’t despise prophesying, “but test everything, holding fast to the good.” I like that, because, to me, one of the things he seems to be saying is, “Don’t get too worried about the bad.” Obviously we reject the bad, but maybe the issue here is not necessarily pointing out everything that’s wrong in a prophecy, but just letting some of that just pass us by and honing in on and holding fast to the good. It is not the prophet who we test; rather it is the prophetic words. A powerful word can sometimes come from a new Christian. Equally, however, no word is true simply because it came from someone who has a good track record of hearing from God.

We are not told to test the Bible! The Bible, we know, is true. But we have to test prophetic words by what the Bible says. We don’t ask God to speak to us about something he’s already spoken about in the Bible. If you ever go up to a pastor and tell him, “God has told me that I should divorce my wife and marry another woman,” don’t expect a particularly sympathetic hearing, okay? You probably won’t get a very sympathetic response. You’ll be told in no uncertain terms that that’s a false prophecy. But actually, sometimes it’s not as clear-cut as that. In tomorrow’s post I will share a checklist we can use to help us as we test a prophecy that has been given to us.

Today, I continue my edited transcript of a sermon on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There are three key things that prophecy is not. You see examples of all of these in Acts 21, which makes that a crucial chapter for understanding New Testament prophecy.

Prophecy is NOT infallible

In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, “We know in part and we prophesy in part.” So by definition, prophecy is not without error. If you study Agabus’ prophecy in Acts 21, you’ll see that the general gist of his prophecy is correct, but the specifics of it are wrong. He says that the Jews will bind Paul and give him over to the Romans. It doesn’t happen like that. The Jews do not bind Paul. Paul is bound, but by the Romans. We can only assume that perhaps Agabus saw a picture of Paul being bound and chained, and perhaps he saw Jews there and he saw Romans there. So what does Agabus say? That the Jews are going to bind you and give you to the Romans. So he gets the details wrong, but he gets the general point right. Prophecy is like that in the New Testament.

Prophecy is not equivalent to Scripture
Some people think that prophecy is exactly the same as Scripture. That’s not true. Even in the Old Testament, Jonah had lots of prophecies. He was a prophet. Almost all of those were not recorded in the Bible. There is really only one prophecy from Jonah, and it’s very, very short and very, very unimpressive in one sense. In fact, that prophecy doesn’t even come to pass since it announces a judgment and the hearers repent. Yet he’s called a prophet. So he must have gone around prophesying, but they just never wrote those words down.

Also, we see that Philip’s daughters in Acts 21 prophesied, but their words are also not recorded. So some people say, “Well, all prophecy should be recorded in the Bible.” That’s not true. It didn’t happen in the Bible and it obviously shouldn’t happen now. Advocates of this view fail to take into account the passage from Joel that is quoted in Acts 2. If all God’s people are to prophesy, it is obvious that not all God’s people’s words can have equal weight with the Bible or there would be anarchy and a very large Bible! Joel must be envisaging something very different from OT prophecy which involved only select individuals.

Prophecy is not authoritative
Also in Acts 21, there was a group of believers, and through the Spirit (they obviously received some kind of prophecy), they told Paul not to go to Jerusalem. Interesting. They clearly had a sense of danger, a sense of what was going to happen to Paul in Jerusalem, and understandably, they made the jump and said, “You mustn’t go. The Spirit is warning us, so therefore, you mustn’t go.” And yet Paul ignores them. He heard it, he weighed it, he listened to it, but he wasn’t locked in by it, and he didn’t let it define his life. Actually, he said, “No, I must go to Jerusalem despite what you said.” Prophecy is not authoritative in our lives.

For the remainder of the sermon I preached on spiritual gifts, I focused on this gift of prophecy. We will be several days in sharing an edited version of a transcript of this section.

What is prophecy?
I believe that prophecy is an impression that God may have something to say specifically to specific people at a specific time. It can be a word for an individual. It can be a word to a group of people, for a church, maybe even for a whole country. But it’s a word from God that’s for the here and now. What is the purpose of this?

Well, he who prophesies, the Bible says, speaks to men and women for their upbuilding . . .” (1 Corinthians 14:3); this means edification or strengthening. We need that sometimes, don’t we? Being built up. The Bible does say, incidentally, that tongues builds us up if we do it ourselves on our own, but for us as a body to be built up, we need prophesy. Prophesy builds us up. It encourages us. The verse carries on—“and encouragement and consolation.”

These two words—encouragement and consolation—are actually quite rich words. They are difficult words to translate properly, and they have a broader sense than the English words that are used there. The word “encourage.” really means there is to comfort, to appeal, to exhort, to earnestly request or entreat somebody, to offer assistance or help or counsel. The word actually is paraklesin. You can hear the link to the word paraklete, which Jesus uses when he speaks about the comforter, the helper, the counselor that’s coming—the Holy Spirit. So, there’s a strengthening that happens. That second word, “consolation,” actually means to “speak direct to.” It means “to lift up, to give hope to.” There’s a sense of correction there, perhaps, and that’s why the word “consolation” is there, where there’s sorrow, bringing hope and trust. Where there’s weakness, bringing strength. It’s very positive, very warm, very upbuilding. People have said, and rightly so, I think, prophets go around building people’s hopes up. The prophetic in the New Testament does not bring condemnation.
There is a positive, warm bias to New Testament prophecy, because God is favorably disposed to the Christian because of Christ.

My friend Andrew has posted on his blog after a long gap. He shares a personal example of how a friend of his recently heard God speak to them. I won’t spoil the story by sharing any of it here, pop over and take a read.

Interview With Liam Goligher from Adrian Warnock on Vimeo.

One of my favorite memories from this year’s New Word Alive is meeting Liam Goligher. If you only want to watch one video from the event, watch this one. I am thrilled that this is the post I am sharing with you on my sixth blog anniversary (it was the 16th April 2003 when this journey began!)

Liam and I have spoken on the phone before, and from the first call I immediately knew that he was a real defender of the gospel. I heard him preach at NWA, and I was blown away. He has the full package: a thoughtful intelligent approach to the text, relevance, humor with biting illustrations, passion, and a big dose of that hard to measure thing called “anointing.” His preaching brought the tangible presence of God and conviction. To be honest, and this is not an exaggeration, I think he is something of a British John Piper.

But it was only in meeting him face-to-face that I realized how much fun he is. We laughed a lot, as well as speaking about many important subjects. This included the need for preachers to let their sermon grip them personally and to pray for the work of the Holy Spirit, which must empower preaching. We also spoke about aspects of the gospel which are under attack and must be vigorously defended.

Liam also spoke about the need to remember to emphasize important aspects like the resurrection, which might not be under attack in the same way. We spoke about my book, and at one point he ribbed me mercilessly, but then was very kind about his own reaction to reading it.

Liam Goligher is the senior pastor of Duke Street Church, Richmond London, which is growing rapidly and currently has around 600 people who attend on a Sunday. Liam is on the committee which organizes New Word Alive, as well as being a regular conference speaker at other events. His preaching is available to listen to free online or to purchase on CD. He is currently preaching on Isaiah in the mornings and Revelation in the evenings.

UPDATE- I have found the original source and as it is only now availble on the wayback machine include a copy here.
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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 continue my interview with Mark Driscoll by talking about his prophecy for Newfrontiers and his view of our worship.