Beginning with verse 33 of Mark
chapter 4, with many similar parables, Jesus spoke the word
to them as much as they could understand. He did not say anything
to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his
disciples, he explained everything. In all of God's dealings with
men, He makes a distinction between those he has chosen and those
he has not. Our Lord's dealings with men
are not all equal in the sense that he does the same thing to
every man. It's just not so. God has chosen
a people from the foundation of the world and he has organized
everything in this creation to work together for their eternal
benefit. And in all of his immediate workings
upon them, all those things which he works specifically for them,
he works them differently than he does with other people. Now,
as soon as you say that kind of thing, somebody will rise
up and say, but the Bible says God is no respecter of persons. Well, that's true. God is no
respecter of persons. But that doesn't mean that he
treats everyone the same. After all, if he treated everyone
the same, either everyone would end up in hell or everyone would
end up in heaven. If he treated us all exactly
the same, did for all of us exactly the same thing, which was, as
some would preach it, that he's already done all he can do or
all he will do, and our eternal destiny is left up to us, if
he did that, then all of us would end up in hell. Because none
of us would seek to do good, none of us would seek him, none
of us would understand. Or if God were to do for everyone
the same in terms of those works of grace, if he would send the
gospel to everyone, regenerate the heart of everyone, and give
faith to every one of them, then all of us would end up in heaven,
wouldn't we? Because God's works of grace are never without effect.
But we know that there shall be some who suffer eternal punishment
and some who experience eternal blessedness. So obviously God
does deal with different people in different ways. What it means
when the Bible says that God is no respecter of persons, the
word actually means to accept someone's face. And what it's
saying is there is God doesn't determine how he will treat a
person according to what that person is in himself. To be a
respecter of persons would be most often you would see it this
way say the judge has two men before him and they're both accused
of a crime and both of them have the same kind of evidence against
them so in all those things they're equal But one of them is a wealthy
man who might do the judge some good, and the other's a poor
man, and he couldn't be any help to the judge. So he condemns
the poor man and acquits the rich man. Now that's to be a
respecter of persons. That is to look at the person
and say, he has something I want, and therefore I'm going to treat
him better than the person who doesn't have something that I
want. Now, God is no respecter in this
sense, no respecter of persons. If you come before Him in the
law, you will be treated the same as everyone else who comes
before Him in the law. When God passes judgment, He
passes judgment with absolute equity. And it won't matter whether
you wear a crown on your head or chains of slavery on your
hands and feet. It won't matter whether you are
male or female. It won't matter whether you are
old or young. It won't matter whether the world
thinks well of you or if the world has condemned you. It won't
matter whether you have gone to your grave with a parade downtown
and your casket being borne on a cart drawn by six horses, and
people all over the world in mourning at your passing, or
if you leave this world at the end of a rope, executed as a
criminal. When you stand before God in
the law, if you've come before Him in the law, He will treat
you with absolute justice according to the dictates of His law. He
is no respecter of persons. And likewise, if you come before
him in the gospel, if you approach God through his mercies revealed
in Christ Jesus, he will not look upon your person
and determine whether or not to receive you according to what
you are or what you've done. He will not say to one, no, you
can't come to me through grace because your sin is too great.
But you over here, you did the best you could. You can come
in. There'll be none of that. He
will not be saying, well, you know, you were kind of a nobody
in the world. You didn't amount to anything. So I'm not interested in you.
Go away. But now you, you were a king.
I think you could be some use to me. Come on in. No. None of
that. Not in the law or in grace. But
most importantly, and as a foundation to all of that, when God decreed
all that would come to pass in this world, and determined who
He would save and who He'd pass by, He had no regard, whatever, to
what that person was. Their persons, what they were
in their natural selves, had nothing to do with whether or
not they were chosen by God to be among His people. Paul says
in 1 Corinthians, there towards the end of the chapter, he says,
you see your calling and election. Now that not many wise, not many
educated, not many sophisticated, not many rich, not many from
the upper class of society. There's not many of you among
God's people that come from that strata of society. But God chose
the weak things to overcome the powerful. He chose the foolish
to confound the wise. And as one brother put it, it's
an insult to be the elect of God, because it would seem that
he chose his people from the very dregs of society. So God does not have respect
unto persons in that way. He shows no favoritism in law,
or in grace, or in his eternal purpose. But there can be no
doubt that God treats his chosen people in this world differently
than he treats other people. Now, you say, how can it be that
in neither grace nor justice he treats people differently,
but now you say he treats his elect differently? It is very
simply in this. He chose a people. And He satisfied
justice in their behalf through the sacrifice of His Son. We
have a just salvation, don't we? We do not have God merely
passing by sin and saying, ah, forget it, don't worry about
it. We don't have God saying, well, I love you, so I'm just
going to let your sin go. Rather, we have God saying this,
I love you, therefore, I will give my Son for you. And He will
bear your penalty. He will satisfy justice. And the scales of justice will
be balanced for every believer just as they are for the unbeliever. And, excuse me, all the works of grace are given
to His people through Christ. Those who are outside of Christ
have no grace. So God does not show respect
of persons, but He does show a difference in how He treats
His people. He says to the Jews who were
as a national people, they were chosen by Him, and favored by
Him, and treated differently. And he says there on the night
of Passover, it will be seen that I make a distinction between
Israel and Egypt. Now you see how this is different
than being a respecter of persons? To be a respecter of persons
is to take note of the differences that already exist and favor
one group over another. God says I'm not going to look
at any distinctions that already exist. I am going to make a distinction. It will be mine to make, I will
do it simply out of my own will. In Romans chapter 11, it says,
the elect has obtained it, but the rest were hardened. You'll have to excuse this cold,
it came back on me. I thought I was done with it,
but while I was done with it, it wasn't done with me. The elect
hath obtained it, the rest were hardened. Now, God had every
right to harden all, God had every right to elect all, but
he chose some, and to them he gave the grace of a softening
of the heart, the grace of making known the truth, and the rest
of them, he just hardened them, let them get harder and harder.
You know, you harden the hearts of men much the same way as you
harden concrete. Just leave it alone. It'll do
it all on its own. Look over here, Mark chapter
4 and verse 10. It says, when he was alone, the
twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them the secret of the
kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside,
everything is said in parables, so that they may be ever seeing,
but never perceiving, and ever hearing, but never understanding. Otherwise, they might turn and
be forgiven." So, the Lord speaking to his twelve and a few others
that followed him, these other disciples, and he said, to you,
to you on the inside, to you whom I have chosen and I have
called, the secret of the kingdom has been given to you. But to
those on the outside, and with God there's an inside and there's
an outside, To those on the outside, everything is said in parables. Now, we look at the parables
and we think, how nice of God, how nice of the Lord Jesus Christ
to bring His teaching down into parables that we could understand.
And He taught in parables so that we could understand the
Gospel. Do you know something? It's for
the exact opposite reason that He taught in parables. Notice
this. It says, to those on the outside, everything is said in
parables, verse 12, so that they may be ever seen, but never perceiving,
and ever hearing, but never understanding, otherwise they might turn and
be forgiven. So what the Lord is saying is,
to those outside, I'm teaching in parables, not so that they
will understand, but so that they won't. I teach in these parables, and
all they hear is the parables. For example, the parable of the
Good Samaritan. How many people have read the
parable of the Good Samaritan and says that we should act like
the Good Samaritan? Now, there's no problem with
drawing that lesson from there. Yes, we should be like the Good
Samaritan and help those in need. But that's what those on the
outside see. Anybody can see that in that
story, right? The priest passed by, the Levite
passed by, Pharisees passed by, the man in the ditch, good Samaritan,
he stops. What is not seen and what is
hidden from those on the outside is not that our Lord was teaching
us that we should be a good Samaritan. He was teaching us that we need
a good Samaritan. We aren't a good Samaritan, we're
the guy in the ditch. Or we might be one of those priests
or Pharisees or something. And he was teaching them that
all of their religiosity and all their keeping the law meant
nothing. And was teaching them that they were the people in
the ditch. He was the good Samaritan. You say, who were the Samaritans?
They were half-breeds. They were the people the descendants of
the people who had been left in Israel during the captivity
and they had interbred with the Gentiles that had been moved
into that area and they were despised by the Jews. That's
kind of, I use the word half-breed and that's considered an insulting
term and that's why I used it because who likes a half-breed? You know, if you're a half-breed,
and it's unfortunate, it's just the way the world is, It's unfortunate
that if you're a half-breed, neither side of your heritage
will accept you. It's not like being a half-breed
makes you acceptable to both sides, it makes you objectionable
to both sides. And so neither the Gentiles cared
for them, nor did the Jews care for them. That's what the Samaritans
were. And our Lord Jesus Christ, for lack of a better way to put
it, is a half-breed. He's the God-man. Now God loved him, but men despised
him on that account and yet it is he who comes and rescues the
man in the ditch. God has joined himself to human
flesh and in so doing has come to us who have been beaten and
robbed of everything good and he has tended our wounds and
put us in the care of of the gospel and of the Holy Spirit
to attend to us. And he has paid the full price
for all that to be done. Now that's what the Good Samaritan's
about. But you don't see that if you're
on the outside. You see a nice moral pattern
to follow. So our Lord told four parables here. And those on the
outside went away scratching their heads. And you know what?
So did those on the inside. They didn't understand. So what did he do? There in the last part of verse
34, but when he was alone with his disciples, he explained everything. Now, why do we like the parables? Well, you and I like the parables,
number one, because Christ has explained them to us. And therefore,
they become useful tools for us to understand the inner workings
of the gospel. But if Christ had not explained
them to us, they would just be some interesting stories. Some
of them would make us scratch our heads. Some of them would
be to us nothing more than some kind of fable with a moral at
the end of it as how we ought to act. But we like them because
God has taught us to find Christ in them and to see the principles
of the gospel illustrated in them. And that's what he taught
his disciples and he taught only his disciples that principle. Now there are some aspects of
our Lord's teaching that are the same for everyone. Whether
they are on the inside or the outside, whether they are the
great multitude that listens, or if they are among his chosen
disciples. First of all, he always, in every
circumstance, teaches the Word. It says here, verse 33, with
many similar parables, Jesus spoke the Word to them. Now the
Lord Jesus spoke the Word, the whole Word, and nothing but the
Word. Every time he opened his mouth, it had something to do
with the Word. Whenever he stood to teach, you can understand
that it was going to be the word. And what do we mean by the word?
The word is defined for us by the Apostle Peter as the gospel
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Somehow or another, by some means
or another, in some part or another, Jesus Christ was always declaring
the word. Now this word, while in one sense
it was his word, And so much so that he is called the word,
yet it is the word of his father. He said, I came and I speak the
word of him who sent me. Now, Jesus Christ is God's prophet
to us and he is God in human flesh. And we might say, well,
now, since he's God in human flesh, he has the right to speak
whatever he wants to. Yes, that's true. But here's one of the mysteries
of the incarnation, one of the mysteries of God being manifested
in the flesh. It's this, even though he was
God, he had emptied himself of all his divine privileges. And
he came in the authority of his father and in the power of the
Holy Spirit. But as to himself, he lived entirely
as a man. So what does he teach? Does he
teach his own ideas? He said, no, that which I've
learned of the father. That's what I'm teaching you. The father's
word. And there's like Paul in speaking
of the gospel, he called it the gospel of God and then said the
gospel concerning God's son, the Lord Jesus Christ, likewise
preach the word of God and the word concerning God's son. Now if anybody else had preached
like the Lord Jesus Christ, we would have considered him to
be very self-aggrandizing. And I guess in the absolute sense
of the word, the Lord was. But then, it was right that he
should exalt himself. He was worthy of that exaltation.
It was right that he should exalt himself. That is, set himself
forward as the only way to the Father. Set himself forward as
the son of God, because that's what he was. Set himself forward
as the son of man, the representative man, the perfect man, because
that's what he was. And it was necessary that we
understand that so that we would come to him. So he spoke what
God told him to, and he spoke those things concerning himself.
And he spoke those things which we needed to know to continue
in our lives as believers until such time as he comes for us
or we go to him. All of these things concerning
him. Everywhere Christ preached, he
preached the word. And that's a great lesson to
anyone who would do the world good by preaching. Whether it
be preaching such as I do here week by week, or the preaching
you do in your workplace as you simply are in, are connected
to your co-workers, the preaching you do in your home to your children. When you teach them Religious
truth. If I can use that word, you know
what I mean. Make sure it's the word you're preaching. However
it is. And you do have to adjust it
according to the age of your children, according to whatever
level of understanding they have. You deal with them on that level.
But always make it a matter of the word. And what more is needed
or useful than to preach the word. Look over here at Hebrews
chapter 4 verse 12. Hebrews chapter 4 verse 12. Now the word of God is not magical,
but it is miraculous. And what's the difference? Well
magic is those things you know that, and of course there is
no such thing as magic, but the way magic operates, if you say
the right incantation or mix together the right ingredients,
such and such will happen. Something out of the ordinary
will happen. Certain actions bring forth certain results.
That's magic. Well, when it comes to the preaching
of the word, When it works, it's miraculous, but there is no guarantee
at any given time exactly what it will do. I can stand and preach
the gospel and get all the ingredients correct, mix up the potion properly,
and it will not accomplish the salvation or up-building of anybody. Why? Because the gospel, the
word of God is not a magic potion, but it is a miraculous power
in the hands of God to the salvation of everyone who believes. And
it says here in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 12, for the word of God
is living and active, powerfully active. The word of God is not
just dead letters in a book. The Word of God is not just lectures
given by someone trained in doctrine. The Word of God is a living thing.
It's the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. It's a word of life. And it's
powerful. It always accomplishes whatever
God intended it to do. Now, a little bit ago I mentioned
something about we preach the Word and nothing's accomplished.
The fact of the matter is something's always accomplished. But it may
not be the same thing every time. Sometimes it may accomplish the
salvation of one God's elect. That'll be the day that God has
determined that his heavenly call will reach their ears and
they are given eternal life and believe the gospel. Sometimes
it's for the comfort and building up of his people. But you know
another purpose it serves? And we may not like this and
it's not what we're seeking, but it does this. It hardens
the hearts of unbelievers. Remember Brother Mahan talking
about people being gospel-hardened. They had heard and rejected the
gospel so many times that the gospel didn't even have an effect
on them anymore. They were gospel-hardened. When
the gospel fell upon the ears of most of those Pharisees, what
did it produce in them? Did it produce faith? Did it
produce worship? No. It produced hate and anger
and violence. The Lord says that His Word that
goes forth from His mouth always accomplishes the purpose for
which He was sent, for which He sent it. And why is that? Because it's a living Word. It's
an active Word. It's sharper than any double-edged
sword. It penetrates even to the dividing
of soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts
and attitudes of the heart. Now, I often see in articles
written by preachers They try to discern the thoughts and intents
of people's hearts. And they'll rebuke this one and
commend that one, you know, and they'll say, if a person does
this, it's because such and such is in his heart. Hold on just
a minute. Now, if you have a direct word from Scripture to back that
up, fine. We're free to say whatever the Scriptures plainly say. But
I've heard people say, and unfortunately, I've even been prone to say these
kinds of things from time to time, if someone doesn't come
to church regularly and everything, it's just because they're lost.
Wait a minute. Not necessarily. Just hold on. We can't judge
the thoughts and intents of the heart. Say, how do you know that? Well, try judging the thoughts
and intents of your own heart. I can't even get that one figured
out, brethren. How could I possibly know your heart? And so for me to stand, as some
do, as a judge over others, to look at their outward actions
and by that try to determine what's going on in their hearts.
We can't help but do what we always do, but to try to make
that public and official, that's way out of line. I tell you,
if you see a brother Acting beneath what you think a brother should
act. Don't judge him, pray for him.
Pray for him. In all likelihood, he's a brother
that's struggling. And he doesn't need your judgment. He needs
your compassion. He needs your concern and your
care. and do all you can to build them
up. No, we are not the judges of the thoughts and intents of
people's hearts. But I tell you, the Word of God
can. And it does so in a miraculous way. As I said, not a magical
way, but certainly in a way that you and I would never be able
to do it. It's mysterious in the way it works. But we preach
the Gospel. And it penetrates men beyond
the facade that they put up. It sees things we can't see.
And it will reveal the thoughts and intents of their heart if
it be evil, and that their religious pursuits be nothing more than
a hypocritical display intended to gain the favor of men. It
revealed that. It revealed it in the days of
our Lord Jesus Christ because His word was odious to the religious
people because it penetrated their hearts and showed them
to be what they are. But you want to know what else
the Word of God does? It will reveal faith in the heart of
a believer. Now how many times have you come
in this place just feeling you had no faith whatsoever? You come in here feeling like
a lost man. Lost woman. Wondering if you know God, wondering
if God knows you. And you sit down, and the Word
of God is preached. And your heart is strengthened.
And you say, oh yes, I believe that. I believe that. John Newton wrote, "'Tis a point
I long to know, and oft it gives me anxious thought. Do I love
the Lord or no? Am I His or am I not? Just listen
to the word preached and it will reveal your attitude toward God. Old Peter, he'd made a mess of
things by denying the Lord three times. There on the night of crucifixion
and afterward, after all the Lord was done with his work and
he's meeting with his disciples over that 40 day period, he takes
Peter aside and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, I love you.
Peter, do you love me? Yes, I love you. And a third
time the Lord says, Peter, do you love me? And it says it grieved
Peter that he asked him a third time. And I think because Peter
understood exactly why the Lord asked him three times. And I
love Peter's response. He says, Lord, you know all things
and you know that I love you. And Jesus Christ, the living
word, did know Peter's heart. And the preached word will penetrate
the hearts of those who listen and will reveal to them what
their heart is if they want to know. Now, a lot of people don't
want to know. They would never dare to say,
as the psalmist did, search me, oh God, and know my heart. and see if there'd be some perverse
way in me. They wouldn't do that because
they're like people who have symptoms of a deadly disease
and yet they won't go to the doctor because they're afraid
the doctor's going to tell them they have that deadly disease.
Which, how foolish is that? Whether or not you go to the
doctor doesn't change whether or not you have the disease. It
only changes whether or not you know about it and maybe can do
something about it before it's too late. But people will do
all they can to resist the Word of God because they know what
it's going to tell them. In verse 13 of Hebrews chapter
4, nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Have
you noticed here now how God is equated with His Word? First
it says that the Word of God is powerful and living and penetrating
and discerning. And it says, nothing in all creation
is hidden from God's sight. That's why there is such power
in the preaching of the word, because it's as though God himself
goes out with that preaching. Everything is uncovered and laid
bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give an account. So in all cases, the Lord preached
the word. In all cases, he kept it simple.
He didn't reach for clever philosophies. There's big business now in religious
books. And if you want to sell a religious
book, you've got to have something clever, unique, something that
nobody else has said before, another angle on it. Our Lord
Jesus Christ did not come to give a new angle on the truth.
He simply came to make the truth more clear. The basic truth that
we are sinners and we need a savior and he's the savior we need. He wasn't trying to describe
the origin of evil. Believe it or not, that's something
people get all hung up about. How did evil get into the world?
I mean, if God's perfect and if he's a good God, how did evil
get into the world? If Adam was without sin, how
could he be made to sin? I like what Spurgeon said one
time. He said, if I came home and there
was a lion in my house, I wouldn't start asking how he got in. I'd
be looking for how to get him out. He said, when it comes to
sin, let's be less concerned about how it got into us and
be concerned with how to get it out of us. But our Lord was not asking such
useless questions or answering it, kept it simple. His instruction was useful and
practical, and he always spoke with authority. Even those that
didn't believe him would say, never a man spake like this man. I wish I could have been there
to hear our Lord speak. There was something about the
way he spoke that no one went away from his sermons unmoved. And the very reason that his
sermons occasioned such objections was because those who objected
to it knew he was right. You rarely ever fight with those
you know to be wrong. I mean, if somebody comes up
to you and says 2 plus 2 equals 5, you'll go, what? It equals
4. No, it equals 5. Okay, whatever.
And you move on. Why did they fight with the Lord?
Because they knew he was right. And it pierced them to the heart. He always spoke in such a way
that any who lacked understanding or faith, well, the fault lay
with them, not with him. Now, he spoke in parables so
they wouldn't understand, but they should have. They should
have. The fault was not in the parable.
The fault was in the hardness of their hearts. But he had a special conduct
in the way he taught his people. Note this, we're going back to
Mark chapter four now. Verse 34, he did not say anything
unto them without a parable. Who's the them? The multitude,
the outside. But when he was alone with his
disciples, he explained everything. This word translated explained,
means to untangle or to loose. It's actually just the word to
set free or to loose something and then a prefix on it to make
it a stronger form of it. You see, truth to us is mysterious. Despite the very simplicity of
truth, our minds are such that we do tangle it up. Jesus Christ
untangles it. It kind of has the sense of,
we'll get to the bottom of this. We'll see what the reality of
it is. We'll relieve it of all the traditions
that have gotten tangled up with it. Do you realize how much of
our instruction in the Word of God actually consists of being
corrected about the things we learned before and the attitudes
we learned before? How much of learning the truth
is actually a matter of unlearning error? And yet that's what the
Lord does. He explains it to them. He expounds
it to them. He untangles it. Notice this. He explained everything. The
Lord has not left anything Untaught to his people that is he's not
left anything that would be useful to us helpful to us We have a
tendency to want to know something more than has been revealed.
I Was teaching this morning in the Sunday school class. There
are two men mentioned Paul says one who has respect of all the
churches and he says and one who is highly regarded by us
two different men that were going that were being sent along on
this project of carrying a gift back to the Jerusalem believers
and You know what my immediate thought was when I read that?
I wondered who these guys were. Why didn't they give the name?
You know, who is this? Was it one of his relatives? Or you know, is it somehow some
connection to somebody else? What church did they come from?
You know something? If it would have been any use
to us whatsoever to know the names of those two men, Christ
would have seen to it that Paul wrote it down. He said, boy,
I sure would like to know when the Lord's going to come back.
If it could be any possible use to you, the Lord would have written
it down, but he didn't. He explained those things which
are necessary for us in this time to understand the way of
eternal life. And that's why we don't reach
for more. If the Lord didn't explain it, we do not need to
know it. In fact, we will probably come
to harm if we try to speculate about it. I've seen a lot of
that go on, it always distresses me. It's one thing to sit around
and just, for lack of a better word, we call it fun, just try
to roll these things over in your mind, but don't ever put
any stock in what you come up with. If it isn't said plainly
in the Bible, just leave it alone. He explained everything, and
then this key word, and this is actually what drew me to this
text, when he was alone. with his disciples. The Lord
teaches these things to his disciples and he teaches it to them when
he's alone with them. The first thing that struck me
is the intimate nature of the relationship between the Lord
Jesus and his disciples. He loved to be with him and he
saved his best, if that's the way to put it, just for them. You know the very word intimacy.
It's been somewhat corrupted in its meaning over the years. And we only, they use it these
days as a euphemism just for the relationship between a husband
and a wife. And that is the ultimate intimacy
in this world. But intimacy has many different
levels. There's family intimacy. And what do you mean by that?
Well, there's things your family knows about you that no one else
is allowed to know. Isn't that true? Once you get inside your
house, you're a little more open than you are when you leave your
house. And then there's the intimacy of friends. You have probably
a handful of close friends, and they know things about you that
nobody else knows, and there's kind of an unspoken bond of silence
over those matters. You're willing to confide in
them, and they in you, and you understand. It's a confidence.
That's a kind of intimacy. Well, the Lord is intimate with
his disciples. There are things he shares with
them that he does not share with anybody else. There are things
he tells them that he doesn't tell anybody else. There are
revelations of himself that he gives to them that he doesn't
give to anybody else. He is personal and intimate with
them. When he was alone with them, when might that be? Well,
three things came to mind. First of all, if you would be
taught of the Lord, of course you must be his disciple, a follower
of him. But that means that you are willing to be alone with
him. We learn from him when in our
hearts it's just him and ourselves. That's when we learn the most.
And that's why it's to our great benefit to discipline our flesh,
that is, restrain it, because it always wants to be off doing
something else, and make the flesh sit still long enough that
the spirit might meditate upon the things of God, completely
apart from the things of the world. I've heard people describe
it as, I want to get alone with God. I know exactly what they
mean. It's not an easy thing for me to do. I'm so scatterbrained.
And I've heard you all mention some of the same things. You
know, you try to pray and your mind goes everywhere. Except, but
we do the best we can. And those times when we are able
to center our thoughts, to be alone with the Lord, as it were,
how much we learn then. Here's another time. In trial
and in trouble. There is something about trouble
that makes us feel alone. And maybe that's why the Lord
leads us into it. If we will not willingly be alone
with Him, He will make arrangements so that we've got nowhere else
to go but Him. I don't want the Lord to send
me trial, and yet even as I say that, I realize that some of
the most blessed times and most prosperous times for my soul
have been under trial. When we are bereft of any hope
in man or in ourselves and we feel isolated and alone, then
we see the Lord and we learn from him. Now, I'm not saying pray for
trial. In fact, our Lord taught us, lead us not into temptation,
testing, trial, you know, but if the Lord puts you there, then
thank the Lord for it and make good use of this time to be alone
with the Lord. Do you feel all alone? Good. Call upon the name of the Lord
and ask him to come into that isolation you feel and be your
teacher. For it is in such times he begins
to explain everything. And then one other time, and
that is on occasions such as this, when the church gathers
itself out of the world And we who love the Lord Jesus Christ
come together in one spirit and one faith to worship one Lord
and one God and Father of all. And we as the church, as his
disciples, are alone with the Lord. Do not be surprised if
you feel ignorant of the things of God, if you're not making
use of those times when the scriptures say Christ explains everything
to his people. Do not be surprised to find yourself
in trouble if you are not willing to set aside some time to seek
the Lord with your whole heart and to be alone with him. For
he may be using trouble to accomplish this good for you, to be alone
with him, to learn. When he was alone with his disciples,
all the blessedness of being alone with the Lord. There, he
explains everything. Our Heavenly Father, take these
words spoken by man, filter them of that which is only flesh, and take that which is truly
spiritual, and empower it by your Spirit to the good of those
who've gathered here. Exalt the name of your Son who
loved us, gave himself for us, and now calls us to himself to
be alone with him, that he might explain all things to us. In
his name we pray this, amen.