“WE ARE THE LORD’S”
D. T. Pye
We have been impressed this week with the need of personal contact with Jesus. It is the most important thing in our lives to have a personal contact with Him. If there is anyone here who does not have that personal link we would desire that you might listen very carefully and that through what is said you might be drawn to appreciate the great need of a personal touch with Him. There is no questioning the fact that our brother enjoyed a personal link with Jesus, and that is something very real. Not only did he enjoy that personal link but he also knew Him as his Lord, and that is important also, for it involves not only what it is individually but takes us on a little into the enjoyment of what is collective. Our brother not only enjoyed that personal link, as we have said, but he also held his link with the Lord in relation to the saints.
This scripture brings forward the fact that the most important matter is the sense of being the Lord’s. Our brother had known personal contact with the Lord throughout his life. He had proved it throughout the war years, for he was often in areas of danger when attending the sick and wounded, but throughout that time he proved preservation and proved, I am sure, the comfort that the Lord Himself gives. There was also a time in his life when, with a young family, he was faced in his employment with the question of trade union membership, whether he would become the bondman of men or whether he would be faithful to the bondmanship
of the Lord, and we are thankful to say that our brother was faithful in this. Now these are really testing matters, but in them we find that there is something wrought in the way of experience in that personal link we have with Christ. It is something choice. It is not only what we do, or what we become, or what we say, but it is the fact of the enjoyment of this link with Him. It is the most essential thing in our lives. For, after all, we are not our own—we have been bought with a price and that is what is so important in our lives, to acknowledge that the Lord Jesus has claims upon His own. He has exercised His claim and right in relation to our brother in that he has fallen asleep through Jesus. The Lord has acted in relation to him.
Now things have come in in our brother’s life which you might say were well nigh overwhelming. We wonder why. These things search us in our pathways and yet we have to recognise that they are in the Lord’s ways and in His ordering and through them we have something to learn. Nothing happens by chance to persons who acknowledge the Lord, but in them something is wrought out. Overwhelming exercises bring deep soul experience which in itself brings its own blessing, for there is a result out of such experience, and there is also the matter of how that works out amongst those our brother has walked with, and that has had its own effects too, I am sure. We would look for something of the blessing of it to be known by us. We can say that our brother has been in the joy of knowing that we are the Lord’s, and he is now in the settled sense of the Lord’s love, for the Lord has acted in relation to him and taken him to be with Himself.
There is a touch of comfort for our hearts in these verses in Romans 12. I read the two
verses and would particularly like to relate verse 12 to the experiences that have been gone through over the past year, especially thinking of our sister, that there might be comfort for her. She has displayed a spirit of hope. I think that has been evident to us locally. A sense of tribulation has been in it all, but she has endured in it, and that is a very precious thing, that from endurance there is a result, and we would desire that the fulness of that may now be proved by our sister. James speaks, in relation to faith, of endurance having its perfect work (James 1: 4), and I think that when there is the ability to endure through testing and tribulation there is a perfect work and .a result from it, which can but be blessing from the Lord.
There has been much persevering in prayer both here, and we can indeed say universally, amongst those with whom our brother walked, and it has extended beyond that area to others in the body of Christ. There is a whole line of persevering in prayer resulting from what has come in in relation to our brother. Well, these things are to yield a result and a blessing.
We can weep with our sister in the sense of her loss. How little we can enter into the side of grief, but there is the side of sympathy and that would flow out now to our sister, and yet there is rejoicing in knowing what there is that is bound up in the Lord for us. May our hearts be comforted, for His name’s sake.
Word at the burial of Mr. T. Wilson, Kirkcaldy
1 October 1981