THE VOICE OF THE LORD JESUS
J. A. Brown
Matthew 11: 25–30; Psalm 36: 5–9; John 8: 12
I would like to speak to you about the voice of the Lord Jesus. When the brethren in this city decided to have these meetings, they no doubt had in mind that we should hear in ministry what God might have to say to us at the present time. So it is no surprise that our brother has brought before us the matter of divine speaking. I have found it confirming as that is what I had been thinking about for this meeting. I was affected recently in thinking about the Lord Jesus before Pilate. He spoke about truth; He said—“Every one that is of the truth hears my voice”, John 18: 37. There has been a lot of speaking in these two days, a lot of scriptures read, a lot of very wonderful things said. Maybe some of you dear young folks at the back would say, ‘well, it has been hard to understand some of what has been said’. I can agree with you, I have found it so too, but Jesus is speaking. That is my simple thought, that the Lord Jesus is speaking, and I would ask you this question, have you heard His voice? He said to Pilate—“Every one that is of the truth hears my voice”. Pilate did not know what Jesus was speaking about. Do you? Have you ever heard the voice of Jesus?
I have read in Matthew’s gospel this section which records the words of Jesus. The words of Jesus are here in the scripture for us, but they continue. Jesus would speak to you in meetings like this. You may not understand everything, but the Lord Jesus would speak to you in what is said in the scriptures that are read, or in some impression that you would get, because there is that which is flowing out from God, of His thoughts for you. He wants you to understand, and the speaker is Jesus. We had yesterday that scripture in Hebrews that God “at the end of these days has spoken to us in the person of the Son” (Hebrews 1: 2), and He is still doing it. Are you listening? Can you hear Him? You might say, ‘yesterday we spoke about very wonderful things and I could not understand them’. Do you want to listen? Are you interested in what Jesus is saying to you? Do you want to hear? Yesterday morning’s reading was about what divine Persons are saying to each other. There was a lot of truth in what was said, but there were three simple words said by a brother in the reading which in a certain way summed it up for me—desire before doctrine. We need the doctrine, for we cannot be guided by our own experience. Where would I end up if I was guided by my thoughts and by my experience? So we need the truth and the Lord Jesus is the One who is the Truth. He is the Truth, but then we have to hear His voice. How much do we want it? How much are we interested in these things of which we have been speaking?
The Lord Jesus here was in a time of very great pressure. In Matthew 11: 20 it says, “Then began he to reproach the cities in which most of his works of power had taken place”. He had been to Capernaum; if you read Luke 4 you will see what He did there. He healed people, multitudes of sick were brought to Him in Capernaum and He healed them all. He did miracles there and here in verse 23. He has to say to Capernaum, “And thou, Capernaum, who hast been raised up to heaven, shalt be brought down even to hades. For if the works of power which have taken place in thee, had taken place in Sodom, it had remained until this day”. These people in Capernaum were not interested in Jesus. No doubt they were impressed by what He could do in healing the sick, but they had not listened to Him, they had not taken on what He was saying. How He felt the contempt and the reproach and the rejection of those to whom He had come. At that time of reproach, He lifts up His voice to the Father and He praises God. I think that is wonderful. There are three parts to what the Lord Jesus says here. First of all He speaks to the Father, He praises the Father. He is functioning here, you might say, as the Minister of the holy places; He is lifting His heart in responsive praise to the Father. He then speaks about the Father, and He brings in most wonderful truth. Some of the things that we have been speaking about in our readings these two days are summarised in verse 27—“no one knows the Son but the Father”. Then He speaks to those around Him who were burdened and weary. I know that this has been used often in the gospel, but it does not just have a gospel setting, it has an appeal to every heart here. Who has never felt burdened? Who is there of us that has never felt weary? But if we start from the point of view of our experience, we would start from the end of what Jesus says here. We would start from our experience and how much we need His help in that experience, but He starts by praising God. O dear brethren, whatever stage you are at in your experience with God, remember that the service of God, response to God, comes first.
In John 4, the Lord Jesus had to do with a woman who was a sinner. She was a terrible sinner, and her moral condition was deplorable, but He speaks to her of living water and He speaks to her of the Father seeking worshippers. That is what the Father is seeking today. He wants you as a worshipper, He wants you responsive to Him in praise. So the Lord Jesus turns first to the Father, not to His own, and He praises the Father despite the pressure, despite the rejection that He had known. What beautiful words these are. “I praise thee, Father, Lord of the heaven and of the earth”. We have been speaking about the Father in these meetings and here the Lord Jesus is speaking to the Father. We were speaking yesterday morning about these communications between divine Persons. The Son is speaking to the Father and He is praising Him for what He has done, for hiding these things. Dear brethren, what we have been speaking about in these two days together would be included in these things, “that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to babes”. You may say, ‘I do not understand much’. The brethren have been talking about the divine economy, they have been talking about the glory of the assembly, they have been talking about wisdom and revelation, and these things are hard to understand. Dear young friend, God will reveal them to you if you are interested. The Lord delights here in praising the Father and thanking Him that He “hast revealed them to babes”. It is what we were speaking about this afternoon as to the spirit of wisdom and revelation. If you want it, God will give it to you. If you are interested in these wonderful things that we have been speaking about, God will give them to you. You might say, ‘I am not knowledgeable about these things’. You do not need to be. In fact they have not been revealed to the wise and prudent of this world, they have been revealed to babes. Jesus was talking about His disciples. How old were these men? I suppose from what I have heard, that most of them were in their twenties. These men that He speaks about to whom God had revealed these wonderful things were the same age as you are. They were young and yet God had revealed these wonderful things to them.
Dear brethren, these things are not beyond any of us because we have been given the Holy Spirit that we might enter into the enjoyment of them. “Yea, Father, for thus has it been wellpleasing in thy sight”. It is wonderful to see the glory of the truth that comes out in this compressed verse 27, “All things have been delivered to me by my Father”, (Matthew 11: 27). Now you could have a whole three-day meeting on that one sentence. I did not have in mind to speak about it, but I was affected by the glory of what has been given to the Lord Jesus. However, “no one knows the Son but the Father”. This would remind us of the deity of the One that we speak about, our Saviour. He is my Saviour and my Lord, the One that I know, the One that I trust. You can come to know Him in a fuller and deeper way every day of your life, but remember that He is God, that there is that to the Lord Jesus that none of us can ever understand. What we call inscrutability. I have felt a little sorry for some of you dear brethren for whom English is not your first language; we sometimes use words that are hard. But there is that about the Lord Jesus that cannot be known by the human mind; “no one knows the Son but the Father”. May we always hold in our minds the deity of Christ, and let us worship when we think of it. There are dear believers who talk about Jesus as their brother. We must always hold in our hearts and in our spirits the glory of His Person when we speak about our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. That little sentence, “no one knows the Son but the Father”, guards His deity.
Then it says, “nor does any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son may be pleased to reveal him”. That is what we have been speaking about in these meetings. Are we among those to whom the Son may be pleased to reveal the Father? This afternoon we were speaking about the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him. What a wonderful thing it is. What Peter got in Matthew 16 was on that principle. Although that experience was special to Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16: 16), in principle every believer in the Lord Jesus can have an experience like that; something given to you by the Father, some insight that you get in your soul of Christ in relation to a living system. The Father would love to tell you more about Him. Dear friend, these are wonderful truths. They keep us right in our thinking about divine Persons. We must start with Them, we cannot start with what we might think. We must start with what the Father thinks, we must start with what Jesus would say to us about the Father. What a wonderful glory there is about the truth, “Every one that is of the truth hears my voice”.
So now it becomes experience to us—“Come to me, all ye who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest”. This has been used often in the gospel and no doubt Jesus was speaking to those around Him, many of whom would be encumbered by the burden of sin. I trust there is nobody here who is still loaded with the burden of sin. Come to Jesus now! I know this is not the gospel preaching but how can I pass such a statement without pleading with you that if you are still burdened by your sins, come to Jesus now. Know the blessedness of what it is to put your faith in that blessed One and in His work and know what it is to be justified. Romans 5 starts—“Therefore having been justified on the principle of faith, we have peace towards God”. What a wonderful thing it is to know that all these sins of mine, so many that I have forgotten most of them, have been taken away. My burden was taken away in the death and in the burial and in the resurrection of Jesus, and in the shedding of His precious blood. Then there are burdens that as believers we carry, burdens of ill health, assembly sorrows, family sorrows. Jesus would say this—“Come to me”. We sang
‘I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto Me and rest’ (Hymn 248)
That is an interesting hymn. The first half of each verse is the words of Jesus and the second half of each verse is the response in experience of the hymn writer,
‘I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary and worn and sad;
I found in Him a resting-place’.
That is not truth exactly, that is experience. Is it your experience? Have you answered to the voice of Jesus in the gospel first of all? But then Jesus is speaking to you all the time. He would speak to you in this meeting; He would speak to me in this meeting. The Lord Jesus in His grace and in His patience is speaking all the time. What a wonderful statement this is, “Come to me, all ye who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest”. It is the peace that you get when you know your sins forgiven, but it is more than that. It is more than the taking away of the burden of guilt, it is more than divine sympathy. “I will give you rest”— that rest that He has, He would give to you. What a wonderful thing that is. The Lord Jesus when here, even when under the greatest pressure in Gethsemane, was restful.
There is a lovely statement in Mr. Darby’s ministry that Jesus entered into all the darkness and the wrath of God; but before He went out of the world He had passed through it all, and went out in perfect quiet (JND CW Vol. 21, p.171). He knows what pressure is, He knows what burdens are, and He would give us that rest if we come to Him, if we answer to His voice, “Take my yoke upon you”. You might say, ‘my sins are gone’. That is wonderful, but to get this rest, your will has to go; the “my yoke” is submission to the will of the Father— another will. You might say ‘my sins are gone, my future destiny is secure, I can do what I like, I can go where I like’. Dear friend, if you think that, Jesus would say to you tonight, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am meek and lowly in heart”. I thank God for everyone in this room who knows the Lord Jesus as their Saviour and wants that relationship with Him to be the core of their life. That is wonderful, but Jesus would say to you tonight “Take my yoke upon you”, the yoke of submission to the will of Another. Jesus perfectly exemplified that. What a wonderful model He is for us, “I am meek and lowly in heart”. These are the words of Jesus. They are not only words that were said two thousand years ago and written down, but they would appeal to us now in the freshness and living power of the One who is still speaking. He would speak to you, so that “ye shall find rest to your souls”. There is nothing like that, the rest that you get there in the presence of God. What a wonderful thing it is to experience that. I want to appeal to you, dear brethren, to experience Christianity. It is not just a system of doctrine, it is not just something that old men like those of us on this platform talk about. It is experience! It matters that you experience these things, but you have to come to that experience through the blessedness of what Jesus has revealed of the Father, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”. I thought of Psalm 36 as an Old Testament setting out of what I have been saying. The psalmist here has come to it that God’s “loving-kindness is in the heavens, and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds”. These are high and exalted thoughts. God is there, and His faithfulness, His righteousness and His loving-kindness are exalted. These are what we call attributes of God, ways in which He is known. The Psalms set out the experience of the one who wrote them; in this one it is David. Then there is a fourth attribute which comes in verse 6, “thy judgments are a great deep” (Psalm 36: 6). All of these attributes, to use that word, all of these ways in which God is known were seen fully at the cross of Jesus, the “great deep”. Think of what that means, that all that God was, was seen there at the cross in the death of Jesus. We cannot measure that great deep, but there the divine judgment was known, “a great deep”. These are things that should affect us in our experience, as we think about the way that Jesus went into that great deep, so that there might be an answer to the heart of the Father. There is an answer; verse 7 says—“How precious is thy loving-kindness”. Do you find the love of God precious to you? You might know that God is love; John’s epistle tells us that “God is love”, 1 John 4: 16. That is a statement of truth, and from it we can say that God’s nature is love. Do you believe that? And then do you know the love of God shed abroad in your heart by the Holy Spirit? That is what Romans 5 brings us into. You are justified, no more conscience of sin, you have peace towards God.
Then there are tribulations, “tribulation works endurance; and endurance experience; and experience, hope”, and then you get through to the Spirit shedding abroad the love of God in your heart. Have you ever had that experience? Have you ever knelt down in your bedroom and spoken to God and felt a sense of the love of God filling you heart? It is an experience, dear friend, that is very wonderful, and the psalmist has obviously had it, “How precious is thy loving-kindness, O God! So the sons of men take refuge under the shadow of thy wings”. That reminded me of Matthew 11, “Come unto me”. What protection is there, what mercy is there, what can we learn there of the blessed One, the Lord Jesus, who is meek and lowly in heart.
All that I have said so far is individual because you must start with individual experience with God so that when you listen, you hear Jesus speaking to you, because He is speaking to you. He has spoken to me in these meetings. He may have said something to you that is different to what He has said to me. I can say that some of the things that have been said have tested me, and some of them have uplifted me. Some of them I have not understood and I am going to go away after this weekend and find out more about them. Dear friend, there must be an answer to divine speaking. It has to be first of all on an individual basis, but then we are brought into what we have been enjoying in our time together this weekend, “They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house”. This is what God has in his mind for every believer in the Lord Jesus; I think this refers to the excellence of what we enjoy as we are together. What a wonderful thing it is, that we can be abundantly satisfied with all the richness that God has in His mind for us. How much do you want it? I tell you, there is nowhere else that you will find satisfaction. I do not only tell you that because I have heard older brethren say it since as long as I can remember, I tell you it because I have proved it. There is no other way of finding satisfaction but in the presence of Christ and in the presence of those who love Him. Stay there, in what the psalmist speaks of here as “thy house”. It is not a physical building; it is an area of safety where God is operating, where light is shining. It goes on to speak about that at the end of the next verse, that there is something there that is available as divine provision. What food it is! We spoke yesterday in a way that stimulated me and challenged me too. Are we feeding on what God is feeding on, on the Lord Jesus, that blessed Man, the bread of God come down out of heaven? What a wonderful source of satisfaction He is as a Person. Everything that we have is in this blessed Person, our Lord Jesus. Then there is “the river of thy pleasures” as the psalmist says. It is a wonderful verse that we sang together this morning,
‘The Comforter, now present,
Assures us of thy love;
He is the blesséd Earnest
Of glory there above;
The river of God’s pleasure
Is what sustains us now,
Till Thy new Name’s imprinted
On every sinless brow’. (Hymn 56)
“Thou wilt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures”; that is what we have been doing these two days. Do you like what God likes? I was almost startled to read that in Mr. Darby’s ministry last week. We often think of how complicated Mr. Darby’s ministry can be, but he said something so simple that a five-year-old in this room could understand it. Mr Darby said, ‘We must like what God likes’ (JND CW Vol. 21, p.192). Well, here is the river of God’s pleasures, something that flows out from Him, and we get a taste for it. Once you get a taste for it, you realise that there is more and more and more available. O may we just get a taste for what is flowing out in the river of God’s pleasures. It involves the Holy Spirit; what is flowing. We find it in our meetings. We go out on a Tuesday evening, and the river of God is full of water, then we go out on a Thursday evening, and the river of God is full of water. There is nothing like it. “For with thee is the fountain of life”, God is the source of all that we enjoy. He “is the fountain of life—in thy light shall we see light”.
Well I think, dear brethren, that we have had something of that experience. There has been a lot of exalted things said, a lot of remarks have been made, maybe difficult to understand, but there is life and light in it. I can assure you of that, and it is a wonderful thing just to enjoy it, “in thy light shall we see light”. That takes me to the words of the Lord Jesus Himself, “I am the light of the world”. I was partly thinking of this in relation to the hymn that we sang as to the Lord Jesus saying “I am the light of the world”. We sang,
‘I heard the voice of Jesus say, I am this dark world’s Light ...
I looked to Jesus, and I found
In Him my Star, my Sun’ (Hymn 248)
Again I ask you, have you found Jesus to be the light for your pathway? It says here—“I am the light of the world; he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life”. He is walking and you are moving with Him. You are as it were in that yoke with Him, for the yoke has in mind movement. Jesus is moving, and as moving with Him we walk in the light. We walk in the light as God is in the light. Sometimes dear brethren, we think of the truth of fellowship as very difficult. There are practical tests in it, I quite agree, but in essence the truth of fellowship is very simple. I thank God that I can say that I can walk in fellowship with every true believer in this world with one condition, only one, “if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another”, 1 John 1: 7. That is the Christian “we”. I know the tests that come in, I know the sorrows that come as to working that out, but let us be exercised to “walk in the light as he is in the light” and walk alongside this One who says “I am the light of the world; he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life”.
These are very simple thoughts, dear brethren, and I just leave them with you. Especially I would appeal to those who might have found the ministry this weekend difficult to understand. I found it difficult to understand, but Jesus is speaking to you in all that has been said. Try to remember some of the things that you have heard. Desire before doctrine; want it and you will get it; do you like what God likes? These are practical experiences. We must have the truth to guide us, we need the Lord Jesus to guide us, to walk in this wonderful light because He is still the Light of the world. Of course, He said it as being here literally, but that light is shining now and with the help of the Holy Spirit we can walk in it. May we just be encouraged to prove that what God says He is able to deliver. He makes promises to you, He makes guarantees. I am not going to go into them all but God is well able to do what He says He will do. The Lord Jesus is available as the Light of the world. May we always remember to put God first and to have in our hearts the need to praise Him, the need to be in a fit state to respond to the heart of God because that is what God wants; “the Father seeks such as his worshippers”, John 4: 23. May He bless the word, for His name’s sake.
Address at Dundee, Scotland
7 April 2012