Prayer and Revival - Part 2 — Bill McLeod

The Greatness of God and Christ

Well, good evening. This evening I'd like to talk about the humility of Jesus Christ. And before I get into that, I want to talk something about the greatness of God, the greatness of Christ. Now, oftentimes as Christians we have a very low concept of who God really is.

In our church one time we had a young man giving his testimony. My brother Keith happened to be in the congregation. This was before the days of revival. And he was supposed to give a testimony because he was asking for church membership.

And he was distinctly asked, just tell us how you found Christ. Here's what he said. The big boy upstairs and I are just like that. That's as far as he got. My brother Keith got up and I forget what he said, but I remember it was very powerful.

And this fellow took off. We never saw him again. He's not the big boy upstairs. The way the Bible pictures our God is sometimes it's just hard to even grasp with our little minds. Isaiah 40 would be a good chapter and many of you are familiar with that, I'm sure.

But you know, God, I've told people sometimes if God was to walk through the Pacific Ocean, he wouldn't get wet up to his ankles. That's not an exaggeration. The heaven is his throne and the earth is his footstool.

That helps me to understand. All the nations of the world, he said, are like a drop in a bucket. And then he even goes further than that and reminds us that we are a mathematical impossibility. We are less than nothing.

Less than nothing. Like a small dust on the balance. You know, if you have an old-fashioned balance and there's a plate here where you put things on to weigh them, and sometimes when the sun hits it right, you see just a little tiny skiff of dust.

And God said, that's what we're like, just a little skiff of dust. And we have to understand. And so much is said, I mean, altogether in the Bible, when it talks about creation, for example, by the word of the Lord, who the heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

He spoke and it was done. He commanded and they stood fast. God didn't take some days or even some hours as far as creation is concerned. And so he's great. We can understand. He's greater than the universe he's created.

We know something about the greatness of the universe. Or maybe we don't. I don't know. We should. Most of us do, I'm sure. Why don't we just take a ride in a rocket for a few moments, traveling at the speed of light.

Now that will be some millions of miles an hour. We leave the earth. We pass the moon in two seconds. We pass the sun in eight minutes. We get out of the local solar system the same day. But before we get to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, it'll be at least three years.

I mean, that's how vast the universe is that God has called into existence. And if we stay on the rocket, you know, the local solar system is part of the Milky Way constellation. And there are billions of stars in this constellation.

To cross the Milky Way on that rocket, traveling at the speed of light, it will take you a hundred thousand years just to cross it. He's so great. Did you know that in Psalm 113, we're told that God is so great, he has to humble himself to behold the things that are going on in the earth.

Well, I can understand that. Walking through the bush, here's an ant hill. You take a piece of stick and you just knock the top off it. You watch the ants for a few moments. You don't stay there for ten minutes.

You just go on your way. It's not that interesting. And that gives a little picture of God in the earth. He has to really humble himself to even look at the things going on in the earth. But that's not all it says in Psalm 113.

It says God has to humble himself to behold the things in heaven. That I don't quite understand. But he has to humble himself to even look at things going on in earth and heaven, because he is so great.

Christ’s Humility in the Incarnation

His range at one time, of course, was the universe is again today. But when he was incarnated in Mary, that changed. And from who he was to become who he became in her. You talk about humility. How could he do this?

The God of the universe being found in flesh, incarnation, incarnu, in a woman. And then being born to live as a man. But that's part of what he did. He was born not in some hospital or even in a house.

He was born in a stable. Now this is part of his humility. And in these things that Christ did, he is laughing at our values and helping us to see things clearly as we are. Born in a stable with animals standing around.

The God of the universe. He was born a Jew. The Jew was the most despised nation on earth. Has always been that way. And Isaiah described the Jew as being scattered and peeled. And a nation that was terrible from the beginning.

You know, we see it even today. The Jew is despised. Look at what's happening over in Israel. And it's still going on. The war they had is kind of re-come up again. We don't know where it's going to end.

If it will, there may be a terrible bloodbath over there. The best kept secret in Israel is this. That there are several thousand Jews every month leaving Israel, emigrating to the United States or Canada or Great Britain to get away from the country where, as one of them said, you have to go shopping with a pistol in your hand or a rifle hanging on your shoulder.

They want to get away from that. You see they're not there with the blessing of God or this would not happen or couldn't happen because he promised his people peace if they walked in his ways. In Zechariah chapter 7, recall, they disobeyed him.

It says they hardened their heart. And then those three things happened to them because of this. God said, I called and you refused. Therefore you will call and I will refuse. In other words, God would not answer their prayers.

Then he said, I scattered you with a whirlwind among all the nations of the world. That's still going on. There are maybe three and a half million in Israel. There are 12 million or more scattered around the world.

So, and the third thing was, as God said, he would make their land desolate. And in spite of the fact that some areas have been reclaimed today, it is certainly not as it was in the day when the Jew first came to the land.

It was a land everywhere that flowed with milk and honey. It was a marvelous country. I'm sure the best in the world at that time because God made it. It was a land that he said, God said. He never took his eyes off it from one end of the ear to the other.

But that's all changed because they hardened their hearts against God. He was born in a stable, but born a Jew. He was not born in some big city, but in tiny Bethlehem, maybe 200 people in that little village.

That's where he was born. And then he was raised in Nazareth. And if you remember, Nazareth was called, well it had a saying, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? So he was born in a stable in tiny Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, and all of this.

His humility, it's as if he was going down a ladder further and further. We notice he was subject to his parents. I remember talking with a bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses one day, and they said, now you believe that Jesus was equal with, as I said, he was equal with God.

Oh, nonsense they said. He said, my father is greater than I. And they said, you know, how in the world, if Jesus was subject to God his father, he couldn't be equal to God. And God gave me an answer and it went like this.

It says in Luke's Gospel that Jesus Christ came to Nazareth and was subject unto his parents. So I asked him this question, if Jesus Christ could be subject to his parents, whom he was far greater than, could not he be subject to his heavenly father with whom he was equal?

It was his humility. He listened to his parents. I'm sure they weren't always right, but he was subject to them. It was part of his humility. He worked as a carpenter, and from some reading I've done in those days, to be a carpenter, it was considered to be a very lowly task.

But Christ was humbling himself as an example to us. He made himself of no reputation, we're told, in Philippians chapter 2. He made himself, he deliberately emptied himself and became a man. And then he went further than this.

Jesus’ Obedience and Reproach

He became, it says, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. And he knew that to be crucified on a cross to a Jew, it meant he was under the curse of God. He that is hanged is cursed of God. And people understood that.

That's why when he hung there, Jewish people looking on him would consider he's under the curse of God. But it's all part of what he was doing in this area of just humbling himself before the universe.

He quietly suffered every kind of reproach. They said he was a Samaritan. He never said anything about it. They said he was demon, he had a demon, and he said, I don't have a demon. But many other things they said.

They said he was insane. They tried to get him off the street. His relatives did. They thought he was crazy. And they called him a blasphemer. He never said anything about it. They called him a glutton.

They said he was a drunkard. All of these things they threw at him. And in response he said nothing because Isaiah chapter 53 had indicated, as a lamb was led to the slaughter, so he opened not his mouth.

He had nothing to say. Pilate couldn't understand it. Herod thought it strange because in those days, if you're threatened to be stuck on a cross, nailed on a cross to die, you'll be groaning on the ground, kissing the feet of Pilate or Herod, and begging for mercy.

And he's standing there like a king. They couldn't understand this. In 1 Peter chapter 2 it says, were to follow his steps who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. Who when he was reviled, reviled not again.

When he suffered, he didn't threaten. He could have threatened Pilate or Herod. He could have threatened those soldiers who were nailing him on the cross. He did none of that. He suffered meekly, quietly.

And we're told to follow his steps. It says he committed his cause to him that judges righteously. And were to do the same when we're under reproach of any kind such as he did. He was rejected by his own nation.

He came unto his own, and his own received him not. His own brothers didn't believe him. It says neither did his brethren believe in him. And of course his disciples at the last were told they all forsook him and fled.

After telling him so strongly, well as Peter at least did, that they would never under any circumstances leave him. Peter said, I'm ready to go with you to death. He wasn't ready for a Sunday school cookie party, but he didn't know that.

But Christ quietly suffered all of this. Then we find, worst of all, you know that film, maybe you saw it, I didn't see it. That film that was done a while ago on the sufferings of Christ. You know it missed the whole point of the sufferings of Christ.

Because his crucifixion on the cross, you know it was bad and all that went with it, the scourging and so on. But I heard about a woman that was crucified on the cross and she lived for 40 hours and was taken down and walked away.

That was not the suffering that Christ suffered so much as the fact that his father turned his back on him as it were. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That was the hard part. And that film had nothing to say in that area at all.

They didn't get it. Two hour film, two minutes about the resurrection, certainly far away. I think somebody pointed out there were around 30 different things in the film that were totally unbiblical. They were trying to do something.

The problem was they didn't know what they were trying to do. They jeered at him. They mocked him. They spit in his face. The slaves beat him with their hands. You see slaves I mean they're the lowest down on the ladder and there was nothing they could do but now they found somebody lower than they and they beat him.

It says the servants beat him and Christ never murmured, never complained, but he prayed a prayer that means a lot. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. They don't know what they're doing.

They didn't know. Some of them found out afterwards when Christ was raised from the dead and the gospel was widely preached in the power of the Holy Spirit. They found out then and understood. But all of this I say dear people is part of his humility.

Christ Outside the Camp

Did you ever think as to why Christ was crucified outside the camp? You find that Hebrews chapter 13, outside the camp and we're to go forth outside the camp bearing his reproach. Why was this? Well outside the camp that's where human dung was buried.

If you had leprosy in the walls of your house and that was possible in those days, you had to take that material out of the wall and dump it outside the city, outside the camp. And if the house itself could not and was so full it couldn't be repaired properly, you had to destroy the house, take all the material, dump it outside the camp.

If you were a blasphemer, you were taken outside the camp and stoned to death. If you were an adulterer, you were taken outside the camp and stoned to death. When Miriam and Aaron questioned Moses' leadership, God gave her leprosy and said if her father had spit in her face, she'd have to stay outside the camp seven days.

Stick her outside the camp. Many other things, gluttons, drunkards, people that were rebels against God, breaking the Sabbath, all of these things you were putting outside the camp and in many cases, most cases, you were stoned to death.

Why was Christ then crucified out there? When animals were sacrificed, they took the carcass outside the camp and they burned it. And there must have been an awful stink there as horns and hoofs and hides and everything were burning outside the camp.

But you see, Christ was completely, totally identified with sinners of every kind. He was not ashamed to be crucified outside the camp. It was part of his humility. Dying for you, for me. Christ died for the ungodly.

I remember a friend of mine, he had preached in a certain place. I was talking to a man who had been in the meetings. He said, I don't like that guy. I said, why not? He said we were ungodly. Well, I said, if you don't admit you're ungodly, you can't go to heaven.

What do you mean? I explained it to him. Christ died for the ungodly. If you're not willing to admit you're ungodly, then you can't be saved. Well, he never understood that, of course. He was numbered, it says, with the transgressors.

I think the immediate reference is to the thieves crucified on each side. Numbered, hanging there naked on a cross beside two thieves. This God so great, he has to humble himself to behold the things that are in heaven and the earth.

How could this be? I imagine angels were there, every one of them, watching this, wondering what was going on. I don't know what they understood about Jesus and the incarnation and then the crucifixion.

Maybe they understood, maybe they didn't. But I'm sure they were all there watching, maybe just waiting for a cry from Christ to come and take him from the cross and take him away. And of course, this never ever came.

The Cross, Pride, and Salvation

You know, he's saying, when I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my riches gained, I count but loss and poor contempt on all my pride. How can I be proud about anything when I consider Christ?

You know, Satan in Isaiah 14, there were five steps he wanted to take up. And the last step, he wanted to be equal with God. Later on in Matthew chapter 4, he took another step up, and made six of them, because he wanted his creator, Christ, to fall down and worship him.

He didn't just want to be equal with God, he wanted God to fall down and worship him. Pride. He's called the King of Pride, and he's that. And oftentimes as Christians, we get proud. We get proud about our looks, proud about our education, proud about our kids that do something great.

Many things, anything, as far as God is concerned, is an evil thing in the light of what Jesus Christ did in humiliating himself in the fashion that he did. Why all this? For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame.

That's a phrase I spent some time on just thinking about. Despising the shame. I mean, hanging there naked between two thieves, despising the shame for you and for me. In a sense, I remember telling some people one time when I think about him despising the shame, he was really spitting in the face of the devil who wanted to go up and Christ wanted to go down.

I see that. For the joy that was set before him. So in Revelation 7, 9, and 10, we find there is a multitude of people who had washed their robes in the blood of Christ from every nation under the skies.

This was the joy that was set before Christ. I mean, the whole idea, the whole plan of salvation is so totally foreign to any way we think or men anywhere would think. Obviously, it came from God. It could not have come from any other source.

It didn't just come from Christ. The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. So it came from God. It was God's plan, God's way. And there's many things we need to learn, dear people. One of the greatest of them is just to walk in humility.

Those who walk in pride, it says he is able to abase. And God does. He hates pride because it has been called the devil's sin. Less being lifted up with pride, he fall into the condemnation of the devil.

That's the devil's sin. And sometimes it's ours. And sometimes our churches are filled with proud people. And sometimes any one of us in this crowd tonight can fall into that sin. And to be freed from that, God often has to lead us through experiences in life that are hard to understand and hard to put up with.

We're expecting to abruptly come down. Remember Psalm 102, it says, you have lifted me up and cast me down. That happened to Joseph. Remember, he was working for Potiphar, the chief of the executioners.

He was a slave. That is, Joseph was. And Potiphar discovered that this slave he bought had unusual administrative ability. Everything Joseph did, it says, was done right. And Potiphar finally gave him the running of the whole operation.

And Joseph, remember, at age 17 was sold into slavery. And now he's in his twenties. And he was a slave. He had no responsibility. He enjoyed this. He had administrative gifts. That was going along great until he refused to sin with Potiphar's wife.

And she lied to her husband and told him how this man had tried to rape her. And he was understandably angry and threw him in jail. So he'd been lifted up and cast down. And that's an example of that particular thing from Psalm 102.

It happens to us. You may go up and then suddenly you come down and say, God, why did you do this to me? God is trying to teach us humility. I think it was Dwight L. Moody that once said that humility was the greatest grace of all.

And he exhorted people to seek to be a humble person because our God, our Savior, was humble more than we can ever understand. The creator of the universe, allowing men to nail him on a wooden cross. And remember this, as Paul told us, God was in Christ.

God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them. People, you know, when you see what God had to do, the length to which you have to go, then you get a much better idea of what sin is.

This was because we were sinners for no other reason than that. He didn't do it, I don't think, to show how humble he was. He did it in order that we might be born again, might be saved and go to heaven when we die.

The Mind of Christ and Humility

Philippians 2, 5 says, Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being or existing eternally in the form of God, did not think it something to be tightly held on to, that he was equal with God, but made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men.

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death. And I say as I look at this, you know, how could he? How could he do this? Being who he was, how could he allow wicked men to mock him and jeer him?

Well, in Isaiah 50, it's a prophetic statement about the Messiah. I gave my back to the smiters and my cheeks to those that plucked off the hair. I hid not my face from shame and spitting. They spit in his face.

They beat him on his back, beat it all they could. Not a word from Christ. He made himself of no reputation, because as he hung on the cross, in the minds of those that didn't know any better, he was just a wicked Jew that had done something terrible, and hence he's dying this way.

He didn't try to excuse himself to anybody. Remember, 1 Peter 2 where it says, he committed his cause to God. And we have to learn to do the same, to be a true follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are 50 references in the Bible to the phrase, the most high God.

Christ, the most high God, died on a cross. Isaiah 57 is a wonderful verse. It goes like this. Thus saith the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place.

With him also there is of a humble and contrite spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. In Isaiah he said, I that speak in righteousness mighty to save.

And God is mighty to save. But beyond that, he's mighty to revive. He dwells in that high and holy place in order to revive. It says that distinctly. All of this, the cross and all that went with it, he did on our behalf for these reasons.

Bearing Christ’s Reproach

Let us, it says in Hebrews 13, go forth unto him outside the camp bearing his reproach. No matter how you look at it, if you're a Christian, there are people that are going to reproach and perhaps also lie about you.

Don't worry about that. Christ said, rejoice and be exceeding glad when that happens. There is a reproach connected with the gospel and with the person of Christ, especially because of the way in which he died.

Many people, they can't become a Christian because they know how he died. They say this is impossible. They don't know the plan of God. They maybe never will. But we understand, for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame and is set down at the right hand of God in heaven today.

Thank God for this. What do we learn? Well, Peter said, if you be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are you, for the spirit of glory, glory of God is resting on you. That's how, you know, we want power, but we don't want reproach.

We want people to think we're cool, we got it all put together right, you know, and we're nice people, and we shine, people like us, speak well of us. That's not how it is, or how it will be if we really want to be a person used of God, that we're willing people even to die.

And many, of course, are. They're telling us that more people have died as martyrs this last century than in any of the centuries prior to that. Well, in Rwanda, the slaughter, genocide there where maybe 150 ,000 people died, it's safe to say at least half of them were born again believers.

And so we're living in desperate, very desperate times. We do not know what's coming down the road. I firmly believe that Almighty God is rattling our case. I think we have entered into a judgment mode with God.

Judgments Upon North America

The stuff that's happening in your country is happening in my country. Right now in Vancouver, Canada, it's a city of two and a half million, second largest city in Canada, and it had such heavy rains.

Can you feature 28 inches of rain in one rain? It's flooded all the wells in the country, all the water is contaminated. Two and a half million people have no water that is not contaminated. And then there's great mudslides in the mountains, and that's all mountain country, you know.

And a couple years back in Ontario, Canada, we had an ice storm, and for three weeks there were 100 ,000 people with no heat, and 37 people died as a result. And then my wife told me just today in Alberta, Canada, they had winds so high that it was actually highway transport trucks blown off the highway.

That means winds of maybe 200 or 300 miles an hour. And this has been happening, we've had, in Canada we've had places too much rain, other places not enough rain, and in British Columbia, which has, it's a province, it probably has more merchant-like timber than any province in Canada.

And some kind of a bug has got into the trees, and there are hundreds of square miles now that are totally brown, every tree is dead. I've seen pictures from the air, it's incredible. As far as the eye can see, everything is brown in a forest that was green last year.

I think God is knocking at the door in a very powerful way here in North America. He said in Ezekiel 14, 21, that he had four, what he called, pardon me, what he called sore judgments. War, famine, pestilence, and the wild beasts of the earth.

And he's doing that today, we see it. Wild beasts of the earth, we've had many cases in Canada lately, bears attacking humans, unprovoked, cougars in the mountain country doing the same thing. There's verses in the Bible that talk, they say that God would take away the fish of the earth, and in eastern and western Canada, in the ocean, they're telling us the fish are all gone.

But God told us twice in the Bible he would take the fish of the ocean away through sin. This is going on. To get back to our theme, Satan wanted up, Christ wanted down. What a contrast, but people, all that he did, he did for you and for me.

I wonder if we thank him the way we should. We sometimes glibly give him a little pat on the back for what he did. Not understanding how far he went in order to finally die in a crop. All these other things that happened were leading him to a death in the crop.

It all led him to that. And he knew this, of course, not even his disciples understood why we see it clearly today. How we should rejoice, thank God, and humble ourselves under his hand so that he may exalt us in due time.

Crucifixion, Self, and Revival

In eastern Canada, there was a man, he was a professor in the Acadia University, and one time he lived in Saskatoon, Canada. He was a deacon in my church. Now, I didn't know he was, at that time, he was not a professor, he was a high school teacher.

I didn't know in the classroom he sometimes told dirty stories, you know, I didn't know that. Had I known that, he would certainly have not been a deacon in my church. Then he moved away, became a professor, and I told a story in a Bible college in Canada about a young man who was a deacon and a high school teacher who told dirty stories.

You know, the Bible says, let no corrupt communication proceed out of their mouth. But that was just good to the use of edifying. And I was talking about that, mentioned this man. I told the story in such a way, nobody could ever recognize who I was talking about.

But, somebody taped my messages and mailed them to him. So one day he told me later on, he was working in the garden, and he had a strong impression he should run in the house and see what his wife was doing.

And she was listening to one of my tapes. And when he walked in the door, I had just started to tell a story about the high school teacher who told dirty stories in the classroom. And because of what had happened there, a girl who was attending our church, but in his classroom, she would never come back to our church again.

And her mother told us about it later on. That's after he left the Saskatoon. He heard this. He said he and his wife began to pray. They prayed for two weeks, asking God to search their heart. And he came to see me at Woodstock, New Brunswick, and we talked together.

He told me what had happened. He said, when I heard that story, I didn't know if you were talking about me. And he didn't ask me, so I didn't have to tell him. But he said, when you told that story, he said, God flung a spear into my soul.

And my wife and I have been confessing sin ever since. But he said, that's not the problem. He said, you know, self, he said, is the factory that manufactures the sin, how do you deal with the self problem?

I said, the cross. And he didn't know what I meant, so I explained that. And he began to pray. It's one of those things I wish I had had on a tape recorder or something, you know. He forgot I was in the room, I'm sure.

He began to pray, crying to God to crucify him on the cross of Christ. And he cried with such intensity of heart, he was just almost shouting to God. And he uses phrases like this, dear God, kill me dead right now.

Dead, I say, dead. Everything in me of self. Kill it dead. And he kept on, I guess, for maybe five or six minutes. And then I heard him say, oh, what peace. He was flooded with the Spirit of God. The following Sunday, he was preaching.

He was not a preacher, but he did a lot of preaching. He was preaching in a Baptist church in the Maritimes. And halfway through his message, a revival broke. And people began streaming to the altar. He couldn't preach any longer.

And although he was a professor in a university, he started in his spare time going up, holding revival meetings. And many people found Christ as their Savior as a consequence of this. Greatly used him.

A professor conducting revival meetings, yes. He had such a meeting with God at that time. But people, first of all, dealing with sin, and then dealing with self. He didn't ask to be filled with the Spirit.

He was filled with the Spirit when he dealt with the self problem. And that's how it is with us as well. He was a proud person before this happened. He could speak well. He had a great mind and all of that.