Tokens of His Compassion - Part 2

And some who have actually ruined their business lives because they asked for a life of prayer and God took them at the word. Sometimes this is called, has been called, the longest prayer of Jesus. If you do your homework and go through the New Testament you'll discover there are 19 prayers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You know through the Bible there are 650 prayers? They'd make an interesting study, wouldn't they? This is not the longest prayer of the Lord Jesus. I don't believe it is anyhow. It's the longest recorded prayer.

Someone said it's the most beautiful prayer, I disagree. I believe the longest prayer Jesus prayed was in Gethsemane. I believe it was the most awesome prayer, so awesome that no one heard it.

These words spake Jesus and lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father. I heard Paul talking to somebody a few days ago and he said, my father. He didn't know what a kick I got out of it.

That was so lovely to me. Sometimes my wife calls me the old man but I still love the old lady even if she does. But when I thought my son said, I heard someone say, my father.

Have you ever really tried to digest this or think of it? I've confessed to you I haven't. I've read the Bible for 70 years and just this week this thought came to me meditating on this chapter which shows how new things can come. That Jesus began his life without a father and he ended his life without a father.

He started his life without a physical father and on the cross he said, my father, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Think of all this amazing history between those two awesome events. These words spake Jesus, lifted his eyes to heaven. Now we always close our eyes, I don't know why, I think I do know why, let me save myself there, to save us from distraction.

I remember walking to Dr. Tozer's office one day, he always came out with something that leveled me to the ground anyhow. One day he said, Len, remember none of us will go to Jesus at the judgment seat and look him straight in the eye, not one of us. You know people talk as though we're going to say, oh Jesus, oh I love you, you'll be so terrified when you see him, you'll will be speechless.

Oh I've only seen one portrait of Jesus as given in Revelation, his eyes as, pardon me, his hair as white as snow. Mary Antoinette, you may remember in history, was a young lady at 21 who got the heart of the King of France and she manipulated him. She was the most beautiful woman in the world they said, but she grieved him and he put her in the Bastille, it's been destroyed now.

The walls were 30 feet thick, nearly I guess about the length of this room. They put her there one night with this fantastic hairstyle she had, this face that looked as though it was enameled, those flawless blue eyes. They put her there in a cell, told her she would die in the morning with the executioners, you know, that horrid guillotine chopping her head off.

They put her in that cell, smiling when she went in, gorgeous. She heard the bell at Notre Dame Cathedral toll out night, hour after hour, five, six, seven, and then at eight they took her out to chop her head off. When they went in the prison cell, that gorgeous young lady was a hundred years old.

Her skin had all shrunken, her hair was as white as snow. Why? Because she'd been living in terror. These words spake Jesus, lifted his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come.

I believe, I didn't check today, I'm working on memory here, but I think this is the seventh time that John mentions the hour. You remember Jesus came to his, the mother of Jesus came to him and said, perform a miracle here at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. He said, my hour is not yet come.

Remember the seventh chapter of John, he said to his disciples, you go up to the feast, I'm not going up, but three verses after it says he went up. He was saving time. It's one thing that you young folk have to beware of.

I think you should have a clock in your room, in every room, in every college, in every house, redeem the time. He won't forgive you. The Lord will forgive you, the clock won't.

People say faith can do anything. If you believe that, I'd like to kneel there and you pray over me and say, Lord, make them rain, it'll change them from 77 to 27. Wouldn't I get up joyful? I don't believe any of you have faith to do that.

Faith can't do anything I want, it can do anything God wants. But God isn't there to manipulate it. Mary Antoinette was a hundred years of age in the morning.

She'd gone through hell and torment, she'd heard that bell tolling. Say, would you like somebody to bring you a prophecy your grandmother made when you were, say, six weeks old? And she said, when you're 17, you're going to have a major accident that will cripple you, when you're this, when you're that, when you... Would you like to read your future? I believe Jesus had been reading his future for many, many years. As far as I remember, he's the only person that came in the world with a specific intention of dying.

His hair was as white as snow, his feet like burnished brass. That's why Dr. Tausser said, none of us would look him straight in the eye. I was reciting to myself one of the great hymns of Charles Wesley today, "'Lo, he comes with clouds descending, one for favoured, sinners slain.

Lo, the tokens of his passion, though inglorious, still he bears.'" When he was resurrected, what did he do? He showed them his hands and his feet. How poor sake Why in the world didn't he go down the street and shout over the cemetery wall and raise the dead as he said he would do? Why didn't he go to the river or the lake and turn it into blood and show his majestic power? No, he showed them the tokens of his passion. "'Lo, the tokens of his passion, though inglorious, still he bears.

Calls of endless exultation to his ransomed worshippers. Hallelujah, Christ the Son of God appears.'" I say Jesus had been, oh, let me say this. What was the supreme desire of the Lord Jesus? Right.

What did he say? "'Lo, I come to do thy will. In the volume of the book it is written of me.'" He's saying here he wants to glorify the Father. Glorified, crucified.

I think he mentions glory about seven times in this chapter. Again, I didn't read them today. The only way God can be glorified is when he's crucified, and all the things that follow after, of course.

His supreme joy, he said, was, "'I always do those things that please the Father.'" Never once in those 33 years did he back off from the will of God. He was never intimidated. Go back for a minute here into the seventh chapter of the gospel of Luke.

I'll go back, yes, okay, into Luke. Let's go back into Luke chapter 2. His parents had been to the feast, remember, one of the greatest feasts in the history or in the record of that marvelous people, the Jews.