That true love for Jesus Christ is demonstrated not by mere profession but by a consistent, integrated life of obedience and devotion. It argues that failure to love Christ, evidenced by a lack of focus on Him and His Word in daily life, is the greatest sin. The message contrasts superficial religious activity with genuine love, which manifests in a deep appetite for Scripture, a desire to know and do God's will, and a life that reflects Christ's character and mission. Ultimately, it calls for self-examination and a heartfelt plea for God's Spirit to cultivate a deeper, more active love for Jesus that permeates all aspects of life.
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It is a great joy and privilege to have the opportunity of sharing in this week together, and I do trust that all of us have a real sense of expectation from God Himself. We know that man has not within himself to help or to bless anyone spiritually. Only God can speak to you in a way that really counts. and only God can meet your need and my need, and impart to us that blessing that we may need. I was encouraged, as I know you were, to hear of those who were led to commit themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ as the result of this conference last year and in previous years.
And we know that no decision is as important as that once-for-all decision to give one's heart and life to the Lord Jesus Christ. I fear, however, many of us who are Christians, who are born again, leave it at that. We have made this great commitment to Christ, and then we act as if there were no other decisions to be made. Whereas the truth of the matter is this, that every time God's word is proclaimed, a verdict is demanded. Submission is entailed.
Decision is required. We can read other books or papers, and we can get information from this source or that source or the other source. And it interests us, we enjoy it, or we don't enjoy it. But the Bible is altogether a different book. It is God's Word. God is speaking. And when God speaks, the submission of man is necessary. We are anxious and eager for unconverted people.
to make their commitment to the Lord Jesus. Would to God you and I were just as anxious, really to care what God has to say to us as Christians, and then to make our commitment to the Lord in the light of His will through His word. The great danger of such a conference as this is, that we are hearers of the Word and we leave it at that. We do not become doers of the Word. And that Word which should be a savor of life, even in the life of the believer, can be a savor of death.
Therefore I think it is of the utmost importance that all of us realize the seriousness of the occasion of our being here. That if God speaks and we are indifferent, we've made a verdict, our decision is no. But oh, how wonderful if God were to lay hold of you and me in a new and deeper way than ever before. And if as the result of our being together, we were more like the Lord Jesus Our surrender to Him were more complete, our devotion to Him were more perfect, and our love for Him were all the more intense.
But that will only be the case as you and I seek the Lord while He may be found. God grant them that during these days we are together, having a holiday, enjoying the glories of all around us, We shall take time to hear God speak and to seek His face. I'm delighted that this is a conference where we haven't got one meeting succeeding another meeting, one after another after another, because that provides us with the opportunity of thinking. And I do hope you and I will not fill our days full of activity, so there will not be the time to get alone with God.
I'm always impressed. with our university conferences in Europe, particularly in Germany. We don't have many meetings, even as you do not have too many meetings here. But the exciting thing is after a message to see those German students take their Bible and without saying a word to anyone, go off into the woods by themselves for an hour or two. They mean business. Decisions are made, and they're affecting their lives. God grant them that you and I equally may be led by the Holy Spirit if I may speak thus colloquially to mean business with the Lord.
Now for our time together this evening, just one verse taken out of context, but that doesn't do any harm because it's just at the end of an epistle and a thought with which we can end the day. But as we turn to God's word, let's look to him for his help. O God, our Heavenly Father, in these minutes grant we beseech thee that thou wilt give us ears to hear thy voice and hearts inclined to obey and to follow thee, that thou mayest be glorified and that we may be blessed, Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, and our Savior.
Amen. The verse twenty-two of chapter sixteen of the first epistle to the Corinthians. A strange verse, almost an abrupt verse. If any man loved not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema, maranatha. or if any man loved not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be condemned, let him be judged, for the Lord cometh. Here we see that a man is to be condemned, not because his heart is black with sin, but because it is not bright with love for the Lord Jesus.
not for something a man has done that is wrong, but condemnation visited upon a person for failure to do that which is good, for to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not to him that is sin. The great commandment under the old covenant The first and great commandment, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. And that a commandment has not been abrogated, but actually it receives point in verse twenty-two, as it focuses upon God manifest in the flesh, the Lord Jesus Christ.
If any man love not, if any man fails to love the Lord Jesus Christ, let that person be condemned. The greatest sin that you and I can commit is not murder, is not adultery. It's failure to love God. It's failure to love his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. In the New Testament we read that people are condemned for three things. He that believeth not is condemned already.
Failure to believe in Christ. Condemnation because a man fails to obey. For he that obeyeth not, the gospel we read is to be condemned. And here condemnation because a man has failed to love the Lord Jesus Christ. Now on the surface all of us would say, why yes, my love may not be perfect, but I love the Lord Jesus. We sing such hymns as we've just sung. Together this evening Jesus the very thought of thee. Or perhaps more pointedly, my Jesus, I love thee, or Lord Jesus, I love thee.
I know thou art mine. But it's so dreadfully simple and easy and dangerous for us to use words that we do not mean, and for us in reality to sing a lie. It is so very, very easy for you and for me to go through the motions and not mean what we say. Profess love to the Lord, and yet fail really to love Him. Where I used to live in Australia, we have an Aboriginal people, and they love to play at games, and their favorite game is the game of war.
And on a moonlight night, they'll light a campfire and paint out the sort of ribbed structure with pipe clay and get their weapons, and one group will stand on one side of the fire, and one group on another side of the fire. and they'll start to hurl insults and epithets at one another, and then they'll shake their spears at one another, and then they'll start to wave their clubs at one another, and finally someone will pull back his hand and throw a boomerang or a spear, and the guidance to get as close to the man opposite without actually hitting him. You'd think they were bent on murder, but actually they're only going through the motions. Or what an infinitely tragic thing it is. if that's true of you and me in relation to the Lord Jesus.
I don't know how it is with you, but so often I find I am two people, not just one person. I can sit at the Lord's table and have the Lord made known to me in the breaking of bread, and sincerely My heart goes out in praise and thanksgiving and appreciation and love to the Lord Jesus Christ. Twenty-four hours later, I am occupied with business, with pressure, with making money, with competition, with a hundred and one other things.
And Christ is not in my thoughts, and my behavior does not speak of the Lord Jesus Christ. Am I two people? Am I two men? You have that same experience, I believe, so often that there are moments of high resolve and aspiration when our hearts move out toward the Lord Jesus. But all those moments are so few in the twenty-four hours of any day or the seven days of any week. Which man am I? Which woman are you?
Are you the person who sits at the Lord's table and says, Lord Jesus, I love you? Or are you the person on Wednesday? are living such a life, preoccupied with life's pressures, that God isn't really in your conscious thoughts, and by your behavior no one would ever guess that you were a Christian. I heard an awfully tragic thing since I've been in California of one of the leading men in our assemblies, known as a speaker, used by God, also a businessman, who was involved recently in a business tussle, in which he told untruth, in which he tried to go back on his word.
And when another brother confronted him with it, he said, well, yes, yes. But he said, you've got to remember, when I'm dealing with money, I'm all business. Now, that cannot be true of you and me if we're to please God. Somehow or other Stacey Woods must not be two men. There must be a wholeness, there must be an integration, there must be a unity, there must be a coming together of my total life devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ. But because we are these split personalities, one thing on Sunday morning, and maybe something else on Monday, We like to kid ourselves, and I may be colloquial, and we always like to have the image or picture of ourselves seated around the Lord's table.
That's what we really are. But men and women, brothers and sisters in Christ, it is not what we really are. I am the man of Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. I am the man who nurtures impure desires and lustful thoughts. I am the man who is quick and selfish. I am the person who is interested in making money and wants to surround myself with material security and want a lovely home and want nice clothes and want a new automobile. And I am also the man who sits at the Lord's table.
and we've got to study ourselves we've got to look within and we've got to ask ourselves well how much am I as represented when I said at the Lord's table and how much am I the rest of the days of the week do I love the Lord Jesus if you and I love the Lord Jesus he will be in our minds he'll be in our thoughts we shall think about him may I ask you a personal question How much time do you spend thinking about the Lord Jesus? I'm not now talking about eleven o'clock or nine thirty Sunday morning. I'm talking about Monday and Tuesday and Thursday night and Saturday afternoon.
How much time do I spend, but you say you don't understand my life. The telephone rings. I've got these calls to make. I've got these pressures. I've got these sales to get hold of and these orders to obtain. There's the house to take care of. There are the children. I know soon to finish the dishes and the phone rings and then they seem to be coming back from school in the afternoon. There are so many meetings. It's one thing after another thing after another thing. How can I have time to think? All right. I admit that you and I have days very full, but we also sit down once in a while. When we have a few minutes off, do we look and reach for the newspaper to look at the comics at the back or what the Dodgers are doing?
Oh, what a sad thing if there's more eagerness to discover the exploits of a baseball team than to study the Word of God. I have a few minutes off, I turn on the television and fill my vacant mind with a spectacle of the world in its way. Or do I like a homing pigeon just when I'm released from pressure, do my thoughts wing their way back to the Lord Jesus and does my heart move out toward him? You see, the test we must apply to ourselves is not how busy we are, but what is filling our mind and heart when we relax just for a few minutes.
The acid test of how much you love the Lord Jesus is how much we think about him, for the word of God says as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. If I love the Lord Jesus I shall love to read about him. Forgive me for being so simple, but sometimes even profound things are simple. the Lord Jesus said, in the volume of the book it is written of me, in which book, none other than the Word of God. I was telling the young people Saturday night, and I want to repeat it to you, that if we confess the Bible to be divinely inspired, and we do, if as a result we acknowledge the Bible to be God's Word and therefore authoritative, and we do, There is an unavoidable consequence, and it is this, that the Bible must have the place of top priority in all of our lives.
Otherwise we're only kidding ourselves and we're not meaning what we say. And I've said it to university students again and again and again, I believe with all my heart. a knowledge of the Word of God is of infinitely greater importance than all their graduate courses and all their undergraduate degrees. Oh, yes, we believe the Bible is the Word of God. So what? It's merely a statement whereby we test other people to see whether they're heretics or not. Oh, we love to apply it. We can have a fine nose for false doctrine. But orthodoxy is not only a matter of doctrine, it's a matter of life.
And the acid test as to whether our doctrine of Scripture is really correct, if it is, as it were, verbally correct is the extent to which we are reading God's Word. But the truth of the matter is we've lost our appetite for the Scriptures. Or, of course, we've got a few favorite verses we can trot out. You can always count on Isaiah fifty-three and... Well, you know the other ones. The one or two Psalms we read, the passages about the celebration of the Lord's Supper and the cross. We can turn to a few passages of Scripture. But we haven't much appetite for the Word of God.
We really are more interested in what's going on in the world, in the newspapers than we are in the Scripture. And it's so much effort to read the Bible, and it isn't very, very interesting. But you say, what's this got to do with love of Christ, everything? Because if we love the Lord Jesus, we'll have a desire to have him speak to us, to hear his word, to know his will. Let me ask you a question again. In your very busy life and mine, how much time are we giving to the reading of God's word, personally and individually? Or of course we read our few verses once a day around the table. Of course we do that.
How many evenings do you spend an hour or two reading the Word of God? Do you spend as much time over the Word of God as you do in the beauty parlor? Do we spend as much time in the Word of God as we do in our gardens? Do we spend as much time over the Word of God as we do with our hobbies, hobbies or our latest recipes? Perhaps we oughtn't to ask these questions, but maybe we should. How much time does Stacey Woods really spend in the Scriptures? Because I've got to speak to myself. You know the story of a young lady who was in England, who was going to have a holiday.
She was going off to the seashore from London, and she bought a book. and she started to read it and found it rather dull and uninteresting and she left it in the train when she got off at the place she was going to spend the two weeks holiday. Down by the seashore she met a young man that was a case of boy meets girl and they did a very foolish thing that not only fell in love but they became engaged to be married in a very short time. And she discovered the young man was an author and fairly successful. And when she was going back to London, he gave her a copy of a book he'd recently written and had been published. And you can guess what book it was.
It was the same book that she'd bought going down. And she'd found it so dull and uninteresting. But she started to read it. And she found it to be the most exciting book she'd ever read. She'd never read a book so enthralling and captivating. It was the same book. But she'd fallen in love with the author of the book. There is a relationship between the strength and reality of our love of Christ and our appetite for the Word of God. Again, if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall delight in knowing His will and in obeying Him.
If a woman really loves her husband, she gets thrilled and satisfaction and fulfillment. in making him happy and vice versa. And if you and I really love the Lord Jesus, there will be a sense of responsibility and attitude toward Christ that we'll want to know the kind of men and women he wants us to be. We'll want to know the kind of life he wants us to live. We'll want to know the kind of work he wants us to do and our whole life will be devoted to him. The Lord Jesus could say, my meat, my food, my life, my existence, the thing I live for is to do the will of him that sent me.
The Lord Jesus was utterly devoted to the will of the Father. He was the perfect servant of Jehovah. And his desire is that because he's loved us so greatly and so truly, even to Calvary, that we would find our fulfillment and satisfaction in just pleasing Him. And again, pleasing the Lord Jesus is not limited to one hour around a table with a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. That may be the high point, but that should represent and symbol the totality of our lives.
as broken bread and poured out wine, in a sense, for the Lord Jesus, who gave to us his flesh and his blood. And then, of course, if we love the Lord Jesus Christ, not only will we want to obey him, and he's made it very, very clear, if he love me, keep my commandments. He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is, that love me. This isn't something I've thought up. It's what the Word of God states. Then, of course, we shall find our deep delight in living the kind of life whereby we shall be a living letter of recommendation of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that there'll be the savor of Christ.
And this will be part of our witness, although our witness will not cease there, as witness will go on to the spoken word. Times up. Two thoughts before I sit down. The first is the command or the warning. If you do not love the Lord Jesus, God says, may you be accursed. The Lord's coming back. That's God's word. Now the question, do you love Christ? What is the strength and depth and extent of your love?
Which person are you, the person who truly feels his heart or rah-rah moving up toward the Lord Jesus tomorrow morning, or the same person who is cold and self-centered and indifferent to Christ most of the rest of the week. Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in Christ, we may deceive ourselves, but God is not deceived. God is not mocked. Let us therefore examine our hearts. Let us confess to the Lord Jesus our shortcomings.
Let us tell him that our love is a poor and weak and fitful thing. And let us pray to him that he will shed abroad his love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given unto us. May it be so for his name's sake. The doctor in, he was only a little fellow about that high, I think, with a rather mischievous twinkle in his eyes. The doctor said, well, now a young man, how do you feel? Oh, very well indeed, thank you, sir. Very well. Don't you ever have any headaches?
Don't you have a succession of headaches? Headings, he said. Why, sir, my head is in heaven. How could I have headaches? So after a little more conversation on those lines, of course, he said, oh, the furs, that. Take him away and just see that he doesn't get into any difficulties. That's all you've ever seen about him. And so he was kept from difficulties after that. When he got away from the army and he went back to his trade, he was a very skilful plasterer and was able to do moulding work very, very well indeed.
And he was actually asking with some other workmen to do some of the moulding work on the ceiling of the cathedral. And so there he was, working away, very satisfactorily, seemingly, because the priests were very well pleased with the quality of the work. And then they were talking to the bishop, and they said, you know, the work's going on very well, but that little fellow there, you know, he won't come to Mass. Oh, the other's come along, but he won't come. Oh, said the bishop. You leave him to me. I'll settle his hash for him. So on the following day he went along, had the man down, approved the work, then the bishop just drew himself up.
Now, young man, why don't you come to Mass? When are you coming now? I'll just give you, well, maybe a week's more work on this. Now when are you coming to Mass? I said, your Lordship, that little twinkle will be desired. Your Lordship, as soon as I hear of your marriage. You dare to speak to me like that, said he. And you know I'm a bishop of the church. Yes, she said, of course, and I know that the scriptures say that the bishop ought to be the husband of one wife.
We're going to tell you about my going to Mass. Well, the accompanying priests were there holding their tithes who laughed and said, Oh, they called Mother Hash the Bishop of May, oh, fine, except for the other man's hash. In any case, what you do see in these cases is this, that these young fellows, they may be young, but they know what they believe. They won't be moved either by bribery or by threats. And there they stand. Stability is a very good mark, isn't it? Now let us think of the next one, fertility.
That means, of course, fruitfulness, and we have various kinds of fruit mentioned in the Scriptures. You remember that Proverbs eleven thirty says, He that wineth souls is wise. The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life. The fruit of the righteous, souls one for the most. Now we ought all to go in for fruit bearing and fruit bearing of all kinds. That ought always to be before the vision of our souls. May we ask a question, we've completed over three and a half months now of this year, or just about three and a half months.
How many souls, how many souls have you won for the Lord? Or would you say, well, I can't speak, I can't preach. We're not talking about preaching. How many souls have you won for the Lord? All we need to be often doing, constantly on the lookout for something that we can do, maybe in a very humble way, but if we are always in touch with the Lord, we shall soon find out what his will is and how we can be of benefit to others.
I remember some people that I knew very well, alas, they failed in their testimony, and a man came to a general meeting, invited very specially by some person outside, and when he got in he was very much surprised to find this esteemed Christian couple in that gathering. Why? He said, I've been serving them in my trade for years. And they've never said anything to me about the gospel.
I didn't know anything about it. They didn't give me an invitation to the meeting. Now I've come here and I find that they are frequenters of a meeting. Don't let that be said about us. Let us have our little pile of tracks near to the door, and any tradesman that comes, and anybody that comes, let us see to it that we don't let them go without something. If we cannot speak, we can give them a track. We give them a track with the staff perhaps on the address of the hall. We can do a great deal in evangelization if we have a mind for them.
And then again, I could give you so many instances of fruitfulness in that way, that a dear fellow came to us from Spain, and the directly he came to the Argentine, he was who'd been lucky with a liberty in Spain that he couldn't give away a tract without being taken up and put into prison. That is how Spain leads to death. You can't speak to a person about their fold and ask them to come to the law. If that person went to the police and gave advice to the police that you were trying to cross-authorize them, you would be taken up, put into prison. That's how it's taken.
So when this Spanish weather came out of the Argentine, he was simply delighted that he could go out, give away tracks, speak to one or another without any fear at all. I don't know how many souls he was instrumental in bringing to the Lord. He was not a great platform man, but he was one and was always on the lookout for his opportunities in the vehicles and the street corner, any place he could go to. And he didn't restrict himself to that. If there was any special meeting for prayer, he was there. Just for the same object that souls might be one. Then we have, of course, the other kind of fruit.
The fruit of character, we remember Galatians five, twenty-two. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, faith, temperance. A wonderful cluster, isn't it? a fruit, a fruit of character. Just think of having a person who is deficient in these things that our Lord looks for in the life of every one of us, in our character.
To have a person erect, constantly losing their temper. What a shame and blunt it is for the testimony of the Lord, isn't it? And so forth. We might go through that with him. And as the apostle says, as he writes to the Philippian believers in chapter one and the eleven, he says, being filled with the proofs of righteousness, righteousness is that which must characterize the believer in every sense. It was a young fellow who lived up in the north of the Argentine Republic, and he got on very well in his business. He was a Syrian, and the Syrians have a great deal in common with the Jews, a very great business ability.
And he had founded a factory, had a factory of rope sold shoes, which are very, very common in use, commonly in use in the Argentine. and naturally he had all his house and his stock duly insured according to the commercial code. And his insurance fell new in the thirtieth of June. And when the thirtieth of June came, he suddenly said to his wife, I've forgotten about the insurance. I have seen you at once. And so he said, I mustn't have a day go past. Of course, he couldn't attend to it when he just remembered it that moment.
And so he was going to attend to it straight away on the next day. But after midnight on the thirtieth of June, the fire broke out. And all this factory was burned to the ground and it stopped the lot. Then came down upon him all the commercial houses of Buenos Aires, where he had to trade it. And they forced him to make an agreement with them, and all he could do after selling his own house and doing everything he possibly could do to get anything that he had liquidated, all he could offer them was forty percent.
And with that they had to be content. They were glad to get forty percent. But the whole thing was done according to law and our friend came out with a clean bill. He wasn't in any way put down as a miscreant or a rascal. He'd done all that he could, but it was bad luck as they say, and there it was. He could only pay his forty percent. Not very long ago, he came down to the city of Buenos Aires. And that we were in the midweek prayer meeting. Now that's a great deal. We've got that midweek prayer meeting on Wednesday.
from one o'clock to two. We hope that all the business people that can come, even if they can't dispose of the whole hour, in a way they can come a part of the time and be with us there in the middle of the city, and we'll meet together for prayer regularly, agree with us. A very, very good thing to be able to do if you're able to manage it here and you don't do it as yet. What do you do? He does us good in what I find is. And he came, this young Selim, he came, here, I brought this to you, I thought perhaps you'd like to see it, and they grouped at it, a certificate by all the houses of commerce with which he had had been in his time's past, certifying the fact that this young man had paid every cent of the money that he owed, He got a job and began to build another factory, and soon again he was on his feet nearly eight years past, but he never forgot that he was indebted.
Not by law, forty percent was agreed upon, that he paid over sixty percent. and he had this unsolicited testimonial from the business houses and they said we've never had a case similar and we'd like to testify to the integrity and uprightness of this man giving his name. That was a good fruit, wouldn't it? Fruit of righteousness. He wasn't content with fulfilling the law, he went right beyond that and you got the fruits of righteousness. How much more we could say. There's that fruit of lips, giving thanks under his name, fruit of worship.
Let us value it as our Lord values it. She has done what she could, as he says concerning Mary of Bethany. And so we have these different kinds of fertility. That's the second mark of the tree. Then the third mark exists, and it is vitality. You see that tree, it looks as if the winter had stopped all growth and there it is there. But here we find the leaves coming and clothing it up fresh with a beautiful green garment. How lovely it is to look upon.
And as you see those leaves coming, you know that there's a sign that the life sap is being sucked up from the soil there in which the tree is planted and it goes up to the trunk and is distributed through the branches and then manifests itself as leaves. Beautiful leaves. the product of the flow of life in the inward part. What a very beautiful thing it is when you see a life that before was fruitless and literate, seemingly dead, vivified, made alive, and everybody can see the difference in what is actually visible now in comparison with what the state was years gone by.
There was a woman who came out to the Argentine Republic to be married. She'd never seen her husband before, and they're very customary amongst the Eastern people. Still, as you may know, the parents arranged the marriages, and the young people just have to call in the wishes of the parents. I don't know that I've known any more failures because of that than I had in the other schools. Well, there she was. She was quite happy. She'd married a prosperous businessman.
She'd been trained in a Protestant school and learned something of the scriptures, but she only had an outward knowledge. And as she was there, one day a corporator came into these business establishments. And he said to the man, I've come to offer you the best book in the world, the Holy Scriptures. Oh, said the man, we have the Holy Scriptures, we have the Men-Arabic. He's a very proud of the language, of course, Arabic is more akin to Hebrew, than English or French or Spanish, must say that. But he was very proud of it. After a little conversation, he said, I think my wife would like to have a talk with you.
Can't we even go upstairs? We can have a talk there. And he soon had to go down again to attend to his business, but the wife was there, and they had a splendid conversation together, and the wife of this businessman felt a strange purging in her heart. And when the visit was repeated again and again, she began to feel that our whole life was useless. Hopeless. After all, what was she doing in the world? And soon the time for her decision came, she came right out of the law. What a difference for Walt now in her life.
She used to go about giving away tracts. She couldn't speak the Spanish language very well, but she spoke a language which everybody understood, and that was she had a face full of the love of God and of grace. And she used to give away these tracts with such a grace that nobody could refuse. I'd been on that platform going down south again, a little group of believers there to say goodbye, and she'd be there, and then as we were talking she'd say, excuse me a moment, and then she'd get into the train, go right through it from one end or the other, giving away her tracks.
A priest would be there, but she wouldn't have any feel of him. She'd just go up to him with that gracious smile, give him a try. She'd look at it very suspiciously, but he'd put it inside his catech. He got a lot of things hidden in there. Good thing to have something good anyhow. This time he had something to take away with him. And then she'd come back and rejoin the group. Well... It was lovely to see her, constantly in the work of the Lord. You know, one occasion she said to me, you know, I'm very sorry the theatre that's two blocks down is going to be closed for six months.
They're going to have repairs. Oh, I said, did you know you were so interested in the theatre? Ah, she said, I am. See, they have their functions, you know, three times a week, and three times a week I go and stand outside the door just as they're coming up. And I see them grumbling, they've seen it before, or what a rotten act that so-and-so was, and so forth. And you see, if they're like that, I just give them my little track. True happiness, where can it be found? And they all look at it. Oh, Peter appeals to them. They hadn't found happiness after all, where they'd be. And now they'd like to know that true happiness was.
Well, that was the sort of woman she was. What a difference, wasn't that? Before that she was just living to herself. The barren life. But now, James, by clarity, the life has been shown out. And she can do no more than do all within her power to bring others to the saving knowledge of the love of Christ. Finally, we have prosperity. Whatever he doeth, whatever he doeth shall prosper. Of course the figure is still that of a tree. And you see the tree robust, healthy, vigorous.
And then you notice that the tree is actually shooting forth another branch on the one side. And then you'll notice on the other side the same thing is happening. Another branch has been formed shooting forth. And this tree is so well planted and so full of life that whatever it does, prospers. And these branches are no withered boughs. These branches show themselves to be a real part of a tree, adding to its beauty and adding to its usefulness. Whatsoever it does shall prosper. What a very beautiful thought that is for us, isn't it?
If we are trees, trees of the Lord's planting, then we shall have these marks, this stability of character, this fertility, bringing forth fruit in our character and in our activities for the Lord. And then if we truly the Lords, then we shall have this vitality, a life that must manifest itself. And in doing so will become a life that is beautiful and attractive to others. And finally, we shall find whatever we do will prosper. If you want to know the secret of prosperity, real prosperity, here you have the instructions necessary for us.
If we have these marks, then we are sure to end in prosperity of life. A life worth living in that, isn't it? And I hope we shall take it heart in regard to a family life as well. Because, you know, an assembly that just keeps all to itself, I know some so-called believers, no doubt they're true believers, but they've said, well, the world is very hard, we cannot get people in today, we'll just consent ourselves and have our little readings. And they just have our reading readings. and they have their breaking of bread and their prayer meetings and practically as far as the world outside is concerned, they might as well not exist.
That's not the way to have a testimony, it is. People talk a great deal about the testimony for one wonder of the times to whom they are testifying. They don't seem to be reaching any others. Now, we must beware that any spirit of self-satisfaction should take possession of us. I'm very thankful to say that in the meeting where we are, we began that meeting in the year, nineteen hundred and twenty-eight. So we are nearly thirty years there now, thirty just less one, and we have had to move.
We began a private house. And then in the mercy of the Lord, I can't tell you the story, there's no time, we got a proper ground, and then we had an unexpected loan of two thousand pounds. I don't know where it came from, I can't tell you that, but it came. And we had to undertake to pay two hundred pounds per annum in repayment of that loan. We were only a group of nine. None of us were rich, but we felt it was of the Lord because the work that was in such a stage in the private house where we were having the meetings that we couldn't go on, we couldn't invite people to come.
So we had the whole, the rent holds in the mercy of the Lord, all that debt was fully paid up and the work had increased immediately after we moved there, the work doubled. And then we had a great time with the tent campaign, here and there, and the Lord prospered the work. And we have seen five separations, five hideings off of Brethren, to establish another assembly, here and there, and all five of us, and we've had five of those hideings off. And now, as we say, we look at our meeting, our little assembly, we say, well, now, we ought to be satisfied with what we've been able to do, not a bit.
Directly we get much over the humble, we begin to feel uncomfortable. I have to say that we're about a hundred meters in fellowship. We've got too many people and we've got too much gifts. So you'll pray for us, won't you? Yes, we need to be thankful. Because when you're suffering like that, you know, with too many people and too much gifts in the meeting, you must have never hiding off. I hope we shall have ten or twelve, I don't see why we shouldn't. There's plenty of room for any amount more meetings in Buenos Aires today, and in Cordova, and in all these big centers of population. And mark you, although we've suffered in a way, fancy thirty people going away and establishing another meeting.
Look at the blanks. Thank God all those blanks are soon filled up. The ridge that scatter is and yet increases, and the ridge that withholdeth more than is meat and is tending to parts. Don't let us be afraid of extending, reaching out, and let us see to it that the halls or the preaching places that we are able to get hold of, they become a centre that will be formed into an assembly. Don't let us be content by carrying on mere Sunday schools or preachings. Let us see to it that there shall be a public and a prominent testament of the great importance. And we shall find it.
that the centre will not lose. We started with a group of nine. We've had five hiding stops and now we're a group of a hundred and eighty. We want to hide off again. The difficulty is to find a place. We have to buy a piece of ground now and then build, and the tremendous cost of these things is almost beyond the need, but has nothing to harm for the Lord. So I hope you will pray as well as pray.