Preparing to Sing in a Difficult Time — Carter Conlon

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Preparing to Sing in Difficult Times

Existing copyright laws apply. I'm going to speak to you this morning about preparing to sing in the difficult time. That's a lovely song. We're going to have to be prepared to continue on singing that in the days ahead.

Very, very difficult days, I believe, that await us. I'm going to pray for incredible grace to speak this word today and then ask God to give you incredible grace to hear it. Father, I thank you that you have planted within us a song that is not circumstance dependent.

Father, I just thank you that you are going to prepare us as a people to sing the same songs that we sing today in whatever awaits us in the coming weeks and months and years of time. For you have ordained a people whose song is not dependent on what goes on around them.

There's a much deeper song, a song that only heaven can plant within us. I ask you, God, for the grace to prepare our hearts this day, this week, as we fast and pray. Lord, as we read your word, as we again determine to live for you in the grace that you've given us, we ask, oh God, that you give us the power to keep on singing even in the midst of the greatest of adversity.

And Father, I thank you that you will overpower and overshadow my frailty and that you will enable me with the mind of Christ to speak your heart to your people. This is your church. Jesus, these are your people.

Holy Spirit, this is your truth. I stand only as a vessel. I do ask for the grace to disappear. I ask, Lord, that you might appear, that your voice and your heart might be heard through me. I ask you to help the people to be unaware of any human vessels, but to be only aware of the God of the universe, who in his mercy chooses to speak through humanity.

Singing Through Grief by the Holy Spirit

Father, I thank you that you're going to do something in our hearts today. You are preparing us. We thank you in Jesus' mighty name. A week or so ago, a little while ago, we gathered in a funeral home and Pastor David led us in the chorus in front of the open casket of his granddaughter, Tiffany, who died at 14 years of age.

And we sang, God is good. God is so good. He's so good to me. Beloved, I want to tell you something. There is nothing but the Holy Spirit can ever prepare you or I to sing that song in those types of times.

There has to have been a deep inward work of God. It doesn't spontaneously come to the surface by the circumstances of disaster. Really, it's everybody's worst nightmare. But the glory of God came into that room because there were vessels in that room that made a choice years ago.

When they came to Christ, it was as the bride and the bridegroom who gathered an altar and say, for richer, for poor, for in sickness and in health, for better, for worse. Lord, I come to you. I give you my life.

And Christ says the same to his bride, I give you all that I am and all that I have, no matter what we have to walk through together. And amazing to see a family gather on the casket like that and to sing such a song at such a time.

I've not prepared this message based on that experience, but it probably is the greatest illustration that I do have today of how only the Holy Spirit can prepare a heart to sing in a difficult time. We've been very fortunate.

We've lived in a generation that has been, at least in part, I'm speaking about North America, acceptable to the practice and presence of Christianity. But that may soon change. Difficult days are ahead for everyone.

Christ’s Cup and the Last Supper

If you go with me to Matthew, chapter 26, please, in the New Testament, preparing to sing in a difficult time. Matthew, chapter 26, and I'll begin reading at verse 26. Now, this is the Last Supper. Christ is about to go to the cross.

And verse 26, Matthew, chapter 26, says it this way. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to the disciples and said, take, eat, this is my body. Now, you have to, you understand this.

I suppose those that are in Christ, if you're new to the Lord, I mean, it's a symbol. The broken bread meant that Jesus was about to yield his body as a living sacrifice for the purposes of his Father and for, of course, your redemption and mine.

And then he took the cup and gave thanks and gave it to them saying, drink ye all of it. In other words, all of you have a taste of it. Now, Christ was about to drink a cup that, of course, he alone was going to be able to go through.

He said to the disciples earlier on, you can't come with me now, but you will understand later. And you remember how perplexed they were. And one of them cried out to him and said, well, why can't we come now?

And Jesus said, well, you don't understand it, but you will. I'm paraphrasing his words, but you will very soon understand what I'm talking about. He took the cup and gave thanks. And I thank God that he did.

God the Father had given him a cup. He was about to drink a cup of incredible suffering. And in that cup of suffering and rejection and death, he was going to pay the price for your sin and for mine once and for all.

He was going to win a marvelous victory. He was going to do something in obedience that would allow God the Father to take with his hands and rip that veil that separated the power of God from his creation from the top to the bottom.

And God in the power of the Holy Ghost was going to be able to come out and now dwell with man, not just in an isolated area, but in the very center of man, in the very heart of man. He was going to come in the form of the Holy Spirit and now take up his dwelling.

And the temple would no longer be exterior, but we would become the temple of the Holy Ghost. And it was because of Christ's obedience to go through and to drink this cup that you and I can sing today.

We have a song. We have hope for the future. In spite of what the physical future holds, our lives are not dependent on that physical future. We have a future much beyond the few short years that any of us have left here on this side of eternity.

We have a future that goes on and never ends. We are going to a place where we're going to rule and reign with Jesus Christ forever. There will be no sorrow there. There will be no sighing there. There will be no sickness there.

There will be no death there. There will be no trial there. There will be no back biters there. There will be no false things happening there. It's going to be a kingdom of absolute life and light. And I believe that in hell, the darkness and the awareness of the separation from God is perhaps continually increasing because the conscience will never die there.

In heaven, there will be an ever increasing revelation, knowledge, a burst of God's glory. It will be an incredible place to be for all of eternity and made available to us because one man, Jesus Christ, 2 ,000 years ago, came as a sinless man and made a willful choice to drink the cup that his father had given him.

Thanks be to God. And he said, I say to you, verse 29, I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of this vine, or the vine rather, until the day that I drink it new with you in my father's kingdom. And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

The Kingdom Within and the Witness of a Transformed Life

Now, he had just previously, if we were to go back in the Bible, Matthew chapter 24, he began to talk about incredible distress coming upon the whole world, a time of difficulty. He told the people sitting around the table that there's a day coming you're going to be rejected.

You'll even be drawn before kings and governors and magistrates for my namesake. You'll be hated of all men. You'll even be betrayed by those that are the most intimate and close to you in your own natural families.

Not a very comforting word, really, when you think of it, but it was a reality. Now, he was speaking, of course, of some of the events that we're about to follow after his crucifixion, but he's also speaking, the word of God, of course, is not bound to time.

He's speaking way into the future, even into our generation, and should the Lord tarry, which I don't really have any sense in my heart that he's tarrying much longer, but should he tarry, he's speaking into the next generation, too, as well.

Matthew chapter 25, they're asking him about the kingdom. You see, the disciples had a sense in their heart that the kingdom was coming to them now, and in reality, they were right, but it was not as they perceived it.

They perceived the kingdom as Christ walking into Jerusalem, deposing, as it is, the Roman rulership that was there, taking over the kingdom because of the power and ability that was within him. They knew nobody could withstand him.

They had seen him raise the dead, stop the wind, calm the sea. They knew he could do all things, and they anticipated it was a physical kingdom, and he said, yes, in effect, the kingdom is coming to you, but not as you anticipate that it's coming, and he begins to try to explain the coming of God's kingdom.

Now, remember that he said elsewhere in the New Testament, the kingdom of God does not come with outward display. The kingdom of God is within you. Today, we live in a generation when so many are running the roads, as it is, looking for some outward display of God's kingdom, missing the reality that the kingdom of God is within the lives of those who have received Christ as Lord and Savior.

His kingdom has come, but it doesn't come with an exterior manifestation. It comes off times as it did to Elijah with that small, still voice of God speaking into the inward man, the life of God being manifested as it is by the power of Christ that is now resident in the heart of everyone who has received him as Lord and Savior.

His kingdom came into my life on May the 12th, 1978, and since that day, since the old nature that ruled this life was deposed from that throne in my heart, a new king has come. He has sat there. He has overthrown tables.

He has thrown down other rulerships and thoughts and arguments against truth, and he has come and conquered, and his kingdom has come into my life. The old song that we sing, You Ask Me How, I Know He Lives, he lives within my heart.

I don't need any proof. I don't need an exterior proof of the reality of Christ and his kingdom. I have all the proof I have in the testimony that he's established within my own life. Hallelujah. Thanks be to God.

Readiness, Fruitfulness, and the Coming Darkness

Matthew 25, Jesus speaks of many who were ill-prepared for the dark night which would precede the coming of the bridegroom. It was a very, very dark time, and there were many who professed to belong to him, but they were not prepared.

They had no oil. They had no living relationship with God. Their whole sense of God was other than where he is found. They were not seeking him in truth and in spirit. They were not asking God for the manifestation of truth to be revealed not only to them but through them, that their lives, that the very range of their life as it is would be taken over by the power of God.

They were not asking for it, and so when the dark night came and a cry came into the people and they said, Behold, he's coming. He has to be coming. Look what's coming on the earth, because if you follow it in sequence from Matthew 24, if you read it through as a story as it is, you see all kinds of difficulty coming and there's an awareness that he's coming.

And when that awareness hits, it's as if there's a people that say, I'm not ready. I'm not ready to go through the trials ahead. I'm not ready to face the dark night that has to precede sometimes the light that's coming in the morning.

I have no song. I have no ability to get through it. And again he goes on in the same chapter in Matthew 25 and he contrasts those that had gained little from what had been entrusted to them and those that had gained nothing at all.

Now there's been an incredible entrusting to you and to me. When we came to Christ, the Holy Spirit of course was given to us as that first deposit, the Bible says, or the earnest as it's called in the King James, of our inheritance.

That first deposit to tell us in a sense that this is, you're not living a pipe dream when you came to Christ. This is a reality. Christ rose from the dead and here's the proof. The Holy Spirit is now in your life changing you, molding you, making you into a brand new person.

The old things in you are continuously passing away and you are continuously being made new. This is the deposit of God into your life on this side of eternity. But there were so many who had taken that deposit and done so little with it.

The deposit that had been put into them of the Spirit of God and of the truth of God had not ever produced the life of God or the heart of God. And the Bible warns about the last days there will be a people who are learning and it's not necessarily talking about the philosophers and the religionists of the world.

But even in the church of Jesus Christ, there will be a people who are learning, but they're not coming to the knowledge of that truth. They're not coming to the place where that truth is supposed to take them or what the truth is supposed to make them into.

We are supposed to be recreated in the image of Christ. Our heart is supposed to change. Our mind is supposed to change. Our thoughts, our desires are supposed to change. The Bible says that if we commit our way to the Lord, He'll establish our steps.

The Bible tells us if we delight ourselves in God, He will give us the desires of our heart. It's not talking about if you read the Bible, you'll get a new car. He will give you the desires. The desires will come from God.

You delight yourself in God and brand new desires will come into your heart. Things you didn't want before. Places you didn't want to go. People's lives that you didn't want to touch. Countries you never wanted to visit.

Things that were not even conceivable to you. You didn't have them in your heart, but you delighted yourself in God and the evidence that God's kingdom has come into your life is brand new desires begin to happen.

Abiding in Christ and Bearing Much Fruit

New things come every morning and old things continuously pass away. Jesus said it this way, if you'll go very quickly, keep a marker in Matthew 26 and go to John chapter 15. Jesus said it this way, verse 8.

He said, Herein is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and so shall you be my disciples. Now in verse 9 he says, As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Continue in my love. Now the word for has loved is agape.

Now most of you are probably familiar with that if you've been a Christian for any amount of time. And it really means a benevolent love or a giving love, a keeping love, finding one's will and joy in something other than his own pursuit.

And Christ is saying, My Father has given me of himself and he has enabled me to bear fruit by entering into his eternal purpose. This is what he's meaning really in verse 9. He has loved me. I have lived in his benevolent love.

I have wanted to do his will and because I've wanted to do the will of the Father, this incredible love of God has come into my life. This incredible giving love, this covering of God's life is upon me and flowing through me and flowing in me.

It keeps me, guides me, speaks to me, provides for me, gives me a song in the darkest of times, carries me through because this love has given me another mind. It's given me the mind of God. I see things now from heaven's perspective, not from the perspective of a man.

You have to understand that Christ was fully man as well as fully God. The Bible says tempted in all points like as we are yet without sin. Fully well able to be discouraged or to find an easier path or to do some of the other things that so many of us are oft times so prone to do.

He's given me himself and he has enabled me to bear fruit by entering into his eternal purpose. You see, this is the desire of God when he entrusts truth to us. He says, I'm not just giving it to you so you'll know the answer.

I'm giving it to you so you'll be the answer. You will have that life of Christ in you that is the answer to every searching heart in the dark time. It's not about you and me, it's about Christ, but Christ will be the answer in us.

A testament, Paul calls it, that is written and engraven right in the hearts of those that have truly received the word of God. John 17, Jesus talks about the work, he said in verse 4, he said about his father, he's speaking now directly to the father in heaven.

He says, I've glorified thee on the earth. I've finished the work which you gave me to do. And now, father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

I have manifested thy name unto the men which you gave me out of the world. Thine they were, and thou gavest them me, and they have kept thy word. Now here's the eternal purpose of God. Christ said, I have glorified your name on the earth.

People have seen you, father, through me. That's why I could say to Philip, Philip said, show us to father. And Christ said, have I been with you so long and you don't yet know me? I had the privilege recently of speaking at my father's funeral, and an old friend of my father's was there.

And I've never met the man. And he said, I've known your father at the end of the service. He said, I've known your father for about 60 years, I think it was. And he said, I walked into the church, I sat down, I looked up, and he said, I saw a man speaking.

And he said, I blinked my eyes and I couldn't believe it. He said, I dropped my head and I looked again. He said, I couldn't believe it. He said, there's Charlie Conlon. He said, back about 50 or 40 years ago.

He said, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And he walked up to me and he said, son, I tell you this much. As long as you live, your father will never die. He said, you look like your father, you talk like your father, you move like your father.

And I was thinking of that after. I said, oh, would be to God that that could be said of me as a Christian. By people that meet me and say, as long as you live, your savior will never die. As long as the church is truly alive, the testimony of Christ will live in our generation.

Jesus said, Father, you have enabled me with your benevolent love to enter into your purpose. And your purpose is that I have glorified your name on the earth. Where I have gone, you have been known. Where I have spoken, you have been heard.

Where I have touched, you have been felt. He said, I have manifested your name to men and I have given them your word and your word is in them. Thus, my work is finished. I have done what you have called me to do.

I have allowed your life to be lived in me. And I have taken your word that you have planted in me and I have planted it in others. They have received it. Now, God, I can go. I can go back to where you are.

And you can give me the glory that I knew before I came to this earth as a man. Hallelujah! Again, back in John 15 .10, he says, if you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.

In these things have I spoken to you that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full. In 15 .10, he is basically saying, if you want to live as I have spoken to you, an overwhelming sense of my love shall cover you.

And in that love you will abide. And the word abide in the Greek text means you will remain, you will endure, you will stand firm, you will persevere, you will remain alive. In other words, circumstance will not take your life from you.

No matter what happens to you, you will still have a song to sing in the night. Nothing in this world will take your testimony away. Because as the Father has given me this benevolent love, because I sought to do his will, so too, if you keep what I tell you, I will give you that same measure of benevolent love.

I will cover you with my presence. I will cover you in my power. I will carry you in my strength. And he said, I have given these things to you, I have spoken these things to you, that my joy might remain in you.

It's amazing, Christ said, it's not your joy, it's my joy. There will be an inward joy, but it's not yours, it's mine. It comes from the benevolence of my presence in your life. You might be going through the darkest hour of your life, and there will be out of nowhere that is tangibly visible in this world a joy that begins to spring up, where you can stand before the coffin of a 14-year-old girl and sing, God is good.

How good he has been to me. There will be a benevolent joy that springs up inside of your life, that your joy might be full. And the word for full in the Greek text means as a perfume, in a sense, that is broken and fills the whole house with a fragrance.

God said, I come to give you a joy, Christ said, that makes, and this abiding joy will be like the perfume of God in whatever house you enter. In whatever situation you find yourself in, there will be an abiding joy in you.

It's not something that necessarily manifests as some kind of a superficial, foolish dancing in adversity. That's really not the joy. It is a confidence in God. It is a steadfastness, that inner knowledge that God is good, and all things work together for good when we understand and when we don't.

Enduring National and Global Crisis

That God is in everything that he has given us to be and to do. Now back in Matthew chapter 25 again, if you go back there with me. Jesus speaks again, we're carrying on, about the kingdom of heaven. And he speaks in part to a people who perhaps have failed to understand that being in the world as others, that they too were destined to have to pass through times of great difficulty.

There are times of personal difficulty that all of us will have to pass through. You know, any preacher that stands and tells you that because you've become a Christian, you will never have to go through trial and difficulty is a liar.

And time will prove him to be so, because you will have to go through it. There are times of difficulty that come to every person. Every society will experience from time to time throughout history times of great difficulty.

Could the people in Europe in World War II ever have anticipated what was coming their way? The difficulty, the trial, the hard times. Could the others throughout times in history who are just dwelling day to day, doing what they normally do have anticipated as invading armies came to their borders and such like.

There are times of national difficulty. And ultimately Matthew 24 and again and of course Isaiah, I believe it's the same chapter 24, speaks of a time of global difficulty that is coming very quickly towards all men.

A time of distress of nations, a time when the very weather of heaven will be changed. A time when the elements, the Bible says, will be actually on fire. Incredible. I saw a documentary years ago from one of the inventors of the atomic bomb who said when they set the first, this man obviously is a physicist, and he said we set the first testing of the atomic bomb up, we were terrified because we knew that within this weapon was the potential to ignite the atmosphere itself.

And we didn't really know what was going to happen. I'm not a physicist, I don't understand that, but this man had a trepidation that the reaction that is caused by this explosion can ignite the very oxygen in the atmosphere.

And the Bible speaks about the very elements being on fire in the last days. Oh beloved, we live on the edge of eternity every day and so often are not even aware of it. We live on the edge of facing God.

We see Christ recognizing in verse 34, a people who have cast off a self-consuming interest for a deep inward working of God, even when some are facing the darkest night. Verse 34, he says, then shall the king say to them, now keep in mind he's talking about the kingdom, come blessed of my father and inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

Now it's amazing because here we see a people who in the midst of adversity are going forward and they have entered into another work. The natural man wants to hide in times of difficulty. The natural man wants to buy a cabin out in the mountains of Montana somewhere and just ride out all the difficulty.

But Christ said, no, there is a kingdom coming and as much as I do the will of my father, there are a people that are going to belong to this kingdom who have made a willful choice to walk in the will that I have for them.

And this will that I have for them is going to take them where there are people who are hungry. He said, come, the kingdom is prepared for you. I was hungry, you gave me meat. I was thirsty, you gave me drink.

I was a stranger and you took me in. Naked, you clothed me. Sick, you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. Now when you look these verses of scripture up, in the original Greek text it has a twofold application.

It's a physical need but it's also a spiritual need. For example, where it says I was sick and you visited me, the word for sick actually means I was weak spiritually in the faith. And for visited means you looked upon me with mercy.

It really does give it a full meaning, doesn't it? It has a connotation, of course, if somebody is ill and weak, it came. But it says, oh no, I was weak spiritually but you looked upon me with mercy. You had the heart of God moving in you.

I was a stranger and you took me in. The word took me in means you gently led me. You took me to something. I was naked. The word naked in the Greek has the connotation of lacking spiritual clothing, lacking the covering of God's righteousness.

And you clothed me. In other words, there are people that are working the work of God in the midst of a difficult generation, a generation of people who are hungry and nobody is feeding them, thirsty and they can't find drink.

They are strangers to God and nobody is there telling them how to get in to the kingdom. Nobody is there to lead them. They are without spiritual clothing and nobody is telling them where to find it. They are sick spiritually and nobody or so few are looking upon them with mercy.

They are imprisoned by sin and the power of the devil. And there are so few that are going to them. And beloved Jesus said, but I have a kingdom. It's been prepared for those that have done these things, those that have the heart of God now manifested in them and through them.

The life of God is in these people. Remember that Hebrews 12, 2 talks about Jesus and says, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross. There was an eternal perspective in his mind, not just about the here and now.

If it was about the here and now, he never would have gone to the cross. He would have given in to the human side and searched out another way that the purposes of God could be fulfilled. But there was a joy.

There was a joy of an intimate fellowship that can't be found anywhere else but through the cross of Jesus Christ. In Matthew 26, 29, where we started, he said, I say to you, I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of the vine, of this fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new with you in my father's kingdom.

Now, I want to tell you exactly how I see this particular verse of scripture. Now, we know that Jesus was about to drink the cup alone. There was nobody who could come with him. He was going to go to Calvary.

Everybody around him was going to forsake him. They were going to run away. He was going to suffer and die alone. God Almighty himself was going to turn his face against him. He would die and justify the righteous wrath of God against sin.

It would become sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. He said, I'm going to drink it alone first. I'm going to overcome the power of sin and the world over your life.

But very soon I'm going to have the privilege of walking through the darkest nights in the person of the Holy Spirit with millions of those whom the Father has given me, who also know that the yielding of their lives to God has an eternal purpose and they will draw strength from my victory.

He said, I'm going to walk through and drink it alone, but I'm going to drink it again, and I'm going to drink it again, and I'm going to drink it again, but I'm not going to drink it alone anymore. There are going to be a people that are going to drink it after me.

They're going to drink this cup that God gives to them. James and John, you're going to drink it. Peter, you're going to drink it. You can't drink it now, but I'm going to win a victory. And then in my Father's kingdom, when you finally have found the source of life and strength, you will put your lips to the cup again, but you won't drink it alone, Peter, because I have overcome the world.

We'll drink it together. My love will overpower you, will overshadow you. In your darkest night, you will have a song to sing, and nothing will take it away from you. We look about the kingdom he's speaking about us when we get to the other side.

I don't think so. Yes, there is another banquet, there is another cup. He's not talking about that. He's talking about the kingdom that's going to come the moment the veil is rent. There are going to be millions who say, not my way, millions who embrace the heart of God, millions who reach out, touching those who have nobody to touch them, leading those gently who have nobody to lead them.

Jesus said, I'll be hated and you'll be hated. I'll be persecuted, you'll be persecuted. There will be an out-of-season time for the gospel in every generation, just like I'm about to go through. But you will not have to drink it alone.

We will drink it together. Hallelujah. And what a joy that will be. I will give you a joy that doesn't come from the world, and the world can't take it away. Can you see Jesus now? Then he says in verse 30, it doesn't say he said this, but it says they sung a hymn.

He said, now let's sing. Think this through. He just told them the world is going to fall apart. People are going to not have God, oil. Others are going to fail of the grace of God. There's going to be difficulty trial.

I'm going to be poured out, betrayed. Closes the books and says, let's sing. Imagine the disciples around that table. Picture if you were there and you didn't understand what was going on. Sing, OK, let's sing.

I want to bet your guess it was a pretty half-hearted chorus on the part of the disciples, like our songs sometimes are. He's able, he's able, I think he's able. Psalm 137, turn there with me. Let's sing.

Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land

Jesus said, let's worship. I'm going to the cross. Let's get out our hymn books. Let's give praise and glory to God. Psalm 137, verse 1 says, by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. We wept when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For they that carried us away captive required of us a song. And they that wasted us required of us merch, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion.