Tokens of His Compassion - Part 10

Wounded so I could be healed. Rejected so I could be accepted. Cast away and forgotten by the Father for a while so you and I could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

And yet we talk about our dry days, our hard days. I'm determined this year more than ever to know Jesus Christ in a new way that I haven't known him before. I want to discover his majesty.

I want to discover that glory he had with the Father. If I have to be bathed with tears, so what? It's a short journey from here to eternity. Once you get through it, it's an awful long way after that.

When we get inside the gate, we wish we'd ask God for heavier burdens. We wish we'd ask God for more difficult tasks. We wish we'd ask God to give us something nobody else wants to do.

There's a world to be won, a more difficult world I don't think there's ever been. There was a meeting last week, and I'm through with this, and Dave Wilkerson brought about 50 of his, really all his converts who are now leading missions in different parts of America, 50 of us or 60 gathered together there. One of them had come from Guatemala.

He was there when the Pope was there about, what, three months ago. I remember they flashed on the screen, here is the Pope with an audience of 400,000 people, but they didn't report what he said. He said to those 400,000 people, there is one great enemy of the Church in South America, it's evangelical Christianity.

What do you think of that? Just before Christmas, the headlines down in El Paso, a man called me, said, the headlines of our paper say tonight, the Pope says, to the 800 million Catholics, you do not need to go to God for forgiveness, just come to the Church. The usurper, the liar has taken over. There's never been as much opposition to the true gospel of Jesus Christ as there is today.

We don't go to a man on a cross, he left the tomb empty, he left the cross empty, that we might be received to glory. The hour is coming for all of us before too long. I beg you, I entreat you, find what is the will of God for your life and do it.

May not be exciting, may tell you go be a businessman and get money and give it to people on the mission for you. He may alter the whole course, but I tell you this, the supreme joy of life is knowing that you're in the will of God. That's our number one problem, number two problem is doing it when you know it.

But the thing is, once we have qualified in his will, he'll give us all the grace, all the strength, he prays that they may have my love. Not a mushy sentimental love, that strong love of God, the love that led him to be nailed to the cross. It was love that held him there, not nails.

Those idiots that said if you're the son of God, come down and save yourself. He could have done it easily and confounded them. He could have breathed on them and destroyed them.

And he takes humiliation and slighting and ridicule and scorn. Again in that garden where we shall never understand, he was crushed. Will you understand it if I say Jesus didn't die on the cross, he died in the garden to the will of God.

That's where he died. If he hadn't died of there, he'd never have died there. The cross was an open manifestation that he had died in the will of his father there in the garden.

I come to do thy will, O my God. If the cup can pass wonderful, if not, I'll drink it. I don't know what you feel, but I feel what I've, I haven't said what I'd like to say altogether, but I feel I live in easy street.

Do you think you dare ask God tonight for yourself, not your pastor, for a baptism of compassion? Maybe from here till you die, you'll weep every day so that other people don't weep in hell. You'll take time to call on God, seek his face and treat him. Ask God to let you adopt a country or adopt a people in your heart that you're going to pray and travail for until he is glorified there.

For that's what he's doing in the garden, he's travelling for your birth and mine. The pains of hell got hold of me, he said. It's not an easy way.

It's a difficult way, but it's a glorious way. And ask that we pray for a few minutes anyhow. Feel free to pray.

Maybe you want to pray for yourself tonight. Maybe you do want to pray for your church, that it's dry and unproductive. Nobody has any tears, nobody has any grief.

We live in a city, what's our city got? 75,000 people, nearly all of them lost. Nearly a million people may be over there in Dallas, most of them lost despite all the churches. Thank you.

Tell God you want to reveal his will to you. Ask him when the hour is going to be, when you have to make a major crisis decision that will alter your lives and maybe, who knows, tens of thousands of people in a lost country tonight. Let's pray for a season.