The two fundamental calls of the New Testament: "Come" and "Go." Jesus invites all who labor and are heavy laden to come to Him for rest, emphasizing the personal transformation that occurs when His truth is internalized and lived out. This call to "come" requires complete abandonment of self and past hindrances, not just intellectual assent but a total surrender of one's life to Christ. Following this, the sermon addresses the call to "go," which is a commission to share the gospel and make disciples, demanding a similar self-giving and sacrifice as exemplified by Christ Himself. Ultimately, true discipleship involves a costly, all-encompassing response to both the "come" and "go" of Christ, leading to a life of dependence, humility, and authentic service.
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Now, number twenty-six, and I mention the number only for the benefit of the instrumentalists, and we'll sing together in a moment standing his name. I travel down a lonely road and no one seems to care. The burden on my weary back had bowed me to despair. I often complained to Jesus how folks were treating me, and when I heard him say, My feet were all so weary upon the Calvary Road.
The cross became so heavy, I fell beneath that load. Be faithful, weary pilgrim, the morning I can see. Just lift your cross and follow close to me.
I work so hard for Jesus, I often boast and say, I've sacrificed a lot of things to what's a narrow way. I gave up fame and fortune is worth a lot to thee. And then I heard him say so tenderly. I left the throne of glory and counted it but lost.
My hands were nailed in anger upon the cruel cross. But now we'll make the journey with your hands safe in mind. So lift your cross and follow close to me.
Let us look to the Lord again for his blessing. Let us pray. O God, our Heavenly Father, we give thee thanks for the various ways in which thou have spoken to us during this conference. And tonight, as we are gathered together in thy name, we pray for the sake of the Lord Jesus and his glory. that thou wilt once more speak to us by thy spirit through thy word. Grant to us, O Lord, a more perfect understanding of thy holy purposes, and of thy will for each of us as individuals.
Give us, ye, as to hear. Give us hearts that will respond to thee without reservation. O Lord, uphold thou me that I may uplift thee through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. This evening I want to read to you two verses of Scripture, not so much that we are going to try to expound these verses tonight, but rather to consider that central idea which each verse contains. The first, of course, is that very well-known ending of Matthew chapter twelve.
Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest to your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. That's the end of Matthew eleven. And that again very familiar verse in John seventeen, as my Father have sent me, even so send are you." Now these two verses express to us two themes of the New Testament which in reality embrace all that God has to say to us, that is in essence.
They can be summed up with two words, two words that God says to you and to me personally. The first is the word come. The second is the word go. Of course, these ideas are expressed in various ways with various terms. The Lord says, come unto me, follow me, believe on me, receive me, take my yoke, learn of me, obey me, have faith in me. But essentially, while there are different facets to these verses or thoughts, the essential theme is one, namely the call of the Lord for us to come to Him.
And then following that, He proceeds to say, Go into all the world. I send you into all the world. make disciples, and so on. The Lord says, come. After what he says, go. Now, it's very important that you and I have some understanding of the character or nature of the truth, of truth as it is, and particularly of biblical truth. And truth really is on two levels. The first is that objective truth we find in God's word.
Theologians sometimes refer to this as propositional revelation. These clear-cut statements which are true, which remain true, which always will be true, regardless of our response to them, apart altogether from you and me, the Bible is true, it is God's word. But there is another level of that truth, namely when you and I respond to that truth, when that truth is received into our hearts and lives, and by the gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit, it becomes our very existence. We have this thought, of course, in the Word of God.
The Bible, God's Word written, the truth of God written. And then the Lord Jesus, who is the living Word, the Word made flesh. It is the purpose of God that this Word that He has given us in the Bible should become flesh in you and me. That this Word should be written on the tables of our hearts by the finger of the Holy Spirit. That we shall not only know this truth intellectually, but we shall live by this truth and this truth will govern and control and dominate and characterize our lives. so that we will almost become living incarnations of that truth.
Many of us today are inclined toward a kind of a Cape Canaveral mentality when we come to the Scripture. And we are content to believe certain facts and leave it at that. But this is never God's purpose for you and me. His desire is that this truth may seize hold of us and control us and become our very lives. And it is in this thought that we shall think of these two great ideas of the New Testament, God's call to come, God's command to go. Of course, we first perhaps heard that call to come initially when we put our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
We began to hear that word go, when we began to realize that we were responsible to let our light shine before men, that God had called every believer to be a witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. But I wonder if we understand sufficiently the extent to which that this word come and this word go is something that the Lord says to us every day, that every day we need to hear the word come unto me. and in the realist sense we need to draw near to the Lord Himself and afresh every day as believers we need to hear that word go.
So God's come and God's go always should and will sound in our ears. We've also got to realize that every time God says come And every time God says go, this is a call to sacrifice, a goodbye or a farewell in one sense or the other is involved, there is always an abandonment. And I wonder if we realize also that God is intensely interested in you and me as people.
As a matter of fact, he's far more interested in us and how we will be affected by his come and go than anything he may want to accomplish in us and through us. Years ago I had the opportunity of serving in a kind of an honorary way as a chaplain to the late Bishop Taylor Smith. He was the chaplain general of the British forces in World War I, but at this time he was in Canada. And my job was to try to look after him and help him get up in the morning and get dressed and buy his tickets for him and take care of him and so on. And it was a very great privilege because he was a great man of God.
And he had the habit of asking very difficult and personal questions. And I remember going into him one morning and he said to me, tell me, Stacey, which is the more important? What you do or what you are? And I thought for a while and I said, expect what you are. He said, don't forget it. He asked me the same question the next morning, the same question the third morning. He said, now I hope you've learned your lesson. Never forget it. God is more interested in you as a person than anything that he may want to do through you. In other words, God is interested in us as individuals and in our response to him.
because the nature of our response to him in large measure will determine the way in which he will be able to work in us and through us. When I was living in the United States, we often used to attend conferences for foreign students. And I remember one conference we had in Colorado where we had something like one hundred and thirty foreign students for some days. And I was very interested in the special meeting we called to get their reaction to the United States. And in almost every instance, lamentably enough, they did not like the United States and were not particularly happy here. And I asked why.
And the answer was this. They said, in USA, people give us things. They do not give us themselves. We feel all the while that people will do things for us and give us things, but they never seem to give us themselves we never get close to them they don't come close to us we can't talk to one another or we talk about baseball and food and the weather and clothes but we don't talk about ourselves and you see again this is perhaps illustrative of the idea that I'm trying to get across to you that one of the most important things we have to consider when we consider God's word go, particularly in relation to the foreign field, is our ability to give ourselves.
You see, it's very much easier to go and do something, to preach a sermon, to give a radio broadcast, to give away a tract. But to give yourself, as Christ gave himself, is something rather different. Of course, the tragedy often is that we've got nothing to give because we are not very much before God. It's very interesting to notice what happened when the Lord Jesus was on earth and he began to call people to him. You remember he saw Peter and James and John and Andrew, fishermen, mending their nets, and he said, Come, follow me.
And they left their nets. That's what they had to abandon when they followed him. And then he said something to them. He said, I will make you, fishes of men. In other words, it wasn't merely that they were going to come and learn certain information from him, but he was going to do something in them that will affect them as persons and their character and their being. What a strange day that must have been when Levi Matthew, the tax-gatherer, was seated at his desk with his money there, collecting taxes. And the shadow fell across his desk.
He looked up into the eyes and the face of the Lord Jesus. And the Lord Jesus said, Levi, follow me. such a strange story we read immediately he got up left everything there and followed Christ he was not like the rich young ruler who was not willing to abandon his wealth he was not like that one who said yes I'm willing to follow but first let me take care of my father let me take get my affairs in order Levi didn't volunteer and say, Lord, I'll come along and follow you now.
To the one who said that, the Lord Jesus said, Foxes have coals and birds of the air have nests. As a matter of fact, he didn't seem to encourage volunteers. Rather, he called individuals, and it is individuals he will call you and me if we will listen to his voice. Levi didn't make any conditions. He simply got up and followed the Lord Jesus, but he made a complete break with his past when he responded to the Lord's word, come. And I do want to emphasize again that Christ's come always involves an abandonment, a sacrifice.
You cannot go on with the Lord and respond to his call, come, and take all the impedimenter of life with you. The Lord Jesus spoke very frankly to those who volunteered to follow Him. He said some very searching things in the Gospel of Luke as they are recorded there. He said if anyone wants to follow me and be my disciple, If anyone wants to respond to my word, come, then I must be first in his life. I must become, come before mother or father, before husband or wife, before brother or sister, before son or daughter.
Again we're reminded of the one who said, I will come, but first I must take care of my father. And the Lord was not willing to have him come under those conditions. It is not an easy thing to respond to the Lord's come. And yet if by God's grace we do so, when he says go, it will not be so very difficult. The Lord also says that if we're going to follow him, there must be a great renunciation in our lives. So far as the things of this life are concerned, we've got to leave them all if we're to follow him.
The Lord never has the philosophy of all this in heaven too. It's Christ alone or nothing. He leaves us with what we have. But the Lord says something even more searching to us He says if we're going to follow Him and answer His come, why then He's got to come before our love of ourselves. And let's not deceive ourselves, you and I love us one another. We love ourselves more than anything else. We've got to go and take up our cross and follow Him.
You see, it's a very, very easy thing to say, well, Lord, I'll give you some of my time. I'm willing to devote some of my education to you, some of my talents, some of my natural opportunities, but that is not good enough. The Lord will not say, come to us on those terms. It must be all or it must be nothing. You see, Christ has got to become our life. We must be identified with Him. In the most existential way, it must be I and you and you and me. it is not an easy thing and then you see there's a continuing price we have to pay and in this sense the Lord says come afresh every day to us because we can only follow him and respond to his come if we continue in his word and continue to respond to him and obey him I never know why it is we leave that lovely hymn to evangelistic appeal, that hymn just as I am without one plea.
I think it's more a hymn for the Christian than for the non-Christian. I think it's a hymn we ought to sing at the morning meeting before the breaking of bread. And if we sang it from our hearts, it could represent the truest response the Lord is looking for, that we are abandoning all as we come to him and eat and drink in remembrance of him. In other words, what I'm trying to say is that it's not an easy thing to be a Christian. It's a costly thing to be a Christian. I get more and more unhappy about trends I seem to see around me today, this sort of cheap grace.
Christ is presented as though If you were to have gone on a plate, we can take and then go on our way with everything else in life. This is not according to the Word of God. It's a terribly difficult thing to become a costly thing to be a Christian. It's simple, but it's not easy. Oh, you say, but it's just believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. In one sense, yes, but in another sense, no. In other words, if you think about believing as believing a few facts of the gospel, you'll go to hell. You can believe John three, sixteen and go to hell because John three, sixteen cannot save you.
It's only the person Christ who can save. And when he says, come, and when you respond to him, it means you're abandoning all. Nothing in my hand I bring simply to thy cross I cleave. and we are turning ourselves over to the Lord Jesus when we put our trust in him. He is our Lord. There is no such thing in Scripture as saying we can accept Christ as our Savior and refuse to have him as our Lord. He demands all. Yes, this cost of discipleship is a very, very real thing.
And my great concern today is this. that I fear the gospel is being presented in such a way that people are gaining the impression that there's just something to be believed, the facts of the gospel. And you say, yes, I believe it, and they say, hallelujah, brother, you're saved, and people are being deceived into thinking they've got a passport to glory and they haven't. We must receive the Lord Jesus, but he must receive us. And I sometimes say when people speak in this light fashion, you say you've received Christ, but ask yourself, has Christ received you?
Because both are involved. Of course, if you give yourself to him, he will never, never, never say no. Now, I wonder if some of us during this week, or these days rather, have been hearing the Lord's come. I wonder if we have been responding to the Lord Jesus. I wonder what the depth of our true response really has been. Oh, it's the most wonderful thing to hear the voice of God, not the voice of man, but the voice of God speaking in one's heart.
and then by His grace to be able to respond to Him. Think with me for a few minutes. But you say, I'm already a Christian. I came here as a Christian. I've already responded to that come. But maybe the Lord has something more to say to you. Maybe you haven't given Him all your heart. Maybe you haven't really given Him your life. Maybe you haven't really turned yourself over to him without reserve. Perhaps he is not Lord of all, which would mean he's not really Lord at all.
Think for a moment or two. Have you really, in the totality of yourself and your life and the unknown future, turned yourself without any reserve over to the Lord Jesus or what a wonderful thing it would be if before this conference were over you were to hear the Lord Jesus speaking to you and I were to hear the Lord Jesus speaking to me equally and he were to say something like this yes you put your trust in me and that was sincere but I've got something more of you that I want I want all of you I gave myself completely for you and to you and I do so and I want you to give yourself completely without any reservation to me without holding back anything some of the things we're hearing of this afternoon even the matter of marriage I leave that with you,
Lord Jesus. I leave everything with you, Lord Jesus. I am yours. Have you heard the Lord Jesus saying that to you in that way? If only as you and I, by God's grace, are unable to respond completely to the Lord Jesus invitation come, that when we hear that wonderful glorious, tremendous word, go. And He commissions us to serve Him. We'll begin to understand what that also involves, and we shall be able to go.
But I'm terribly concerned today, lest there are some of us who may be persuaded to go when we haven't really come to Him completely. and then when we go we'll not have very much of ourselves to give maybe we won't even want to give ourselves to him the second word the Lord Jesus speaks to those who are willing to listen and I believe he says it to each one of us although the destination may be different is that word go he said I want to send you I want you to go and preach the gospel I want you to make disciples you say yes Lord I'm willing to give my money but you know it's a very easy matter to give money it very very seldom hurts us none of us know much about giving till it hurts we've got so much and there's so much more to come in and we know so little about self-denial But when the
Lord says, go, we say, yes, Lord, here's my pocketbook, and we dish out a few dollars. And then the Lord says, go again. And if we say, very well, Lord, I will need to give you some time. I'll give you two months. I will go off to La Paz. Two months. Yes, I will need to give you two months, Lord. And I think the Lord will take that. And it won't cost you very much. What's two months? or two years in a life not very much and I've got some talent Lord I can play the piano or do this or do that yes I'm willing to share my talent with you and the Lord is still waiting because the thing he wants is that when he says go we ourselves will go not a bit of money not so much time Not so much talent, but we ourselves will really go in the totality of our self-giving.
You see, even on the mission field, we can just be giving a little bit of time and a little bit of talent and not really giving ourselves. I mean, I don't think this is true of many missionaries, but it is true of some, where they can live up in the compound on the hill. And that's where they're walled in and they live their lives there just as if they were in New York or Philadelphia. And then they go down to a little bit of visiting and track distribution and preaching and healing and washing up and doing that. And they go back, but they're not really giving themselves. I was in Algeria the other day and again hearing about the tremendous work that Dr.
Sinjin is doing, apparently irritates a great many missionaries. because he's able so completely to give himself to those people where he's working in North Africa and how they swarm all over his house and go into all his rooms and he never seems to have any privacy. He evidently has the ability to give and give and give and give of himself in a most extraordinary way. And you see, if the Lord wants to send us He wants to send us as those who have given ourselves completely to him without holding anything back so that when we go to the place of his appointment we'll be able to give ourselves not just our time and talent and energy but ourselves and all that we are to those to whom he sends us.
This is a costly thing too. It isn't easy. You remember the story of the woman with that issue of blood and she touched the Lord Jesus and the Lord Jesus knew immediately something had gone out of him and if in our service to the Lord Jesus something isn't going out of us we're not really going in the way that the Lord wants us to go of course in all of this the Lord Jesus is the pattern You know there was that moment when God the Father said to the God the Son, Go. And without reservation he went.
And you know what it cost him. The abandonment of his glory. No longer did he exercise on earth his divine prerogative, his right. He gave up his independence. He was rich. He became poor. He gave up all his privileges. It's all summed up in those words. He emptied himself. And as he came to you and me as that babe in Bethlehem, you know what he became. He, the Son of God, became the Son of man.
He became the servant, the slave of God. He became the friend of publicans and sinners. He could reach out his hand and touch that leper without shrinking back. But oh, that wasn't the end of his self-giving when he went, when God said go. He identified himself with us and took our guilt. the guilt of our sin. He endured the separation from God the Father. He became sin for you and me.
He went to the cross. In other words, when God the Father said to God the Son, go, it cost the Lord Jesus everything. And all I do hope will not think that when we say, yes, I'll respond to the Lord's go, we can go tripping along on the light fantastic with a gay giggle and thinking it wasn't going to cost us anything. Oh, you can go to Timbuktu like that way, but you won't really be going in the sense that God wants you and me to go. You know what the Lord Jesus said when he came?
He said, Lo, I come to do thy will, O my God. And at Gethsemane, he said, Not my will, but thine be done. And you see, when the Lord says, Go to you and me, we've got to be saying every day of our lives, not my will, not my rights, not my desire, not my comfort, not what I want, but thy will, O Lord. And oh, I think we have a bit of idealism when we're young. What I want to tell you as you get older, it's more difficult to say, not my will, because you want to settle down and be comfortable. And yet every day the Lord says to every missionary on the far-off field, go, but you say they're already there.
But you see, each day there's got to be a fresh self-giving in his name and for his dear sake to those to whom he sends us. And then when we think of the Lord Jesus and all that he was in glory, that he could speak and this world would spring into existence. And he became utterly dependent upon God the Father. He became completely dependent upon God the Holy Spirit. And you see again when the Lord says, go to you and me, in a new and deep and existential way in the very essence of our being we've got to enter into a life of dependence in which we are depending upon him and trusting and looking to him for all.
Oh, I feel desperately ill. Well, I think of the blasé self-confidence of some of these people with their new wretched little techniques of making Christians What a travesty upon the gospel and upon the work of God. I was at a young people's conference a few years ago. They'd taken a course on how to do it and they were sent out to do it. And there were teenagers still wet behind the ears and it made one ill to hear them talk. How many Christians did you make this afternoon? Oh, gee, I made three. Did you really? I made four. Or they had their patter, they had their technique, and they rush up to someone and say, one, two, three, four, bingo, you've got it.
This is not God's work. There's nothing in the word of God to suggest it's God's work. No, no, it's a costly thing. The Lord Jesus didn't rush around with little formulas. He went to the cross. And if you and I are going to represent Him and go into all the world and preach the gospel, in the deepest and most spiritual sense, there is blood and sweat and tears. It will cost you and me everything to be the men and the women that God wants us to be for His dear namesake. Oh, let's not be trivial and trite about these things.
And it means a life of dependence. It means a life of humility. Spiritually it means day by day girding yourself and taking that bath towel and doing some foot washing. But that's the way the Savior went. And for him it meant the cross. And girls and fellows, let's not kid ourselves. If you're going to live and serve the Lord Jesus, you cannot avoid the cross. There must be your identification with the Lord Jesus in death and burial and resurrection.
And this isn't some ceremonial dunking in the Gospel Hall. I'm not speaking lightly of baptism. but there's a spiritual reality behind baptism of our identification with the Lord Jesus. And there must be a sense in which we can say with one of old, I died daily to self and self-desire and intention and all the rest of it. And it doesn't get easier. But you see, And I really hear the Lord's come. And with the totality of ourselves, we come to the Lord Jesus and cast ourselves upon him and experience his grace and blessing and salvation.
When he says go, with all the demands of the go, it won't be so impossibly hard. But I think if we've been trivial in our coming to Christ, then we'll find it to be impossible to be really serious in the depth of what the Lord intends when it comes to our going. And so you see the words of the Lord Jesus come and go involve a giving up and a becoming. because the Lord Jesus wants to make us what we are not naturally for His sake, that we may really represent Him.
And in the world in which we live, we've not just got to proclaim a message, but we've got to authenticate that message by our life lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. And the plea that I'm making is that we do not have a low view of Christian service, but a high view of Christian service which demands our all. Personally, I believe the call to sacrifice has never changed and never will change. These principles are eternal and Christ is our example.
This will involve Not doing our work, but His work. And one of the curses of Christian service is that we rush around like busy little ants with our own little organizations and our own wretched little works that we're going to offer up like Cain to the Lord Jesus, and he will reject it. We are not to do our work for Him. We are to do His work for His glory under the distinction. But if His work becomes My work, then in a sense it ceases to be His work. And all the danger of Cain's offering is with us today as it was back in that misty past.
And then we've got to realize that while we need training and we do, and education if God so will, and we do, and we need those gifts of the Holy Spirit, for the ministry to which God calls. Always our resource, our only resource, will be God Himself and nothing else and no one else. And you see all of this is involved if we hear the Lord speak and we respond to His come and then we respond to His go. And you see service for the Lord Jesus must not just be thought of as activity.
I'm an evangelist. I'm a teacher. I'm engaged in church planting. I'm a radio man. I've got a special youth work. I'm in literature. I'm in university work. We mustn't think in those terms in relation to God. It isn't just activity that we perform and we say, no, I've done that. And then we retreat into our own life. but we must be so identified with the Lord Jesus and the work that he is giving us to do that we as it were become part of our ministry and it not be something apart from us I do hope that I've made myself plain or better put that the Lord has spoken to you and made his word plain You see, there is this truth of God's word and we believe it with all our hearts.
But then by the Holy Ghost it's got to be worked down into us so that all of this glorious truth is being demonstrated in a life lived in sacrificial abandonment to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so he says, I want you to come to me. I love you. I died for you. I offer you forgiveness and salvation and life and fulfillment and glory. But when we come to him, we've got to come with nothing in our hands and without any reserve. And then when he says, no, I want you to go for me.
And we say, yes, Lord. It will be as costly, it will be a costly thing even as it was costly for the Lord Jesus when the Father said go to him. So do think about these things. And as I close, I'd like again to ask you these two questions. Have you fully responded to the Lord Jesus when he said come? Perhaps the Lord has been speaking to you in some of the sessions today, perhaps tonight. And perhaps in a new way, you've begun to realize what the Lord wants of you.
He just doesn't want a bit of your mind. He doesn't want your intellectual assent to say, yes, I believe your death was an atoning death. He wants you to cast yourself completely upon him without any reserve. And maybe there can be, I'm not now talking about getting saved the second time, the theologians don't become alarmed. But maybe tonight, in a fresh and a deeper sense, the Lord wants you to come to him. Or perhaps he's begun to stir your heart as you thought of the tremendous need in the world around us.
The need that goes on and on and on. And you say, Oh Lord, I'd like to hear your go. I'm ready to be sent. It's not a case of saying, Lord, here I am, let's get going. No, no, no, no. It's a case of Lord, here I am, send me. But all that you and I can understand, something of what is involved in being sent, and all that he'll speak to you and me and will have the desire in our heart that even as the Father sent the Son the Son may be able to send you and me the two words of the New Testament come and all that that involves and go and all that that involves with a pain but with a joy and privilege of blessing of being a fellow laborer together with him.