God is my No.3 Strength

Listen to one or two verses of scripture. I'm taking them almost at random. Here's our Lord, and he's with his disciples.

He's been crucified and raised from the dead. And in the last chapter of John's gospel, this is what you find. I'm sorry, the penultimate chapter, the 20th.

This is what you find in the 19th verse. The disciples are gathered together in a little huddle. They're scared stiff.

The doors are locked for fear of the Jews, because being an associate of Jesus means that their lives actually were in jeopardy. He'd been done to death because of, well, they claim, blasphemy, his accusers. And those who were with Jesus, they were concerned that the same treatment meted out to him will be delivered to them.

So scared stiff, they're behind locked doors, and wonder of wonders, Jesus comes in. John 20, 19, on the evening of that first day of the week when the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came out and stood among them and said, peace be with you. After he said this, he showed them his hands and side.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. And Jesus said, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.

And with that, he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.

Jesus breathes on people his Spirit. It's interesting, isn't it, that the second chapter of the book of Genesis, you get God breathing out on a handful of dust, red dust, red being the Hebrew word which gives us the term Adam, and Adam comes into existence. Jesus breathes out his Spirit in regeneration.

Originally, the Spirit was breathed out and men came into being. Well, Acts chapter 1, Jesus has made an appointment with the disciples and told them they're not to start preaching until the Holy Spirit falls on them. And so, maybe in the same upper room, I can't prove that, but it's very likely, the disciples are together.

And verse 8 picks up the reading. This is Acts 1.8. So, when they, the 120 disciples, men and women who were serving the Lord, when they met together, they asked him, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it's not for you to know the time or dates. The Father has sent by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

Just to correct that, our Lord Jesus gave that promise before they went into the upper room. He said they've got to go and to wait for the empowering of the Holy Spirit. And then when you move over to Romans and the middle chapters in that book, you find the apostle speaking about the effect that the Holy Spirit has on a person's prayer life.

Look at Romans in chapter 8 when he tells us the apostle is a very good pastor. He acknowledges the problems that you and I have. It's not always easy to pray, is it? And so, speaking of the Holy Spirit and his ministry in this area, in the same way, this is verse 26 of Romans 8, in the same way, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, helps us in our weakness.

We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express, and he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. Well, three little cameos, three little extracts of Scripture, and I could have picked many more, but that sets up the framework for this evening. We have been looking on a Sunday night for some weeks now on the phenomenal subject of this is your God.

We've been trying to examine what is God like, and I remind you that in this series we started at base, we thought of God as the creator, the magnificence of his handiwork, evident today even in a world that also bears the signs, the marks of sin. This is our God, God the creator, but God is more than just creator. He's demonstrated that he is personal.

How do we know he's personal? Well, he's come into this world in the form of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus said on one occasion, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. So, we know more about God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and we've had a look at certain aspects of our Lord's character in terms of him being our Savior, him being our Redeemer, and so forth. But Christians don't just believe that God exists as Father and Son, but that he exists as the Holy Spirit, and that's what we call the Trinity.

Of course, you sometimes get at your door, you open the door, who's there? Mr. Jehovah's Witness, and he starts to lead you almost immediately into the nonsense as he understands it or she understands it of the Trinity, and they'll use a mathematical term, and they'll say, do you believe in one God? And you say, yes, I believe in one God, and yet you believe that God is the Father, that's one, yes. You believe that God is the Son, yes, that's two. You believe God is the Holy Spirit, the answer is yes, that's three.

All right, says the Jehovah's Witness, you don't believe in one God. One plus one plus one equals three. What is the problem behind the Jehovah's Witness's reasoning? He's got the wrong arithmetical sign.

Shift the multiplication, or shift the addition to a multiplication. One times the common denominator of one times one equals not three, but one. Even in arithmetical time, in arithmetical terms, you can illustrate that God is one, and yet there are three aspects to him.

More of that in a moment. I had some folks, Rita and I, spend the day with us, I was going to say for lunch, but anyone who ate my lunch that I'd cooked wouldn't be out in the evening service. And anyway, we had our house full, and there were two handsome, intelligent, young American lads.

And we had a ball at the end of our meal, because well, when you're dining with Americans, you've got to have ice, because they have ice with everything, extraordinary people. And we had a surfeit of ice. Now, what should be more entertaining on a Sunday afternoon than to take a piece of ice and try and drop it down your sister's neck? What should be more entertaining for that same sister to follow the brother's bad example and try and drop it down the pastor's neck? Well, it could have been worse.

I mean, they could have taken the jug of water and slopped it all over. Or they could have been stupid, and they weren't, because they're very intelligent. They could have taken a hot kettle that's boiling and directed the steam at one another.

Ice is a solid. Water is a liquid. Steam is a vapor.

But bring the chemist in and ask him what the formula is for water and for steam and for ice. He will tell you H2O, one substance. That can exist in three different constituencies, three different aspects.

Let's just have a look at a little diagram that's coming up, just the first part of it there, and shield the rest. Here's the word Trinity that's coming up, T-R-I-N-I-T-Y. It gives us a term, or at least it stems from the term trio.

And I've put up a triangle there. And the triangle, of course, has three points to it. And the triangle itself, if you just drop it a moment, the first point of the triangle.

Just stop there. Let's refer to the first person of the Godhead, the Father. What does the Father do? Well, John 3 16 tells you that God so loved the world that He sends His only begotten Son, the Father sending the Lord Jesus.

Drop it just one more, will you? The Son. What does the Son do? Well, when our Lord was born, you find that the information was given to Joseph. You will call the Son who's born of Mary, you will call His name Jesus.

Why? Because He will save His people from their sins. So, in the teaching of Christianity regarding the Godhead, you've got the Father who sends, and you've got the Holy, you've got the Son who comes and He saves. It's Jesus who dies on the cross of Calvary.

It wasn't the Father who died, it was the Son who died. God sent His Son and He loved His Son so much that it was a tremendous sacrifice. The Father felt the pain and the anguish through which the Son went through.

I had a good dad and when I was sick as a kid, I could always go to my father and I knew that he would empathize with me. Well, that's the same sort of thing. The Father sends the Son and the Savior, He comes to save.

But when Jesus leaves the world, He says to the disciples, as indicated in the passages, the first two passages that I've read, that He's going to leave His own witness. So, let's drop down to the third aspect of this little diagrammatic presentation. The Spirit.

What does the Spirit do? Well, the Spirit baptizes. And the word baptism really has to do, at least the metaphor is with water. You take a jug and you drop it in the water, you baptize it, you immerse it.

And so, John, who is the spokesman in John chapter 1 and verse 33, John the Baptist that is, referring to the Holy Spirit, he says, when the Holy Spirit comes or when Jesus sends the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will baptize you. One of the favorite expressions of the Apostle Paul is that he's in Christ Jesus. Some people like pop music.

Others of us have different tastes. Some people can remember when Cliff Richard was a young man. Generally, they're being pushed in their wheelchairs these days.

I have known people full of Cliff Richard. You know, every turner, every corner you turn around in their home, there's a picture of Cliff Richard. Every concert they go to, Cliff Richard.

Full of him. Now, that's only a very, very weak way of illustrating how you can be so full of something, a concept, an affection, an alignment between you and someone else, even at the human level, but at the divine level. It's even more wonderful.

When Jesus' disciples were moving around the streets of Jerusalem, when they were talking to people who'd known them before and now had a further experience of them, they said, there's something about you. You're different. How do you explain it? They said, well, we have received.

We have received the Spirit of Jesus. So, the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, is the third person of the Trinity. So, our God exists as the Father who sends, as the Son who saves, and as the Spirit who soaks.

And to have a full assurance that you're in Christ Jesus is to be involved in each of the ministries or receptive to each of the ministries of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You see, God doesn't want you to be a Christian simply by trying to deduce something from a text. The Word of God is true, and if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God's raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

But there's more to it than that. There's a felt awareness. I know.

I know I'm a Christian. I know. Well, more of that in a moment or two.

We're going to sing. This is number 115 in the supplement. Shall we exercise our legs and stand up? Great God and Father of our Lord Jesus, we bow our heads before your throne, thanking you from hearts which are full of gratitude that you sent into the world your Son.

Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, that you should come to do your Father's bidding and to hang on a cross for our sins and to make it therefore possible for the delete button to be pressed as far as the Father is concerned, so that when he looks down upon us, he has no further recollection whatsoever of our misdemeanor, of our wrongdoing. That to us is truly wonderful, and we express our thanks to you, God the Father, for sending your Son. And Lord Jesus, we praise you too, that you have not just left your Word, though that in itself is so wonderful that we would give our lives to be able to ensure the retention of Scripture and pass it on from one generation to another.

We thank you that also in your grace you have left your Holy Spirit, so that as the Father sent you, you have sent the Holy Spirit. And we thank you, Holy Spirit, that we can say, breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew. As the Father breathed out, and as Adam was made, as the Son breathed out, and those frail disciples got some intimation as to what they could become powerful warriors of yours.

So we pray, may the Holy Spirit fall on us fresh, may there be that same out-breathing of the Godhead upon us, and may we know in our minds and in our hearts that we belong to God without any shadow of doubt, so that our last conviction as we draw our fleeting breath in this world might be, we are His, and our eternity is sealed by the blood of Jesus, and by the witness of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Do sit down.

A few moments ago before the service here, I was actually with a lady who I think is 96 years of age. If she's not 96, she's not far off. She's lovely.

I'm about twice as big and twice as weighty as she is. She's about to slip into heaven. I've been at so many, many beds with a similar sort of experience on the part of the occupant that I've almost come to have a formula as to what happens in terms of a person's assurance of just being right with God and being at peace as they slip over.

This little tableau here, these flowers and these books, they bespeak another man, they testify to another man who was with us almost every Sunday evening in what he would call the gospel service and had been for years, Len Bickerton. And he went to be with the Lord just a few days ago, and we had his memorial service, and we've left this little memorial to his life up at the front, because while it seems right to give thanks to God for people who've been part of our fellowship, there's a little group of roses all together in a display in the foyer, and that was because, well, we buried another of our friends just a few days back too, Rose, Rose Foster. If you line the three of them up, Rose Foster and May Hoare and Len Bickerton, and you started to ask about their spiritual experience, you would find that there was an incredible variety, and yet there was one common denominator.

They trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and they knew that God had sent his Holy Son into this world, and the Son had sent the Holy Spirit. Let me tell you a story about two men who went from a village to another village. The villages were the same.

The journeys were different in time. In other words, they were on their own. When the first man set out, it was wonderful weather, glorious sunshine, and he went for some miles, and he could see his destination just in front of him.

And he also noticed in the cloud, in the sky, there was some black clouds, and there was a tremendous deluge, and foolish man, he hadn't got an umbrella, and when he arrived at the village, he was absolutely soaked, drenched. The other man, he set off on the same track, from the same starting point, and arrived at the same destination. There was just that fine drizzle, you know, you don't know whether to put a mack on or not, and he walked all the way, as his friend had done, and he finished up absolutely soaked.

They both had the same finish, but the experience differed. For one, it was a gradual rain, for the other, it was a climactic, literally so, experience of the heavens breaking, and the water cascading down, or almost like that. It seems to me that my parable helps us, as we listen to testimonies this evening, in regard to the grace of God.

It's not whether it was a deluge, or whether it was a drizzle, the important thing is knowing that you've been soaked, or you're going through a process, where the end result is a soaking, a baptism, an empowering. Pardon to the morning congregation, because I've just used this illustration three Sundays ago, two Sundays ago, when I arrived back from India. I was with some kids who were not much older than the majority of people in our balconies.

They're working out in one of the most God-forsaken spots, or seemingly so, on the Indian subcontinent, Calcutta. Calcutta's got 60% slum, and I can hardly mention the name Calcutta without my eyes filling with tears. And these are youngsters, young families, not having broken 30 years of age.

One of them came to me and said, Uncle, I hate being called Uncle, but I have to live with it in India. Get over 40, and you're Uncle, wherever you go. Uncle.

We've established two churches in the last few years, and we want to thank the Lord for what He's done through us. So I said, Tell me, how did you go about it? I mean, these people can't read. They don't have radios, at least the majority, so they can't tune into radio programs.

You can't give them literature, because, well, obviously they don't see it. They can't read it. So they said, Uncle, we went down that particular road, and they pointed it out, if you can call it a road, by these shanties, and we stopped and asked the people as we went down the road, could we pray for them? And they said, Yeah.

And they said there was one man, and I forget whether it was a cancer or an ulcer, but he had stomach problems, and we prayed for him. And Uncle, days later, he was completely well. And as a result, so many people came to us, and the homes were open, and we've established a couple of schools, inverted commas.

I mean, these are not sophisticated things. And they went on to say, it went round like wildfire, to the extent that a couple of ladies with grey hair came along and said, Could we pray for them? Because they'd like their hair returned to black. And we said that perhaps it would be better if they went to a chemist.

Why don't I tell you the story? You shall receive power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you. Here were men and women who, to distribute tracts, would have been fairly useless, not completely, but mainly so. And the only means of the communication of the Gospel had to be one by one, in terms of testimony, and also a belief that God is and God will move in power.

Sometimes at the cutting edge of evangelism, where you're in new territories, then I think that something of the dynamic of the Gospel and the power of the Gospel, as found in the Acts of the Apostles, is replicated even today. I'm too old. I've been to too many conferences.

I've read too many books. To get involved in the minutiae of theological debate as to the terminology of an awareness of the Spirit. But what I do believe is this, that men and women have a right, if they're Christians, to have an overwhelming assurance that God is.

So that when you get to 96 years of age, you're not in doubt. When you slip away into glory, you can go with your eyes looking heavenwards. I believe that when men and women testify to their faith in Jesus Christ, even though perhaps they're not gifted to address hundreds of people, they should, on a one-to-one basis, have an authority and an understanding to tell people about what the Lord has done for them.

And I've known some timid Christians, as a result of an empowering of the Holy Spirit, an experience similar to that of Muriel, to discover that their mute tongue has been oiled and they've been able, as a result, to speak with a boldness that they never had before. The Holy Spirit and his deluging down upon us is not to give us esoteric experiences. It's not necessary to lift us up in ecstasy.

And I'm not against emotion, not at all. Emotionalism, yes, if it's manufactured simply by the skillful putting together of the service. If it's a contrived psychological thing, you can have that, you can keep it.

But there is, as a result of your Spirit being lifted up before the Lord, an assurance that is given and a boldness that can be yours, that I believe is the inheritance of everyone who trusts Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Which of your fathers, says the blessed Christ, if your son asks for a fish, will he give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will he give him a scorpion? If you then, though you're evil, know how to give good gifts to your father, how much more will your Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? You couldn't be a Christian without having had the influence of the Holy Spirit being directed and applied to you. The Holy Spirit goes before.

He prepares your heart, he prepares your mind so that when somebody communicates the Gospel, there you were ready, receiving. The Holy Spirit goes before the conversion experience. At the point of committing your life to the Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit also is there as he realizes, as he brings to fulfillment in your life all that he has prepared you for.

And the Holy Spirit is there too to tutor you in the things of God. For Jesus says when the Holy Spirit comes, as he speaks to his disciples in John's Gospel, when the Holy Spirit comes he will remind you of all the things that I have taught you. That's why one of the tests of being filled with the Spirit is do you read God's Word? Does it mean a lot to you? Because the Holy Spirit who inspired the Word, this is his book written for you and for all who are Christian people.

The Holy Spirit, he wants to give you the disciplines that you need for you to live out your life so that when temptation hits you at its fiercest point, you will have an equal and need more superior power to be able to offset that temptation. And so you find in the Word of God scattered in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Gospels anticipating the ministry of the Holy Spirit and in the letters that the Apostle Paul and John and Peter write, you find these practical consequences of knowing the Holy Spirit. The assurance that you save, boldness in witness, a desire to read the Word of God, personal disciplines, so that when you come to the end of your life you don't make a shipwreck, rather you're ready and prepared to go as my friend to whom I've just made reference is.

But you know all this business about the Holy Spirit and the baptism in the Spirit and the fullness of the Spirit can mean very little to you unless first of all you've confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. There's only one way into the fullness of the Spirit. It takes you to the cross, an acknowledgement of your sins, and having gone, so to speak, beyond the cross and into your spiritual experience as you try and live out your life for Jesus.

You need that connectivity to Him. You need to know more and more of Him being with you. The hymn writer puts it, when we walk with the Lord in the light of His Word, what a glory He sheds on our way.

And by that, though he's not referring directly in the hymn to the Holy Spirit, this is the consequence of the work of the Spirit in your life. You say, well, I don't know whether I've been baptized in the Spirit. I don't even know, my friend, whether that's a very useful comment for you to make.

This is the question I would put to you. Do you feel as disciplined as you ought to be? Are you as bold as you should be? Are you as prayerful as you want to be? Are you sensing the presence of God to the degree that you would like to sense His presence? And if the answers to those questions are not all yes, then it's obvious for me to point out from the Word of God that if you hunger and you thirst for more, then He is there to fill you. The theology can work out afterwards.

It's the experience that you need, that we all need, that this church needs. You don't need to be afraid of the Holy Spirit. He'll not deal with you on a mass production principle.

He takes you just as an individual and deals with you and your individuality. You don't need to be afraid in terms of this whole area of glossolalia or speaking in tongues. He can give you an experience like that, if that is His will.

He can give you an insight into His Word with such an ability to apply His Word in a specific situation that it becomes a prophetic Word for that individual or for that group of people at that time. These things are not complicated. They're not or should not be controversial to people who are mature.

We are in the arms of our God who wants the best for us. That's why He sent His Son. We're recipients of the salvation that Jesus has brought.

That's why He has given us the Holy Spirit so that that salvation, in all its wonder and in all its depths, might be succeeded to us so that ours can be a vital, encouraging, exciting Christian life, so that we can be used to pray for others within the grace of God, for their physical and their spiritual healing, so that we can be used to have intuitions about situations in which we need the wisdom of God. That's one of the giftings of the Holy Spirit. There are occasions, not always, by any means, there are occasions when people have come into my vestry and I've known before they started to speak what it was that was upon their mind.

That's not because I'm clairvoyant. Perish the thought. Simply because there are occasions when God releases, discharges information into your mind.

This is why a preacher has to be dependent on the Holy Spirit. You can do all the preparation in the world and you can have a theologically precise sermon but it doesn't achieve anything unless it knows something of the unction of the Spirit. There are occasions when you've heard preachers speaking, I think of Tim Saunders, when he was taken out of himself and you knew that this gifted man was in a realm that was way beyond his gifting.

How do you explain it? The unction of the Spirit. The consequence of being filled with the Spirit. And that applies not just to the preaching ministry but also in personal witness.

How was it I was able to say that? How did I manage to unravel that situation? And the answer is, well you didn't. The Holy Spirit did and is prepared to do so through you. You shall receive power.

After that the Holy Ghost is come upon you. What does our church need? What does any church need? What does the body of Christ need in this country? It needs the quickening of the Holy Spirit. It needs to have authenticated to itself that it is part of the saved community.

It needs to have an authority to speak boldly the things of God. It needs to have an awareness that God is and God can manifest his power in extraordinary fashions today as well as use the ordinary grace of meeting together and singing and Bible exposition and so forth. All these things I claim you will find in the Word of God that speak of the working through of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Just put up my last slide and we're just about through. You will receive the bottom part of the first slide. You will receive power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you and you will be my witnesses.

Okay, let's go further. Power for what? Power for study. God makes his Word more exciting.

Power for prayer, knowing how to pray more effectively. Power for discipline. The last verse of 1 Corinthians 9, I got the reference wrong there.

Power for evangelism, Acts 4.3, the disciples spoke with boldness. Let's stand again and pray. And you pray for yourself.

Pray for me. Pray for our elders. Pray for the deacons.

Pray for every department of the tab. This church is as open to the Holy Spirit as we can possibly be. We want his best for every person.

We want to know the disciplines. We want to know a release of power and authority. We want the church to become so attractive because God is here that people will either be afraid to come here or they'll come because the Spirit has drawn them because it's the only place, along with other evangelical pulpits in the town, where the good news of the gospel is proclaimed.

So let's pray. Let's pray for those of you who've got problems in assurance. You want to know how the truth that you belong to the Lord.

It helps just to extend your hands. Sometimes physically to do that can be a means of helping to concentrate our minds as well as our bodies. We're in business with God.

Maybe some of you are finding it so hard, don't we, in our personal lives, to buck things that we want to get rid of. So difficult. Ask the Holy Spirit that he might make us holy in our thought life, in all that we're doing.

Some of us want boldness. We've never spoken to our neighbours. We've never spoken to our workmates.

God forgive us. We've never spoken to God. We want to have this empowering, this deepening.

Some of us are with sickness in our bodies. Though the Bible doesn't give us a prescription and an assurance of health forevermore, it does say that we can pray for the healing of the body. The realm of the mind in my mind, Lord.

The path that we tread in our feet, Lord, be glorified. So Father, we come to you in all the depths of experience that is possible. We ask that you will release your power within us.

Help us, Father, to be victorious in areas where we've known defeat heretofore. Help us to be alive and alert to you. Deliver us from a conservativism that has no warrant in your word.

Prevent us from a fanaticism that also is so distant from the revealed truths of scripture. Keep us balanced, but keep us open. Keep us willing and keep us daring, and enable us to walk with you, keeping in step with the Spirit, blessing you for his sovereignty in our lives.

And now may the blessing of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest with each one of us now and always. And see a people said, Amen.