DESIRES ANSWERED BY THE GOSPEL

G. C. McKay

Psalm 145: 13–21; 1 Timothy 2: 1–7; John 12: 20–26

I read these scriptures because of the allusion in them to desire. I trust you are here with some right desires. We know there can be wrong motives, there can be the desires of the flesh, there can be many things that enter into the human heart; but I would hope that you would be here with the kind of desire that God would delight to answer. I read the scripture in 1 Timothy because it brings out the fact that God has His desires in the glad tidings. He “desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”. I would like to think that this would be an occasion when there might be a coming together of these two desires; the desire in your own heart for blessing and God’s desire to bless you, so that every right desire of your heart might be accomplished. We look for God to speak in His word in the gospel, and we also look and pray for a hidden operation in the heart and conscience of each one present at a gospel preaching. Without that divine operation the most wonderful gospel preaching could go out without any effect. God not only gives His word but He operates in the heart, and He stirs up the conscience. He will begin to work with an unconverted person so that there comes about a desire and a sense of need, maybe a sense of distress. God would work that way. He would bring about desire for the truth.

What kind of thirst and hunger do you have? Are you among those who hunger and thirst after righteousness? Do you love what is right, what is holy and what is pure? Would you love peace of conscience and heart in the presence of God and everything clear between you and God? Would you like your heart to be filled? What is your desire? My own thought would be that you might have right desires and intense desires, that you might not be here in a casual way; but if never before that now God would stir up in you an earnest desire to get into the gain of the glad tidings, to come to know God as a Saviour God, to have Christ for yourself as your Saviour, to have a clear conscience, to have your sins forgiven, to be clear in mind and heart, to be able to look up with confidence to God and to see our blessed Saviour at the right hand of God as your Saviour who is dispensing blessing for you. Would you like that satisfaction? God’s desire is these things. We do not think enough about what God desires. What a, great heart He has! He “desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”. This is the background to the gospel. The gospel goes out from the great heart of God. He desires that all men should be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth; to be saved from a lost eternity and also to be enlightened and brought to the knowledge of the truth. In other words, that they should come into the full light and blessedness of what God’s thought is for them.

I suppose many of us have sat in gospel preachings, careless and resistant, and all the time God was yearning over us. God’s desire is not going to change because we do not accept the Saviour or because we resist or delay. It brings out yearning. In the days of old, God said, “My spirit shall not always plead with Man”, Genesis 6: 3. Think of God’s Spirit striving in the days before the flood. God fixed the time and He said, “his days shall be a hundred and twenty years”. Now God has fixed a time of the glad tidings. He has not disclosed to us as to how long the gospel will go out, but we know it has gone out for many years and God waits, and while He waits His Spirit strives and speaks. Do you feel it? I trust you would feel a sense of God’s love and care. We read in the beginning of Genesis when all was dark, that the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. That was before God said “Let there be light”. The Spirit of God was hovering there in the darkness. That means He was not inactive.

He was not at rest or satisfied. He was there

hovering. In the gospel preaching, the Holy Spirit would act, would make a divine personal appeal towards you. If there is darkness in your heart and an unresponsive state it would be, as it were, that the Spirit of God would hover, looking for the moment when light breaks in.

God said, “Let there be light”. It is a wonderful moment when God in His mercy brings in light in the soul, and things begin to become clear and the gospel can be received.

We could speak simply as to the psalm. This psalmist is full of God. He is extolling God as King, and he is speaking much of His mighty acts and His great goodness and His righteousness. In verse 8, “Jehovah is gracious and merciful; slow to anger, and of great loving-kindness. Jehovah is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works”. He extols God in His works and His grace and His glory. Then in verse 13 we come to the suggestion that you usually get in the psalms, that while there is what is arrived at and what is glorious in the soul of the believer who writes the psalm, there is also the deep side of exercise. That is why I read that section in the psalm, it is the side of exercise. “The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their food in its season”. This applies to the actual creation, that the eyes of all are on God. Really God is keeping everything going, supplying the animals with their food, “Thou openest thy hand”. Why does the earth give food so bountifully? Why are the elements so arranged in the year to bring about fruitfulness on the earth? It is God that does it. You say, It comes round every year. It comes round every year because God brings it round every year; He brings about the seasons and has promised not to interrupt them. After the flood He says, I will maintain these things in My faithfulness to My creature, and He opens His hand. You think of that when you have a meal. That is where the food came from, it came from the hand of God because He opened His hand, even materially.

But then in satisfying the desire of every living thing He has in mind that man is not like the animals in this, that he was created by God breathing into him. Man has a spirit, and has a link in that way with God. Man has desires that no animal could have. The lower creation has desires for food and certain instincts which are right.

These are very wonderful things in creation, but in creating man God had in mind something greater. Indeed He had in mind that He Himself in Jesus would come down into this scene as Man. What thoughts God had in creating man, that the One whom we know as God’s beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that Person in the Godhead, would come into manhood Himself.

God created man with spiritual desires, with longings that go beyond the longings that belong to the rest of the creation. This is what we are looking for in the gospel, something which would spring up in your soul to such an extent that you would say, I will not be satisfied until I get it; I want to find the blessings in the gospel, I want to be in touch with God and before Him, I want to know these things and be sure and satisfied in my soul in a link with my Creator. And God looks for that desire. He stirs it up, and then it says here, “Thou ... satisfiest the desire of every living thing”. The gospel is individual. Maybe several are converted in one gospel preaching, three thousand in one day in the Acts, but it is all individual, you really have to come to the thing yourself, so every living thing should have its desire. “Jehovah is righteous in all his ways, and kind in all his works”. He is both these things. He is righteous—if He is going to satisfy the longings of the soul of man and provide for him, He has to provide for his moral needs. He has had to provide the great moral basis for your salvation and satisfaction. It is the foundation of everything with God that He is righteous and He is holy. He cannot deny what He is in Himself. He cannot allow His righteousness and holiness to be impugned. He has to assert His rights and maintain His holiness, and so He has to deal with things in a moral way.

So if you are going to have your desire satisfied, what about the moral side of things in your soul? Has that been settled? It can be settled through faith in the death of Christ and the shedding of His blood. Has the matter been settled on your account? For God it is settled. He settled the moral question. It is a wonderful thing to think of God in the material creation and what He can do there, but the wonder of it is this, that sin having come in and blighted creation, God has solved the great moral question. He did it in Christ at Calvary’s cross. Sin had come up and made an affront to God, sins had been piled up like a mountain in the sight of God, and His glory questioned by the rebellion of sinfulness of man. Then the matter was settled at the cross because Jesus bore the whole matter of God’s righteous judgment against sin judicially. All question of sins and the question of sin itself, He bore it in those three hours on Calvary’s cross and He settled the moral question. It is a wonderful thing that such a great work should be compressed into such a short time. A short time, but how long it must have been for Him to be on the cross forsaken, of God, suffering there. What He suffered from men was dreadful, but He suffered from God in these three hours of darkness. It was beyond what men could enter into, and so the darkness came on the whole earth and Jesus was shut in with God and there the matter of sin was settled. Justice’s sword fell on the holy, guiltless One, and thus the matter was settled. The world is full of problems and it cannot solve its problems, and the one problem it will never solve is the moral question, but God has solved it. He has a righteous basis for salvation for everyone; for forgiving your sins, which means that God will not hold them to account, and to set you up in justification, righteous in His presence. He can do it on account of the work of Jesus, and He does it on the basis that you are a repentant sinner and that you believe in the Lord Jesus.

Do you qualify? It does not take much, but it takes these things we sang about in the hymn, ‘Repentance only, God requires from man’ (Hymn 123). You must come as a repentant sinner, and acknowledging you are a sinner. You cannot come and pretend you are not and still get the blessing. You cannot come with excuses, or with any good deeds, or anything to counterbalance your sins; you come just as a sinner, you acknowledge that is all you are, you come in repentance. You see something of sin too, as in God’s presence, and you realise how unfit you are for God’s presence. Someone has said that no one really has come to anything until they have looked, perhaps for a moment, into the jaws of a lost eternity. Have you ever done that? If I am not saved, if this question is not settled on my account, I am going to go down there into the terrors of a lost eternity. How dreadful even to contemplate it! But then God has provided for your salvation from your sins, and salvation from the wrath to come. The moral question has been settled by Jesus on the cross, but perhaps it has not been settled in your soul. It must be settled if you are going to have your desires satisfied. How could you have peaceful enjoyment of the satisfaction of the spiritual desires of your soul if you are still burdened with sin and sins, still burdened about your condition before God? God would settle the matter, and then as presenting it as settled in Jesus, He would do more than take away the guilt and the sense of the bad conscience, more than heal your conscience, He would deal with your heart too.

God made you and He knows what you need. I have spoken about your desires, but God has knowledge beyond your desires; He knows what you need in your conscience, what you need in your mind, what you need in your heart. He knows what will fill your heart. We often say that, God made your heart and God knows what can fill your heart. The world cannot. You can take all the pleasures, and possessions and riches, in the world, and put them into a man’s heart and he will not be satisfied. But if you put Christ in his heart then he will be satisfied, and if he receives the Holy Spirit too, which is one of the great blessings in the gospel, there is not only satisfaction but a source of life and satisfaction in everything.

Not only do I have Christ as my Saviour, but I can look to Him in everything. I can trust Him with my eternal welfare, and with my life day by day. Then also I have the gift of the Holy Spirit that God gives to those that obey Him as the source of satisfaction and joy within.

What does the living water do that Jesus gives? This gift of the Spirit springs up. Oh, have you desires that spring up? The Holy Spirit will affect your desires, so that instead of you being governed by the wrong desires of the flesh, there will be something springing up in your very being, the power of the Spirit, affecting your mind and your heart, bringing about desires that spring up into eternal life. Eternal life is for your satisfaction. Have you ever reached that realm, the realm of eternal life? That is what God has in mind. Sin has brought in death and shadow and cloud and disaster and terrible oppression on the spirit of man. God had the tree of life in mind before Adam sinned. He had something in mind to settle that terrible need in the heart of man, and that is eternal life; life that is unclouded by death or by sin, life that is beyond death, and involves for the believer blessed links not only with the saints but with divine Persons themselves.

One thing the preacher can do is to encourage you and say, Well these things are for you.

That is like these few verses we read in the psalm, “Jehovah is righteous in all his ways, and kind in all his works”. Is that not encouraging if you hesitate? He is “nigh unto all that call upon him”. Is that not encouraging? God is not far away. The word of God says it, He is near to “all that call upon him, unto all that call upon him in truth”, suggesting that there is sincerity in your heart as you call. Then, “He fulfilleth the desire of them that fear him; he heareth their cry, and saveth them”. God “keepeth all that love him, and all the wicked will he destroy”. He is a holy, righteous God. Faith is not the portion of all, there are those that will not receive the glad tidings, but then “Jehovah keepeth all that love him”. I think if you go through these experimental matters in these verses we read, maybe you will be able to go back to the beginning of the psalm and be like the psalmist. Look what he says, “I will extol thee, my God, O King, and I will bless thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless thee, and I will praise thy name for ever and ever”.

That is the result of the glad tidings, God is known, and those that know Him praise Him.

I have already alluded to 1 Timothy 2, but it is very interesting because this epistle brings out the fact that in a certain sense God has His dwelling down here. He dwells in the heavens, but there is a realm down here in the saints of God in which God dwells by the Spirit, and if you go there to the house of God, you will find a very remarkable thing. God being praised? Yes, surely. A holy realm? Yes, but you will find people praying for all men. That is what belongs to the house of God down here, “supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings” are being made for all men. God’s house is a place where God’s feelings and desires are known, and they are expressed in the prayers of the saints as well as in the gospel preachings. So you find there that persons are praying. They want to lead a quiet and tranquil life, they are not opposed to kings and those that are in dignity, they are accepting God’s ordering in that. They want to do what is good and acceptable before our Saviour God. Christians can speak of Him as our Saviour God, but they know Him thus as aware of the fact that He “desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”. Then the verses go on to give us the truth of the situation that exists, “God is one, and the mediator of God and men one, the man Christ Jesus”. It is precious to the believer to read that, “the man Christ Jesus”—a different kind of man, different from you and me. As Jesus came into manhood He was not simply a better Man. Persons will say, Yes He was a good Man, perhaps a better Man,

perhaps the best Man that ever lived. He is greater than that. He is a different kind of man altogether, of a different order of manhood, a real Man but a different kind of man altogether.

For example, He did not have to obey the way we have to obey. We have to obey in the sense of submitting, our wills have to be bowed to the will of God; but Jesus never had to be bowed to the will of God, it was His delight, the actual motive of His heart and being to do the will of God.

What did He do, this perfect, blessed, holy, sinless Man? He “gave himself a ransom for all”.

That is the scope of His giving so that the door is open for everyone. Think of God acting in such a way, to open the door for salvation for everyone. Not only does He desire that all men should be saved, but He has provided the ransom too. The door is open through the ransom, the death of Christ has laid the basis, so the way into blessing is available for every man. If anyone does not receive it, it is not because the provision was not there. And then there is

“the testimony to be rendered in its own times”. This gospel preaching is just a little part of the testimony being rendered. Paul was the great apostle of it. There is tremendous liberty of heart attached to the gospel preaching because God’s heart is so wide. His love is so great, and the divine provision is so full and perfect in the death of Jesus. It is not like some kind of restricted offer, it is just that God’s heart is out, and His righteous requirement has been met in the death of Jesus so that persons might be saved. Can you not feel that, the liberty of it, the expansiveness of it, and the opportunity of it, the great breadth of the glad tidings? Now the question comes down to you and me. Am I in it? Are you in it? Have you gone through the door into this realm of blessing and availed yourself of the death of Christ?

I would just speak briefly on John 12, a very interesting scripture because persons come up and they have a desire to see Jesus. These Greeks were looking

for something. They came up to worship and they would attach themselves to the Jews because they saw there was something of divine light there. They do not come themselves, they look for someone to speak for them; they came to Philip, and Philip gets Andrew and they come and tell Jesus. Jesus’ answer is very instructive, “The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified”. You find moments like this in John’s gospel. You find it in chapter 4 when He saw the fields white to harvest after the woman of John 4 was secured, and now here again He hears that the Greeks want to see Him and His heart goes out and He says that the Son of man is going to be glorified. We were speaking of expansiveness a moment ago.

Have you ever thought of the glory of Jesus as the Son of man, the One who has taken up the burden that lay upon man? He is the Son of man, He is going to be glorified. He is going to reign over this scene, and the nations are going to come in. That is what Jesus is anticipating here. The Greeks are going to be there too, not only the Jews, but the Gentiles, all for the glory of the Son of man. But then He says that the grain of wheat has to fall into the ground and die. Now that is another side to the truth. However right their desires were at this time, the Greeks from one point of view represent the mind of man, that man would try to lay hold of divine things himself and using his own capabilities. The Lord Jesus says, No. If you are going to know about these things you have to understand and face this great matter that I am going into death, and the fruit will be as a result of My death. Everything that will be for God’s pleasure will emerge from this grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying.

Otherwise it would abide alone.

We spoke of Jesus as a different kind of man, and while He was here He abode alone. He was the only one. A new order of manhood was seen in Christ, it was seen in no one else, but then as going into death it bears much fruit and there are persons who are like Jesus. How wonderful to think of the death of Christ as

producing a harvest for God. Are you going to be part of that harvest? Because He is a blessed Man beyond death. The Saviour died, but He rose again in wondrous resurrection power, and as He rose His death became, as it were, the birthplace of His people; that is, there are persons who have their origins in the death of Christ and they are like Him. Then what are we going to do now? That is partly why I read verse 25. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus, you come into the gain of what He has done for you. The question of your life in this world arises. You say, I want Jesus, I want these things. What about His death? And then what about your life in this world? We all have a life in this world. “He that loves his life shall lose it, and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal”. That is, our affections are to be fixed on Jesus in another world beyond death. Oh how testing, but how blessed, and Jesus makes it attractive. “If any one serve me”. Do you want to serve Him, this One who died for you and loves you? “If any one serve me, let him follow me”, that involves His death and being in keeping with the death of Jesus. You say. This is the gospel? Yes, you have to come into keeping morally with the death of Jesus and to hate your life in this world.

All your desires were perhaps attached to your life in this world. We are speaking about desires, “he that hates his life in this world”. You give up these worldly aspirations and all that the flesh would wish, and instead you want to follow Jesus, because He says, “where I am, there also shall be my servant”. Do you want to be where Jesus is? It means your affections will be in a realm that is beyond death where He is, a blessed, risen and glorified Man.

But then there is always encouragement in scripture. The scripture presents glorious matters, but it usually brings in the practical side as to how it bears upon us; and if scripture brings in a practical touch that bears upon us, I think you very often find that there is a touch of divine encouragement. Well, here is the touch of encouragement, “if any one serve me, him shall the

Father honour”. It would be fine to be honoured by the Father, because you love Christ. Not only do you love Him and come into the gain of what He has done, not only do you find Him the answer to all your needs, but you are actually prepared to hate your life in this world. You find the satisfaction of your heart and soul being tied up with a Man who is in another realm altogether. Are you prepared to serve Him and be with Him? May we be prepared for that, because that is the way to come into full blessing and to come into honour, honoured by the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. May we come into these things in reality, for His name’s sake.

Preaching at Peterhead
21 March 1999