Commit — Bill McLeod

Psalm 37 verse 1, fret not thyself because of evildoers neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity for they shall soon be cut down like the grass and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good so shalt thou dwell in the land and verily thou shalt be fed.

Delight thyself also in the Lord and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord trust also in him and he shall bring it to pass and he shall bring forth your righteousness as the light in your judgment as the noonday.

Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him fret not thyself because of him who prospers in his way because of the man who brings wicked devices to pass. Cease from anger and forsake wrath fret not yourself in any wise to do evil for evildoers shall be cut off but those that wait upon the Lord they shall inherit the earth for yet a little while and the wicked shall not be.

Yes thou shalt diligently consider his place and it shall not be but the meek shall inherit the earth and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. And the fifth verse again commit your way unto the Lord trust also in him and he shall bring it to pass.

Would you be seated. The truth I want to share with you tonight is the truth of committal one of the most important truths that a Christian can ever learn. A Christian worker once publicly testified in one of our meetings as God had spoken to him about the matter of a complete committal of all to God and what this really meant.

He said it had revolutionized his family life his personal life and his ministerial life and I believe it. Commit your way unto the Lord and after you commit God says now trust. Trust also in him. And then what?

Then he shall no doubt abide. He shall bring it to pass. But wherever I go I find there are very hazy notions. Christians don't really, many of them at least, do not seem to really completely understand what this text means.

What it really means to commit something into the hands of God. Perhaps we know how to commit it but we don't know how to trust after we commit. Let's see how the word commit is used in the Bible. This I think will help us to come to a better a clearer understanding of the meaning of the word.

Committing What We Place in God's Hands

The first reference of far as I know in Scripture is over in the book of Genesis where we read that Potiphar, the man recall who bought Joseph, remember he was sold twice, and Joseph bought him the second time.

Potiphar bought Joseph the second time at the age of 17. Now Joseph apparently was not around the place very long before Potiphar made the discovery that he had a most amazing young man on his hands. No matter what he asked to do it was done a hundred and one percent.

And then Potiphar noticed something else. That there was some kind of an unseen beautiful influence working with this young man through him. There was a blessing, a blessing on everything he did. So finally Potiphar gave him more authority and watched the situation.

And then he saw the blessing of God was being poured out on his house, on his business, and finally he was emboldened to make what Joseph called a total committal of everything to Joseph. Joseph said my master has committed everything to me.

And you know how thorough that committal was? It was so thorough that the account declares that Potiphar never even bothered his head about such a thing as an accounting. He never ever asked Joseph what was going on.

He never checked up to see how things were going. He never even asked what he had, what his assets were. Matter of fact the Bible says that all that Potiphar bothered about was the bread on the table.

That's all he knew. And that helped me to understand the meaning of the word commit. Now there's an old saying that hell has no fury like a woman scorned. If you remember the story of Potiphar's wife, I tried to get Joseph to sin with her, he refused to do this.

And so she lied about him and told her husband one day that this Hebrew slave Joseph had tried to rape her, and understandably her husband was very upset, and he had Joseph thrown into the prison where the king's prisoners were all kept.

Now Joseph is now around 27 years of age, terrible change and turn in circumstances, but it's in the hands of God. And he wasn't long in the jail before the jailer made the same discovery that Potiphar had earlier made, that he had the most amazing person on his hands.

And so we read in the same 39th chapter of Genesis that finally the jailer, he committed everything in the prison to Joseph, and it says the committal was so thorough that whatever happened in the prison, Joseph did it.

And the jailer had a breeze. All he had to do was pull out his hand once a month and take his paycheck. He didn't have to look after anything. Joseph was in total and complete charge. That helps me to understand the meaning of the word commit.

I put it in God's hands, and then I take my hands off. And that's the hard thing to do. Very, very hard to do. In Romans chapter 3, Paul asked this question, what advantage then does the Jew have, or what profit is there of the religious rite of circumcision?

And he answers the question by saying, much every way, chiefly because that unto them, that is unto the people of Israel, were committed the oracles of God. God committed his word to that nation. And in spite of the vicissitudes of their national life, the ups and the downs, the declensions, apostasies, backslidings, and occasional revivals, and sometimes they had very wicked kings and sometimes they had floods of false prophets around, in spite of all this, God got the job done through that nation.

He never changed the committal over a period of 1600 years. They were the official custodians and their godly men were the writers of the word of God. That committal was never changed. That helps me to understand.

In John chapter 5, the Lord Jesus Christ said, the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment unto the Son, that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. Now that committal apparently was made in eternity past, and it'll last till eternity future.

Paul knew about that because he said there's a day coming in which God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel. And of course, Paul knew about it in Acts chapter 17. He said, God has appointed a day in which you'll judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained, whereof he has offered faith unto all men, and that he has raised him from the dead.

God has committed all judgment to the Son. That committal will never be changed. Then Paul said to a younger preacher, Timothy, the things that you've heard of me among many witnesses the same, commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also.

You commit truth to some other person's mind and heart, that's in their mind and heart forever. You can't really take it out. You can't really take it back. That helps me to understand the meaning of the word.

Paul, the Storm, and Committing Ourselves to God

Then we have a beautiful example of committal in the 27th chapter of the book of Acts. Here's Paul and somewhat less than 300 people in a small cockle shell of a boat, and they're caught in a storm, a violent storm, and things look very bad.

Many days, now there's sun and moon where stars appeared, and all hope that we should be saved was taken away, it says. Then one night, you know, things are always worse at night when there's a storm blowing at night, and trees, you know, branches are coming off the trees, and they hail and all this.

It's always worse at night because you can't see what's happening out there. And one night the sailors in the boat, they thought they were drifting into shallow water. There was only one thing could tell them that, and that was the thundering of breakers on reefs up ahead.

And they began taking soundings, it says, and sure enough, the boat was drifting into shallow water. So the Bible says they cast four anchors out of the stern of the boat, and they wished for the day.

And sure enough, when day broke, they were off to an island, and the Bible tells us how there was two seas came together, and they're pounding on the reef there, and they were in a very bad situation.

You know, sometimes you and I get in situations that are bad. They're so bad, we don't want to make a decision because we don't really know which way to move, and we stay in that decision, and we don't exact, we don't want to do anything because it looks bad either way.

And you sure don't want to make a mistake. You know, sometimes you get in a situation where you have to make up your mind, like the story of the two frogs walking down a country road, and one took a jump, and he landed in this deep, deep rut, and he couldn't get out.

And so his friend that was at the top of the rut trying to encourage him, and he was making the biggest jumps he could, and his friend was helping, but it didn't work, and he just finally got all played out, and his friend said, I haven't a point for half an hour, I have to go.

And so he's hopping across the field, and he hadn't gone too far before his froggy friend caught up with him, and he said, well, how in the world did you get out of that rut? He said, man, I had to. There was a truck coming.

And you know, sometimes, someone has said that a rut, you know, is just a grave with both the ends knocked out, and sometimes we dilly-dally over a decision. We put it off for weeks, and months, and so on, and sometimes God brings a truck along, so brother, you have to make up your mind, and that's not bad.

So there they were, they're sitting in the morning, they're opposite this reef, what are they going to do? If it's a mud bottom in the ocean, the anchors will start drifting. If it's a rock bottom, one of those ropes may break, a stanchion may pull out of the back of the boat, the whole thing may rip off the back end of the boat, a fluke on an anchor might break, they just can't stay where they are.

So what do they do? Beautiful. The Bible says they cut the ropes, and they committed themselves to the sea. Do you see what a beautiful picture of committal act is? There was absolutely no way of going back to those ropes and those anchors in the sea.

If they changed their mind, it didn't make any difference, it was too late. One of the problems in the average Christian life is right here, that we always have one bridge, you know, we're over here in no man's land, but supposing the shelling gets too heavy out here with God in no man's land, we always have one bridge left, so we can skinny-back where the average Christian is, where it's nice and safe and cozy.

And what we need to do is to ask God Almighty to bring in the heavenly Air Force and bomb that last bridge. So you can't get back. They committed themselves to the sea, but not really to the sea, they were committed into the hands of God, who stood by an angel the night before and talked to Paul and said, Paul, everybody on the ship will be saved, the ship itself will be destroyed, but not one soul will be lost.

And more than that, I've given you everybody on the boat, which meant that everybody was going to be saved. And so it turned out in the marvelous providence of God. But it's a beautiful picture of Camille.

I don't know if you ever read anything about some of the early Canadian explorers like Fraser, the Fraser River in British Columbia, of course, is named after this particular man. In my opinion, he was a very, very courageous person.

I don't suppose anybody here has ever ridden in a birch bark canoe. I had that privilege just once. They're just like a dream, there's light as a cork, you can spin them, they don't have a keel on them.

The one I was in didn't have seats, it had movable ribs, so you could put heavier parcels and by moving the ribs closer and all that kind of thing. But they're very, very fragile. And there are frequent notations in the early explorers in their logbooks, you know, their diaries, and notations of this kind, when is shorn gum, when is shorn gum, when is shorn gum.

Now they didn't have Wrigley Spearmint back in those days. What are they talking about? Well, you see those fragile canoes, they would be 30, some of them were 40 feet long, and they were built with small pieces of birch bark, which were laced together with a black spruce or black willow root, and then gummed with charcoal, a mixture of charcoal and spruce gum, and this was on the seams.

And of course these boats going down, they'd hit these big standing waves, a six-foot standing wave in a rapid or something, and the thing would pound and it started leaking, so they had to go ashore and gum.

Gum them, yes. Or on a big lake with big waves. And we have some big lakes in Canada, like Lake Winnipeg is almost 300 miles long, and they get some large, on Lake Superior, they've had waves at 40 feet.

Now I mean that's high, it's a lot higher, I guess maybe than the roof of this building, that's big. And so they frequently had to gum these canoes. I mention this because Fraser said something that's very, very important.

You know, when he started off down the Fraser River, they didn't know it was around the next bend. They were in mountainous countries. Have you ever seen the Fraser in flood time? It looks like a big, dirty, brown serpent just going down around the hills like that.

And there's a place called Hell's Gate, if you've seen it, you'll know why it's called that. These men didn't know anything about it, except it's a big, turbulent, strong, currented mountain river. But they started off.

But you know what he said? He said this, when once we were cast upon the bosom of that awful flood, there was no turning back. And that's committal. That's committal. There is no way back. And one of the reasons why our committals don't last is because they're not that kind of committal.

We haven't made the committal in such a way that there's no turning back. We've got to plan and design so we can turn back. And it's not a genuine committal because of this. Now let me give you some examples of committal from some meetings we've had.

Trusting God With Family and Ministry

A lady got up in Minneapolis and gave the following testimony. It was just beautiful. She told us how she had five sons, and as a Christian mother, she was so concerned they might be saved. She made them go to Sunday school.

They went to young people's. Her husband, apparently, was not a Christian. She got no help from that department. And the kids all grew up. None of them professed the faith. And finally, they all got married.

And then they all moved away. None of them were living in Minneapolis at the time. And she said, you know, two years ago, I had it out with God. I got down on my knees one night. I really told God what I thought.

I said, God, I did everything a Christian mother should do. I pled all the promises in the Bible, and I prayed by the hour, and all the rest of it. And you never saved one of my children. God, you really failed.

And she said, people, that's when the action began. And God came to me in a very powerful way. And God showed me that I'd been standing this way all those years, that what I called committal, he called nothing better than wicked unbelief.

I had never really believed God was going to do it. I had prayed. I cried and said, oh, God, please do something. But I didn't really believe he would. I'd never taken my hands off the situation. I'd never really put them in the hands of God.

And then in just in simple faith, trusted God to do it. God showed me the whole thing. And she said, two years ago, he just broke my heart. And she said, that night, I committed my five sons and their wives to God.

And all I did after that, every day I prayed and said, Lord, thank you that you're doing it. I thank you that you're doing it. And she said, people, that was two years ago. My five sons and their five wives are all Christians now.

Now, what God was not able to do in 25 years of fussing and fuming and fretting and wicked unbelief and all the rest of it, and making it worse by calling it faith, he was able to do in less than two years.

When she came to Psalm 37 .5, to commit and then trust, virtue of Saskatchewan, a lady came to me after a crusade meeting. And she said, you know, my husband and I must have failed. They also had five children.

She said, my youngest is 22 years of age. He's an absolute rebel. If I mentioned God, he just acts like he's demon possessed. He'll almost literally scream. And she said, my husband and I are both Christians.

And we wonder where do we fail? We just don't know what's wrong. I said, you ever commit them to God? She said, well, I don't know that I understand that. So we talked about it for a while and God showed her what it was all about.

And I said, now, remember, you will commit them together tonight. Don't you ever take them out of God's hands. You take your hands off. You let God do it. And I said, please remember this. When you make this kind of a committal, the situation may immediately get worse.

Don't panic when the situation gets worse. That just means God's got his hands on it now. God's doing it in his own way. That's a hard lesson to learn. Very hard. Three months later, I got this beautiful letter from her.

I have it in the file at home. And she said, two weeks after you and I prayed, my younger son, the rebel, he phoned me long distance and said, mother, I'm not feeling well. I've been to see a doctor. He says I should take a couple of months off from work.

She said, I almost called her hallelujah on the phone. I knew right away that God was working. She said, I told him, come on home. So he came home. She said, he lay there in the bedroom. He laid in bed most of the day and he didn't eat very much.

My mother instinct was to rush in there with the Bible and get him saved. She said, but I remembered what you said. He's heard the gospel. He knows what the gospel is. The Holy Spirit's got enough to do it.

Now you keep your hands off and you let God do it. And she said, I did that. And one day I was walking past the door and he called up and said, mom, will you come in and pray with me? I want to receive Jesus.

Do you know where that young man is tonight? He's in Bible school, going to ministry. I don't know what's happened. I haven't heard from her since then. What's happening so far as the rest of the family is concerned.

I had a preacher friend. He had a serious problem in that his wife didn't think he should be in the ministry for 11 years. He struggled with a problem. Not only did she tell him what she told him, she'd say, okay, you tell me, God called you into ministry.

Boy, he sure didn't call me. And she used to tell him, why don't you go back to your tools? He was a first class carpenter, a house builder and all that kind of thing. Why don't you go back to your tools?

And sometimes he was tempted to do it because she not only told him, she sometimes shared this with people in the church. And he was having an awful time. And he used to come and ask me to pray with him for his wife.

And I talked to him about committal. He didn't understand it. You know, I was saying the other day in one of the meetings that when you're climbing a mountain, you can't see because you're too close to it.

You have to stand back about 10 miles to look at it. And some of us here, and I wouldn't doubt at all, but some people here tonight, your problem is so big, you can't see God and you're going to have to get detached from your problem and back off so you can get a look at God and see who God is and then make a committal of that entire problem into the hands of God.

That's what we have to do if we're ever going to see the power of God come into these situations in the way in which the Bible promises that it can and it will. He shall bring us a pass, no doubt at all about it.

He shall bring us a pass, not if all the signs are right. He shall bring us a pass, no matter what the devil does. But all hell will roll. God will do it anyway. He shall bring us a pass. If you'll trust and believe, if you'll take your hands off and let God do it in his own way.

But you know, he couldn't see it. And I preached on committal at a rally up in north Saskatchewan, and he was there. And he saw it. He saw it. Boy, he got out of that meeting and he committed his life into the hands of God.

You know what happened? She only lasted three weeks. I was preaching in Nipwin, Saskatchewan, gave an invitation, and his wife came down the aisle one night, she was crying, could actually see the tears spurting out of her eyes, wringing her hands.

When she got to the front of the church, she was walking in a pitiful little circle, crying and wringing her hands, and a bunch of ladies came running over, and they got her and took her off into a side room, and they counseled and prayed with her, and she met God.

And I was talking to him about a year back, and he said, Bill, it was lasting and it was real. She goes out soul winning now, if you please. A fellow came to me in a Vancouver crusade, and he said, how do you get a Jehovah Witness converted?

I said, you commit them. And he said, what's that? Now, all his family, see his wife and all his children were hot Jehovah Witnesses, and he said, if I open my mouth about God and the Bible, they tell me to shut up, that I don't know anything about it, that I'm just in the darkness, you know.

Well, I said, you commit them. So, we knelt together, I showed him what the Bible said. I said, okay, now remember, you commit, and then what do you do? Alright, he said, you trust. Okay, I said, now your business from now on is to trust God, and keep thanking God that you know God's going to do it.

You don't know when, you don't know how, but he's going to do it. He was back in the meeting the following night, he came up to see me after the meeting, he was almost incoherent. He was talking so fast, and finally made me understand that one was already converted, one of his kids.

The Spirit of God got a hold of his heart, and he was converted within 24 hours. You know, my own life, it's a product of committal. I had a mother. See, I came from a broken home. I never ever heard my parents ever say anything nice to each other.

And my mother finally left. I remember my aunt coming over one time, I could never forget it. She took a dirty old broom, and she swept the table off with this broom, and put some, you know, some dishes on the table, and we had a meal.

I can see it yet. A broom! And we had a lot of problems. Then my mother became a Christian, and she came home. I was 14 years of age then. My father said, your mother's coming back, but you don't have to listen to her religious talk.

We didn't have a clue what that was. She came home, and she committed the whole family to God. She said, Lord, you're going to save them all, and I nodded. You know what happened? Guess what? All four of us found Christ, and three of the four of us became preachers, and my father got saved when he was 72 years old.

But my mother said there came a day when, you know, my oldest brother was past 20, and I was just about 20. My next brother was 19, and my youngest brother was about 15, and none of us were converted.

You know, the statistics, you know what they say? The statistics say if you're not converted by the time you're 19, your chances of finding Jesus Christ are very, very small. Don't you believe it! As long as there's a God in the skies.

You think God can only convert children? Where do you find that in the Bible? When my youngest brother got married, he was so opposed to God and the gospel, he and his wife, when they got along, they shook hands and promised each other they would never become Christians.

So guess what he's doing today? He's an evangelist. I mean, God knocks the whole thing into oblivion when people commit and then trust Him. Alright? What are we supposed to commit? The Bible even tells us that.

Committing the Soul, Work, and Calling

For example, it says, Commit the keeping of your soul to Him, and well-doing is unto the faithful creator. Have you ever done that? Some people, you know, they receive Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, then they hang on for dear life.

They're not sure, boy, that last five minutes on earth, that's the thing that really counts. If you're really in grace, you know, in the last five minutes, man, you're going to make it, but if not, zonk, off to hell you go.

And you know, a lot of Christians live that way. Well, the Bible says, commit the keeping of your soul to Him. Have you ever done that? The God who saved you can keep you. He holds our soul in life, it says, over in Psalm 66.

We are kept by the power of God. What kind of power do you think God has? Kept by the power of God, through faith, unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. If you've never done it, why don't you do it?

Then the Bible says, commit your works unto the Lord, and your thoughts will be established. You ever got a secular job? You know, a lot of people are worrying about tomorrow. They're not sure, you know, this job they've got, boy, they don't think they can really do it.

Why don't you commit it to God and let God do it through you? You know, I read something very interesting over in the book of Exodus. A man called Bezalel, God filled him with the Spirit of God, and I don't think he preached anything in his life, as far as we know.

Do you know why God filled him with the Holy Spirit? So he could be a cunning workman, it says. Do you ever think that God wants you to be a better carpenter than you are? A better schoolteacher than you are?

A better farmer than you are? God wants you to be a better doctor than you are? Do you ever think of that? And he filled Bezalel with the Spirit of God, so he could be a cunning workman. So commit your work, whatever your work is, if it's in the church or outside of the church, commit your job, your work to God.

Then your thoughts will be established, and God will do it through you. I don't know how in the world God ever put his hand on me to preach. You know, I say to people, and I really mean this, if I was to tell you my life story, I would take three minutes and two minutes would be wasted.

I never robbed a bank, I never got drunk in my life, I never took dopamine, I never did any of these things. I never did anything. And as I said the other night, I was so shy. I'll tell you, I was in classroom one time in about grade seven, and I had a friend, if I can call him that, and I had to make a speech.

I shook my shoes for a whole month. A speech! And the teacher insisted on it. And you know what the problem was? My father was the caretaker. And if I didn't do what I was told in the classroom, I got knocked in the middle of next week by my father when I got home.

And that rascally friend of mine, I got up to the front, and I looked around, I took a deep breath, and my eyes lit on him. You know what he'd done? He had a pencil, and he'd cut out with a pair of scissors, he'd cut out a figure of a man that looked like me, and he had a rope around the neck of the man, onto the pencil, and he was going like this.

I just went through the floor. And I was working in a logging camp, you know, and God called me to preach. I said, hey God, you're talking to the wrong person. Is someone else around here with the same name?

It couldn't be true. He said, yes, I want you. I said, God, I can't. I blush when I look in the mirror. The Lord said, you have to do it. We battled that thing out. What a battle we had. I put out two fleeces.

I didn't think God could put a drop of water on us. I made it so difficult there was no way he could do it, and he did it. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. My mother committed me to God.

Boy, you commit and you trust people. That brings the power of God into your life. It brings the power of God into your home. It brings the power of God into your church. Commit and trust your works to God.

Then your thoughts will be established. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. Then I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause. Job 5 and 8. Have you ever committed your cause to God?

There's a verse in Proverbs that says, he that is first in his own cause seems just that his neighbor comes and searches him. There's a fellow I knew, and years ago he went to Camford Bible School. I didn't know anything about this, you know, but he apparently thought that I knew that he'd been kicked out of the Bible School.

I didn't know a thing about it. There's an old saying that if the fish had kept his mouth shut, he wouldn't have got in trouble. This fellow thought something that wasn't true. He thought I knew about it.

I didn't know about it. So he wanted to defend himself and make himself look better to me, and so he said, you know, old man Hildebrandt didn't like when you kicked me out of the Bible School. Well, I knew that Mr. Hildebrandt wasn't this kind of a person.

Well, I didn't have all the facts. He that is first in his own cause seems just. But eventually what happens, his neighbor comes and searches him. He tells a different story. You know how it goes. There are three sides to every story.

Your side, my side, and then the truth. That's hard to get. Two years rolled by, and I was talking to a fellow, and we kept talking, and he happened to mention this fellow's name. I said, you know, yeah, I said I went to Karen Ford Bible School, and he went, and he said they kicked him out.

I said, why? He said, well, they caught him stealing batteries out of a car. Oh, that was the other side of the story that I didn't know about. Instead of trying to defend yourself, instead of trying to present a better self-image to the people out there, why don't you let God do it?

Why don't you put it in the hands of God? Why don't you stop defending yourself? Why don't you follow the godly example of Jesus in 1 Peter chapter 2, it says, we're to follow his steps who did no sin, who when he was, neither was guile found in his mouth, who when he was reviled, reviled not again.

When he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself, a marginal reading says he committed his cause to him that judges righteously. And that's why Jesus Christ never had anything to say before Herod or Pilate.

Answers down, nothing, nothing. It was committed. How could he defend himself? That would be taking it out of God's hands. Have you ever committed your cause to God? Your personal cause to God? If you're one of those people that goes around defending yourself all the time, the devil will keep you running, you'll be as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with a hundred-year itch.

The devil will just keep you going the rest of your life defending yourself. You know, when we cut pulpwood, we used to have what they called a strip, and they'd blaze trees and they'd make a strip, it might be 60 yards wide or 50 yards wide or whatever, and your business was to cut all the trees over a certain size, and that entire pulpwood strip, you had to make a straight road down the center and all, and you know, it was a matter of work hard or starve.

Well, there's a fellow in the next strip to me, we called him St. James because he was always bragging about St. James, which is where he came from, it's the suburb of Winnipeg, some of you will know that, but he never seemed to get much wood cut.