which says, I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I will look to see what he will say to me and what answer I am to give to this complaint. So I'll ask the Lord's help as we look into his word. Father, we thank you that your word is brimming full of ideas. And when we had that long reading, Just now, Lord, we are reminded of the vast amount of history you've given us to think about, about your ways upon the earth, about the way you are in control of nature, you're in control of the amazing powers that happen during storms and earthquakes. But you also, Lord, are in control of all of the conflicts, all of the wars, all of the ceaseless strivings of men for dominion over each other. You're in control of all of these things, O Father. And we praise you during all of the turmoil and difficulties of life. Lord, you can be that security, that strength to each one of us. We thank you for this. But we also thank you, Lord, that we know that you speak to us today. And we pray, Lord, that as we look into your word now, that you are going to speak and encourage us, inspire us from your word to Encourage us to move forward with Jesus in this coming week. And I pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, we have this very long reading which encompasses whole kind of areas of the life of Israel from the past, great miracles of God that He did to release them from the powers of nations round about, their present plight which was that Judah had become an oppressive unjust society where the poor were suffering and God was telling them about the future that the Babylonians were going to come and bring incredible problems and conflicts and turmoil as they conquered towns and led away people captive and as they destroyed the rulers of this oppressive place and unfortunately as we see this present conflict going on in Israel at the moment, seeming innocent bystanders get caught up in it and get killed and get captured. And Habakkuk is in the middle of all of this as a prophet appears to be having conflicting thoughts. You can see, in fact, that the editors of the Bible have chosen to give certain headings. Now, those headings in italics that you'll see on page 1456 onwards, they're not actually in the Bible. They've been added by the editor of the New International Version, or for that matter, most versions have these kind of headings. But you'll see from the headings, it does give us a kind of structure. We see that Habakkuk says he's got a complaint. He's got a problem. He's got a difficulty about the way God is dealing with him and his people. And you'll see the Lord answers it and then we have Havockett's second complaint on page 1457 and various other sayings and it finally ends up with the editor putting in a thing on chapter 3, Havockett's prayer. Now, essentially the prophet has this problem of interpreting what his life is about and what's going on and how God is working in the world. And he seeks an answer and he's a prophet and he's seeking an answer. And in order to find that answer, he has to do what it says in chapter 2, verse 1. I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I will look to see what he will say to me and what answer I am to give to this complaint. In fact, Habakkuk here appears to be indicating that People around him were complaining about the way that God was dealing with Israelite society. And indeed, the word of God that was being revealed from Habakkuk was being objected to by many of the Jewish people. But we see that Habakkuk as a prophet has a solution, has a way of dealing with this problem, which is to stand at my watch, station myself on the ramparts and look to see what he will say to me and what answer I am to give to his complaint. Now I want to look at that situation briefly and then apply it in our own lives. What is the solution? To us in our day-to-day living, for all of the challenges we have in life, the battle of the mind, remember, the big battle that we have as Christians is in our mind. The devil tempts us through our mind. We get discouraged in our mind. We have, you know, yes, we suffer, we have problems, we have difficulties, but it's in our mind and our emotions that actually the battle is taking place. And above all, in our mind affects our emotions. It's the way our mind is thinking that our emotions respond to it. And I want us to see whether or not we can actually apply this in our own daily living. to see if we can. Now, the first thing I want to point out, though, is this, is that the prophets, the great prophets of God, who were used by him to write scripture, evidently had different ways in which revelation came to them. We see Daniel, for instance, seeking God in prayer and fasting. When he had a similar, we might say complaint, I think complaint is the wrong word. He had a similar problem interpreting what was happening to the people of God with all that Daniel sought the Lord in prayer and fasting. And was, you know, from early in the morning to late at night, was seeking God for the answers. And God brought revelation to him. We see that Ezekiel, we're told, was in the Spirit. And indeed, the same kind of word is used, the Greek equivalent, in the book of Revelation when John said he was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. And revelation came to him which he was to write down. We can go through the different Old Testament prophets and see that they have different situations in which they receive revelations. Zechariah, which David was preaching on some months ago now, he had night visions. Dreams, maybe, in the night, or maybe it was just that night, and suddenly these great and marvellous visions of the future came to him. In Habakkuk's place, he talks about watching and stationing himself on the ramparts, looking to see what God will say to me. Now, some people have suggested, very few, but one or two have suggested, well, maybe that's what Habakkuk did, maybe. He actually did go up on the ramparts of a walled city. And that's where he meditated and waited for God to speak to him. Most commentators believe that, in fact, Habakkuk is talking here symbolically. He's talking, you know, figuratively. He's using an analogy. He's saying, I am going to stand at my watch. I am like a watchman. Now, what is it about the watchman standing himself on the ramparts? The watchman is concentrated on one thing, watching and waiting to see and to hear a significant message. The watchman on the city walls used to have to hear the other watchman calling out to him. And, you know, all's well, it's eight o'clock and all's well, and then the watchman would hear that and say, fine, good, and then he'd pass that on, and all round the walls the watchman would pass on the significant message. If one watchman heard another watchman say, the enemy attacks, then in fact that would all go round the ramparts too. the watchman was in a position of concentration and focus upon listening and waiting and looking for a message to come to him or for that matter information to come to him which might obviously he might actually see for himself the enemy coming and Habakkuk says it's the same for a prophet to stand at his watch station himself on the ramparts and look to see what he will say to me now First thing I want to say is this. Those who belong to the Evangelical Church, the Orthodox Evangelical Church, believe that all revelation of God, all scriptural revelation of God, ceased after the book of Revelation. There is no more scripture to be written. Scripture is complete. Now, I don't intend to go into any arguments for the reason why we believe that scripture is complete. We will have Bible studies on that in the future, no doubt, and no doubt in the past you've had Bible studies on that. We're just going to take that for read. Scripture is finished. There is no new revelation to come. But equally well, we also, of course, know that there is today many Christians who claim that there's been a revival of prophecy in a general sense today. Now again, we haven't got the time even to think about going into that in detail. We're convinced by scripture there's to be no new scriptures, as I've said. But we do believe that there is prophetic power in the church, as the Holy Spirit takes of this book and reveals it to us. Now look, there's a significant difference between saying, I have prophetic power, I'm a prophet, and saying, this book has prophetic power. It's a significant difference. Those who claim that there's a gift of prophecy today indeed claim that there are individuals that regularly have messages from God with prophetic power. Well, that's not where... I say, we haven't got time to, you know, we could have a friendly discussion about this. We haven't got time tonight to go into that. But what we can say is this, though. The prophetic power, the life-transforming power of the Word of God still operates today in the Church, and it operates through His amazing book. Those of us who don't believe in there being living prophets today have no need to be ashamed of God. Somehow we're missing something. The Holy Spirit of God has been given to the church to give this book power. And we don't have to somehow think that that makes us inferior because we're not claiming to have some kind of prophetic gift. We have every reason to believe, scripture tells us again and again, we have every reason to believe that this book can speak with prophetic power. It can happen without prophets, as indeed, God can do many mighty miracles today, but he doesn't need miracle workers. And indeed, we can have, you know, we can have fantastic works of God without apostles. because God sovereignly works as he wills and is not confined to what human beings think he needs to be confined to. When it says in the book of Thessalonians that the word of God came to the Thessalonians with power and with the Holy Spirit and with full assurance, we should be praying for that to be happening in our churches and in every church. We should be seeking God. Nights of prayer, yes, I believe so. Days of prayer, yes. seeking God in prayer and fasting. Yes, for the power of God through the preaching of this amazing book, which is the Word of God. Scripture can come to us with life transforming power, Pentecostal power. When there have been revivals in countries throughout the world, There has been Pentecostal power. There has been a work of the Spirit in bringing not just ones and twos sometimes, ones and twos in power, sometimes hundreds, thousands to Christ through the power of the preaching from this book. Now, why am I saying this in reference to this verse? Well, because I believe that this verse has application Not just to prophets, it obviously had application to Habakkuk two and a half thousand years ago and to the other prophets that they had a responsibility to be in a position where God could reveal new truth to them and cause scripture to be actually revealed so they could write it down. In fact, even in the passage, 2 verse 2, that's exactly the situation. The Lord replied, write down the revelation, make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. That was their responsibility in those days. But I also believe that God can reveal himself, will indeed not can, does and wants to reveal himself to every common or garden Christian, whether they're a day old as a Christian or 50 years old as a Christian, he wants to reveal himself to us in life transforming power on a regular basis. And we need to do exactly the same kind of thing that Habakkuk was doing. Stand at our watch, station ourselves on the ramparts and look to see what he will say to us. Now I want you to notice that Habakkuk's image or the Lord's image that the Lord gave to Habakkuk, as the Spirit guided him, is a military one. You only have to have a watchman because a city is in danger of military attack. And we were talking earlier about the fact that we are surrounded by a host of spiritual enemies. We are in a constant spiritual battle. And this is the first thing that each one of us needs to understand. The devil wants to stop us listening to the Word of God. You may remember that a demon-possessed man raised a commotion in the synagogue when Jesus was preaching. And that is typical of what the devil does in our day-to-day life. How often it is that, you know, we're thinking, oh, I must start the day with a, you know, have just a short time of prayer, and then something happens. Or we ourselves, we turn on the radio, and there's a really interesting bit of news item. Oh, I'll just listen to that for five minutes. It becomes ten, and then we've got to go out into the world, get to our jobs, and we haven't listened to the Word of God. The devil will always raise a commotion to prevent Christians at the most simple level of listening to the word of God, as indeed the devil also causes us as believers to get bored with preaching, not bother to come to meetings because we've got this, that or the other. Habakkuk tells us we need to understand we are in a situation of a spiritual battle. I will stand at my watch. I will put myself in a situation where I am not going to let other trivial things take the place of the Word of God. I will listen to what God has to say to me. And I want you to notice also the Bible tells us clearly that we as Christians are to be dedicated to reading the whole of the Bible. I'll say that again. The whole of the Bible is our inheritance and our responsibility to read as Christians. Where does it say that? Is that in the book of Hezekiah? Well, there is no book of Hezekiah. No, of course it's not. But I tell you where I think I find it. I find it in the book of Matthew. Because in the book of Matthew, Jesus said, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Now we need daily physical bread every day. We need daily physical food if we are to be healthy. We need daily spiritual bread. That is what Jesus is saying. We can't live on bread alone, but we need the Word. Every day we need bread. Jesus said we have to pray for our daily bread. Pray, you know, part of the Lord's prayer. And every day we need the Word of God. And furthermore, every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God is what we live on. Now, spiritual bread isn't just doctrine. I'm not just suggesting that somehow if you get to, you know, you might sign up for a Bible reading plan and read through the whole of the Bible in three years. Well, you can do that, but you could go three years without ever actually getting any spiritual benefit at all from it, because you're reading the Bible just as a book, just as an interesting book. It also may be the fact that parts, many parts of the Bible are difficult to understand to begin with as a young Christian. And even as older Christians, there are parts that we don't quite understand. So, listening to the Word of God isn't just reading, isn't just an intellectual process. It says in 1 Peter 2, verse 1, Therefore putting aside all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander, like newborn babies long for pure milk of the Word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you've tasted the kindness of the Lord. Now notice, like newborn babies, longing for the pure milk of the word. Peter is implying that in the word of God there is all that is needed for growth in respect to salvation. Because he says, long for it, so by it you may grow in respect to salvation. And we need to be seeking that spiritual milk for our souls, not just not just furniture for the mind, not just that we know the books of the Bible off by heart or we know the battles of the Bible or we know lots and lots of facts, but actually each day we are having something from the Lord which will direct our lives, help us to love Him more, help us to serve Him better, more intelligently live out our day-to-day lives with practical wisdom. And we should be actually making it our aim, indeed, to live on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Not just our favourite book, not just our favourite part of the New Testament, but seek indeed to go through all of the Word of God and allow the Bible to speak to us. Now, I want you to notice second is this. This sounds very super-duper, super-spiritual, doesn't it? Whoa! Yeah, I can imagine it. Hour in the morning reading the Bible. Hour of prayer. Luther said he had so much to do in his life, he needed three hours of prayer in the morning before going to work. That sounds great and we often quote it, but actually in practice, many of us, and me as well, looking back on the past five years of my life, there have been many times where I could have done with five minutes, not three hours. Five minutes in the presence of God. It sounds super spiritual, but look, when Peter says, like newborn babies long for the pure milk of the word, are we allowed to press his analogy? I think we are. How long does a baby feed for? It's not long, is it? What a baby does, it feeds often. It's not so much that it's feeding for two hours at a time, but it feeds regularly and then it's satisfied, not interested with the bottle. Then when it's hungry again it starts to cry perhaps and you know it's hungry and then you feed it again. Now to me this is a picture of really what we need to be as Christians. We're not going to get in our minds this picture that, oh this is super spiritual, having to wait upon God at the beginning of the day is something I couldn't possibly do. No, not at all. There is a leaflet. I've actually printed it. I remember getting it myself years ago. I printed a 20-year-old letter this month for everybody here, called Seven Minutes with God. I was talking about this with Ginny and Jennifer actually last week, and I was really pleased to see that it's on the internet for free to print it off. Now, this idea is something that goes back 60, 70 years, and it basically is a method for each day presenting yourself before God, not for three hours, just for seven minutes. And in that seven minutes, we listen to the word of God. We have a daily Bible reading from wherever it comes from. Might be from a might even be daily light that some people use, or it might be a Bible reading system that takes you through the whole of the Bible in three or five years. But in that seven minutes. You have You have simply a prayer where you seek the Lord in prayer, you read the Bible and think about it for four minutes, and then you have two and a half minutes of prayer, which includes adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and praying for things, supplication. Seven minutes. Now, seven minutes isn't much. But seven minutes every day for a new Christian can be transforming. And actually, you know, seven minutes with God, or ten minutes, or fifteen, however you want to stretch it to, if regularly taking place in our life, can be transforming however old we are as Christians. Now why am I emphasizing this? Because you've known me for years, we'll know that I regularly talk about quiet times. But you just have to say that we know that this is the key to actually Having the start of a fruitful Christian life. So it's the key to the whole vigorous life, but it's the start off. It is the start off. And many Christians have never established that. That system where they stand at watch, station themselves on the ramparts and look and see what He will say to me. And what He will do to answer problems and the intercessions that we bring before God. And I want to really, I've got enough probably for most people, 20 people I think probably here, and I'll get more printed next week, but I really would suggest to you that we must take this seriously. Whenever questionnaires are taken of masses of Christians, it's always found, unfortunately, that a very small percentage have a regular time of prayer every day with the Lord. Now, of course, seven minutes doesn't sound very much. And of course, what happens is that as your spiritual appetites get bigger and bigger, just like a baby, you have bigger and bigger meals. But it's a natural thing. It's not you're being forced into spending time with the Lord, but you get a bigger and bigger appetite to have more time with Him. Now, I want to just think about, just to finish, a few things. about Habakkuk when he says, I'll stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I found it very interesting to read Matthew Henry on these verses because he takes a very similar line to the one I'm taking and he says this, he says, the prophet standing upon his tower or high place intimates his wisdom in making use of the helps and means he had within his reach to know the mind of God. Now those that expect to hear from God, that is just Promenade Garden Christians like me and you, firstly, we need to withdraw from the world and get above it. Jesus said, when you pray, go into a room alone, shut the door and pray to God in secret. Now that is the basis of focusing. focusing on the Lord in the inner room, the place where you can shut the door and get alone with God. Now, when I used to live out in the suburbs many a moon ago, I used to have just a five minute drive or so out into the countryside and I had the most beautiful place where I just used to sit and read the Bible and pray. It was absolutely gorgeous in a summer day like this, you know. in a valley, you literally, you'd walk just a hundred meters away from the road and you'd be in a valley, it was deserted, no people at all, just animals, the sun setting, beautiful. The whole mind, you know, kind of relaxed and yet at the same time, because you knew you were coming to read the Word of God and pray, it's a delightful setting in which to actually, to actually meet God. I used to call it a site for sore eyes because, in fact, I used to go when I first came up to the East End in the 70s. I used to go back from weekend, from time to time, and that's where I used to go to pray. And it was just a sight for sore eyes to be away from the ugliness of the roads and the buildings and the tarmac and all the clutter and ugliness. It's much nicer now here, actually, to be fair. In the East End it was 40 years ago. But it was lovely to get away from the countryside. And it was a sight for sore eyes in the sense of, you know, physically refreshing to look at the green and the lovely valleys and everything. But spiritually, we have a sight for sore eyes when we get alone with God, wherever it is, whether it's out in a beautiful bit of scenery or whether it's in our inner room. We need to withdraw from the world. Jesus said, Seek the Lord in secret and He will reward you. That is the promise of the Word of God. That the person who seeks God, who decides, I am going to stand at my watch, station myself on the ramparts, God is going to reward him in secret. He is going to reward her in secret. And she will see, he will hear wonderful things from God. The second thing that Matthew Henry says is we must raise our attention and fix our thoughts. We must have the attitude of someone like an Olympic shooter. We don't expect someone who's about to shoot, you know, in the Olympic Games to be kind of so relaxed and sleepy and they're just going. They're not at all. The adrenaline is working. They're fully awake. They're waiting to hear what God is going to say and they're going to respond to it wholeheartedly in prayer. That is what the Lord wants from us in our quiet times. In seven minutes of a quiet time, we can have more quality time with God than half an hour or two hours of just vaguely waltzing around, you know, by vaguely going through the Bible but not really concentrating on what the Lord says. So setting ourselves upon the ramparts or upon the tower, as Matthew Henry says, is incredibly important. The next thing I want to know is this. is that it is important. It is important to meditate upon scriptures. Now, Psalm 77, which you don't need to turn up, but Psalm 77 talks about the Psalmist in a similar situation to Habakkuk. He's worried about the fact of evil in the world and being in distress. He talks about verse 7 of Psalm 77. Will the Lord reject forever? Will He never show us favor again? Has His unfailing love vanished forever? But then he also reminds us in verse 5, I thought about the former days, the years of long ago, I remembered my songs in the night, my heart mused and my spirit inquired. And he talks in Psalm 77 and elaborates and develops the idea of meditation upon the word of God. Now this of course means Sometimes, obviously, we're going to go beyond seven minutes as the Lord leads us into deeper meditation. As we are able to concentrate upon the word, the Lord reveals more and more and helps us to understand more and more. Now, the psalmist had the advantage, indeed, of having memorized scripture. The Hebrews, of course, didn't have many books. They were scrolls written and deposited in the temple in the first instance. And when synagogues started to be built, in the synagogue, in the arcs in synagogue, the cupboards, the wooden cupboards in synagogues, they didn't actually have scriptures. They had to learn them. We have the fantastic ability to take out a Bible and read it and then read it again and think about it, mull it over, see how it applies to our life. As it says in Psalm 77 verse 11, I shall remember the deeds of the Lord. Surely I will remember your wonders of old. I'll meditate on all your work and muse on your deeds. Now, that process of meditation. continues after we've had our time with the Lord. 7 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, however it is. Because as we're on our way to work in our car, or as we're standing at the bus stop, or as we're on the train, or as we've got a few minutes during the day when, you know, we've just got a break for a couple of minutes, have a cup of tea, we can think back to what the Lord spoke to us about in the morning. And we can muse and meditate and put it over in our minds and maybe jot that down something in our diary. a prayer to the Lord about someone or something that that particular verse applies to. I'll muse on it, I'll think about it, I'll tease out more meaning from it, like a honey bee sucking as much nectar from the flower as he can. So the Christian should take the Word of God that God speaks each day, those individual verses or phrases that we've been meditating upon, and we should be trying to take more and more out from Scripture from it. We have, therefore, a process by which we hear the word of the Lord, we meditate upon it, and, of course, we seek to put it into action. We seek to put it into action if, of course, there's a practical side to it. I'll stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I will look to see what he will say to me. And what answer I am to give to this complaint? Now, that was a very practical thing. Habakkuk needed to give an answer to those people who were questioning him about the way God was dealing with Israel. In our own lives, we do have, from day to day, we have situations where we need wisdom. We have a problem amongst the family, you know perhaps there's been a bit of an upset between brothers and sisters or relatives and we need wisdom to be able to bring peace and reconciliation into those situations. We have problems at work where we may feel we've got to say something to someone that isn't doing their job properly, but we don't want to discourage them or make them feel bad. We don't want to actually cause them resentment. We do want to get on with them in future. We need the Lord's help and we pray and we seek His help from the Word how to deal with that situation. So, We have a situation where the Word of God has the power to speak to us day by day as we enter into God's presence. Now may the Lord help us to see the importance of this in practice. May the Lord help every one of us here who are Christians who really know the Lord to actually spend time with Him and seek Him and seek His Word each day. But I want to finish by two minutes by talking to someone here that may actually not yet have ever received Christ. May never really have ever heard the Word of God speak to them clearly. And that may never have read the Bible. And maybe there's one or two people here that I've been talking almost in riddles, talking about hearing the Word of God. Talking as though we're talking about some kind of vague mythology. Now I want you to notice that the Bible claims to be a revelation not only of the mind of God, which we are to read and to understand, but above all is a revelation of the action of God. Because the God who revealed himself to the prophets And they wrote down in physical, originally they were written down on clay tablets in Hebrew times. And then they started to write on a form of paper. But the revelation of God that was firstly revealed on paper and on clay tablets, the Bible tells us this revelation took on flesh. That God took on a human body. and didn't merely speak through prophets, but was a living person, lived amongst us, full of grace and truth. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the ultimate way God speaks to us. And Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead in order to provide us with forgiveness and with new life. Now, if you're not a Christian, I'm not asking you to spend seven minutes with God each day. I do think it's a good idea for you to start to seek God, to cry out to God, to help you. It says in the Bible that if you seek me, you will find me if you cry out to me with all your heart, if you seek me with all of your heart. And the Bible says that those who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Those who call out to God for salvation will be saved. But I'm not asking you to get involved in a long program of Bible reading. I'm calling you tonight to come to Jesus who is alive now. and receive Him as your Savior. I'm not asking you to receive a revelation. I'm asking you to receive the King of the Universe who died on the cross, who now at this moment has wounds in His hands and side, evidencing His love for this dark world. And I'm calling you to trust Him and to turn away from a life lived without Him. Let's close in a word of prayer. Oh, Father in heaven, we praise you and thank you for the wonderful way in which we as foolish, weak human beings each day can hear the Word of God. And we can hear it through our own personal Bible reading. We can hear it when we have Bible studies and we share together, when we hear preaching, when we read a Christian book. We thank you, Lord, in all these different ways you apply the Word of God, the revelation of God to our lives. Thank you for this. And we would pray, Lord, that you will help every one of us here to seek you and find you early in the morning through the day, lasting at night, Lord. We pray that you will help us, Lord, not to just buckle under the weight of the world, its lazy ways, its casual ways, but Lord, we may rather have a fervent spirit seeking you And Lord, we praise you, we thank you for all the riches you've brought into our lives and all those riches you will bring into our lives day by day in this coming week as we seek you. We thank you for this in Jesus' name. Amen.