Now you will find the reading in 2 Timothy chapter 3 and reading into chapter 4. 2 Timothy 3 beginning at verse 10 and reading on into chapter 4. 2 Timothy 3 verse 10. But thou hast fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, long-suffering, charity, patience, persecutions, afflictions which came unto me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra, what persecutions I endured. But out of them all the Lord delivered me. Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them, and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation. through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, truly furnished unto all good works. I charge thee, therefore, before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word, be instant, in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry, For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day, and not to me only, but unto all them also. that love his appearing. May the Lord add his gracious blessing to that reading from his own holy word. It is a very great honour and privilege which has been afforded me of being invited by Mr Silversides and the local branch of the Trinitarian Bible Society to address you at this meeting here this evening. It is a pleasure to see the faces of familiar friends and always indeed an honour to come to this province where there are so many serious Christian people who love the Word of God. I will say a word or two, if I may, about the Trinitarian Bibles. I think you would agree with me when I say that there's one virtue out of many that is worth mentioning about a Trinitarian Bible. It looks like a Bible. There are some Bibles that you can purchase in some places and without being disrespectful they seem to introduce a Mickey Mouse element. I don't think really serious Christians are impressed by that kind of imagery. We need a Bible that reflects in its very appearance and presentation what it is, the honest, true word of God. And I think as a visiting speaker I would like to say so much in commendation of their Bibles Those of you who read Greek will know perhaps that there is an excellent Greek New Testament done in very fine, clear Greek print. If you haven't got one of those, I do commend them to you. And then those who like to carry a Bible with them in their pocket, which is an excellent practice, There is a slim New Testament, very beautifully done in leather, and a slim whole Bible, I'm told, though I haven't seen that, I don't think for myself. All of these things are very well worth knowing about. Well, as you see, the subject this evening that I have said before you is that of Revival, or the Word of God and Revival. And I beg to look at a text of scripture in the Old Testament, Isaiah 57 and at verse 15. Isaiah 57 and verse 15. For thus saith the High and Lofty One, that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy. I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. The first point of teaching that we are confronted with in this text in Isaiah is this. It is the fact that God is a speaking God. Thus saith the Lord. The God with whom you and I have to do and will have to do in eternity is a God who speaks to man. No doubt it is for that reason that he made man in his own image and in his own likeness. He gave us the power to understand what he means. And all through scripture we see that God has been speaking to man. We are told that our first father Adam walked with God in the cool of the day. What was he doing? He was listening to the voice of God in that paradise before sin entered. His Maker was instructing him in wisdom and in duty. When sin entered, God spoke still. He spoke of the coming of the Messiah, the Saviour, one who would bruise a serpent's head and crush him underfoot. The blessed Jesus Christ, our Lord, received his immediate intimation of his coming as we were hearing in prayer from the Chairman this evening. And God has been speaking all throughout the centuries of mankind's history. When the flood was about to come, God did not deluge the world without first of all intimating to Noah what he must do and how he must act. And to Abraham and all the patriarchs, this same speaking God called them to himself. and summoned them out of the world, and appeared to them in visions, and gave them verbal revelations of himself and of their duty and respect of himself. When we come down to the days of Moses, we have an added privilege. Not only is God now speaking, but in the days of Moses, he is writing down the words that are spoken. We have the beginnings of what we now call the Old Testament Scriptures. This God who has been speaking from the beginning now insists that his voice be recorded on paper in a manner which can be preserved for posterity. And as Moses wrote the scriptures down, he was conscious of an overriding hand of providence, a special peculiar influence upon his mind, even upon his hand, so that the things he wrote, he wrote at the very dictation and insistence of God. This was true for all the Old Testament books, the prophets likewise, the psalmists, Solomon with the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the other books, until the coming of Christ himself. And at that point we have God incarnate speaking, what is Jesus Christ, but God himself in our nature, appearing and speaking with men. And the view that Jesus Christ has of the Scriptures is normative for believers. Thank God we're not left to our own wit and wisdom to try to work out what our attitude to the Bible should be. If we were left to our own wisdom then we would be in a perilous condition. But the God who has been speaking from the beginning to mankind and then has inscripturated his words in Holy Scripture in the person of Christ shows us what our attitude as men and women should be to those scriptures. His attitude must needs be our attitude because he is the perfect man. He is the pattern man. He is of course much more than that. He is the saviour of the world, the Lord from heaven and the Lord of glory. But he is also our pattern and example in life and in his attitude to everything upon which he speaks, and he speaks repeatedly and frequently concerning his attitude to Scripture and that which therefore must be our attitude to Scripture. What does our Lord Jesus Christ say? Well, he tells us that heaven and earth will pass away, but the Word of God will not pass away. He informs us that the scripture cannot be broken, which must mean in all intelligent understanding of those words that scripture is both infallible and inerrant. If it cannot be broken, then it is inerrant. And then our Lord Jesus Christ shows us how to use the scriptures in confronting the devil, as he does, on one notable occasion, he doesn't enter into debate or argument or discussion, he doesn't entertain points of view or aspects of the truth from this position and that. All he does is says, it is written, it is written, it is written, get thee behind me Satan, it is written. And that is an end of all controversy in the mind of Jesus Christ. If all of that is not enough, we see Christ saying to his disciples that they are to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees. What can he mean? Well, the leaven of the Pharisees is the tendency in the Church, and in it all, to wish to add something of our own to the Bible. The Jews were people who had the Old Testament scriptures, of course, But they always had this tendency to want to add something of their own to the scriptures. What was that? Well, principally it was their tradition received verbally from their forefathers in the form of an oral tradition. And the Pharisees added to Scripture. They wanted to have the Bible, they said they believed in the Bible, but they always interpreted the Bible also in the light of their oral tradition, their verbal tradition from their forefathers. With the consequence, of course, that in many respects the Scriptures were contradicted by their tradition and nullified and made void by them. And that tradition and temptation has been in the Christian church from that day to this, and it will be to the end. And we know very well what our Saviour's attitude to that temptation is. We must not add anything to the Scriptures. They are perfect, they are complete, they are inspired, as we saw in the reading of 2 Timothy 3, 16, given by inspiration of God, which means that they are God-breathed, and nothing is required to be added to them. They are a perfect rule for belief and for practice. Then our Lord explains to us concerning the leaven of the sadducees. That is a very opposite tendency. It is another temptation which we all face in church life and in the Christian life and that is to take something away from the scriptures. The Sadducees did not accept the Old Testament canon of 39 books as we have it, they only accepted really the five books of Moses. And so they were nullifying the authority of those other books from Joshua to Malachi. And, of course, both these tendencies have been in the Christian Church. In the Middle Ages, the tremendous temptation was to add and add and add and add more and more to the scriptures. I have to say that it is still the official position of the Roman Catholic Church, as you will know. Their recent catechism, written in the early 1990s, and with full imprimatur of the the papacy and the magisterium of the Roman Church affirms without any hesitation that God's word consists of sacred scripture and sacred tradition. And they really are doing exactly what the Pharisees were doing in the days of our Lord's life on earth. They were adding to the rule. Whereas on the other hand, within Protestantism, the same tendency is reflected in respect to the Sadducees. It is to cut short the rule. And sadly, this is what has left our churches and our country in the fearful condition that you and I know very well that they're in. It is not simply the adding to the Word of God, but also the subtraction from the Word of God. and we refer to the influences that have done that as higher criticism and liberalism and voltmanism and modernism, but they have done fearful damage. That is the way our Lord looks at the scriptures. They cannot be broken. Heaven and earth will pass away, but these will never pass away. Not a jot or a tittle shall pass from the law till all things are fulfilled. And when we come to the writings of the apostles, we see that our Lord's attitude to scripture is 100% endorsed. When they quote the scriptures, as they do in Romans and Galatians and Hebrews and many other passages of the New Testament, They do not qualify it in any way by suggesting that these scriptures are now in some respect deficient, insufficient, or faulty, or fallible. When they quote the word of God, as they do continually, they do so as quoting the very oracle of God. And in certain places they even define for us the theological position that they took up in respect of these scriptures. The very passage we read is very clear, all scripture is given by inspiration of God, 2 Timothy 3.16, words which will be very familiar to us all, but would God they were familiar to the people in our churches everywhere today. It's not that God has allowed men to write the scriptures, and then breathe into them some quality to make them inspired. It's not that they excel as literature in the sense that Milton and Shakespeare and others excel in their powers of literary expression. Indeed the Bible does excel. as literature, and it is superlatively great literature, which even from a literary point of view cannot be ignored by children in school, even supposing there was nothing more than the literary benefit, the Bible should be one of the prime books studied for its own sake. But of course, we are not here as literary students, we are here because we believe this book is the very word of God. And when Paul tells us that the Bible is given by inspiration of God, It is equivalent to saying that God, through his two lips, has breathed out this message. As an old, quaint Puritan put it, the Old and New Testaments are the two lips of God, whereby he speaks the message of truth to the world. And if that's not enough, then the Apostle Peter endorses exactly the same theological view of the Scriptures by telling us this, that the prophecy of scripture came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And it's very interesting that the word moved in that passage in 2 Timothy 1 at the end, the word moved there doesn't mean that you push it this way and that way, it means to be carried In other words, the writers of scripture, according to the teaching of Peter, were, in a certain way of speaking, being carried as they were writing the Bible books. That is another way of telling us that the degree of divine control over their minds and over their hands, as they wrote, was total. They were completely under the control and the influence, the guidance, the superintendence of God himself. So precious are these books, so sublimely important for the world. But God didn't allow these clever and wonderful Christian men like the apostles to do it themselves. They were carried along, they were being given extraordinary, unique, phenomenal divine assistance, so that what they wrote did not come by human interpretation, but came from the very mind of God himself. And the Apostle John, you remember, says the same thing in words which are chilling and fearful. If any man shall add To the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall add to him the plagues written in the book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the prophecy of this book, God shall take away his name out of the book of life. That is the philosophy, if you will. That is the attitude of these apostolic men to what you and I today call the Bible, the Word of God, which is determinative of everything that matters in life. Now that's not the view of many scholars and the scriptures have been deliberately and constantly undermined over the last hundred and so many years in Britain and Germany especially and also other places of course. They've been undermined by various theories Let me just mention one or two quickly in passing. The first of these theories is what we call higher criticism. That is to say, the idea came in to Scotland, it came in from Germany I have to say with sorrow. It came into Scotland and it's come into Ireland and England and America. The idea has come in that the Bible cannot be said to be the word of God, The Bible, it was said, simply contains the Word of God. You can't identify Bible and Word of God, they said, these higher critics. But you dare say this, the Bible contains the Word of God. I think the illustration we're looking for is that of a tub of sawdust. Like a child's game at a party, you have the tub and the sawdust and before the children come in you put a pound coin somewhere in it and a bar of chocolate and a few other good things mixed in among the sawdust and when the moment comes when they're having their games, they all queue up and of course one child comes and puts his hand in, nothing but sawdust. and the next two the same, and then comes a fourth one, and ah, he gets the pound coin, somebody gets the chocolate. Now that's the philosophical view which these higher critics had of the Bible, and the effect of that was they emptied the churches. Of course they did. No intelligent man or woman is going to listen to the preaching of the Bible if the Bible contains at least 50% of sawdust. They might as well stay at home. And that's what the world did. That's why England, where I come from, is a nation of mouldering churches and crumbling church buildings. Scotland has become the same. Edinburgh, which used to be the Calvinist capital of the world, the AIDS capital of Europe, and the drugs capital probably too, and everywhere beautiful spires and they're turned over to warehouses and the like. There's no question as to how that happened, it wasn't an accident. It was that the people voted with their feet, and you and I must realise the answer to all our problems for life and death and eternity is we must get back to the Biblical view of the Bible, Christ's view of the Bible. But wait a minute, that's not the end of it. These higher critics weirded the people, but there was still a lot coming to church. And then in the 1920s, another view became common. It was known as Bartianism. Karl Barth, B-A-R-T-H, In Switzerland, a very brilliant and able man developed a new idea. The world was tired of that old liberalism and higher critical attitude to the Bible, so this new theory came in. What is this? Well, Bartianism taught that the Bible cannot be said to be the Word of God, but the Bible becomes the Word of God. in certain circumstances. Let me explain. You're reading a chapter of the Bible, let us say, and much of it, to use the modern idiom, doesn't turn you on. But wait a minute, if you come to verse 26, suddenly your heart is strangely warmed, as John Wesley said. Something has touched you. Now, said Karl Barth, what has happened is that the Bible there has become the Word of God for you. You mustn't say the Bible is the Word of God, because those first twenty-odd verses that you were reading didn't touch you in any personal or emotional sense. It was only the twenty-fifth verse that touched you. So the other verses were not for you the Word of God, but that twenty-fifth verse became the Word of God. It was a crisis experience. God spoke. What's the illustration we're looking for here to make this a bit clearer? I think it's the picture of an electric light. There's the light. Well, if you switch it off, it goes down. Press again the switch, and lo and behold, it's bright. And this is the Bartian view of the Bible. It's not lit up for us until God does that wonderful dynamic thing in a personal way. He makes it real to you. That's when it becomes the Word of God. But that's only liberalism in a different form. How can we trust a Bible when we never know the moment or the day, when God may see fit to make it bright in our experience? Carbart confused two utterly different things. He was confusing revelation with illumination. The difference is this, that revelation is what God has said. and deposited that in this book. Illumination is an action of God's Spirit within the mind whereby he opens our eyes to see the preciousness and the power of his word. So Karl Barth was no help either. It's a very great tragedy that when the 1920s came, I'm afraid some of the reformed men Even in our good pre-church of Scotland, they were Orthodox men, they were in tears, they thought this is a great revival, a wonderful change has come upon the world. Here's this new man, Karl Barth, he's praising the Bible, we're back to the Reformation standard. But it was a will-o'-the-wisp, it was a mirage, it wasn't what they thought. Their judgement was premature and they were bitterly disappointed as you can see. But then, of course, that wore off and so something else came along. A man called Rudolf Bultmann. Another very brilliant man. But what does Bultmann's idea about the Bible? Well, it's this. That the... especially the New Testament consists not of a record of what really happened in actual fact and in genuine history. No, no, not that. What the New Testament Gospels and other parts of Scripture give us is the Church's reflections on the person of Jesus Christ and the Church's interpretation of what Jesus Christ was and what he did and what he said. And the Church edited the facts. Now, don't misunderstand me, says Balthianism, says Bultmanism, Of course the New Testament writers thought that Jesus had a virgin birth. Of course they thought he did miracles. Of course they thought he rose from the dead. But all those things were not part of real history, you understand. That was holy history. That's the history which was in their imaginations. But they were so impressed by Jesus Christ that they supposed that all these things were really true. But you and I know better. We have to get rid of these accretions which the early church's imagination imposed and superimposed on the facts. We have to edit out these myths and get to the core of truth. What's the illustration here? Well, it's some citrus fruit with thick peel. You peel off the peel, you don't eat the peel, you get rid of the peel and the pips and maybe the core, and the bit that's left you can safely eat. That's the Bible. you demythologise it, you get rid of these supernatural additions which are really no part of history. Now friends, how did it come about that these various theories of the scriptures gained such ground in the world and in the Church? Well, I'll tell you what my view is. I wonder if you've heard of a scholar who was a Bultman expert called Etta Linnemann. Now Etta Linnemann, as I say, was a scholar in a German university, and this would be now about, I suppose, thirty years ago. She was a great authority in Bultman technique. She was lecturing her students in one of the German universities, I think it was Philips University, but I wouldn't be too sure about that. What she did was this, she was training the scholars who were under her to apply this Bultman technique, what to excise and what to remove, and to do the radical surgery, cut out this and take out that. And she was doing this in her books, she wrote a number of books, books about Bultman techniques and Bultman methodology and all the rest of it. And she was really quite famous, very important, renowned, honoured, a scholar, a brilliant person. And then something happened to her. She was converted to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is literal history, I'm not making this up by the way, this is true. And this is what H. L. Linneman did when she was brought to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, as a true evangelical now, She came before her class and she said something like this, Do you have any of my books? She said, If you do, I ask you to burn them. All my books, she said, are worthless, because I didn't know the Bible is the word of God. And she told us everything there. Scholars may be very clever, but no man can understand the scriptures until he is born again. we need to be regenerated. If we don't have the Holy Spirit, we know nothing. Do you remember the passage in Luke 24 when the two on the road to Emmaus were with Christ and he was talking to them and their hearts were getting warmed along the way? Then opened he their eyes and they understood. Until our eyes are opened, we don't understand. We don't understand anything before we're converted. Even when we're converted we have a lot to learn. And what do we have to learn? Well we have to learn what the scriptures mean. I remember when I started to read John Calvin's Institute as a very young Christian, when they came out in the edition of James Clark and Company from I think London, and they were being sold new, two volumes at thirty shillings. If you can remember what a shilling was, well that's what the price of these two books were. and I tossed up as a young Christian, was it a good use of money to spend a whole thirty shillings on these two volumes of Calvinism. Eventually I bought them and I began to read Calvin's teaching from the scriptures and telling you it was an absolute intellectual earthquake. I was never the same after. I cried, I wept when I read about the character of The God whom he represented I'd never seen. I'd never seen a fraction in my Bible of what that man had seen. I hadn't understood a tithe of what God was saying to me in his word. And you see he was a man profoundly illuminated and able therefore to bring treasures which we'd never seen before from the word of God. That's why I refer really to this verse in Isaiah 57, verse 15. Thus saith the high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a humble and contrite spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. All that I have said, really, is right here. Three things I draw to your attention from this verse. And the first one is, let us notice, my friends, the biblical presentation of the being and the character of God himself, the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy. we must get back to that view of God. Ninety percent of the troubles in the church arise from shallow views of God, don't they? They do in my experience. All this shallow worship. People rolling about in the aisle, barking like a dog, laughing like a hyena. Somebody else speaking in some tongue which is never understood by man or angel. And what's gone wrong? Well, it's this fact. The fact that people have forgotten the awe, the respect, the reverence due to God, his being, his person. God is of infinite substance, he fills heaven and earth, he transcends heaven and earth. Holy persons of Father, Son and Spirit, who can understand that? The Father ever begetting the Son. The Son ever begotten of the Father. The Spirit ever proceeding from the Father and from the Son. My friends, we are confronted with sublime, absolute mystery. The wonder of heaven will be to enter into a little more understanding of this. But this is the God who is presented to us. He is high above all. He sits upon the circle of the earth, we are told, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers. Doesn't he put everything in its place? Little politicians trying to do everything in their own strength, financiers, business people, they are but ants crawling about upon the face of the earth in the sight of a great God. Well now, this exalted view of God is where the Bible continually brings us to. Whenever we're afraid, it reminds us of God. Who art thou that thou art afraid of a man, says the Bible. Cease ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils. Where is it to be accounted of? Christ says the same. Fear not him who can destroy the body and then do no more. I'll tell you who to be afraid of. Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. That, of course, is God. And our whole Christian life is transformed as soon as we have this vision of the majesty and sovereignty of God, the High and Lofty One. What's meant by that? Well, I could put it like this. You remember how Paul in 2 Corinthians, I think chapter 12, speaks about being lifted up to the third heaven? Not the seventh heaven, there's no such thing in Scripture, that's an invention of men, but the third heaven. And Paul went up and up and up, whether in the body he didn't know, whether in the soul he didn't know, but he went up to the third heaven. And there he said he saw unutterable things, unspeakable privileges in the third heaven. And when he came back to this world, he was forbidden to preach them. They were too close to the secrets of God. We are not to know them in this life, but we will know them in another life, doubtless. The third heaven. What is the third heaven? Well, I think it's this. The first heaven is where the clouds are. Well, we can all easily get there these days, we have aeroplanes. But then the second heaven is the stars and the planets. You can't so readily get there, but they are inventing machines called spacecraft, and they're trying their best to get there, and you might get fairly close to some of those, although you may not live long enough to come back and report on the subject, but it's a vast universe. But that's only the second heavens, as far as your eye can see. With a telescope, that's all you can see to the utmost of the second heavens. But there's another heavens beyond it. What's that? the place where the very presence of God is visible, where he sits upon his throne enthroned in unspeakable majesty, adored by angels and archangels, prostrating themselves before him, crying, holy, holy, holiest the Lord of hosts. Now that's the third end, and that's where believers will be in the end of their earthly journey, if they persevere to the end through this dangerous and evil world. And that's the God who speaks in scripture. The God who has told us these things is such a God. And what an insult it is that puny men with their so-called scholarship and intellect should presume, who should dare to tamper with the Word of God. It's like that king, I think, was it Jehoiakim, sitting in his summer house, winter house rather, hearing the words of Jeremiah being read, taking out a penknife and carving them up as soon as he'd heard them and throwing them in the brazier to burn? What an unutterable profanity! So to mishandle the Word of God, the High and Holy One and the Great and Lofty One. Let me ask you this question, my dear, dear friends. Is this your view of God? When you meet for worship in the Lord's house, wherever that may be, Is this the spirit of worship that you are familiar with and accustomed to? When the Word of God is preached, do you tremble at it and yield due obedience to it? Do you lay it up in your hearts and do you practice it in your lives? I speak, of course, to myself as much as to you. It's relevant to every one of us. We'll be tied as if we become mere sermon tasters and all our interest is in coming to church and hearing a man and asking how good he was and how does he compare with the other fellow and is he better than that one. No, no, we don't go to church for that. We go to hear the word of God and do it. Be hearers of the word. Be doers of the word, not hearers only, as James so notably tells us in a certain place. He dwells in the high and holy place. He's a great and lofty God. Well, let me hasten on to the second thing I have to say, which is this. Notice now who it is that God respects, and who He blesses, and to whom He imparts His favours. Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, I dwell in a high and holy place with Him also. That is of a contrite and humble spirit. Of a contrite and humble spirit. He is defining for us there, secondly, the kind of person, man or woman or child, the kind of minister or elder or deacon he is prepared to bless. And it gives him his fellowship and his love and his favour. What sort of people are these? Well, he says they are the humble and the contrite. The spirit of unbelief would argue like this, and men do argue like this, if God is so great and holy and lofty and exalted, he can't be interested in the likes of you and me. If he looks down from heaven upon us and we are like grasshoppers in his sight, then God isn't interested in the likes of us. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. God doesn't care whether we live a holy life or a careless life, whether we get drunk or sober, whether we fornicate us or chaste and married. He's not interested in that. He's up there. That's the language of unbelief. The deists used to say that in the 18th century. You know what deism is? It was the theory that God made the world and left it to go its own sweet way, as it were. Rather like winding up a clock and putting it on the mantelpiece and walking away, and it just goes on ticking under its own impetus or its own energies. No, that's not the way God speaks. The God of the Bible is a God who loves men. He cares for men. He is interested in men, though we are but specks of nothing, and you and I are but created nothings in His sight, yet He cares for us. I dwell with Him also, that is of a contrite and a humble spirit. Oh, what words! This God is concerned to have fellowship with us. He did so with our first father Adam in the beginning, and he forfeited it because of sin. But he walked with Abraham, and Abraham walked with him, and all the patriarchs walked with him, and so did the Old Testament prophets, and so supremely did Christ in his manhood. He walked with the Father, so did the apostles, so did the early church. They walked with God. But what sort of people must we be to enjoy this favour? Or says someone, we've got to be learned theologians. Not at all. Or says somebody else, we've got to be ordained to the priesthood or the ministry and wear clerical vestments. Not at all. You can wear clerical vestments and be an abomination in the sight of God, unless your soul is holy. And I say that as one who at home always wears clerical vestments. There's no reflection, whatever, on them or themselves, but I say in and of itself, No outward thing will commend us to God. Priesthood, or if we're bishops or archbishops or cardinals or popes, makes nothing of us. What then are the qualifications that the Most High God requires of me? A contrite spirit and a broken heart, that I hate myself for my sins, that I smite upon my breast, say, God have mercy upon me, I'm not worthy to lift up my eyes to heaven, I am a sinner from my mother's womb. God, take pity upon my lowly, worthless condition. I've done nothing but sin since the day I came into the world. Canst thou look upon this worm that I am? Ah, says God, that's the man I love. Give me men like that, says God, who don't stick their head up in the air like the Pharisee and pray with their robes at the street corners to impress the passing crowd. No. pray in secret with their door shut, tears streaming down their faces because they love God and they love to have communion with Him. We have this illustrated to perfection in the Gospels, don't we? What about those days and nights before our blessed Saviour died on the cross? There were two things happening concurrently, good and evil, side by side, then as now. On the one hand, the high priests, and the chief priests, and the leaders of the people, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, were all ganging up to crucify our Lord, to condemn him. On the other hand, who was there? Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus. And now, my very dear friends, Where did Jesus Christ go for fellowship in those final evenings of his life, having spent the day preaching his heart out to the people and performing great miracles? Where did he go? Did he go to the high priest's palace and have fellowship with Caiaphas and Amos? Did he enter into the palaces of these learned scholars? No, he went his way to Bethany. There was a woman there who sat at his feet, drinking in his words. There was a man there whom it raised from the dead who loved every syllable that came out of his mouth. That's the kind of man God will bless, the kind of woman. And thirdly, what sort of blessing does God give to these contrite, humble, penitent souls who are indeed nothing in the eyes of the world, contemptible, They have no degree after their name, these contemptible people. They've never been to learned universities. Oxford never saw them walking in the quadrangles, and Harvard and Yale never saw them with their parchments in their hands as they walked up to the dean of the faculty to receive their applause and honour. No. They were probably nothing more than humble workmen, sweepers of streets and cleaners of homes and scrubbers of front door steps and menial workers, but they loved Jesus Christ. They love the Lord, they love the Bible, they tremble at the thought of this pleasing Christ. But what's the blessing they get? Well, he tells us, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. That brings me, doesn't it, into part of my stated subject, the word of God and revival. Oh, my friends, if I know anything of your heart, if you're a Christian, you long for one thing in this generation, that God may come. I think wherever you go in Britain today, Christians are thinking and praying of one thing only, and that is that God would revive us again and visit us again. Oh, how we yearn to see his work. As our beloved chairman was saying in prayer that he would revive his work in the midst of the years. Does anything matter? Would it not be worth being shot a hundred times through the head, if only God would come and bless us again, filling our churches, our pulpits, with the glory which used to be in them all. This very beautiful building, so kindly loaned to us by our beloved friend, the Minister of the Congregation. Oh, to see it filled, and all the buildings of this beautiful city filled again. Would you say it's impossible? Absolutely impossible. This is the post-Christian age. This is the post-modernist society. Nobody's ever going to come back into the churches as in the old days. The Victorian age is gone forever. But that's not what my text says. He can revive the contrite. He can revive the humble. He can make his word powerful again. What of the Protestant Reformation? But this very thing. That beloved man Martin Luther, struggling to find the righteousness of God, and discovering it in an old Bible, and then nailing up his 95 theses on a church door, a Schlosskirte door in Wittenberg, turning the world upside down. It was this very thing. Has God no more Luthers? What about George Whitefield? Born in a public house, the Bell Inn Gloucester. Struggling to find what it means to be born again. Reads a book, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, as he's walking across one of the quadrangles of his college. Suddenly the light dawns. I must be born again. He discovers it with unspeakable joy. Needs to tell other people. His first sermon, about 15 people get a sort of madness under it. And the bishop said, we hope it will last at least until next week, this madness. It was the conviction of sin. He goes into the open air. All the miners in Bristol suddenly come out to hear him. And with their black, coal-stained faces, listening to this message of life, the first indication he has that they're listening to him is white Charles going down their cheeks as the coal is washed away by tears of contrition and repentance and love for Christ and his death on the cross. Let me come to America in 1858 and 9. You may have heard of Jeremiah Lanphier, who was a Dutchman in his background, and he was called to be a downtown missionary in this part of New York, in a Dutch Reformed church. All around him, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homes. He didn't know where to begin. He couldn't knock on them all. Life wouldn't be long enough to knock on all these doors. What would he do? He decided to put a notice on the front railings of the church. There'll be a prayer meeting at noon tomorrow in the consistory. Come and join me if you're interested. Six men, I think, go in. They pray for blessing. Next day, twelve come in. Next day, twenty-four. Numbers are not exact, but they're similar to what they literally were. In a matter of months, the story, the literal, historical facts are that they were having to stop the indices of New York City about four o'clock every day. to allow the people to go into all the churches, they were standing remotely in the churches, they were pleading with God, praying, praying that the spirit would come down. It wasn't engineered by Jeremiah Lanphier, it wasn't some clever trick that he worked on the populace of New York, that's fantastic to imagine it. God's moment had come. His time. They tell us that about a million people were converted in that area in two years. A million people. Well, you say that's never going to happen again. It's happening right now in China. The spokesman for the Overseas Missionary Fellowship was saying in my hearing not long ago, Tony Lambert, he was saying that in China just now, There must have been at least 20 million people converted in the last 20 years. Your lifetime and mine, 20 million people. In the banner of truth we're sometimes getting letters from people in central China who are reading banner books in English. They're grateful for them. It's very touching to read the way they write their letters. It's very broken English as you can imagine, but they're trying to say they're so grateful to God. A friend of mine lecturing in Biblical Studies and in Covenanting History in Australia was saying that Chinese people listening to him, drinking in about the Covenanters, many of whom came across here to Ulster, of course, as you very well know, these Chinese people drinking in the message about the Covenanters, and talking about our Covenanters, Chinese people, our Covenanters, they are their Covenanters, of course, we all belong together, we are the people of God, The blessing that began in 1858-9 in New York City crossed the Atlantic. Old people in Lewes used to tell me this, that as the ships were going between the north of Scotland, plying their journeys to North America and back, that sailors on these ships would sometimes feel the gust of the Spirit upon them, and they felt something spiritual affecting their souls as they were crossing. God was at work in those days. And indeed they began to pray in Scotland that the blessing would come there as they did indeed in Northern Ireland. And you know the story at Kells, the mission house there, and James McQuilkin and his friends, was it just three of them praying, just three young Christians praying for the blessing to come down. They didn't call a Presbytery or a Consistory meeting, they didn't call for a General Assembly, just three earnest young men praying. And God was pleased to hear their prayers raised up, Brownlow North and others. Wonderful things were happening. I'm sure you know the story of that. I think the school was at Cold Rain, wasn't it? The girls' class was at the top of the school, and the boys' class on the ground floor, and the teacher was a Christian, teaching the boys on the ground floor. And one of the boys was unteachable. He was just weeping his eyes out for sin, and a sense of sin. And the teacher said, Go home, son. He said, You can't stay in this class. You'll learn nothing today. And I'll send a Christian boy with you. Go home and come back another day when you've got over this trouble. And so the boys left, and they found some sort of broken-down cottage, and they went inside to pray. And this boy who was under conviction of sin got liberty of the gospel, and his face was radiant, came back to the classroom, and all the other children were astonished at the change in this boy. And not only that, but they came under conviction of sin themselves, many of them. The teacher gave up the school that day. He said, there's no point in trying to teach you people. Go into the playground, he said, there's a wall there, and pray all of you on your knees to God for mercy, and see if you can find grace from God and salvation. So they went out. The teacher looked over the wall, saw these boys on their knees, one after another, like children, praying to God and finding salvation. Of course it was visible to the girls, they saw it. And they came under conviction of sin. Members of the public passing the school, they came under conviction of sin. What was happening? The High and Holy One was reviving the church in Ulster. Would God, He would revive it among you all again. Our love for you in Scotland is abounding. We love you, beloved, faithful people. We know how much you have suffered for the cause of Christ. Oh, that God would come upon you and pour His Spirit again upon you as in the days of old. You know the stories of what happened in the 1920s under that amazing preacher W. P. Nicholson, how they had to open sheds and areas of the workplace of Holland and Wool to receive all the stolen goods of penitent sinners who had been brought to conviction of sin. A blessing came to Scotland. Historians say that one person in every ten in Scotland in 1859 and 1860 was brought into a church. Congregation was springing up everywhere. from the borders right the way to the butt of Ness in the North West. In 1860 in Scotland, in the Flea Church of Scotland, which I have recently had occasion to be put out of, as you may or may not know, sadly, in that dear church which I have loved and served for 25 years and more, in 1860 the Moderator had a special day, I think it was a Wednesday, in which they talked about nothing in the Assembly but what was happening in the Revival. All over Scotland, new prayer meetings. many new converts, people attending meetings that they'd never attended in their lives. How did it happen? God was reviving His work. I must finish. Let me refer to my native Wales. Not that I was born there, but my forefathers on my father's side were Welsh people. In 1904 and 5, the last great revival in this country struck in Wales, if I can use the word struck. The name of the village that I would refer you to is called Hros Llanelliog. And the people outside noticed the singing was different as they were passing the church. They said, the singing in there is beautiful. God had come in as it were, people's hearts were liberated to bless and praise him. In a matter of a few days, the minister had to have services in the morning for the mothers who took their children to school and then came to service and then went home to make the dinners and then came back for the afternoon service and then went home for tea and made the tea for the husbands and the children and all the family came for the evening service. Many of them were miners, Welsh miners, coal miners. And they say that the only way you could get from the back of the church to the front was that all the people put their hands up like this and you rolled the person across all the heads of the people and he stood here. There was no space. The place was crowded from wall to wall. And the miners going down their cages into the bowels of the earth were singing the praises of God. Those coming off duty were singing the praises of God. They would hear one another as they passed going up and going down. The pit ponies had to be taught The Queen's English, or maybe Welsh, they didn't understand ordinary instructions because they were used to, shall we say, unprintable commands, which they had to obey. But now everybody's language has cleaned up. They had to be taught all over again what the commands meant. One man, seen to be in the dark, crying his eyes out. What's the matter with you, they said. I'm going to lose my job, he said. Before the revival came he said the people were so unkind to these pit ponies, my job is to look after them, they used to throw coal at them. And I had to groom them and look after them and feed them. And now he said the revival has got everyone so kind, they're all feeding them, they're all grooming them, I've nothing to do all day, I sit here. I'm going to lose my job he said. Well, my friends, heaven upon earth. I have prayed for forty years that God would visit us again. Some of you have prayed for longer than that. We have seen our country sliding away from God. What is our hope? It's in the promises of God. The God who was promised in his own time will do it again. And when he does it, it won't be with people rolling round the aisles. What will he use to revive his word? His word. Thy word is truth. My friends, let us pray until the wilderness and solitary place become like a rose.