You turn in your Bibles with
me to Song of Solomon. Song of Solomon has the most
beautiful description of the intimate and dynamic relationship
between the Lord Jesus and His Bride. And often in Song of Solomon
we see the Bride crying out And the cries that she makes are
the cries of all of the pilgrims on the way to heavenly Jerusalem. In verse 7 of chapter 1, she
cries out, O Thou whom my soul loveth, where
You feed." It's a cry of a soul longing for fellowship. She wants to know where to be
fed. Where do you feed your flocks? And she's told very simply, you
grow your way forth in the footsteps of the flock. You follow where
the sheep have gone. You'll find the shepherd. You'll
find the shepherd and the sheep together. And then in verse 3
of chapter 3, there's a cry of a soul that has had fellowship
and lost it. She says to the watchman, the
guard out of the city, he says, did you see him? Did you see
him whom my soul loves? In verse 1 of chapter 8, we saw
just a few weeks ago, We saw the cry of someone that has had
fellowship and needs more. She's had some fellowship. She
knows the anguish of broken fellowship. She knows the anguish of broken
fellowship because of her turning to herself and turning to the
world. Oh, that you were as a brother. that you were someone that I
could embrace again openly and publicly. And in verse 6 of chapter
8, she says, Set me as a seal upon thy heart. We see her leaning
on the Beloved and she's coming up together with him from the
wilderness. And she wants affirmation again
and confirmation of the depths of His love for her. She anticipates
Him going away. And that's right, I think, for
us to think in this part of Song of Solomon, that we are looking
at the Church after the advent of the Lord Jesus, knowing the
fellowship that He's brought, knowing the depth of that intimacy
of walking with Him, leaning on Him as we saw last week, leaning
on the Beloved, coming up from the wilderness. And now she's
wanting things to be said. She anticipates He's going and
in the last verses we'll see that He's going. And then she
calls out, the Song of Solomon finishes, she says, my beloved,
make haste to come back to me." In the verses we're looking at
today, as we saw last week, she was leaning on Him. Faith leans
on the Lord Jesus. Faith leans because there is
a need. Faith leans because He has a
willingness to be lent upon. Faith leans on him because he's
proven his love, and he's proven his faithfulness, and he's mighty
and able to protect. And there's a connection, as
we saw. There's a connection between fellowship and faith. We lean on his person. You lean because he's near. You lean because of what he's
done. You lean because of his word
of promise. You lean because he protects. You lean because he loves. That intimacy of a relationship. The verses before us today are
remarkable in the context, aren't they? There she is coming out
of the wilderness at the beginning of 8, verse 5. And then in verse
6 she says, set me as a seal. And then you might wonder, as
I've been wondering for some considerable time, Why, these
next verses, I raise thee up under the apple tree. There thy
mother brought thee forth, there she brought thee forth that bare
thee. The question is, what is the
Lord wanting us to see out of these verses? Let's pray. Our
Father in heaven, your word is just ink on a piece of paper
until you shine the light of your dear and precious sun on
it and cause these words by your spirit's power to become spirit
and life. Heavenly Father, may You cause
Your Son to be exalted in our midst this morning. May we be
caused to look up to Him, to gaze upon Him, to see Him so
wondrously fulfilling all of Your promises, even the promises
that are being fulfilled right at this very moment as He, in
His glorious resurrection body, sits in heaven reigning over
this universe, interceding by his wounds. having taken by His
blood all of His people into the holy of holies of heaven,
made His people holy, spotless and blameless, perfectly accepted. That is the song of the redeemed
in heaven, our brothers and sisters who are there before us. And
we pray, Heavenly Father, that You'd cause it to be the song
that is on our lips and in our hearts again today. We pray for
your guidance and your care of us, our Father, and for your
promises to be fulfilled before us again this morning. We commit
ourselves into your hands. In Jesus' name, our Father. Amen. And so the question, of course,
is who raised up whom here? I raised you up under the apple
tree. And it's remarkable, isn't it?
We can think very much and very often of how He remarkably raises
up His people. He brings His people from life
to death. He brings His people from bondage
to freedom. He brings His people from blindness
to sight. He brings His people out of the
kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his dear and precious
son. He raises us up and there's no
question about it. But the remarkable thing in this
verse is that the words in Hebrew are masculine. And so it's actually
the words of the Shulamite talking about her beloved. She raised
him up. Isn't that remarkable? I raised
thee up under the apple tree. So it's her speaking, it's the
bride speaking to her husband. It's a remarkable thought, isn't
it? We read Solomon's prayer and he wants God to hear and
to respond and to hear and to respond again and again. He's
talking to him. He who knows everything and sees
everything and hears everything is saying, will you please hear?
Will you please hear my cries? Will you please hear my groanings? Will you please respond? You
seem silent, Lord. You seem silent to the cries
of your people. And yet we know He is not." The
Shulamite, of course, went through that time of darkness, didn't
she? She sought Him and she prayed. She prayed to him and he didn't
respond and she asked others to join her in searching for
him. You can read it in chapters 5 and 6. She agonized over the
fact that by her sin she had rejected him who came with such
sweet tokens of his love to her and spoke such extraordinary
words to her. But now he's answered. He's come to her and He's answered. And of course, the lesson, the
big lesson is that the Lord delights in the prayers of His people. He puts us in a situation where
we are called upon and caused by the circumstances of life
to pray. And it's a sign of fellowship,
isn't it? It's a sign of need and dependency. It's a sign of
leaning upon Him. It's a sign of fellowship and
it's a sign of love and it's a mark of faith, isn't it? We
call out to Him. we are in situations in the majority
of our lives, despite what we might think of our abilities,
we are in situations that the Lord took His people out of Egypt
and He took them to the edge of the Red Sea and there before
them was seven miles, ten kilometres of water and there behind them
was the greatest superpower's army of the day. And where do
you go? Where do you go in that situation? How do you get through what is
an impossible situation? You look ahead and it's impossible,
you look behind it's impossible, you look around and you've got
a ragtag bunch of people without weapons dealing with the greatest
army on the earth. So often that's like our pilgrimage
brothers and sisters. How often are we made to feel
like the circumstances that surround us are bigger than us and beyond
us. The Lord delights in the prayers
of His people and He delights in answering those prayers in
a way and at a time that brings glory to him. So he causes his
people like Jacob to wrestle with the Lord as he's about to
meet his brother Esau who has determined to kill him. And he
wrestles with him and he says, I won't let you go until you
bless me. The children of Israel, in Exodus
chapter 3, God says, their cry came up to me. He says to Moses,
he says, their cry has come up to me. I'm sending you back to
rescue my people. Their cry, verse 9 of chapter
3, the cry of the children of Israel has come unto me and I've
also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppressed them. It's remarkable, isn't it? Moses
is now a man of 80 years of age. He was 40 years when he killed
the Egyptian who was harassing one of the Jewish people and
fled to the desert of Midian where he met the Lord. But if
you remember back in Moses' history, when Moses was a baby, what was
the edict of Pharaoh, king of Egypt? Every male child you kill,
they have had 80 years at least of oppression. The question is,
did God hear? In all that time, did He hear? And the question that comes to
the hearts of many of the Lord's people is, not only did He hear,
but does He care? Does he care? The circumstances
around me, so often many of the Lord's people will say, seem
as if he's not only asleep, but he is just blind to what is happening. That is not the case, brothers
and sisters. He was going to act. Why did he wait 80 years?
Well, one of the reasons was, of course, that Moses needed
to be that age. The other thing is that the people
of Israel had been promised that they were going to be down there
for that period of time. They were going to be in Egypt.
Abraham was promised, he says, they're going to be down there
for all those generations, 400 years. and they will be there
for 400 years. And remarkably in Deuteronomy
when they are taken out, it says, to the very day. to the very day, there was a
day appointed for the deliverance of his people. It is thus here,
there comes a time, there needed to be a Moses, there needed to
be an Aaron, there needed to be a Miriam, there needed to
be a Joshua, there needed to be a Caleb, there needed to be
all of those people, hundreds of thousands of them. 80 years
is a long time of oppression. But remarkably the Lord's people
throughout history have grown in those times because we grow
as we saw last week. So we come up out of the wilderness.
How do we come up out of the wilderness? We come by leaning. We don't come by our own power
and our own strength. She, despite the appearance of
his absence, despite the appearance of his silence to her, she never
stopped looking for him. She never stopped speaking of
him. She never stopped asking others
to speak on her behalf to him. Lean. Lean, the Shulamite reminds
us, lean and never give up, brothers and sisters. Lean hard and never
give up. Put all the weight of all of
your being upon the Lord Jesus and wait. He says, He saves a
humble people for the oppression of the poor, for the sighing
of the needy. Now I will arise, said the Lord. There comes a time when He will
arise, and I will set Him in safety from Him that puffs at
Him. Awake, says Psalm 44, 23. Awake,
why sleepest thou, O God? Arise, cast us not off forever. Why do you hide your face and
forget our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed
down to the dust and our belly cleaves to the earth. Arise for
our help and redeem us for Thy mercy's sake. God will be made
to arise remarkably by the prayers of His people. He'll be woken,
remarkably woken, by the prayers of His people. Now of course
we want to acknowledge the absolute sovereignty of God and so He
leads His people to these places and then He brings out those
cries and then He answers those cries and the result of it is
They see His glory and they see His faithfulness. You might well
remember the story in Mark chapter 5. And that same day, verse 34 of
Mark 4, sorry, that same day when Eden was come, he said to
them, let us pass over to the other side. Let us cross this
Sea of Galilee. And when they had sent away the
multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship. There
were also with him other little ships. And there arose a great
storm of wind and the waves beat into the ship so that it was
now full. And where was he? There they
are, his people, in their little boat, buffeted by the waves,
their little boat full of water, about to sink. He was in the
hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow, and they awake him
and say to him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? to drown. What did the awoken
Lord Jesus do? He just spoke a word, didn't
he? He speaks a word and there is peace. He arose and rebuked
the wind and said unto the sea, Peace be still. And the wind ceased and there
was a great calm. And he said unto them, Why are
you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith? See, what would faith have said?
He's the one who put them in the boat. He's the one who got
into the boat with them. And he's the one who made the
word of promise, didn't he? He says, Let's go over to the
other side. When he says, let's go over to the other side, they're
going over to the other side. Doesn't matter about wind and
waves, doesn't matter about other ships and other enemies, they're
going over to the other side. Faith would have said, we're
going over to the other side, I don't know how you're going to get
us there, this thing might turn into a sudden ruin, but we're
going over to the other side. That's what he said, isn't it?
His word of promise. How is it you have no faith?
The other thing of course that was revealed in verse 41 of Mark
4 is they now had a proper fear. They had a proper and serious
fear. And this is a much better fear than fear of drowning in
the Sea of Galilee. They feared exceedingly. They were fearing wind and waves
and drowning. Now they feared exceedingly,
and said to one another, What manner of man is this? When God brings His people to
these situations, He does it to reveal something of Himself. And what a remarkable gift it
is to the people, to sinners like us, that he, even in the
most extraordinary afflictions, would use those things to reveal
something of himself. The greatest tragedy that can
befall people on this planet, isn't it, is for God not to reveal
something of Himself. And if He reveals Himself through
pain, if He reveals Himself through difficulties, and He really reveals
Himself, then all of those things will be swept away. All of those
fears, all of those doubts, all of those things will be swept
away in something much, much bigger. Much, much bigger. It's a great gift when God reveals
Himself to His people. It's a great gift when He reveals
Himself as an awesome and fearsome God. He put His fear in His people. It's a covenant blessing that
they look to Him rather than their circumstances. They look
to Him and His promises. She raised Him up, it says. She
raised Him up under the apple tree. And if you remember from
some considerable time ago, we looked at Him under the apple
tree. Him as the apple tree, as the
apple tree verse 3, chapter 2 verse 3, as the apple tree among the
trees of the wood, as the one that is most precious and most
special amongst all the trees of the forest. So is my beloved
among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with
great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought
me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love. Faith Faith remembers. Faith calls on God. Faith raises him up. And of course the shadows are
all those shadows of the Old Testament. Solomon prayed that
prayer, didn't he? There he had this magnificent
building. It sat on 25 acres of land here at his temple. I'm
not sure how big Solomon's one was. It was the most magnificent
building. Imagine looking at it from a
distance and it just sparkling in gold. This huge building,
this huge building on top of a hill. with all those remarkable
things and as you went inside it became more and more extraordinary. And Solomon saw that temple and
he saw the Shekinah glory of God. He saw God come as He had
in the Old Testament times, come as a cloud and fill that temple,
come and reveal His presence in that temple. And yet Solomon
acknowledged Solomon knew, as all the Old Testament people
did, that this and every little part of it is just a representation
of the Lord Jesus. It's a shadow. They are shadows
of good things to come. For thousands of years they had
shadows, and the shadow became more and more clear. In Genesis
3.15, the seed of the woman Now tempted, now in Satan's dominion,
he's made a promise. She said, your son, a child of
yours is going to crush the head of the serpent. He'll be wounded
in that crushing, but a child of yours is coming. Simon says,
will he really dwell on earth? Eve was promised and the Gospel
was promised to Adam and Eve while they were still in the
garden. There they were dressed in their fig leaves and God slew
a lamb and clothed Adam and Eve. They had to come before Him in
the works of their own hands and all that had brought into
their lives. They had to be stripped naked
before God and stand before Him without pretending to be anything
that they weren't. And then God preached the gospel
to them in covering them, covering their shame before him with a
slain lamb. The first blood that was shed
in this universe was shed to represent the Lord Jesus Christ.
That's why Abel in the very next chapter brings a lamb, a slain
lamb, to the church. He and Cain come to church, to
the place of worshipping God, and Cain brings the works of
his own hands. He brings the fig leaves, as
it were, and Abel brings a lamb, and the response of Cain. When
Eve had Cain, she said, I've got me a man from God. This might
be the man who's going to crush the head of the serpent. And
yet, Cain saw that his brother was righteous before God, and
he slew him. Such has been what has happened
throughout history with mankind. But all of these shadows, all
of these pictures and types, Noah and the ark is a picture
of the Lord Jesus. They're all there, all through
the Old Testament. The shadow becomes clearer and
clearer. God put His people in an ark
and the entire wrath of God fell upon that ark. And there inside
that ark were just eight souls, a preacher of righteousness and
his family. And the ark is covered outside
and inside with pitch, which means propitiation. It means
a wrath bearing sacrifice. The ark is a picture of the Lord
Jesus. All of these shadows, the shadows
in the Old Testament were there as glorious pictures and representations
of the Lord Jesus. The Passover Lamb is another
shadow, isn't it? It's a picture of the Lord Jesus.
that the blood, you take this lamb and it's one with you and
you slay it and you put the blood on the doorpost and you consume
that lamb, your life comes from that lamb and you get yourself
inside your house ready to leave. And then the wrath of God descends
on that house, on that land, and it passes over. And what
a remarkable thing God says. He says, when I see the blood,
when I see the blood, not when you see it, you're inside the
house. He says, when I see the blood, when I see the blood of
the Lord Jesus, I will pass over you. Picture after picture. Shadow requires three things,
doesn't it? It requires an object and it requires light from behind
the object and it needs somewhere for that shadow to fall. And so all through the Old Testament
we have these shadows. Religion spends its time looking
at the shadows and playing around in the shadows. The children
of God like Abraham did, he doesn't look at the shadow, he looks
to the light and looking to the light you actually see the object.
And the object of the Lord Jesus becomes clearer and clearer and
clearer. as the Old Testament unfolds
and we get pictures of what He's going to look like, we get pictures
of what He's going to do, we get pictures of what He's going
to say, we get pictures again and again of what He does on
the cross, how He rescues His people. And all of it is a manifestation
of His love to His people. There's not one circumstance
in our Lord's history that's not some way or another a manifestation
of His love. His love stooping. This is from
our bulletin a couple of weeks ago. His sympathy is love weeping. His compassion is love supporting.
His grace is love acting. His teaching is the voice of
love. His silence is the repose of
love. His patience is the restraint
of love. His obedience is the labour of
love. His suffering is the travail
of love. His cross is the altar of love,
His death is the burnt offering of love, His resurrection is
the triumph of love, His ascension into heaven is the enthronement
of love, and His intercession in heaven is the prayer of love. I wonder Song of Solomon speaks
so beautifully, doesn't it? Of this dynamic love relationship
between the bride and her husband. The shadows get clearer. She remembers. She raised Him
up under the shadows. She saw Him in those shadows
and she saw Him as glorious and they brought to remembrance the
reality of who He is and the promise of His coming. Will God
really dwell on earth was what Solomon was praying, wasn't it?
I see all this fancy stuff, but I'm looking for Him. I'm looking
beyond all of this, but I'm looking to Him. Abraham was looking beyond
what he saw. He was given this vast land.
And he says, I'm actually looking for a place that's really got
foundations. This doesn't have foundations at all. I've walked
all over it. I'm looking for a place whose
foundations are God. I'm looking for a place whose
foundations are in heaven. So the Old Church, the Old Testament
Church, these shadows, waited long for his coming. is like the waiting of a mother
in childbirth, isn't it? There thy mother brought thee
forth. He had to come out of all that
Old Testament picture and type and out of all those shadows.
See he was born, the Lord Jesus' human nature was born of the
seed of the woman. And the woman in the Old Testament
church was the seed of David, wasn't it? She was born, he was
born of Mary. And it's remarkable how their
Bible is just full of pictures of women in travail, all of the
hugely significant women. You think of what their lives
are like. Sarah had to wait for all that
time Years and years and years she had to wait. Rachel had to
wait. Women struggling to have children. Hannah waiting to have children. Ruth, what hope did Ruth have? A Moabitess widow. to a poor, impoverished mother-in-law. And yet she clung to her and
she became this David's great-great-grandmother. You think of the people of Israel
the number of times that they went through extraordinary trials
as they were to be killed in one way or another. Pharaoh tried
to deal with them in Egypt. in the days of Esther, Haman
tried to kill them all. Always there was an attack by
the people of this world, by Satan inspiring people to decimate
and to eradicate the people of God. Why? Because the seed of
the woman must come. The seed of the woman must come.
And when the seed of the woman did come, what was the response? Herod's response was exactly
the same. Let's kill the baby. Let's kill
this child that's the promised one to come, the one that is
to be born out of that mother of the Old Testament church.
And he goes to that little town of Bethlehem and he kills all
the children two years and younger, just so that in killing all of
them he might get his hands on Messiah to kill him. The mother brought him forth. There thy mother brought thee
forth. There was no doubt that he was going to be brought forth.
No doubt at all. God had spoken. There she brought
thee forth. that bear thee." There out of
this Old Testament church came this Mary, and even in Mary's
having of this child there is great travail for her cousin
Elizabeth. Elizabeth is another one of these
women who is in travail until she has a baby, an old, old woman,
barren. An old, old woman who has John
the Baptist, the forerunner of the Lord Jesus. And Mary herself,
she's promised, isn't she, that her sword will pierce her heart. It's remarkable isn't it? I often
think that when the Lord Jesus is being attacked by those Pharisees
and they said to him, he talks of his lineage and they say to
him, we weren't born of fornication. We are Abraham's children. The
reference, I think, is to Mary. For 33 years, the rumours would
have gone round, wouldn't they? Here was a woman, an unfaithful
woman, who had a child, a child out of wedlock, as it were, a
child before her marriage vows. But also, This is a description,
I believe, of the new birth. See, the Church is the mother
of us all, isn't it? Those that raise up the Lord
Jesus are brought forth in this world. And it's not for nothing
that the Lord Jesus speaks to Nicodemus and says, you must
be born again. You must be born again. Salvation is described in the New Birth
as being born again, being born from above, being born by the
Word of Promise, being born by the Gospel. What an apt description
it is of New Birth. Just let's look for a little
bit at some aspects of New Birth. First thing about New Birth is
that there has to be life. before life is revealed. It's
quite a simple matter, isn't it really? The actual birth is
not the beginning of life. Life begins with conception. The Church is the mother of us
all. The heavenly Jerusalem is where the children of God are
born from. They have a life before there
is life revealed. They have a life before God,
before life is revealed in this world. Also, the bringing forth. When that life comes into this
world, it is a time of great pain, a great agony, a time of
great uncertainty, a time of great expectancy, isn't it? It's a time of great hope. But mixed with the hope is all
of this extraordinary pain that has to be gone through. The law in the souls of men must
do its convicting work. In the new birth people have
to be brought to confront God in His reality and to confront
them as they really are. There must be a meeting with
God. You must be born from above. God must do something remarkable
and it's a painful work Turn with me just briefly again to
Ezekiel 36, and we'll read how... This is the passage of scripture
that I believe the Lord Jesus is taking Ezekiel to. He's talking
to him about the new birth. He's talking to him about that
water. Verse 24. He said, In your birth, in our natural
births, we are passive and someone else is active. In the new birth
from above, God must act. God must do. Let's read the I
wills in these verses. 23. He says, I will sanctify my great
name, which has been profaned among the heathen, which you
have profaned in the midst of them, and the heathen shall know
that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when I shall be sanctified
in you before their eyes. And then he says, this is why,
for, because, I will take you from among the heathen, I will
gather you out of all countries, and I'll bring you into your
own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water
upon you, And you shall be clean from all your filthiness and
from all your idols. will I cleanse you. A new heart
also will I give you and a new spirit will I put within you
and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and give
you a heart of flesh. I'll take away a stone which
is impervious to the Spirit of God, as it were. It's as unfeeling
to God. as a stone. It's unresponsive,
it's unmouldable as a stone. It has no life like a stone. A new heart, a new spirit. I'll take away the stony heart
out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh and I'll put
my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and
you shall keep my judgments and do them. And you shall dwell
in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my
people, and I will be your God. I will also save you from all
your uncleanness, and I will call for the corn, and will increase
it, and lay no famine upon you. I will multiply the fruit of
the tree, and the increase of the field, and you shall receive
no more the reproach of famine among the heathen." when this
new birth comes upon you, then you shall remember your evil
ways and your doings that were not good, and you shall loathe
yourselves in your sight for your iniquities and your abominations."
He does it for his sake. It begins with his glory. in
verse 23. It finishes with His glory in
verse 32. He says, I don't do it for your
sakes, says the Lord. He does it for His sake. A new
birth is a new creation, isn't it? It's actually the implanting
of something in the heart of a sinner that was never there
before. It was there in promise, there
in the mind of God, And his chosen child, he hedges his way and
he cares for him and he loves him exactly as he loves him throughout
all eternity and all time. But he brings him to that place
and it's likened to a birth. Except a man be born of water
and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. That which
is born of flesh is flesh, that which is born of Spirit is Spirit. And he says that this spirit,
the wind blows where it wishes. What a wonderful thing to hope
for, that the wind of God's spirit will blow. Blow upon that garden
and it will blow upon those people that he brought that convicting
work to. And there will be a crying out.
In birth there is a crying out, in new birth there is a crying
out to the Lord. Come to me, he says, all you
who are weary and heavy laden. Come, he says, come to me. And the new birth comes, there is
great cry of joy isn't there. There's a new life being born
into the world and there's joy. And not only is there great joy,
there's great hope for the future. And a new dimension of life begins. It grows. A new life that's sustained
from a different source. A new life that has different
joys and different pleasures and different pains. A different
life altogether. The Church now, by the preaching
of the Gospel, is calling upon sinners to come. But when it's being honest, it's
talking about coming with pain. It's a painful process. The new
birth is an entrance into a new world through a narrow and constricted
and difficult path. It's not just a simple matter
of praying some sinner's prayer. It is actually a supernatural
divine work of God. Every member, every member of
the Church of God is born from above. Every member is born in
travail. When in Acts chapter 2 Peter
preached that great sermon, it was those who were cut to the
heart. They were cut to the heart. They
had, for the first time, even though they had seen the Lord
Jesus and walked with the Lord Jesus and seen His miracles and
heard His teaching, they had absolutely no idea who He was
and they had no idea what they were doing. And when Peter preached,
this Lord Jesus sits on the throne of this universe, this Lord Jesus
is God, they were cut to the heart and they cried out, They
cried out, just like a Philippian jailer. They cried out, what
must we do to be saved? What must we do to be saved? Salvation comes as a new birth. She brought forth the one that
bears the We raise Him up, don't we? The Church remembers, the
Church as she's leaning upon Him, she recalls in a conversation,
she's raised Him up. She's caused Him to awake and
to arise and to renew communion and fellowship with her. And
she's reminded, she's reminding Him of what He is in His incarnation
and what will come as a result of it. And as the apostles went
out after that day of Pentecost and they brought the Gospel to
this world and to the Gentiles, they went with much pain. They
all lost their lives, bar John. It's remarkable, isn't it, to
think how Satan counterfeits the things of God in this world
and causes, in a sense, the people of God to step back a little. One of the things that everything
can be tolerated in religion these days except fundamentalism. Isn't that right? As long as
we all join hands together and are nice to each other, the one
thing that is despised in the world is fundamentalism. It's zeal in a sense, isn't it
really? The New Testament Church brought
forth the Lord Jesus into this world because they were, for
want of a better word, fundamentalists. You could beat Paul, couldn't
you? You could thrash him with 39 stripes. You could stone him
and drag him out of town and leave him as dead. And he dusted
himself off and went to the next town and preached exactly the
same things and exactly the same things happened. They got themselves
killed, crucified, speared, tortured for hundreds of years. The Church grew, in a sense,
on the blood of the martyrs. The big difference between Christian
fundamentalism, of course, and the fundamentalism of this world,
is that our battles and our victories are won not by any carnal means
whatsoever. The Kingdom of God is not won
by argument. The Kingdom of God is not won
and served by weapons of warfare of any sort at all. The Kingdom
of God is won through the preaching of the Gospel. We raise Him up. and we wait. We preach the Gospel
of a successful sovereign God who in answer to Solomon's prayer
came to this earth and dwelt here and died here and in his
death he bore the sins of all of those children that the Father
had given him. and he successfully put away
their sin and he brought in everlasting righteousness for them. He fulfilled
all those shadows. You go to that Old Testament
and seek to find Jesus there and you will see him as he promised,
you will see him everywhere and every time you see him you will
see a promise, something about his work and his person and you
will see him on the cross and you will say, finished and fulfilled. saved his people. He called his
name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. And
he reigns right now in heaven, ruling over this universe. The
New Testament church, like a mother. anxiously waits and prays, expecting
the coming of the Lord. It's an embarrassment to me.
I hope it's not to all of you, but it's an embarrassment to
me how often I think that it would be really nice if he waited,
if he just waited while I did some things here on this earth.
It's extraordinary, isn't it? When we pray the Lord's Prayer,
it's not the Lord's Prayer, it's a disciple's prayer, Thy kingdom
come. We're actually asking God to
come back and destroy absolutely everything we see, to destroy
every single thing that I have done. Take it all away and take
out of this world His people. That's what they're praying,
isn't it? They open Parliament, praying the Lord's Prayer and
they're saying, come and destroy this building and this nation. That's what the prayer is, isn't
it? Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. We wait, don't we? 2 Peter 3.12
says we are looking forward and we are hastening. We are hastening
the coming day of God. We long for it. We're longing for Him, brothers
and sisters. We're longing for the consummation
of a relationship with Him where we will be able to have Him as
revelation It says, isn't it, He will be so intimately close
to us that He'll wipe the tears from our eyes and He'll take
His people into a new creation where there'll be no more tears
or crying. For this order of things will
pass away. God's children long for Him. He was brought forth. We raise
Him up. We bring him to remembrance,
we say, for how long, our Lord? We say, as the Bible finishes,
doesn't it, with those simple words, come, come, Lord Jesus. Come, Lord Jesus. And the New Testament church
is like Paul. where he sees his children, the
children of his love. He says, my little children,
my little children who I love and I loved in preaching the
Gospel of the Lord Jesus, my little children who have been
led astray. He says, my little children of
whom I travail in birth again until Christ That's the longing. That's the
longing of Christians, isn't it? That Christ will be formed
in you, born again. Christ in you, the hope of glory. It might be painful. like the
waiting of God's people through all of time. Waiting might be
painful, but like the waiting of childbirth, it's an exciting
and expectant thing. The Lord will have His way and
have His people with Him. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father,
we pray that You would cause us to look behind the shadows
and cause our eyes to be turned to Him who is our God, who is
our Saviour, who is the only mediator between God and men.
Our Heavenly Father, we thank You for the new birth. We thank
You that throughout history Your people have been born from above.
And we praise You, Heavenly Father, that that is a sovereign activity
of Your hand and therefore we preach And we pray and we lean
with great expectancy, Heavenly Father, that you will do immeasurably
more than we can imagine or ask. We pray to you, Heavenly Father,
that you do not ask people's permission to save them. You
come and take up your residence in the hearts of your people
and take away a heart of stone and they find you being there
and you bring your welcome with you. We just praise you, Heavenly
Father. Help us. to walk as the Shulamite
did, leaning upon her beloved, leaning and coming up out of
her wilderness, resting by faith in who He is and what He's done
and what He is doing and what He must do into the future. Help
us to long for His coming and hasten it, our Father. We pray
in Jesus' name. Amen.