The Holy Spirit 03 — Svend Christensen

The Holy Spirit Leads Believers Into Truth

Good morning. Are we happy in our thoughts? I just want to read a couple of verses. I mentioned yesterday morning that this was a burst, it's always been a, you might say, a light burst of ours. We've been speaking about the Holy Spirit, and he certainly has come to not only lead us into all truth, but the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God, says Romans 8 .14.

So we need to be led to Romans 8 .17. And it says, Blessed be the Lord God of my master Abraham, who had not left me desperate. Not that desperate, my master. May I be in the way. Blessed are our lives down through the years.

One chapter has many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now, howbeit when he speaketh you into all truth. Not speak of himself, neither that shall he speak. Things to come. For he shall receive of mine all that hath of mine.

It's a thing to know that the Spirit of God is a person. You don't just have some kind of an influence with it that comes and goes, that women with. But he is a person. The divine person, as one says, he moves the deep.

He rides with sinners. He said, My spirit shall not always strive with men. He's a person. And thank God he's still striving with sinners. Let's end up. Chapter 14, verse 26. It says that. And I'll tell you the Father, and he shall give you another comforter.

He may abide with you forever, even the spirit of truth. He's the spirit of truth. And verse 26, Father. The comforter which is the Holy Ghost from the Father will send in my name. He shall teach you.

You should have that also. Come to teach us. He testifies to the Lord Jesus. We read that in John 16. How he would testify to that. He glorifies Christ. Chapter 9, verse 31. It says that. The churches had rest.

12, to thee and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified, walking in the feet of the Lord, and in the comforter. There were five men that were laboring there at Antioch. The Spirit of God said, We are directed of the Lord.

The Spirit Helps Believers Follow God's Will

And you can really excline your knee. If you really know you're in the Lord's will and I mean the way the Lord led me, you can expect the Lord to alter the hard times. And he'll still look after you. He helps our infirmities.

In Romans 8, verse 26. Likewise, the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities. I like that. And that's certainly good. As the body gets weaker. If you make an intercession for us, and say, Father, we have it made.

We have one of the right hand of the Father that ever liveth to make intercession for us. And we have the comforter indwelling us, making intercession for us. So we have everything that pertains to life and Godliness.

We have the precious Word of God. We have Christian fellowship. We have so much to encourage in the things of God. There's no excuse. In Romans 8, verse 11, it speaks about the Spirit quickening. He makes life.

He gives life. In 1 Corinthians 2, he's searching all things, the deep things of God. He may be grieved. It says, grieve not the Holy Spirit. He may be vexed. It says, vex the Spirit of God. It speaks about Isaiah 63, verse 10.

Stephen said, he do always resist. He can be resisted. And he may be tempted like Ananias and Sapphira. Why test ye, says Peter 2. And God, he may be blasphemed against in the days of the... He may be quenched.

These are just some of the scriptures that bring out that he's a divine person. And it's a wonderful thing, too, that we are indwelt, not by something that's just this mere indwelling. A person's a trinity, if you like, exactly like that.

Dwelling in our body. The testimony that we gathered yesterday, the crowning of the Lord's people, Denmark and Copenhagen. When I was nine years old, my parents came to Canada. My father came to Egypt and born there.

Conversion, Calling, and Obedience to the Lord's Leading

I told you we walked to a church three miles one way from Austin twice on Sunday. And never heard the gospel till I was speaking of the Lord before he gets our attention. And it was the death of my father that God used that to bring it to himself.

Saved in November. When I got saved, there was nothing wrong with being there. I was only there for six weeks. We were sent to North Africa. And while reading the New Testament in North Africa, four hours after the fiesta, I remember I gave you the scripture yesterday where the Lord said in Mark 5, 19, Go home to your friends.

You know, after I got my testimony from him, I couldn't type. I was raging on the back five. When I got my testimony, I said, God's Word of Salvation by Alexander Marshall to everybody I knew up in Prince Edward Island.

And I had a couple of responses. There was a great booklet of God's Word of Salvation. But like Paul, we thought not to be disobedient to that heavenly vision. So when we came out of the air force, our first great desire was to go home and tell all friends it's done.

Told the Lord, leading us to a mayor's Bible school. How he opened the way for us to be discharged up there so it didn't cost us anything to travel up to around the 1 ,200 miles. Contact with my dear wife.

And nearly 40 years now that we have been married, and I still haven't had to be there any. We went back to Prince Edward Island first in 1947 and commended in 1948 from all of the gospel chapel. And the conditions were very backward.

And the area we labored in, the highways were terrible, the mud. I've been stuck right in the middle of the road with a four-wheel drive Jeep. All four wheels turning. I've got the Jeep sitting just on the bottom, you know.

And I say we had some rough times. And the cars didn't last too long because most of them didn't use oil filters then. And they'd get into the engine and then fill the oil up at 20 ,000, 25 ,000. It was amazing how hard it was on equipment.

Patrols were more valuable. We said in those days it was a lot of hard work, physical work. There were no Christians around at all hardly. They just had to hear the word and then get saved and then teach them and baptize them and meet together around the Lord's table.

There's a lot of joy to that, but there's also a lot of labor. Everything we did, we had to. We got the church of Scottsdale and picked it up. We had to go to the mail to Charlottetown. We had to take a welder.

God’s Provision in Christian Ministry

You know the Lord's provider, the welder, he'd just been saved one week. A man by the name of John Moore, his two sons are in the assembly up there now in Charlottetown. And he docked that deep welder for the price of the casing you put down.

He never charged anything for anything else. That's how the Lord supplied. I remember one time on Saturday night, after a while, I built a six-cabin load. I had no experience building. Had to do it over again.

I think I was 11 for a day. We had to learn how to do things properly. But we were too busy, we thought, to do that. We just built it the best we knew how, and it stood for many years. Just recently it had been replaced.

Came to build a dining hall, a large building. We had to hire a man. He was the elder of a modernistic church, and he said to me now, Sandy, are you sure you're going to get paid for that? I said, there'll be no doubt about that.

Well, he said, you must have a big organization behind you. I said, it's the largest in the world. And so it is. One night at an open-air meeting in Monmouth, a young man that hadn't been paid that Friday came to me and said, I'd like to get my pay.

And I said, and what do we owe you? $45. Well, I looked at my bill form. I had the 25. And the visiting speaker would have asked, did you loan me $20? And I paid them all. In the evening, we'd come over to speak at the chapel that afternoon.

So he loaned me $20. When I got home, we only had $5 left in the camp fund. It was Saturday night. And I was going to pay him. There was no other money in any purse or anything like that. Things were just coherent amounts, as it were, living by day.

Well, that afternoon, I went to visit Mrs. Strait. Mrs. Strait was here a new day in the hospital. And just as I come into the hospital, I met a brother from another part of the island. Oh, he said, I'm so glad to see you.

I got $25 here for you for the camp. And so many times, God just came in. And the last moment, he is faithful. Then after that, I want to say a little word, too, how much the Jewish Foundation has helped us up there when we had very little.

They would give us a loan with very little, you know, and they trusted the Lord and trusted us. And I don't think we ever missed a payment, and any of these payments. And they were really encouraging.

Some of you might have invested in bonds for that. It certainly helped in the camp, and the building of the Charlestown Bible Chapel, and things like that. The Lord was very, very gracious. Now, we were in Charlestown on Prince Edward Island from 1948 to 58.

Following Divine Guidance to Orlando and Augusta

And then the Charlestown Bible Center, it's a Christian center. They were very ill, and you better come down and visit him, because you may not see him again if you don't. But he did get better. But at least that cost us to go down to Hawkus, down there.

A couple of pioneers, and just an organized station of brethren, they were concerned about starting an assembly every year in Florida. They invited me. I didn't know. Just one man invited me to have dinner with him the next day.

They took us down to Fort Lauderdale, and he had a group of brethren there. And they said, We're really concerned about building a chapel in Orlando, Florida. But we all apologized. We will not help build a chapel.

The Christian will let them have somebody that will work with them for a while to help get it started. And we've been thinking about where you might want to come. And I thought, that's the thought that popped in my mind.

All these people, you know, that want to retire, want to go to Florida. And I told some ladies to retire. That was my outlook. I didn't want to go. And I said, Oh, I imagine you'd be able to get somebody much older than us and a lot of other workers around.

So we laughed at that, but they wrote to me, Frank Wardenbush. Frank isn't here this morning, is he? Frank Wardenbush wrote to us coming, and I still gave the same answer in reply. But, you know, as the month went by, the Lord began to exercise me about Florida.

As strange as that may seem, the months were moving on, but it was in February of 1961. I was in my study, and I was really struggling and praying. I'd been reading a book through Unanswered Prayers, and in the book it mentioned men asking for some definite evidence, like something to make it in, you know.

So I said, Lord, if you really want me to go to Florida, then give me a long-distance telephone call. Something I can't mistake. Well, I came up and had lunch and went down to the study again, and about 1 .30, which would be 12 .30 Florida time, the phone rang.

It said, Frank Wardenbush. We'd just had a prayer meeting, and we had just all of a sudden felt that you're the man that should come to Orlando. We wanted to phone you. We're going to rush you. And then somebody said, no, they're calling him.

He was there. We came down to Orlando, dear Bob and dear Willie Meadows. We left up there in Halifax. It was blowing, snoring, and sub-zero. It was 11 o 'clock, and the temperature was 80. So I said I would come and give you about six weeks, and we'll visit and work and try to give the assembly a start.

I'd never met any of them. They're perfect. Many of you know dear Bob. We'd like for you to come and labor here. If you want me to come to Orlando, then today when I'm visiting, leave me to someone I can point to Christ.

I put in the fleet up again. That day I met a Mrs. Gilmore. She was real interested, invited me in. I had the joy of meeting her again. There was everything. But, you know, I went back, came down, and all I say, except you really know the Lord's will in your life.

You can really say, well, I must be doing something wrong. Down here, you call for the loaded trailer. You say, you can load it. Don't be afraid. You can't unload it. But this is not much about the way the boats and things should go.

We didn't get very far. The boat tied the Blue Lake balloons. In fact, when we left, it was so loaded down, I had to take a ton of it off of the trailer to get ship down. Then as we're coming down to the customs, the Lord had worked so diligently with the immigration people that she said, everything is in order.

When we got to the border, they said, now the two boys, we're not sure about them. We had to wait until the head man from the police supplied a hunting cabin for us to stay in that night. We didn't, we just left all that money, and with the work where we left in Halifax, there's enough to travel down with.

That's a thick stuff. Then as we're driving down through Maine, a tremendous storm come on the way, and just ahead of it, a big tree came right across the highway. We had to go around it, just on the bank of the road.

Never saw so many obstacles. Down as far as Baltimore, it was 1 o 'clock in the morning. The watchers wanted us to stay there all night, but Jonathan, the youngest boy, he had, was it chickenpox or measles or something, and broke out with that.

We didn't want to bother anybody. We went to go across to get gas, and a great big truck coming 70 miles an hour sideways, demolished the car. It was a new type of trailer. It just flew like a balloon, too, as the thing tipped against it.

God’s Preservation Through the Car Accident

I remember a black man come running, and he said, Isn't he killed? Isn't he killed? He said, The man up there was shooting at you. Two ambulances come. It really looked much worse than it was. Thank the Lord.

There was just a lot of bruises, and all the rest of us escaped well. So you see, you need to know the Lord's will. If not, we would have gone back and said, It can't be the Lord's will, but we had a definite leading of the Lord.

And I believe the years in Orlando were probably some of the most fruitful years of our lives. During 10 of the years, we averaged baptizing 25 every year. The Lord saved a lot of souls there, and they kept on scattering because of the employment situation.

But it was really a wonderful thing to see the Lord work then. And we were somewhat used to, we started while we were there, with a garden assembly, and a bare lake assembly, and indirectly helped with lake house.

So there's now four assemblies in there. Well, every day we're going, but in the bedroom, never had that before. Fountain. The Georgia. We'd like you to come up and minister in Augusta. That's when we started in South Augusta.

Augusta, was eight miles from the mother of that family. And they said, we really feel that you'd be the man to come. Exercise of heart. And driving home, out to the home of the family, driving home, at the Jewish machine of Christ.

Would it be better to stay in Orlando? And they'll probably do a lot of work the brethren should be doing, or would it be better to move on and seek to help start another work? Well, you know the answer.

They're all convicted out there. It's better to start to help someone. Just two other families, Dan Hollingsworth and Bernie O 'Neal, and Earl and I were the first three couples to start that little assembly in South Augusta, doing another family, another cave.

But I want to tell you, there was a tremendous baby in South Augusta. We met the first time to break bread as an assembly, September the 9th, 1973. We left Orlando in 1973. And they're all blessed. Sometime later in the fall, we were starting to look for a place to build or get a building, and we heard there was an army chapel for sale, and Dan and I went out to look at them.

And that very night, it was a Wednesday, that very night of prayer meeting, and a lady came to us, came to the assembly. She said, you know there's a building, the Church of God, that's going to be for sale right across the street from where I live.

It hadn't been advertised yet, but I thought you were going to see the minister. So after the prayer meeting that night, we went over to see the man. We asked him, is this for sale? Yes, it's for sale.

Now, do you know what it was? It was a converted army chapel. Beautiful old rustic inside. And you thought, well, Bob came down and looked at it. I think it was 96 feet long and 36 foot wide. It had a couple of rooms up where the doctrines used to be.

Two-thirds of it was date money. The Presbyterians had it first, and they outgrew it. And then the Church of God had it, and they outgrew it. And now we had so much. So an acre of land, an acre of land in that part costs $20 ,000.

There's a three-room house, a little cottage, and a chapel on an acre of land for $35 ,000. Really amazing. Only a few of us. And to properly qualify for the loan we wanted, we had to have $6 ,000. And the Lord provided that too.

We were able to get the loan from Stuart Foundation. You know, we are human. Where the brethren had been very kind to us, and we stepped out to Augusta. Humanly speaking, one certainly said, Lord, how are you going to look after us?

There's only two other families in our house, and we're moved. How are we going to live? That's from the human standpoint. We lived in a servant quarters. First, the brother, he had a nice property, but on that there was a little one-bedroom house.

It used to be the servant quarter, and that's where we moved into, and they put a piece on it. Two of our children left at that time. $52. $50. She's going to take $15 with me, and we'll have a little bit of money, and something came up.

She started counting out what I thought was $15. She started counting out 20s. You're making a mistake. I got it that close, you see. That year, there's no way that new building, and we had the Christmas program in that same year, four months later.

They fixed it up with air conditioners and carpet. All of the parlor work, many of us worked there manually, and others from other centers came and helped. Tremendous job to fix up that old building. But they outgrew that.

Now they have built a nice new chapel on five acres of land. The Believer's Gospel Chapel on Orchard Beach Road, and that's the name of it, in Augusta. So it's good to see how the Lord blesses and continues to bless.

Restoration and Spiritual Renewal in Prince Edward Island

We're only there less than a year. Less than a year. Less than a year. One situation arose in Prince Edward Island. They had quite a bad break off and necessary things, and in the assembly is a good elderhood.

You don't have a good elderhood, you have... That's what happened. The elders of interest, one of the other elders, he was a bank manager. They moved to another city and left them very short of leadership.

And things rose up again, and there were 50 people left. And they phoned us down in Georgia and told us the situation. And I believe many more would have left if the Lord hadn't led us back. So we went back to Prince Edward Island in November 1974.

I want to say the next five years were the hardest years of our lives to try to build up something that had been hurt and would have been troubled and where brethren wouldn't speak to one another and all this, you know.

Young people had all departed. As a young person, I tell you, it was hard going. You know, prayer, a deacon to, you know, speaks about elders, needs to be patient, had paid off. You go there now, today the half of the audience are more young people, young couples.

Lord has given us many more than that we lost. The work has been strengthened. And some of these brethren that wouldn't speak to one another, they do. Oh, the Lord has just performed miracles. You see men that get so hard they won't even accept apologies.

So when people ask for forgiveness and they won't accept it, they have to do something. And he has. As a brethren there in his early 70s, it's a delight to be around him. Before he was something like a cranky dog, you know, you'd sit down next to him, he'd bite you.

It is right. I just love that man. I learned to the Lord in 1957. So he sort of looks at me as a spiritual guest, but it's been wonderful to see him.