Communication of Our Faith - Part 5 — Alan Redpath

And I would like a few more questions for tonight, questions that are relevant to the ministry of the week, and put them in the question box on the first floor in Fitzwater Hall. I hope you'll come this evening prepared to give a brief word of testimony concerning what God has done for you.

We'll have a time of question and answer and a time of testimony to His goodness and His blessing in our hearts in these days. Now let us bow before Him in prayer. Dear Lord, our hearts are hungry for Thee today.

When I first, Jesus, my man, have been, You living waters burst out of the rock for me. Each one of us urgently, desperately need Thyself in all life-saving fullness in our lives. O Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

Break me now, Spirit of the living God, for that none of us may be quite the same as we have come of having a fresh encounter with Thyself in these days. In our lives be transformed, changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we see Thy face.

Speak, Lord, for I serve and hear us. Speak just now with some message to me to my need, which Thou only dost know. Speak now through Thy Holy Word and make communication of our faith. And we've considered this subject under four different headings so far.

Restoring Relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ

We've talked about the relationship which must be restored, the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ in our lives. We've talked about the responsibility which must be realized. I have set Thee to be a light, a reflector of light in the world, an area in which if we move in it, we're beyond competition.

Recovering Revival Through the Cross

And then we've talked about the revival which must be recovered, that there should be upon us all the marks of the cross. It's not another Pentecost we need, it's another Calvary. The revival isn't going through Chicago beating a big drum, it's getting back to the cross with a big song.

Unless God brings us there, we haven't got much to offer. And the Lord has been wanting to do that with us all in these days, bring us right back to the cross. And then we've talked about the requirements which must be recognized, that the terms of this task as which are fulfilled are costlier than we think.

The Christian Life as Total Warfare

This is not a picnic, not fun and games, it's total warfare. I don't want to tread on thin ice or get into deep water unnecessarily, though I'll be departing tomorrow if that's all right. But I do want to say that I get very concerned about the way in which some young people are presented with the Gospel in these days, as if it's all fun and games.

Anything's all right as long as you end up with devotion. You can do anything. Flip it up, and have cakes, and have a great time, and fun and games, and fill in the gaps, and present to young people that the Gospel is a great light, a wonderful thrill, and happy light, and everything's fine if you only follow Jesus.

And it's not presented as total warfare. And I believe that young people need to be presented with, from the very start, that they're engaged in total warfare. If they come to Christ, life's going to be a battle.

It's a thrill and a victory, and it's a fight all the way through. The Christian is not someone, of course, who goes through life with a long face and a big Bible and looks miserable. He knows the joy of the Lord and his strength.

But he's not, on the other hand, a floppy individual who just superficially touches every situation with a light touch. There's something about him that speaks of the obligation, and the solemnity, and the seriousness of the task in which he's engaged.

The terms are cross-generating. Heaven has dawned upon his soul, and he's in the grip of a living God, and his life has been transformed. But then when you've said all that, where are we right now? Well, I want to speak to you all from the final message this morning, and the final angle upon our scene, upon the resources which must be received.

Receiving the Resources of the Holy Spirit

The resources which must be received. I have much upon my heart. I don't know just how I'm going to get through what I want to say to you this morning, and I'm trusting that the Lord may put it through clearly and with authority and yet with love and grace, and it may mean something to you.

Because when all is said and done, we are shut up to a miracle. And the Lord spoke of it when he said, you shall receive power. After that, the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and his rewitness is unto you, and you shall know him in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.

There is no substitute in the life of a Christian for the Holy Spirit. There's no substitute in the life of a church for the Holy Spirit. The Lord's method is always miracle. Not new methods he wants, not new strategy, not new ideas, but new men.

Men who are prepared to be small enough for working, men who God has reduced to a minimum that he might be to them his maximum. He moves in the realm of miracle. From beginning to end, the Christian life is a miracle.

The Christian church is a miracle. And it's engaged in the operation of miracles, of carrying out miracles in the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no substitute for the Christian, or for the church, for the Holy Ghost.

Satanic Opposition and the Church's Need for the Spirit

Now Satan knows that. The greatest enemy of the devil is not the Christian. That's only incidental. The greatest enemy of Satan on earth is the Holy Spirit. Because he is resident in the Christian life, your life and mine become the focal point of battle.

Battle which never ends until our dying day, when we reach glory. I used to pray when I was younger, Lord don't let me ever get involved in a situation in which the devil is not interested. I've stopped praying like that now because it's been answered for me.

More abundantly than I expected. But if you are really in business for God, Satan is in business with your life. And every movement of advance and every movement of the Spirit of God in you is accompanied by a counterattack from the enemy.

When you are in the Christian church, you're in a moving concern which is facing battle all the time. Therefore it is typical of Satan that he has the whole of us, many of us, most of us confused about our adoption of the Holy Spirit.

There are some strange manifestations of the Holy Spirit abroad today. Panic theology I call it. That Christian people when they're facing a situation have found themselves with inadequate resources. They haven't got what it takes to get to a country on the mission field which has been for centuries in the grip of Satan.

And they either withdraw for another higher education or they press in for an experience of the Holy Spirit which has no foundation in Scripture. One of the greatest and most vivid things that the church has known for a long time is what is known as the charismatic movement.

People have entered into an experience of speaking in tongues. Well I haven't spoken in tongues. It takes all the grace of God to make me speak right with the one tongue I have got. But if this was really the answer to the church's need today, then it would be the major theme in every one of Paul's letters.

Now I don't dispute the fact that there may be such a thing as the gift of tongues. I think it would be very hard for us to prove as evangelicals that this gift was withdrawn after Pentecost. But I would press upon you the fact that it is the last in order of a gift.

It is a minor and not a major gift. It is only referred to in one letter of the Bible, the Epistles of the Corinthians, only in two chapters, and then always with a view to dampening it down. I repeat that if this was really the answer to the church's need, the thing that we need most of all, then it would be the major theme in the New Testament.

But I find it is only a very minor theme. I spoke to a missionary in Africa recently, a missionary leader, who professed to have received this gift. And I spoke to him for hours with my open Bible, and we talked about it together and prayed about it, and he finished the conversation this way.

Well he said, I don't care what the Bible says. I've got an experience, and you can't argue me out of it. Now when a man talks like that, it's highly dangerous. You can't have all the gifts of the city, but you can have all the graces of the Spirit.

And the major theme of the New Testament in relation to God's Holy Spirit is not gifts for grace, character. Galatians 5, 22 gives us the fruit of the Spirit in a Christian life. And this is the major theme.

You shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me. Now of course, in our fear of becoming extreme or fanatical, we've exchanged the false fire of fanaticism for the no fire of orthodoxy.

And we find ourselves absolutely helpless to meet the challenge of these days. John Wesley used to know that which our hearts hunger for. When his brother Charles Wesley wrote, Jesus thine all victorious love shed in my soul abroad, then shall my heart no longer roam rooted and fixed in God.

Oh that in me the sacred fire might now begin to glow. Burn up the dross of base desire and make the mountains flow. Oh thou who at Pentecost did fall, do thou my sins consume. Come Holy Ghost of thee I call, Spirit of burning come.

That kind of thing we don't pray about because we're afraid of it. But that's what we need. I was in Ethiopia just recently at a mission station, S .I .M. station. I stayed there for about a week. And I stayed with a couple who came from this country who were the mission raid builders for the S .I .M.

And they just celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. And the husband had bought his wife the most extraordinary and unusual twenty-fifth wedding anniversary I've ever heard of. And what it was?

He bought her a present. And what it was? Bathroom. I don't think, I hope there wasn't a sting in the tail of that, of that gift. But he bought her a bathroom. And when I went to the house and saw it, my word you'll never, it was lovely.

It was all the green tiling and beautiful baths and beautiful equipment and lovely chromium-plated taps. And I thought, well, bless their hearts, they deserve it. And I was very thankful for this because I had been for ten days in a very remote area and this bathroom would meet my needs, which was urgent at the time.

And so I looked at it with a great joy, not only for his wife's sake but for mine. And so I repaired to my room and prepared for my bath and went in with great excitement and great anticipation. And I got ready for it and I turned on the tap and nothing happened.

No water. So I had a breath again and went to see him and said, say, what's the idea here? You've got all this lovely bathroom but I can't get any water. Oh, he said, I forgot to tell you that the local council haven't turned it on yet.

It'll be six months before we have any water. So I thought, that's done it. My need is not met in that way. You see, what a wonderful bathroom but no water. Every bit of equipment but no water. Everything except the water, the one thing that really matters.

Now I believe today that that's our trouble. In the church we've got everything except the water of life. The water that I shall give you shall be in you a fountain springing up into everlasting life.

The Lord Jesus just wants that we have each one of us today the fountain of life, the source of life, the strength of life, the victory in all our hearts. And we have everything except the life. Oh, we've got the doctrine right, we've got the orthodoxy right, we can talk about the Holy Spirit, we know the theory, but oh, how urgent we need, we need the life.

Being Filled Continually With the Spirit

And God the promise is, ye shall receive power after that Holy Spirit has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me. Well now, let me just look with you in the Word what this really means, what it's all about.

Turn with me, will you, to the epistle to the Ephesians for a moment, and the fifth chapter, and there we read Paul speaking to the Ephesian church in verse 17, Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.

And be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be being filled with the Spirit at present continuous tense, be being filled with the Spirit. Speaking to yourselves in songs and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

What a happy verse that is, isn't it? Speaking to yourselves in songs and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. So obviously the Christian life is expected to be a life that's joyful and a rejoicing life.

And Paul says if you want this kind of life, the secret of it is you must know what it means to be continually being filled up with the Holy Spirit, and then you'll learn to give thanks always to God for all things.

You know that's tough. Fancy being asked, can you give thanks to God for everything? Aye, very difficult. Thanks to God for all things? I remember Dr. Paul Rees, who was at the English Catholic Convention a few years ago, and he told a story about a man who was in Birmingham, Alabama, and that's a good effort, and he was sitting in a Greyhound bus at the bus station, temperature over a hundred, humidity very high, heat terrific, and he was waiting in the bus.

Christian man suddenly into that bus entered a very large lady who sat beside him and oozed over his section of the seat. And in a moment or two, five children came and joined her and sat on her lap. And this little fellow was squeezed right over into one corner.

And oh, he got so frustrated. The heat was terrific. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. And the man was thoroughly frustrated, and suddenly he remembered that in his quiet time that morning, he had this very verse, giving thanks always for all things unto God.

And he said, Oh Lord, what on earth can I be thankful for in this? And then suddenly he said, I know, thanks a lot, this woman is not my wife. Now that's not me, that's Paul Rees, blame him for that. But seriously, seriously, oh you know, when a wife is really filled up with all the Spirit of God, you begin to know that there are no mistakes in the love of God.

He never makes a mistake. There's nothing that happens to a man filled with the Spirit by accident. It's all permitted by our Heavenly Father. All things work together for good for them that love him.

Nothing happens by accident, though it's very tough to take, yet we can praise him for it. Ah, but then the answer, the secret of it all, is that we must know what it means to be filled, be being filled with the Spirit.

That's a command. You see, it's possible to be indwelt by the Spirit, but not to be filled with the Spirit. Every Christian has the Holy Spirit. You can't be born again except you have the Holy Spirit.

There are many verses of Scripture which make that perfectly clear. For instance, Romans 8, 9, if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of him. It was the Holy Spirit who convinced you of sin, because you believe not on evil.

Your conscience tells you it's wrong to tell a lie, but it's only the Holy Spirit who convinces you that it's sin not to believe on Christ. John 16, 8. He convinced us of sin because we believe not on evil.

It was he who led us to accept Christ. The Spirit said, quicken us, the flesh profiteth nothing. John 6, 63. And at that moment we were filled with the Spirit. Ephesians 1, 13. And indwelt by the Spirit.

Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. And you were baptized by the Spirit into the family of God. 1 Corinthians 12, 13. All these things took place at the moment of your conversion. It is impossible to be a Christian without having the Holy Spirit, and therefore without potentially entering into the realm of miracles.

But listen, it's possible to be a believer and not have the Holy Spirit. May I repeat that? It's possible to be a believer and not have the Holy Spirit. My friend Major Ian Thomas, whom many of you know, preached at Moody Church one Sunday night and really rocked the congregation.

His text was unsaved believers. That's quite a subject. People who have everything in their heads and nothing in their hearts. People who can be correct in doctrine and sign every possible correct fundamentalist doctrine, and yet it's all in their head and not in their heart.

Oh yes, I can believe my Bible from cover to cover, and yet have no indwelling Christ. It's all up there, instead of down here. But if you're a Christian, if you've been born again, if Christ has really come into your heart and you've yielded your life to Him, you have the Holy Spirit.

But it's possible to be a Christian and not to be filled with the Spirit. So you have verses such as these. Walk in the Spirit. Galatians 5 .16. Quench not the Spirit. 1 Thessalonians 5 .19. Thieve not the Spirit.

Be filled with the Spirit. Ephesians 5 .18. You see, may I put it this way? You may have the Holy Spirit, but He may not have you. Salvation is like getting a book with two volumes. You go to the bookstore and you ask for Dr. Lloyd Jones' book on the Sermon on the Mount.

A book which ought to be in every preacher's library. Which ought to be in every student's library too. Dr. Lloyd Jones' on the Sermon on the Mount. A tremendous book. And you go there and get the book and you take one volume and come away with it.

And you leave the other volume behind. And suddenly when you're coming back out of the bookstore you realize you've forgotten it. And you go back and you ask for it. And the person in the bookstore gladly gives it to you.

You've paid for it. It's all yours. And you go back with two volumes. Well, salvation is like that. You have one volume. The death of Christ for forgiveness of your sins. You have another volume. The life of Christ, the risen life of our Lord indwelling you by His Spirit for victory day by day ever since.

So that you haven't to struggle and fight for it. But you take both volumes. You take by faith Jesus to forgive you. You take by faith the Holy Spirit to deliver you. And you have two volumes of full salvation.

Appropriating the Fullness of Christ by Faith

Is this a second blessing? Do I believe in a second blessing? Yes, I do. Because I believe in a third. And a fourth. A fifth. And any day without a blessing would be a miserable day. Oh, yes, there are millions of blessings in the Christian life.

But the fullness of the Spirit is an experience beyond the new birth. There is no such thing as a continuous fullness of the Spirit. It's a continuous appropriation of a continuous supply from Jesus Christ Himself.

When I trust Him He fills me. The moment I begin to believe, at that moment I begin to receive. And as long as I keep on believing, praise the Lord, I keep on receiving. So as I believe, I receive. As I go on day by day believing in Him, I receive more of Him.

It's a crisis. A crisis into which I hope hundreds of you have entered this week. When your lives have been totally abandoned to the Lord Jesus Christ. The trouble is that so many of us go through that again and again.

We come forward to every altar call, every invitation. We give our lives always to Jesus and our sincerity is beyond dispute. With all our hearts we mean business and we surrender to the Lord, but we only take that one step.

We don't take the other of appropriating faith. There's a great friend of mine who's familiar to many of you. And he has two children, two girls. One of them is much older than the other. The other is a post-grip.

And one Monday morning he was sitting in his study, thinking about his sermon the previous day, and sometimes preaches of Monday morning feelings. And feeling it had been all so hopeless. His ministry had been ineffective.

And downstairs he suddenly heard his wife say to the two children, run upstairs and tell Daddy breakfast's ready. So they did so. And the big one, having longer legs, got up first and dashed into the room and sat down on her daddy's knee and put her arms around his neck and said, Daddy, breakfast's ready.

And a minute or two later a post-grip came along and stood at the door, coughing and panting, and looked inside and surveyed the situation. And then suddenly Big Sister said something rather catty to Little Sister.

You don't need to come any further, she said. I've got all the reserves, Daddy. And Daddy saw that Little Sister with her lips beginning to quiver and a tear going down her face. So he said, no darling, come on, right here.

And he stuck out his spare knee and held out his spare arm. And Little Post-Grip came running in and jumped on the knee and he put his arm right round her. And she looked across at Big Sister, who was only 18 inches away, and said to her in not a very Christian spirit, she said to her, you may have all there is of Daddy, but Daddy's got all there is of me.

Now that's what it means to be filled with a spirit. The moment when you have all there is of Jesus, and you have all there is of him, at the moment you're born again. You don't receive him on the installment plans, you have a full salvation within you, resident in you at the moment of your new birth.

But the question is, has he all there is of you? And the moment he has all there is of you, that's the crisis of identification of Christ, when the spirit fills what you have emptied. For God can only fill what you are empty.

Now let's just pause a minute in the midst of our message this morning and ask ourselves quietly in God's presence, have I entered into that crisis? Have I really, really been willing for God this week to empty me of everything that is contrary to his will, or am I still fighting a battle about something?

He wants to fill you so that you might use He wants to fill you so that you might understand what the will of the Lord is. He wants to fill you so that in everything you can give thanks. He wants to fill you so that you will have grace adequate for every situation.

He wants to fill you so that your life may more and more increase in the likeness of Christ. Everything depends upon this transaction. Have you nailed it to it? Have you not? Maybe it means that you should go to your room on your own, and you should get out a little bit of paper and write down on it what the Bible says the Holy Spirit is.

The Bible says that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. He's the spirit of love, the spirit of grace, the spirit of faith, and so on. Am I acting a lie? Am I committing in my life something contrary to that?

Am I lacking in love and critical and unkind? I need to go away alone with God and examine my life about these things and write what's wrong and tell the Lord I'm willing to be empty. I know a place in Northern Ireland, it's called Balimino.

And some years ago there, a Protestant lady was having a series of cottage meetings in her house every Wednesday night. And next door there lived a Roman Catholic, one of the few in that city. And she invited her to come in, and this lady said, I'm sorry, I can't, not allowed to.

So the next morning she asked her, did you have a good meeting? Oh, she said, great meeting. How many did you have? Twenty-seven, and my little cottage was full. Will you come next week? No, can't, not allowed to.

Next week went by, next meeting, and then she asked her friend, how many did you have last night? Oh, just fifty-one, my house was full. And she thought, well, that's funny. Will you come next week? No, can't, not allowed to.

So next week's meeting was held, and it was always the same conversation occurred. How many did you have last night? Sixty-two, and my house was full. Well, that was too much for an Irish Roman Catholic, so she said to her friend, listen, you told me your house was full, you're in thirty-seven.

And the next week you've got fifty-one. And then you're sixty-two, how do you do it? The thing's impossible. Oh no, she said, didn't you hear? Well, you said, what do you mean, didn't I hear? Well, she said, we just emptied all the furniture out in the lawn, and made room for more people.

Say, God isn't going to fill you with the Holy Spirit unless he knows that you mean business. Are you prepared to empty out of your life the books that take the place of the Bible? Spend more time reading the novel with the shade of the doubtful in it.

Do you prefer that to the Word of God? God has to empty you of that. He has to empty you of your lack of control of the television knob. He wants a life to show to him that they mean absolute business.

Then he says, the first condition of fullness is emptiness. And that means complete, absolute dissolution in myself. I'm ready for God to enter my life to fill it. And you notice here in this chapter in Ephesians, that the fullness of the Spirit is not for missionaries, not for preachers only.

Oh no, it's for everything. It's for husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee. The Christian life, as it's rightly understood, touches every social relationship and has immense implications.

And the greatest factor in evangelism is the Christian family and the Christian home, and the outputs from that home. And all of us need to be filled with the Spirit. There's a right and wrong way of doing everything, every kind of Christian work.

And above all, you need the fullness of the Spirit to make your life for Lord Jesus. This is not some emotional experience for a few people. It's absolute necessity to meet the demands of the day in which you're left.

It's a necessity for your life, right now. Be being filled with the Spirit. I think perhaps the greatest necessity of all is that by being filled with the Spirit, you learn to be able to stand against every storm.

Steadfastness Under Pressure

Some time ago, my wife and myself and family were traveling over from Southampton to New York. We were going by boat, which was more popular than by air those days. And we were traveling in, if you don't mind me saying so, and excuse me mentioning it, what is the world's largest liner, the Queen Elizabeth.

And we were two days out at sea, and when we noticed that the captain of the Queen was looking through his glasses at a cloud of smoke coming along behind, and it was getting larger, this cloud of smoke, and word went round the passengers of the Queen Elizabeth that for the first time in her history, the world's largest liner was being overtaken at sea by the world's fastest liner, the United States.

You usually enjoy that bit of the story better. And about four hours later, the United States passed us. Unnecessarily near, I thought, but as she went by, as she went by, we were told afterwards that the commander of the United States sent a message to the commander of the Queen, which said, you look very beautiful, but you're very slow.

The reply wasn't published. About eight weeks later, when I was returning to Britain, I was sitting in the chief engineer's cabin on the Queen Elizabeth, and he was a Christian man, and he said, you know, just two weeks ago, coming out from New York, exactly the same thing happened on our return voyage as happened on your outward trip.

And he said, the United States overtook us. And he sent us a telegram which read, sorry to pass you, but he said the old man, referring to the commander, was ready for him. And he said, sent a reply which read, that's perfectly okay, but it does not meet for the royal lady to travel in fast company.

I thought that was quite a good answer. He said to me, look, would you like to come and see the engines of this boat? Oh, I said, I'd love to. He took me downstairs to the boiler room, there were four steam compressed boilers, one of them wasn't operating, it hadn't been used since the days of the war.

If they used it, they would use fifteen hundred tons of oil a day, and Cunard, he said, believed in economy these days, and he was operating on three boilers, had been for years at nine hundred tons of oil a day.

But he said, there's something else I want you to see. He took me right down to the very skin of the ship, way, way below surface, and we walked out into a narrow gangway. On either side of us were two enormous propeller shafts, huge shafts, four hundred and fifty feet long, one hundred and fifty yards of solid steel, and they were going round at what seemed to me a tremendous pace.

And we went right to the skin of the boat, right to the back of it, and we saw the place where those four shafts went out into the ocean, and I heard the crash of four giant propellers driving that floating atel across the Atlantic, eighty-two thousand tons of it.

It was tremendous. And I went back to his cabin, and just for the sake of conversation, I said to him, my, that was wonderful, I wouldn't have missed it for anything, but I said, you know, those propellers must be going at a tremendous speed.

And he laughed at me, he said, you're no engineer, are you? I said, no, what do you mean? He said, if you were, you would know that I could get those propellers going so fast that they would make a hole in the water, and the ship would slow down and ultimately stop.

He said, I have forty-eight engineers on board the ship, and they're constantly calculating the ratio between revolutions per minute in the engine room and steadiness at the point of rise. I'd never forgotten it, because something has been built into my heart that tells me that God wants from me not speed, but steadiness.

Not a flash of enthusiasm, but steadiness in the storm. And he said to me, you know, we've been going across this pond for about twenty-five years, and he said we'll do it for many more. We've been through it when we've been threatened with torpedoes, and we've been bombed in wartime.

And he said we've been through it in hurricanes and gales, in rough seas, in tempests, in fog, sometimes in smooth weather, in clear sky. And he said we've been doing it for twenty-five years, and we've never been late.

Mind you, he said we're behind schedule sometimes, but he said we catch it up, because we've discovered the secret of steadiness at the point of rise. And I need God's fullness in my heart to keep steady in the storm.

Oh, not an emotional experience. Not something that makes me go around shouting hallelujah. Not something that's merely emotional, but something that when everything's hitting, and the storm is on, and the pressures are on, when normally I would press the panic button and try and get out of it.

And I can pan by the grace of God. Now that's what God wants for you. He wants to send out to this school a thousand students who have learned the secret of steadiness. Because if you haven't learned it in six months on the mission field, you'll be a casualty.

Exceptional Faithfulness in Ordinary Circumstances

Well, I just want to talk for the remainder of my time about how this may happen in my life. I hope I've shown you the need. You ever read from Oswald Chambers, an author who needs to be taken in small doses frequently?

He says this, some people think that Christians are expected to do exceptional things in unusual circumstances, whereas the truth is that a Christian is expected to be an exceptional person in ordinary circumstances.

No halo for that. Right down to earth. Nothing, nothing just thrilling about it. But someone whose reaction and whose behavior in ordinary circumstances is exceptional and marks him out as a man in whose life God has worked a miracle.

There's an authentic stamp of reality about him, something about him that can't be explained on the basis of education, on the basis of understanding. He's a miracle. Because when the heat is on, and the pressure's on, and the tragedy has happened, and the things have happened in his life that have simply taken the rug from under him, and everything absolutely has collapsed all around him, he's standing.

One of the greatest authors of our day is T .S. Lewis. You remember his book, Strute Blätter? That allegory of the description of satanic warfare upon the saints? One paragraph reads like this, don't be deluded, Wormwood.

Like screw tape to his nephew who is responsible for carrying out the tactics of hell against the church on earth, don't be deluded, Wormwood. Our cause, listen to every word of this, our cause is never in greater danger when a human being, no longer desiring to do the enemy's will, that is the will of God, no longer desiring to do the enemy's will, looks around him upon a universe from which every sign of the enemy's existence has disappeared, and asks, oh God why have I been forsaken?

And yet, keeps on obeying, dead in it, in the stone. And before long in your life, my dear friends, God will give you an experience of darkness when all signs of truth have gone from your ministry. He'll put you through an experience, often, in which there's no longer any sense of God's presence, no sense of truth from service, and you're left absolutely in the dark.

What do you do then? Unless you know God's spirit filling you moment by moment, you collapse. Because you see, God's purpose for all of us in life is enlargement through pressure. What do I mean by that?