The Return of God's Glory - Bill Mcleod — From the Pulpit & Classic Sermons

Welcome to From the Pulpit in Classic Sermons. Each week we bring you a different message from some of history�s greatest speakers in the Christian faith and powerful sermons from modern preachers too.

This week we have Bill McLeod with his message, �The Return of God�s Glory.

The Glory of the New Testament Ministry

I want to read from 2 Corinthians, Chapter 3, if you have a Bible with you. We�re going to begin at verse 6, the last word of verse 5, and then reading on from there. �God, who also has made us able ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter but of the Spirit.

For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance, which was to be done away, how shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious?

For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more does the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory. For even that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect by reason of the glory that excels.

For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remains is glorious. Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech, and not as Moses who put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished.

But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament, which veil is done away in Christ. But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart.

Nevertheless, when it shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away. Now the Lord is that Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.".

Thirteen times glory or glorious. Verse 8, How shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious? And I don't know if you've ever considered this portion of the word of God or not, but what Paul is saying, to put it simply, is this, that the Old Testament system, there was glory there.

The Bible talks about the sight of the glory of God on the top of Mount Sinai being like devouring fire. But the Old Testament system has been done away, and Paul's argument is that the ministration of the Spirit, the New Testament, will be much more glorious than anything the Old Testament knew.

Bach Sing, well known in India, a great man of God, wrote a book called The Return of God's Glory. I don't think you can get it in North America. He's not a great writer. That's not his gift. But I read the book some years ago and was greatly challenged and helped by it, as he discussed the problem of the losing of the glory of God in the work of God, and then how we may see the glory of God return.

And that's what I want to talk about this morning. I'm borrowing his title, not his book. One of the great problems, of course, here is that we may not even be conscious of the fact that the glory is gone.

Indeed, we may never have known it, but perhaps there was a time when God was working powerfully in my life, in my church, and is not now. But it happened so gradually. The erosion was so gentle and took so long that I'm not even aware of it.

Ichabod and the Departure of God's Glory

Phinehas' wife, she died in childbirth. She had just gotten the news. Her husband was killed. Her father-in-law had fallen off a seat and his neck broke and he was dead. And her pains came on her, and a baby boy was born.

And she named him Ichabod, saying, the glory is departed from Israel. Because the ark of God had been captured and taken by the Philistines. And the ark of God contained the testimony. It was called the ark of the testimony.

It contained the word of God. And the word of God was gone. And she died. The glory is departed. She knew that. Others maybe did not know that. And here we might think of King Saul. The glory of God left him.

Sometimes people think, well, he never really got a good start and somehow, perhaps, God shortchanged him. No, God did not get a glorious start. He was filled with the Holy Spirit. Samuel told him, the Spirit will come on you and you will be changed into another man.

And it happened. And he saw the glory of God. And at the beginning, it says, everywhere he turned himself, he vexed and troubled the enemies of God. But it did not stay that way. And the glory of God left him.

And he knew it. But he would not repent. And he never did. And he struggled for years with the problems. The problems consequent upon a failure to repent. He prayed. He sought the Lord. He inquired of God.

But the Bible says he did not inquire of the Lord. And the Bible is not contradicting itself. It's just telling us this. If we saw him, we would say, Saul is praying, earnestly seeking the Lord. But God saw his heart.

And God said he was not praying at all. The Lord did not answer him in any way, it says. And later on it says, God slew him because he did not inquire of the Lord. But he had. But the problem is this.

He that turns away his ear from hearing the law, that is the word of God, even his prayer shall be abomination. So I may be praying, but at the same time I may have turned my heart, my ears, away from the word and will of God.

So my prayer becomes to God an abomination. So as far as God is concerned, I am not praying at all. They that forsake the law praise the wicked. They that keep the law contend with the wicked. He that turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer shall be abomination.

And Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the whole Bible. As God left him, God's Spirit left him. And an evil spirit terrified him, the Hebrew language says. And he died a poor suicide. He started it and Amalekite had to finish it.

That in itself was probably a judgment of God because he had failed to destroy the Amalekites as God had asked him to do much earlier. Then think of Samson. He spent this night with his head on the knees of an unconverted evil woman.

And God only knows what went on in that chamber. And when she cried and said the Philistines are on you, she'd done this many times before, he said, oh, I'll go and shake myself as I've done many times before.

And it says he never knew that the Lord had left him. He didn't know the glory was gone. Oh, people, the glory had been there. He once carried a gate, which archaeologists say probably weighed a couple of tons.

He carried it on his shoulders a distance of eleven miles uphill all the way. Three thousand soldiers of Judah had to ask his permission before he would allow them to bind him with ropes. They knew what would happen when the Spirit of God came on him.

The glory of God. He was probably for twenty years the most talked about person in the whole country. For the job one of them asked, he flew a thousand men. But then he sinned, and the glory left him, and he never even knew it.

Somebody told me not long ago, the Spirit of God has left me. I said, how do you know? Oh, she said, I could just feel him going. I don't really think that's how it is, and I said so to her. The Spirit may leave you, you may feel exactly the same as you felt before.

The glory may depart, and you may not even know it. Thank God in Samson's case it was sort of deathbed repentance, I suppose you might call it. He was blinded, grinding in the prison house, fetters of brass, brass is often in Scripture a picture of the judgment of God.

The Philistines were having a great day, a victory celebration because their enemy, Samson, had been defeated, and was in jail. Everybody was there. Three thousand people on the roof of this big open temple, and probably many thousands more down below, and they were worshiping their God and praising their God Dagon, the fish God.

And somebody had the happy idea, let's bring Samson up and let him make sport for us. And to humiliate him, they had a boy lead him by the hand. And he asked the boy where the pillars were. He knew the temple, he'd seen it before.

He knew its structure. He asked the boy where the pillars were, and the boy told him. And he laid hold of the pillars and called on God with all his soul, and the glory came back. And he slew more by dying than he did by living, which is the Old Testament way of saying Galatians 2 .20.

Delilah died too. She was there. The Lord got them all. The man of God perished in the doing, but he was restored, and God's glory returned. The glory left King David, and for perhaps a year, we don't know the exact time when the child was born, the exact time after his sin with Bathsheba.

But the glory left him. Day and night God's hand was heavy upon him, his moisture was turned into the drought of summer. And somehow he didn't seem to connect this awful spiritual experience he was having with his sin.

So God sent Nathan the prophet, and you remember that dramatic story in the Bible. Thou art the man. And then, thank God, his instant repentance. I have sinned. It was very costly, the whole thing. Restore unto me, he cried, the joy of thy salvation.

It was gone. No fellowship with God, nothing but the frown of God. And he'd known such sweetness before, and no doubt he'd tried many times to get back to that again, and he couldn't somehow. Not until he repented, not until he saw his sin.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. Then will I teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners, sinners shall be converted unto thee. O God, deliver me, he said, from blood guiltiness. Many of us need to pray that too, because we're not witnessing Christians, and the blood of the lost is on our hands.

We're praying for the power of the Holy Spirit, and it does not and cannot come, because we want the power of the Spirit for wrong reasons, not in order to share Christ with others, not in order to live a godly, self-sacrificing life, but in order to be looked at and admired, and maybe to get out of my present bad feelings.

And so my motives are wrong. Has the glory departed from your heart, from your church, are you aware of it, or has the erosion, as I said before, been so gentle over such a long period of time that you don't even know it?

Jesus Christ as the Glory of God

What is the glory of God? To put it as simply as I can, the glory of God is Jesus and His work. In the Old Testament, God said, I will set glory in the land of the living. It was a prophecy, I am sure, of the Lord Jesus Christ, Isaiah.

Look upon Zion, and we need to remember that in Hebrews chapter 12 there is a spiritual Zion. You are come, the writer says to Christians, to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.

Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities. Thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation. Not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken. But there the glorious Lord shall be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby.

Our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. Listen to Simeon. Lord, now let Your servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Your salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people, a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of Your people Israel.

And he said all of that about the Lord Jesus Christ. It is written of Jesus that He manifested forth His glory. We beheld His glory, John said, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

And in John 17 Jesus Christ said something, and we need to lay hold of this. He said to His heavenly Father, And the glory that You gave me I have given them. We too should have the glory. Greater works in thee shall He do, because I go unto my Father.

The glory of God is the person of Jesus. Do you remember Moses' prayer in Exodus 33? Show me Thy glory. I think what he expected to see was thunder and lightning, some great, fantastic, glorious, majestic display of the power of God that would shake the universe.

That's not what he saw. It says, The Lord passed by and declared the name of the Lord which speaks for the faithfulness of God and the entire person of God. His goodness, it says, His mercy, His forgiveness, the glory of God passed by, and that's what it was.

So we have the Lord Jesus Christ saying to wicked sinners, Go in peace, go and sin no more. He manifested forth His glory. Dear people, He wants to do that again. He's doing it in some places. He wants to do it in your life and in mine, and in our churches too.

Repentance as the Way Back to God's Glory

How do we get the glory back? We get it back by asking for it. We've indicated already, repentance is absolutely essential. I must repent. Remember, therefore, from whence you are fallen and repent and do the first works.

That's what God says. The way back. Ask God. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation and uphold me with Thy free spirit. And I will be healed. That's where it all begins. When I get to the place where I can't live without the glory of God, without seeing something of the manifesting of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, it's a glorious gospel, Paul said, because it speaks of a glorious person.

The people rejoiced because of all the glorious things that were done by Him. The people rejoiced because of all the glorious things that were done by Him. Some of us saw some of those things back in 71, 72, and to some extent even after those days.

The Toronto Revival and the Return of God's Glory

And to some of you, some of these things will not be new, and to others, perhaps they will. We were asked to go to Toronto, and seven of us went. Toronto Baptist Seminary wanted a team to come, because the chaplain of the seminary had come to Saskatoon.

I well remember him sitting in my office and saying, Don't expect me to get involved. I've come here to pick up some information. I've been asked to write some articles on the Canadian Revival. I just smiled, because I knew it would happen.

It was happening to everybody. And one night he and I were standing against the wall of the Third Avenue United Church where the meetings were being held. Fourteen hundred people probably there that night.

At the invitation, the whole front of the church was crowded with people kneeling, crying to God. And he and I were standing against the wall, and he said, Don't ask me to go down there and counsel. I wouldn't have any idea what to say to those people, but I know how to lead a sinner to Christ.

He no sooner said that than out of nowhere a man came, laid hold of his arm and said, Sir, could you pray with me, please? And I just walked away and left him. I thought he might as well learn. Well, he went back to the seminary, and the next morning he was walking across the campus, and a student told us later on what happened.

They passed on the campus, and they said good morning, and the student said, I saw Jesus in a chaplain's face. And he turned and ran back into his room and fell on his knees and prayed for two hours and met God.

And the glory of God returned to his life. So they asked us to come with a team, and there was Art Birch, another Baptist preacher and myself, and five Alliance people including Walter Bolt's son, Wayne, who is now pastoring successfully in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan.

He was then about 18 or so, cowboy boots and all, and we flew to Toronto. As long as I live, I can't forget the glory of God and that meeting in the seminary. It went on for 14 hours. It was the longest meeting I was ever in.

The team all shared. They asked one of the ladies to share her testimony the second time, and she did the same testimony the second time. I spoke about 10 minutes and then sat down. No invitation was given.

And you know, if God isn't in town, it's quite embarrassing. A student jumped to his feet and said, what's going on here? Is this of God? If it is, I want it. Can somebody tell me? What is this? And he came forward, and we had a chair here, and our team came and knelt and prayed with him, and the rest were all listening.

And he got to his feet. His face was shining like a June morning. He went back to his seat, and then it started, and they started coming one after the other. And people left the meeting, got on the telephone and phoned friends, and the crowd began to grow and grow, and it went on and on.

And the professor, after some hours, got to his feet with a loud cry, like Esau. And he started down the aisle. He was tripping over his feet. The tears were spreading out of his eyes. He fell over the chair, and he said, Oh my God, all these years I've sought and taught the academic, and today I want the spiritual.

My God, have mercy on me. And oh, he met God. And then from that school, teens went all over Ontario into churches, sharing the message of revival. And I was preaching in South India to a gathering of the Marthoma Church, which has a tradition that Thomas the Apostle started them, and I think the tradition is well supported by the facts.

It was their annual conference. There were several thousand people there, and I spoke. And I mentioned this happening in the Toronto Seminary. It just flashed into my mind, so I shared it. And the next speaker, when he got up, he was from Canada, a team missionary, and he said, I want to say something about the Toronto Baptist Seminary, because he said, I was a backslidden missionary.

I made up my mind I was not going back to India again. And a team came from the Toronto Seminary to our church, and they shared in the glory of God returned to my soul, and I'm back here now because of that.

Revival Through Confession and Personal Repentance

I prayed with a pastor one time. He'd been guilty of doing things for the funds in the church he should not have, and he'd been indiscreet with some women in the church. I don't think it had gone to adultery, but he was in trouble, and he wouldn't admit anything.

And he and I were kneeling, praying, and there was a big pillar right beside his chair. And we were praying, and he was hard and cold, and suddenly he gave a shout, and he threw his arms around the pillar, and he began to cry at the top of his lungs to God not to kill him.

Oh, God, he said, don't kill me, don't kill me, please don't kill me. He told me after as the hand of God came around his body and squeezed him, he thought he was dying on the spot. The glory of God touched his life.

I was in another meeting before the meeting began in the Maritimes. There were only about twenty-five or so at the most Christian workers there. Before the meeting I was introduced to a pastor. I found out he was the most successful pastor in the whole area in terms of evangelism and missions.

He was talking and telling me all about all that God was doing, and in my heart I had a dead feeling as if there was something wrong with this dear brother. So I was praying for him, and he was sitting in the meeting.

And Howard Gardner, my song leader, he shared and led in a song or two, and I was talking very low-key. Four or five minutes, when suddenly this man began to weep, he put his head between his knees, he began to weep, and he wept so loud, finally we couldn't preach anymore.

And Howard went over and took him off into another room in the church, and through all these walls we could hear him crying at the top of his lungs to God have mercy on his soul. The glory of God had touched his life.

He came back in in a half an hour or forty minutes, and we asked him to give his testimony, and he wept. He said, Brethren, it's never happened to me before in my life. When I was sitting there, he said, Jesus came, and he demanded that I give him my all.

Brethren, I've never been confronted this way before. The glory of God, and he said, O God, do it a thousand times. Accelerate this whole thing. The people may know your power and who you are. The glory of God.

Howard and I once spoke to a gathering of forty pastors. It was the strangest thing. Every now and then it was as if the hand of God touched a crowd from this side and moved to that side, and then went back, and the heads would all go down like this, and come back up again, and go down like this, just in a row, across like that, and back again, and back again, and back again, and Howard said after him, Did you ever see anything like that?

I said, No. God was there. It was different than anything we'd ever seen before. And we're not just thinking in terms of the spectacular, but more in terms of the dynamic of what the Spirit was doing in the hearts of people.

A pastor came. We were holding meetings in Winnipeg, and Brother Ralph here could tell hundreds of stories like this, I'm sure, too. And this pastor, I was glad to see him because we had things between us that needed to be straightened out.

I hadn't seen him for many years. He was pastoring in the States then, and he'd come all the way to Winnipeg because he said, I heard about the revival. I need it in my own heart. We knelt at Enum Chapel in Winnipeg, and we prayed.

When he got to his feet, he said, I never felt a thing. I never felt a thing. But when I knelt at that chair, I know what I did. I gave God everything. I'm not going to take it back. Then he went back to his church and began preaching this message, and a revival came.

They had to continue with special meetings every night for 11 weeks. He did all the preaching. They prayed with about 3 ,000 people. They had to establish a revival center. They sent teams to the whole state of Oregon.

The glory of God just touched a life. The glory of God can so easily depart. How do we get it back? By praying, by repenting of our sins. God said, how weak is your heart seeing you do these things? The work of an imperious, foolish woman.

He was talking about Israel, married to God, but committing adultery with those that were no gods. Committing adultery, it says, with stocks and stones, with their idols, and with other nations. We sometimes don't understand because the new idolatry, remember, is covetousness.

Covetousness is idolatry. The covetous man is an idolater. A man's life does not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses, contrary to what most New Testament Christians in North America seem to believe.

Hearken, my beloved brethren. Has not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to them that love him? But you have despised the poor, it says. Yes, and in many cases we have.

We wouldn't give them the time of day because they might make some financial or other demands on us. We just don't have the time to do that. Glory is departed, but thank God it can return. It returns through faith.

Faith, Identification with Christ, and Bearing His Reproach

I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Psalm 27. What did Christ say in John 11? To Martha and Mary, he said, didn't I say unto you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?

Did you ever stop to think of this, that the raising of Lazarus from the dead had something to do with the faith of Martha and Mary? He said, if you believe, you'll see the glory of God, which means if they didn't believe, they would not see the glory of God.

It was not just the power of Christ. It was only the power of Christ in one sense, but in another sense, it had to do with the faith of the people. Back in the early 1800s, there were many revivals in the United States of America, and a man called Reverend Calvin Colton wrote a book, which was republished a year or two ago, I discovered, in the eastern states, but the price is a little too high for such a small book.

I think $17. Anyway, it's a very interesting book. I have an old copy printed in 1832 in my library, and there's one element or teaching in the book that was of great interest to me. It was this. He talked about the glory of those movements of God.

He said we were never satisfied with what they call insulated conversions. We would use the phrase isolated conversions, one here, one there, a family, and so on. He said we were never satisfied with that.

That was not revival. We kept praying and fasting and believing God until the Holy Spirit came, he said, and took the work out of our hands and made whole communities aware of the glory and power of God.

Then thousands would be converted, and he said this. This kind of revival never came to a church that did not believe it would come. This kind of revival never failed to come to a church that believed it would come.

Do you suppose God works in different ways today? That God doesn't honor faith today, or that God doesn't turn away from unbelief today? No, I don't think things are any different today. There has to be faith, repentance, prayer, faith, identification with Christ.

Peter said, if you be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are you, for the spirit of glory and of God is resting on you. You want the spirit of glory to rest on you? We have to be willing to be reproached for the name of Christ.

The doctrine of identification with Christ is a sweet doctrine to those that understand it, but it's not sweet perhaps to be reproached for the name of Christ, but that's the outworking of complete identification with the Savior.

Think of Hebrews chapter 13, where the Word of God puts it this way. It says, Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the camp outside the gate. And then comes the appeal, Let us go forth therefore unto him outside the camp, bearing his reproach.

For here we have no continuing city. We seek one to come, bearing his reproach, outside the camp. Why that's where they took the blasphemers and killed them. That's where they took the murderers and killed them.

That's where they took all the refuse and buried it. That's where the human dung was buried, outside the camp. That's where the rebels were taken and stoned to death, outside the camp. And Christ died for the ungodly, so he was identified with the ungodly outside the camp.

There was one clean place outside the camp, and that's where the cross stood. But it was surrounded with a stench of burning garbage, the sins of the world. Jesus died there. If you be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are you for the Spirit of glory and of God is resting on you.

Doing God's Work in God's Way

What did Bach Sing say? He tells how in the early days, he worked with American missionaries for years. They called him the Billy Graham of India, and he was greatly used. Many people found the Lord over the years.

But after a while he became disillusioned with the kind of work they were doing, because it was not really meeting the need as he saw it in India. So he broke with the missionaries amicably. Some of them haven't forgiven him yet.

And he began working in what he thought was a more biblical way. Today I think he has about 600 assemblies that have been started through their work. They have annual conferences with 20 ,000 people. Some of their assemblies have 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 people in fellowship.

The center is Hyderabad in India. George Verver, who spoke at this conference several years ago, is a personal friend of Bach Sing's. They often get together. They pray together. They are concerned about the loss in India.

They have about 400 workers. Operation Mobilization have in India, trying to meet the enormous need of that great country, 700 million people or more, jammed into an area the size of western Canada. But he said, we lost the glory of God when we started doing God's work in human ways.

He said we used to send teams out to the marketplace, and they would give out 100 ,000 tracts in a day. And nothing happened. Almost nothing seemed to happen. So we would send them to another marketplace, to another village, and nothing seemed to happen.

So then they began to pray for answers from God. Lord, what's wrong? What are we doing wrong? No answer. So they fasted and prayed. They were getting a little more biblical now. And then God showed them.

You never asked me what marketplace or what village to go to. Oh. So then they began praying, and they would not go out anywhere until God indicated where they should go. And when that was clear, it was also usually made clear how large the team should be and who should be on the team.

And they started doing it this way, and still there was no real blessing. So they fasted and prayed some more. And God said, when you got to the marketplaces, you didn't wait for my guidance. You just rushed ahead and did your thing.

And so he said, through fasting and prayer, the early apostles, it says in Acts, they said, we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word. The ministry of the Word rises out of the prayer, you see.

God indicates what, where, and when, when we fast and pray and wait on his name. And they made this discovery, and he said, when we started doing God's work in God's way, the glory of God returned. And he described some of those meetings where people couldn't even walk to the front.

They were under such tremendous conviction of sin. They sometimes just lay on the floor prostrate where they'd been sitting. They couldn't walk. We saw that happen too. I remember a preacher. He signaled to some preachers in the Winnipeg meetings.

He wanted to get to the altar. He couldn't walk. There was no strength left in him because he'd seen the holiness of God. Preachers came and carried him to the altar and put him on his knees. And he met God.

The glory of God touched his life. It was a thrilling little story, the return of God's glory. Supposing Peter, on the day of Pentecost, had gotten up in front of that great crowd in Jerusalem and simply exuded a quiet confidence in God and said nothing.

What would have happened? Well, supposing he'd got up and invited those people in the crowds to come down to this certain camp where they were having a conference, where the meals would all be free. Well, supposing he did something else such as we do today and didn't preach the gospel.

Well, people say you have to build a bridge before you can preach the gospel to a person. You must build a bridge to them. I'm not saying that that's always wrong, but it certainly isn't always right.

Peter didn't build a bridge to those people. He didn't know most of them. They did not know him. They did not know whether he was genuine or hypocritical. They knew nothing at all about him. But that day, 3 ,000 people were converted just the same.

Supposing the apostles had said, well, now, this fasting business is pretty demanding, and spending hours a day in prayer, that takes up a lot of time that we could use in better ways. What would have happened to the work of God?

The glory would slowly be withdrawn, and then we'd be like a windmill beating the air, getting nothing done, seeing very few converted, seeing little, very little of the power of God, because God has withdrawn because His Spirit has been grieved.

So we're told, Ephesians 4 .30, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you were sealed unto the day of redemption. Don't grieve God's Spirit. He's the source of the power and glory. The dynamic of Christianity is the Spirit of the Lord.