Lord, we know that
we have just used the words which one of old, long time
ago, used, but did not understand that it was the Lord
speaking. He thought it was a man, though a man of God,
until he was brought face to face with the fact, no, it
is not man that speaks, it is God; and then directly with
Thyself he said, “Speak Lord, Thy servant heareth.”
We pray that we may have that enablement to discern when
the Lord is speaking, when it is not just a man but the
Lord. And O how much hangs upon the Lord speaking to us
as it did with Samuel. We would be like Samuel, that
mighty power amongst the people of God. We ask Thee that
we may truly hear Thee through any other voice that may
speak, ...that we may hear inwardly the voice of the
Lord, ...that we may go down before Thee and receive
whatever instructions or commissions Thou wouldst have us
receive. So help us, Lord, this morning, for Thy Name’s
sake, Amen.
There is a hymn in one of our hymn books; some of you
will know it, others may not. And it runs like this:
My goal is
God Himself.
Not joy, nor even blessings,
But, Himself, my God.
‘Tis His to lead me there;
Not mine, but His, on earth,
At any cost, dear Lord,
By any road.
Young
Christians without much experience sing that with a good
deal of enthusiasm. Older, more mature Christians sing it
holding their heart. I wonder if you would commit
yourself to those last lines: “At any cost, dear
Lord, by any road.” You say, “Yes.” If you
do, then you are prepared for what is coming, for on that
very ground I am quite sure we are going to meet a
challenge this morning. It will bring a challenge of a
real crisis upon which so very much for us all will hang,
far more than we are aware of.
Well now,
having said that, let us go on. In this hour of our
sessions, we are occupied with the two humanities, and
especially with the great transition from one humanity to
Another: the humanity of the first Adam (an inclusive
word and term; collective as well as individual) to the
last Adam, Who also is individual and
collective.
Later in
the week we may have something more to say about the
collective aspect of the New Humanity, but we have a lot
of ground to cover before we get there, to the place
where I think a very big adjustment has got to be made in
our mentality and conception of that corporate aspect—we
call it the Church. I am certain that we have got to make
some mental changes over this Church conception; however,
we leave that, and this morning we come back to this
transition, this passing from one humanity to Another,
with which the whole Bible is occupied, and particularly
the New Testament.
I weigh my
words; I am very careful. I am not a bit concerned with
or interested in just passing to you a lot of teaching
and information. I am too old for that. Everything has
got to contain something vital upon which destiny hangs.
So I weigh my words, and I want to repeat this: the New
Testament in its entirety is occupied with one thing
(there are many things about the one thing contained in
it) but this is the one thing: the transition from that
one humanity, kind of being—mankind, to Another. The
Other being Christ, the First of this New Race and Order
of mankind upon which God’s heart has been set from
the beginning. This New Order of humanity is of far
greater importance, as we said and pointed out yesterday,
than even angels. As little children, we used to sing a
little hymn: “I want to be an angel.” Do you?
Well, God has a far, far greater destiny for you than
that of angels. “Angels desire to look into these
things”; it says: “they desire to look into
this.” “Not unto angels, but unto Man”—
this is the supreme conception of God’s heart in
this creation of which Christ His Son is the First—the
Beginning.
Change-Over:
In The Control Of The Holy Spirit
Everything
therefore that you will find in your New Testament in one
way or another has to do with this change-over, and
everything that we shall find in our own spiritual
experience, if we are really in the hand of the Holy
Spirit, has to do with this. You say: “Oh, I am
going through this experience. I am having this
difficulty. I am passing this way of sorrow, of
perplexity.” Whatever it is, it is all in the
control of the Holy Spirit related to this transition,
movement from one ground to Another, from one personal
kind to Another Personal Kind. The focus is right now
upon the situation that you are in, whether it be a good
one or a bad one: “by any road, at any cost.”
And here
it is that we begin what is not going to be in the first
place pleasant to contemplate. What is it? The absolute
necessity for the practical devastation of one kind of
humanity. I underline the word practical, not doctrinal,
not theoretical, not theological, not philosophical, but
practical devastation of our old humanity.
I wonder if you have recognized that the Old Testament
throughout is occupied on one side with this: the
exposure of the inability of that humanity under the most
favorable conditions to satisfy God. God took out a
people, related them, attached them to Himself. While
they remained on His ground, He blessed them with every,
not spiritual, but temporal blessing in the earthly. They
had only to be obedient to the commandment and blessed
was their balm and their store and their basket and their
family and their business and their everything prospered
on this earth. He gave them a marvelous economy under His
sovereignty right through from the garden, through
Israel. And what have we when we close our Old Testament?
The failure of that kind of humanity under every
condition, and every favorable condition that God could
give temporally. It is a tragic story, and the Old
Testament has to close. No, it has not attained: it has
failed. You have to write on that side the big word
“Failure” over that whole history of mankind in
relation to God.
Now when
you come into your New Testament, what do you find
happening? This whole issue is being headed up to its
climax in the New Testament. God has stepped in with an
intervention and along one line said: “We are going
to definitely and positively bring this thing to a
culmination and a climax; but to do it We must let people
see and know, and all history and all time, recognize why
it is necessary for Us to bring about this culmination
and climax of that humanity.” Oh, note this, while
we are not interested just in fascination, there is
something fascinating about this. It is gripping, when
once you begin to see.
God’s
Kind Of Man: This Other MAN
So, not in
the order of time or chronology, we have our four gospels
as they are called, and what are these four gospels? They
are two things; of course, they are the introduction of
God’s kind of Man. He is put there, and then
alongside of God’s kind of Man, the other kind of
man is arranged. You cannot read these gospels from that
standpoint without being shocked. It is the only word for
it—shocked—at the exposure of man alongside of
this Other Man, this Man that God has put down
in the midst. Read your gospels again in this light: the
reactions of men to this Man. Are they not terrible? You
wonder sometimes how on earth they got the cleverness to
note some of the things that they bring up against this
Man.
Now
steadily moving on in the gospels, moving on in that way
and uncovering, exposing, there is a manifestation of
that kind of man intensifying. Note the point where it
seems a new intensification comes in in this malice,
this hatred, this prejudice, this wickedness—against
Whom? Why, what has my Lord done? What means this rage
and spite? Intensified, until you come right up to the
days of the Cross. You remember, of course, He has been
moving on the ground of the crucified Man from His
baptism onward, and that is a significant fact when you
carry it into the unseen realm, where the forces of
antagonism are at work.
The
Heart Which Says ‘No’ To God
But now we
come actually up to the time of the Cross, the hours
before the crucifixion, and the hour itself; and you have
gathered around that Cross a representation of every
aspect of the human race. From the inner circle to the
wider circle, they are all there; and the focal point is
the Cross of Jesus Christ. And what is that Cross
bringing to light? Let us take a few cases and instances
of this. We will begin with the highest representation of
the highest religious system and order that history has
known.
Caiaphas,
the high priest of Israel, in whom the race is officially
centered and gathered up—he is representative of the
nation. You read the story put together from these
accounts where Caiaphas is the chief actor on the stage
of this drama. No words of mine or of man can describe,
really, that man with this Other Man in his presence. I
think the only description, the only words that approach
the description of this man were long before prophesied
by Isaiah. You remember? You are so familiar with them in
Isaiah, chapter six, when the prophet has made his
response to the Lord’s appeal, “Who will go for
Us?...”—said Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me!”
What did the Lord say to him? ...and He said (the Lord
said): “Go, and tell this people, ‘Hear ye
indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but
perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, make
their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with
their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with
their heart, and turn again, and be healed.’ ”
That sounds terrible. “Lest... lest... lest they
turn again.” Make it impossible for them to do so,
take away their ability to go back upon their course. Is
not that terrible?
But what are you dealing with—you are dealing with a
hardness of heart which has been hardened and hardened
and hardened again against the Word, against the
prophets, against all the revelation that God has given,
a hardening, a hardening until they have gone beyond the
point of no return and God has said: “You have so
hardened your heart and said so positively ‘No’
to My Ways, that it is beyond now remedying.” That
is Caiaphas and Israel at the Cross; the heart which says
“No” to God.
What a
heart, what an exposure, what a revelation of human
capacity in the Presence of the Highest Privilege. Yes,
it is coming out now, what has gone on. It had perhaps a
very simple beginning, but it grew and grew—there
was no turning back when it was possible—until it
reached the point where God said: “Take away their
capacity for hearing and seeing.” The judgment of
the hard heart of man, even under all those appeals and
pleadings and sobs and tears of God, comes out at the
Cross—what the Cross reveals about what is possible
in our hearts!
You say:
“That is Caiaphas, that is not me.” Oh, you do
not know the human heart if you say that. You do not know
the human heart if you have never had any rebellion in
your heart, if you have never had the capacity for saying
“No” to the Lord and had to have a battle over
it. It is there: it is not Caiaphas, it is Adam: this is
Adam following through by coming to development.
What
An Opportunity This Man Had
In the
high place of religion you come from Caiaphas and move
over to Pilate. Pontius Pilate!! What an opportunity this
man had. Oh, what has history said about Pilate? We do
not think of Pilate without some feeling of disgust.
Pilate, who had the opportunity of humanity in his hands,
and what is he doing? Well, you say, he is vacillating,
he is moving from one foot to the other; he may at times
seem to be rocking, but all that speaks of weakness—inability
to come right down one hundred percent on one foot and
make his full and final decision, trying to pass it over
to someone else to make the decision, trying to shed the
responsibility... but why? Why? —he represents a
time server... “If you let this Man go, you are not
Cæsar’s friend.” That is it!—Cæsar’s
favor, Cæsar’s ability to further my worldly
interest: “If I take this line, then all my worldly
interests are in jeopardy; my prosperity in business, my
good standing with the authorities, those who have it in
their power to further my interest.” He is a time
server, and Pilate goes down in history as the man who
handed Jesus over to be crucified from his own inability
to make a decision in His favor. “Take Him, you take
Him; I have said, I find no fault with Him, but you take
Him and crucify Him.” The weakness of what?—the
awful tragedy of a divided heart, the main feature and
factor in which is: “how this is going to effect me
and my interest.” That finds us out all the way
along.
You see,
that was the battle that Jesus Himself fought in the
wilderness with the devil. The devil was saying how it
would effect You if You go the way that You have decided
to go, how it would effect You: “You want the
kingdoms of this world, You take the line of compromise.”—That
was Pilate . . . what an exposure of what is in man.
Wanting
To Have
We hurry
on and come nearer, nearer to the center of the circle,
we come to Judas Iscariot. You cannot use that word, that
name now, can you, without a frown, almost a sneer.
“Judas”—when you want to say the worst
thing that you can say about anybody, you say:
“—he is a Judas.” It started somewhere in
a very simple way, it started in a day when either the
Lord Himself (Who knew what He was doing, mark you) or
the other disciples, said to Judas: “Look here,
people will give us gifts to help us along, we have to
have somebody to look after the gifts. Judas, you, you
have the bag.”
A simple
beginning, but what happened? Being in that position drew
out something that was deep down in that humanity.
Perhaps not even Judas knew it, but this drew it out. You
know the end. A man who again goes beyond the point of
return and recognizes at last that he has been betraying
the Lord. Everything was put in his way of glory, the
heavenly order; and there is nothing else to do but to
take his own life.
What has been exposed? What is it in this humanity that
is down there in the root of things and comes up and up
if only given an opportunity?! I heard Dr. Campbell
Morgan once say in preaching that we are capable of
anything if only we have the opportunity for it. That is
searching. What is come out? Covetousness, that is all.
Wanting to have; and my friends, while you shrink from
the name Judas, be careful, this is in us all, even in
the work of the Lord. Covetousness to be recognized, to
be given opportunities of service, wanting for ourselves
even in the things of God. As disciples, the root may be
there—this wanting to have, to make ourselves
something. Covetousness, which the Word says is idolatry.
The Cross will discover what is in us; it will bring it
out.—Well, that is Judas.
A
Man Who Did Not Know Himself
Now let us
come nearer still, perhaps to the innermost circle, Simon
Peter. Simon Peter is a man who did not know himself and
who thought so differently about himself from what was
true: “I will never forsake Thee, I will go with
Thee even unto death. Though all men forsake Thee, yet
will I not. I will not,”—“I will,”—
“I.” Where did that begin? You have heard this
before. Blinded by this ego, this selfhood, oh, Simon
Peter, you do not know yourself, but the Cross is going
to uncover you, find you out, and expose you and
devastate you. You will go out in despair of yourself and
shed many tears. The Lord will have to send someone
searching for you with a special message: “Go to My
disciples and to Peter... I know what is happening there,
I know where he is and what is happening.”
Poor, poor
Simon Peter. What was happening? Well, the Lord told
Simon Peter what would happen, and Simon Peter did not
understand it until afterwards. “Simon, Simon, Satan
has desired to have thee, that he may sift thee as wheat”—strip
off that false covering of selfhood that covers. Really,
Peter, what is there, you do not know... sift you as
wheat.
Simon
Peter found that the Cross is a very searching and a very
devastating thing to any kind of self-confidence,
self-sufficiency, self-interest, or anything of self. It
is going to simply desolate that kind of humanity.
Men
Without Anything Left
Now I take
just one other instance after He, Jesus, is crucified,
after that part of the drama is completed. Two of them,
two of His disciples, went on that day to Emmaus, a
village. You know the story in Luke 24. As they talked
sadly, this stranger drew near to them (their eyes were
holden that they should not recognize Him) and He said:
“What manner of conversation is this that you have
as you walk, sad? ” They replied: “Are you only
a visitor to our city, have you only just arrived, have
you not known what has been happening in the last few
days?” Then the Lord inquired: “What things?”
He is drawing them out—“What things?” They
said: “The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth. He
was a Prophet mighty in Word and in deed. We hoped that
it had been He that should redeem Israel, but our rulers
crucified Him.” In other words, they said, “Our
hope is all gone, all our expectation is destroyed. We
are men without anything left.”
Then this
stranger took the Old Testament (I do not think He had it
in His hand: they knew it, they had it in their heads)
and He started at the beginning and worked His way all
through the Scriptures. And as He opened to them the
Scriptures, their mouths opened, their eyes opened, and
when they arrived... you know the end, they sat down to a
meal, He took the bread, the loaf, and blessed it. Eyes
were opened; they knew Him, and then He disappeared from
their sight.
What has
been disclosed? What has been exposed? This—you can
have your head absolutely full of the Scriptures and know
them up there, and they will never save you in the day of
crisis. The very thing that is written by God for our
salvation does not save us when the Cross is planted
right at the heart of our lives; it is a crisis in which
we collapse. That is a terrible thing. You can know all
the Scriptures, and yet when it comes to the test of some
tremendous experience, some devastating experience, all
that we have read and heard and thought we knew is no
good to us.
Of course, there is a lot more in this story than that,
but this is my point—what a disclosure of the human
heart. What an exposure of this other man, how he can be
a disciple, how he can go about with the Lord for years,
how he can know all that the Lord has said, and seen what
the Lord has done and how he can have the teaching in his
head and then when it comes to the real test of the man,
he cannot stand up to it, he collapses.—We had hoped
(with our Bible in our hands) we had hoped, and they are
in despair.
Another
Humanity Altogether
The
devastation of that one humanity under every kind of test
is essential to the Other Humanity which Christ is. How
different He Is—Another Humanity altogether,
Another kind of Man in Whom there is nothing of this at
all, nothing of this. The apostle once said to the
believers: “You have not so learned Christ”; in
other words, “If you had learned Christ, you would
not be doing that, you would not be like that.”
Now let us
get hold of the issue before we go further. What is it?
Oh, it may not all come at once—it could not, this
devastation; it is spread over a whole lifetime, but it
has a beginning, mark you, a beginning; and this is the
course of a truly spiritual life. You will mark spiritual
progress and spiritual growth and spiritual maturity by
this one thing: how little the individual thinks
of themselves, how little they are in the
picture, their own picture and other people’s
picture as themselves. Or shall I put it the other way: how
much of Christ do you meet in them and not themselves.
That is the test—how much the Cross has
devastated them in their own natural life. It is the
essential and inevitable way to spiritual fulness, to
Christ, and the fulness of Christ, which is something
altogether different from what we are.
The
Tragedy Of The Carry-Over Of The Other Humanity
Well, now
having said that, we are going further with this this
morning. I want to take you over to that part of the New
Testament which focuses this whole issue more than any
other part; which brings into view on the one side, the
exposure of the one kind of humanity and on the other
side, the Other Humanity which the Christ is. I have
often been asked the question, for example in Romans 7:
“Is that the history of a ‘born again’ man
or an unborn again man?” I have had the question
asked me since I have been here, and I have proposed to
postpone the answer until now.
“The first man is of the earth, earthy...” and
so on. Is that an unconverted man, a man before he is
born again, or is that a born again man? That is a born
again man, make no mistake about it. Paul is writing to
born again people in Corinth. He opens his letter with an
address to the saints which are in Christ Jesus—saints
by standing through faith in Christ Jesus, and all that
is in those letters is addressed to Christians; but it is
a horrible exposure of something about Christians. I
confess to you I have more than once in my life in
reading that First Letter to the Corinthians asked
myself: “Were these men, these people, really born
again? Can we classify them as Christians?” Yes, the
address is “to the saints by standing through faith
that are in Corinth.”
The
tragedy in Corinth was the tragedy of the carry-over of
relics and remnants of the other humanity. There is
something here of the New Humanity, but there has been a
carry-over of the old in the Christian life; the result:
confusion—confusion in judgment, confusion in
behavior, confusion in relationships. And if you think
that word is not justified, I want to remind you that
they wrote to the Apostle Paul on one occasion asking him
ten elementary questions about the Christian life, about
what Christianity is. They were in confusion about the
elementary things of Christianity.
I am not
going to stay this week with all those questions, but
there they are. There is confusion, terrible
complications in Corinth. There is weakness—weakness
in life, in a living testimony. There is shame, reproach.
The apostle has to say some very strong and some very
hard things to Christians because of a carry-over of the
old humanity into a relationship with the New without the
clean cut. Is that why the apostle, after his
introduction in the First Letter says: “I made up my
mind, I determined, I resolved, to know nothing among
you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” Oh, we
are going to meet “Christ crucified”
repeatedly through these two letters, at critical points
in their spiritual life. “Christ crucified,”
Paul says,—“that is the foundation on which we
are going to build, you Corinthians, you who have
carried-over some of the old humanity into the realm of
the New and find that the two things will not go
together:—immediately there is confusion and defeat.”
Well, here we are in these letters to the Corinthians,
and these more than any other letters in the New
Testament represent the battleground of the two
humanities. Right there at the beginning of the First
Letter as a heading, this is carried right through. The
battleground of the two humanities —that is with the
Corinthians.
May I mark
one thing before I go further. Paul came to this
situation to deal with it, in Corinth, and said in doing
so: “In coming to you, I made a definite, positive,
conclusive resolve ‘to know nothing among you, save
Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.’ ” What did he
do when he said that? What does that mean?—“I
am not coming to you people who are
philosophically-minded and are so interested in
philosophy, I am not coming to you with a new philosophy,
I am not coming to you with a new religion, I am not
coming to you with a new system of teaching. I am not
coming to you with a new order and form and technique. I
am coming with everything gathered up and focused in a
Person, in a Man.”
You see
the force of that? It is forceful. In essence, Paul said,
“No, I am not interested in any of these other
things that you may be interested in. For me it is this
Man, Christ Jesus, this different kind of Man and this
Man Who is crucified to all the other kind of man: crucified
to this world, crucified to old humanity, crucified
to all these things that you think so much of, that are
so important to you, crucified to the whole
realm.”
It is a
Man, and a Man only, a kind of a Man, that is the point
of this letter; all is focused, gathered into a Man. Now
from that point onward, the whole thing develops. There
is on the other side that man that they have tried to
bring over and are still nursing here at Corinth, and
there is on the other side this Other Man. You read right
on and find: “If any man be in Christ, there is a
New Creation, the old things have passed away; and behold
all have become new.” The great divide is at the
Cross. Well, this is Corinth, and the old and New
Humanity is the real battleground; and what a
battleground it is.
If you are thinking objectively and historically, stop,
stop at once; come over your two thousand years, bridge
that gap, get away from geographical Corinth or
historical Corinth, and come right here. We belong to
that same humanity by nature; but by grace, we belong to
Another Humanity. And this is where Christendom is all in
confusion today and in defeat, so that we read in papers,
Christianity has had its day, it is not counting, it
really does not matter, it is no impact upon world
conditions and situations, and so on. That is the
conclusion of the natural man because of what he sees in
Christendom.
We have to
agree to a very large extent, even though we do know
something else. Nevertheless, Christendom has got into
that terrible plight today for this very reason—it
does not understand the cleavage which the Cross of Jesus
Christ has made between the two humanities. It does not
understand that there is no bridge tolerated by God
between these two. The Cross has cut right in between
these two humanities; and as I was saying, it may not all
happen at once, but through a lifetime, the Holy Spirit
will be teaching us, if we are teachable, if
we are sensitive, if we are walking in the
Spirit, the Holy Spirit will be teaching us: “That
is you, that is not Christ—(putting it in a phrase).
That is you, that is your way of talking, that is your
way of thinking, that is your way of going about, that is
just you, that is not Christ.”
Oh, it
would take a long time; but, oh, it would be so
profitable to study this Other Man as He walked in this
world and see the principles which governed His life,
which were all heavenly and all spiritual and made Him
absolutely incalculable in this world.
The
Dividing:
“he that is spiritual” and “the natural
man”
We are now
coming to Corinth, and we have not moved far into the
letter until we are shown what belongs to the one side
and what belongs to the Other. Oh, that Christendom had
really had its eyes opened to chapter two of the First
Letter to the Corinthians. Here we have two designations;
here are the two humanities. One is the natural man, and
let me say again that is not necessarily the unborn again
man. Corinth shows that and is used to show that. It
stands through spiritual history to show the tragedy of a
carry-over from one humanity to Another in not allowing
the great transition to be clear cut. That is what is
here, and so in Corinthians we have the dividing: we have
“he that is spiritual” and “the natural
man,” and then there opens up the characteristics of
each.
When we
launch out into the characteristics at Corinth, we come
almost immediately on this: personality complexes—
that is “the natural man.” “I am of Paul,
I am of Apollos, I am of Peter, and I am of Christ.”
You tell me that we are not capable of that—making
even a servant of God, a greatly used servant of God and
a servant of God who is a saintly man, making him the
focal point, the pivot around whom we circle —his
way of teaching that appeals to me, his interpretation,
his personality. The apostle of the Holy Spirit puts that
sort of thing in the category of the natural man because
the effect of that is the divisiveness in the Body of
Christ—that is what the letter opens up:
divisiveness in the Body of Christ. Oh, do not talk about
personalities; they may have been used to your help; you
may owe a lot to the Lord because of them, but do not be
constantly bringing them into view. Paul will argue back
and say: “Who is Paul, who is Apollos, who is Peter?—Only
servants of God through whom you believed!” Let the
instrument recede into the background, and let Christ
come to the fore; be occupied with Him, talk about the
Lord Jesus.
Perhaps
there is a lot of this in a conference like this—
this man’s name and that man’s name and this
teacher and that teacher. We have our preferences and
attachments, but we must drop the whole thing. Paul is
saying nothing but “Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”
We must drop all that personality complex business which
in the development only means division in the Body of
Christ, and division is weakness and defeat. We must
restrain from this sort of thing, for this is moving
along the wrong line. This is moving from the outside—trying
to gather around personalities and calling that “unity”
instead of dealing with it from the inside; and after
all, if only, if only we saw Jesus Christ, we would see
what the Church is.
Dear friends, the Church of Jesus Christ is not an “it.”
It is not a system of teaching. It is not something
ecclesiastical. It is not an institution. (Oh, I thank
God for the day when He showed me this.) The Church
is a Person and That Person is Jesus Christ in corporate
expression.
We must
revise our mentality when we talk about the Church, the
Body of Christ. What are you talking about?— not an
it, a something, as though it were a something in itself,
and a teaching in itself. No, it is this Man with a
family, with children, brothers and sisters, begotten of
God, that is the Church.
Oh, how
much ecclesiasticism we can have without the family life,
but the Church after all, when you come to the final
Word, is just the measure of Christ that there is in
those who make it up—“till we all attain
unto... the measure... of Christ”—every one of
us. That is the Body of Christ, that is the Church.
Now I am
going to close this morning. We have seen the very first
thing that you meet at Corinth is this carry-over of an
old humanity in personality complexities, and the Lord
says “No” and the apostle says: “No...
only ‘Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.’ ”
The Lord search our hearts concerning these two
humanities. Let us pray...
Now, Lord, this can very quickly and very easily be all
covered over in the next moments when we go away and have
to think back as to what it was about in that hour. Spare
that; save us from that. Lord, we are not wanting to
impose upon Thy people any kind of suppression, but we do
pray that the Holy Spirit will solemnize our hearts in
the presence of such great issues in the greatest issue
of all time and eternity. Give us quiet meditation,
prayerful meditation in our hearts to see where we are,
where we are in this whole Bible. So help us, God, for
Thy Son’s sake, Amen.