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Before I speak this morning, I want to draw your attention to a book that was given to me by the librarian this morning, and you wouldn't believe this, it's called A Plant of Renown. You remember last night I was talking to you about the tender plant, and I was telling you it was a plant of beauty and a plant of renown? Now here's a book about it, and I didn't know. That's good news, isn't it? Smile, please. That's good news, but the bad news is that there's only two that's left. But to keep your heart still beating very fast, it's, I don't believe this, it's a dollar ninety five.
and the librarian said that she's selling these at a dollar sixty five, I believe. Now don't go just now, wait till after the meeting, and you can have one of these books. Another thing is that thank you for the response to Through the Valley of the Shadow, and there's four books left. Now, the librarian doesn't want these books to lie over for another year, so we want four volunteers to pick up those books, and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll autograph them for you if you, if you pick them up and get them off the shelf.
And if you don't need it for yourself, take it for someone. Could I tell you a little story? Just about the book? The, this happened in Montreal just not too long ago, that there was a family, a Roman Catholic family, who were brought to the Lord, but the old grandfather, he was a, a, a staunch Roman Catholic, and he would have nothing to do with Jesus Christ at all. And finally he told them, don't talk to me anymore about him because I have my church, and that is good enough for me. Well, he had cancer and had to be taken into the hospital, and it was terminal.
And they were just so worried about him, and they kept on praying. And one day his grandson went down and just talked to him about ordinary things, and then when he left, he said, oh, he said, I just brought this book, uh, you might like to read it, and just left it on the, the nightstand, and off he went. Two days later, the phone rang, and the old gentleman says, I want the whole family to be down here tonight at visiting hour. And when they came in and were standing around his bed, he picked up the book, and he says, I found Christ through reading this book.
See? Maybe you've got someone that you feel would benefit from this book. Then why not, uh, take one of the four copies and give it out? And just a little private information, just this morning while talking to the Gladstone, brother Fred, uh, and and his dear wife are with us this morning. Praise God for that. And Fred was just telling me, he said he they they lost their young so- son just about two weeks ago, I believe, and they're hurting, and we should remember them in prayer. But he said that he spoke to his young son who was dying, and of, of the book, and his young son looked up at his dad and said, yes, he had a wonderful experience with God.
And you see, it's, it's doing a work for the, for the Lord, and it's touching areas that we personally could not touch. Now, let's open our Bibles to Matthew chapter five. Matthew chapter five. And you remember I, I told you when we started our series that we were going to take a few of the Beatitudes and discuss them with you. Last, uh, yesterday morning, we spoke to you about verse five, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the kingdom and inherit the earth.
Now, look at verse six, because we will focus on this verse this morning. Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Let me just add one word here, just to bring the sense to us individually. Blessed indeed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Now, you remember, or perhaps you don't remember, what I mentioned about being blessed indeed, blessed indeed by God. And it means that the person who hungers and thirsts after righteousness will be blessed by God.
That is, they will be given a, a happiness from God that the world cannot give. They will be filled with divine joy, and they will be enveloped in that peace that the world cannot give, but God can give a peace that passes all understanding. Now, all these shades of meaning are bound up in the word blessed. And if you want to be blessed by God, uh, this morning and in succeeding mornings, then if you hunger and thirst after righteousness, then God has promised to bless us.
And not only so, there is a double blessing here, because those who indeed seek after, uh, and hunger after righteousness, hunger and thirst after righteousness, will be filled. Now that word filled means that they will be satisfied. Satisfied. And I just want to ask you this morning, beloved, are you a satisfied Christian? Now, I'm not asking you, are you a Christian? Are you a believer? I suppose that all of us would say, yes, I am a believer, but that's not the question. Are you a satisfied believer?
Are you a filled believer? Are you a blessed believer? Now, we're going to talk about that as we go very, very gently through, uh, what I believe the Lord Jesus was teaching his disciples on this wonderful occasion. I suppose it could be said that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are those who have a passion for righteousness or right standing before God. Now, you'll notice that I use the word passion, and I u- I use that, um, advisedly, and you'll see that develop as we go along this morning.
A right standing before God. Now, I- I believe that any believer who hungers and thirsts after a right standing before God, or in other words, who hungers and thirsts for holiness before God, that that person will indeed be blessed of God and shall be satisfied. I am more convinced than ever, beloved, that this is an area in our ministry, and it is also an area in our life that is being neglected today.
This holy living, this holiness. Most of us, when we hear the word holy, we, we, we run for our lives like scared rabbits. We are afraid of the word. But I want to tell you, whether you run or not, that God demands from you that holiness that he himself exhibits to the world. Be ye holy, he said, for I am holy. And whether we like it or not, and whether we have to look down into our life and eradicate and get rid of things that are there, encumbrances, the sins that dost so easily beset, whatever they may be, great or small, the little foxes even that spoil the vine, that we have to, in our hunger and thirst after God, in our passion for holiness, all these things have to go.
And should we hang on to any of them or one of them, we cannot experience this blessedness and this satisfaction that we have talked about. Now, as it is in the, in our individual lives, so it is in our corporate bodies, in our assemblies. I believe that the early brethren, the early, early brethren, those who founded our movement, that their great motto before God was, um, absolute purity and absolute unity.
That was their two watchwords. How great, how wonderful, how majestic. And may I add something here, and I feel that I must say this, that I believe that some of those, most of those men who founded our unit, our, our assemblies, were some of the most godly men that were alive in the world at that time. They were... men of God, and they knew what it was to hunger and to thirst and to have a passion for purity and unity, and they insisted that in the local corporate body that this should be so.
Why is it that so many of our assemblies today are, are fading out slowly but surely? Doors are being closed over all the North American continent and in Britain. Why? I believe one of the greatest hindrances to aggressive Christian witness and to spiritual growth is unconfessed sin. Whether it is in an individual or whether it is in a local church, unconfessed sin has ruined the testimony of many a local group.
The unfortunate thing today is this, that things have become so complex in our midst in some instances, that the elders are turning a blind eye to sins that are being practiced because some of their own family or intimate friends are involved. And because those things are not being dealt with, stagnation and sterility has set in. And there are many assemblies today who are functioning. They're going through the motions, but there's no spirit in them because of the unconfessed sin that is in their midst.
Now, let me show you something that is very important for each one of us to know and to realize. Israel left Egypt, and let us just say for, for the sake of figures, and there were two million of them. And one day, Aaron and Miriam, the sister, brother and sister of Moses, they began to talk together, and they began to, to decry and deride Moses and said that they could do things that he was doing, and why should he have the preeminence, and they were not being given their place as they thought, and they began to grumble and so on.
And suddenly God came in and smote Miriam with leprosy. She was astounded. She was astonished. And she looked at herself. A leper? Surely not, but yes. And she went to the man that she was decrying, and she said, Moses, plead for me to God, please, that I may be cured of my leprosy. Moses graciously did that, and God came in and cured Miriam. But watch this. That the progress of two million people was impeded for one week because of the sin of one woman.
See that? That's just how serious it is. And I want each of you here this morning, and I have no reason to point fingers. It is a general statement that I'm making. Look into your heart, beloved. You say, oh, our assembly used to be like this, and you think of the wonderful times that you've had in the past, but we don't have these times anymore. There must be a reason. And mark my words, if I'm not correct, that the reason for the sterility and the coldness and the complacency and the insensitivity that has come into so many of our groups is because there's sin in the camp.
Now, having painted that rather bleak picture to you, let, let us go on here and think about this, this hungering and this thirsting. I believe this hunger here, beloved, is a, a hunger that must feed on the Godhead or die. There's just no way that this hunger that the Lord is referring to here can be satisfied unless it is satisfied from the Godhead itself. And this thirst that the Lord mentions here is, is a thirst for divine things that no earthly stream can satisfy.
And so you see that this hunger and this thirst is, is apart from the world, and it is focused upon the Godhead. Now, do you hunger and thirst for God in this way? I want to give you a few examples of men who hungered and thirsted. In Psalm eighty four— don't, don't turn to it, just take a mental note of it and read it. It's a beautiful psalm. The psalmist here says, how amiable are thy dwelling, is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.
That word amiable means how lovely. How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts. And then he goes on to say something like this, my soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Now there's a man who was hungering and thirsting after God. All he wanted, the supreme desire of his life, was to be in the, the dwelling place of God and to feel his presence, and his heart and his soul longed and fainted for the courts of God.
Now that's the kind of hunger and thirst. If we were to go on in that psalm, we would find this, that he envied the birds who had made their nests in the house of God. He just thought that they were there, and they were raising their young there, and they were so close to God that he envied those, those birds who were so close. And thank God for, for those, and I'm afraid that there are few who have a hunger and a thirst like this. Now, David had the same kind of feeling in the twenty seventh Psalm when he said this.
Now, we rush over this verse, but let us take it step by step. David said, one thing have I desired of the Lord. Now, you, you think of this for a moment. Think of David, a great man with many in- interests, with, with wealth and influence to enjoy anything. But he said, the one thing that I desire most is to dwell in the house of the Lord. See, that's hungering and thirsting. Everything just faded into insignificance before the glory of being in the house of the Lord.
And why did David want to be there? Because he wanted to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. And David wanted to pray, and David wanted to worship, as the beauty and the glory of the Lord was revealed to him. Now I want to ask you, how do you come up, or how do you stand in view of God's standard? These people who are hungry and thirsty after God. Now, those that do this are going to be filled.
And what do you think that this really means? They're going to be filled, they're going to be satisfied. Well, here's what I believe that is all entailed in this, that we will be filled with the sense of the indwelling Christ. And finally, and this is, uh, Ephesians chapter four, that we will be filled with the fullness of God. Now, I guarantee you, beloved, that anyone who is filled with the Spirit, who knows of the glorious presence of Christ in their life, and who experiences the, the fullness of God, is a man or a woman who is filled, who is satisfied.
Are you satisfied? Now, the Lord said, I came that you might have eternal life, and that you might have it more abundantly. Isn't it wonderful to know that Christ came to give us eternal life? And I thank God this morning that I have eternal life, and I'm sure you do, you do too. But beloved, it is a tragedy of the first order that there are so many of us in the assemblies today who are satisfied only with eternal life.
And beloved, that's only the beginning. For Jesus said that I not only came to give you eternal life, but I came to give you abundant life. Abundant life. And there are so many, so few of us today who are living on that plateau, that spiritual plateau, where God's blessing is poured out upon us, and we are free from the, the, the hindrances of the flesh and the world and the devil. We are free in the presence of God.
Let me tell you something that's very interesting. You know that verse that we quote so often, and, and it means so little, really, that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there's liberty. You know that quest- that, that verse, don't you? We've heard it since we were in Sunday school. What does it mean? You probably would have a, a problem to try and describe that correctly. Now let me, let me listen carefully now. Let- listen carefully. That where the Spirit is Lord, there is liberty.
You get that? Are you sure you got that? Where the Spirit is Lord, there is liberty. And oh, that we hear very little about the lordship of Christ today, and we hear even less about the lordship of the Spirit today. And that's one of the areas that we are missing out, beloved. And we are being deprived of so much of God's blessing because we do not conform to the standard that he has given us, abundant life.
And I believe that an abundant life is a life where the Spirit is Lord. It is a life that is filled to capacity with the Holy Spirit. Now, have have you have you ever experienced this in your life? And I'm trying to be very practical this morning. There's confusion as to what the filling of the Spirit is among us, and we're afraid. The majority of us are afraid of this, of this phrase.
And when you talk about the filling of the Spirit, they said, oh, it's all right, I've got the Spirit. If you're a believer, thank God you've got the Spirit. You're sealed by the Spirit, and that's for your salvation. But where we go wrong, beloved, is that we do not admit and have never thought it through that not only do we need the Spirit of God to seal our salvation, but we need the power of the Spirit of God in our service. And we can serve, supposedly, and we try to serve without even acknowledging the lordship of the Spirit and the filling of the Spirit in our life.
Now, John chapter three talks about the indwelling of the Spirit, that is, we are born by the Spirit. Now it's beautiful. You know, we owe more to the Holy Spirit, and I'm not going to get into this this morning, but we owe more to the Holy Spirit than we give him credit for. And we've all experienced this, if we're believers, of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But then in John chapter four, we read of the upspringing of the Holy Spirit. And the Lord said to the woman that the water that I will give you shall be in you a well of living water springing up.
I want to challenge you this morning. Have you ever had the experience of the Spirit springing up within you? The living waters springing up? Now, when we're talking about this, we've left the majority behind. They've never risen to this plateau. But that's not the end, because in John chapter seven, Jesus said on the last day of the feast that he that was thirsty to come and, and drink, and he said that that water that he would give him would flow from their inner parts, their inner life, and would flow as streams, as rivers of water.
Not a rivulet, not a creek, not a river, but rivers, plural, of living water. And when we come to that third stage, most of us are left behind completely. We don't know about this. We've never experienced this. And there are some people who tell me you don't live on experiences. I thank God for the experiences that I have with Jesus Christ. I thank God for the experiences in private and in public that I have with the Holy Spirit. I wouldn't be without them. And it gives me that blessedness that the Lord talked about here in being filled, in being satisfied.
You know, there are many today who are being filled. You know, there is a danger, and I want to mention this to you very, very gently, lovingly, that there is the danger that we are so busy dotting our I's and crossing and and crossing our T's, that we are and holding the status quo, that we are depriving ourselves through coming so legalistic, we are depriving ourselves of the moving and the filling of the Spirit in our midst, and beloved, we are allowing men and women around us to go to hell.
That's how I feel. God's looking into my soul, as I have said that this morning, and I didn't intend to say it, but it needs to be said. Someone needs to say it. And why, why is it, why is it, beloved? And oh, how I cry to God for the answer to this question. Why is it that so many little independent groups are coming and establishing themselves around our chapels and flourishing, and God is blessing them? While we ourselves are slowly dying. Why?
Could it be that we know the truth and we're not living up to the truth, we're not obeying the truth, and that these people whom God is blessing today, they don't know all the truth, but they are living up to the truth that they know. And God is acknowledging that and pouring out his blessing and his spirit upon them. While we are stagnating. Oh, that God would help us to, to consider these things. Let me tell you something that has happened just in, in the la- within the last two years.
In fact, it is an ongoing thing, I believe. The little country of Romania, behind the Iron Curtain, I believe that there's about two two million people in that little country, and I believe that there are uh one point two million evangelicals in that little country. You hear that? You know that there are four hundred assemblies in Romania? And here's the shocker. Do you know that there are more as- more believers in the assemblies in Romania than there are in the assemblies in the North American continent?
It's staggering, beloved. Absolutely staggering. And during the last two years, God has opened his hand, and the Holy Spirit has been, has been running through that, that poverty-stricken nation, believers and others living in penury, and the Spirit of God has been running hither and thither, and thousands of people have been swept into the kingdom of God. And listen now till I tell you some of the, the conditions, the physical conditions.
There's practically no meat in Romania. It's all sent out to bring in currency into the country. You cannot get a drink of milk unless it is by a doctor's prescription. The milk that's produced is sent out the country to bring in currency. Bread has to be two days old before it is put on the baker's shelves, to keep people from eating as much. They are not allowed to heat their houses more than forty five degrees in the midst of these Siberian winters that they get in Central Europe.
And they're only allowed to have one naked light with a forty watt bulb burning in their house at one time. You say, but how can people exist? Beloved, the fact is this, that people are existing, and in these circumstances, they are hungering and thirsting after God, and they are being filled, and God is opening his hand and pouring out a blessing that they are hardly able to contain. Praise God for that. And if it takes poverty and penury and persecution to bring us back to him, may he bring it soon, because we need it.
Now, a good question to ask at this time, can, can blessing like this come to the North American continent? And I would say emphatically, no. A thousand times no. And my reason for saying that is this, that we are living in the Laodicean age. And we are like the Laodicean church. And we have become rich and prosperous. Beloved, I was in an assembly just recently, and a few years ago there were nine millionaires in that assembly, now they're five.
We're rich. We're prosperous, we are increased with goods, and that's what the Laodiceans said, and that's what we are saying. And when we get into that s- that unspiritual condition, we shut ourselves off from the blessing of God. And in that condition, we become insensitive. And we don't realize, here, here is the, here is the tragedy. With all the affluence that we have and all the lovely times that we have together, and the busy, busy, busy, busy life that we live.
We don't realize that we are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked in the sight of God. And until we realize this on the North American continent, and until we realize what true repentance is and confession is, I don't believe that God will open his hand among us. Oh, that God would show us our need this morning.
Oh, that God would show us our emptiness. Oh God, show us our emptiness. Until we have realized, beloved, what selflessness is, and what repentance is, and going back to yesterday morning, until we have realized what brokenness is in the sight of God, we'll never experience his blessing, and we shall never be filled, and we shall never be satisfied. I hope I have not been too hard on you this morning.
I have said so many things that were not on schedule at all. Maybe God is speaking to us. And as we have ministered those heavy things, it's accompanied by love. I love you. And it's because I love the Savior that I talk to you like that. For if we would just conform to his image and obey his word. Nothing would give him greater joy than to see his children walk in truth.
Let us pray together. Father, we hardly know what to say to thee this morning. I know that thou hast looked down deep into my soul, and I can feel the searchlight of thy word in my heart right now, and perhaps thou hast also been dealing with some of thy dear people. Lord, we bow humbly before thee, and we would confess to our inadequacies and to our disobedience.
And Lord, we would repent. And we pray thee to come into our life in all thy fullness and give us that happiness and joy and peace that is only to be found in thee. We thank thee this morning for thy long suffering with us and thy patience. We don't deserve the least of thy mercies, but, oh God, if it's possible, if it, if it has not, if it is not too late, if it is possible, lay thy hand on thy children everywhere this morning and bring them back to thee.
And as we part now, we would give to thee, Lord Jesus, our love. We love thee so much. Thou art so precious to us. Thou art that tender plant, that thing of beauty, and we worship thee. And O God our Father, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, so mighty, so awesome. We worship thee too. In the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.