PREACHING OF THE WORD OF GOD

Edwin Mutton

Luke 12: 16-21; 23: 39-43; 15: 24 (end)-28; Revelation 3: 20

Hymn: 354

The Word of God contains the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard. We sang in our hymn about the grace of our God:

We speak of the grace of our God.         

What a subject that is! The grace of our God – a God who has made Himself known, who has made His love known, who has brought His love within the range of those who need it. One of our hymns says:

Sinner, see thy God beside thee.                (Hymn 112)

That is God coming right to where you and I are in our lost state away from Him, deserving and about to receive judgment if we do not believe; and God comes and speaks to us in His grace.

We speak of salvation and love.                

Part of God’s wonderful gospel, part of the way of His grace, salvation for me. Remember Paul’s preaching: “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved”, Acts 16: 31. That message has not changed, it has not lost its effect, it has not had any ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ added to it since Paul preached like that – “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house”.

Salvation and love – think of the fulness of God in His love for man wanting to bring you into a place of infinite blessing. Some of us learned when we were very young that grace meets us where we are, because love wants us where it is. God wants men and women, boys and girls, to enjoy heaven with Him, not only in a time yet to come. We used to sing that hymn:

There is a happy land, far, far away.

No, God wants you to enjoy the happy land here and now. He wants you to enjoy a happy land with Him and enjoy His love.

We speak of the Saviour’s great Name.        

The centre of everything that God has for men is in Christ, in the One whom we have been speaking of these past days, the One who will have a magnificent place in this very world where we are. Within a few years this world could be a place where everyone knows the Lord from the least to the greatest. If the Lord were to come today, that reign of millennial glory would not be a long time away and, as the Lord came in, as Jesus had the place that is so rightly His and is acknowledged, there would be those who would rejoice in the knowledge of Him: “they shall all know me, from the least … unto the greatest”, Jer 31: 34. I trust, though, that no-one in this room will be here on earth then. The gospel is to be answered to now in the day of God’s grace. God is going to have His way on the earth in those thousand years. Things are going to happen before then which are of unspeakable awfulness. Think of sin as it appears on the world now. What do you think it is going to be like when the church and the Spirit are gone? Men think things are bad enough now. If the Lord were to come today, tomorrow they will be ten thousand times worse. He that restrains and that which restrains will be restraining no longer and men will suffer the reality and awfulness of sin. But this afternoon in this room, we are preaching and speaking of the Saviour’s great Name.

We are speaking of the blood of the Lamb: “Without blood-shedding there is no remission”, Heb 9: 22. The Saviour has been here, He has been to the cross, He has shed His blood – and:         

We speak of the blood of the Lamb,

Which frees from pollution and sin.

If you are under bondage to sin, if you are polluted with sin, you can have your freedom, washed in the blood of the Lamb. There is power in the blood, the cleansing power of the blood, and you know why it is so certain? It is because that blood has been accepted by God: “When he sees the blood … Jehovah will pass over …”, Exod. 12: 23. Dear aged saint, you may have a very real appreciation of Jesus, you may have valued it through a lifetime of salvation, but your salvation rests not in what you think of that blood, but what God thinks of it. That is the security of your eternal place with God.

We speak of the glory to come.                

Do you want to have part in that, do you want to have part in the glory that is to come?

Of the heavens so bright and so fair.        

Well,

But, unless thou’lt in Jesus believe.

(the hymn it quite true in what it says),

Thou wilt not, thou canst not be there.

Now, the men that we have read of in the gospel were very, very near, and yet some of them missed the blessing; and that is my message this afternoon. We have been very, very near the great things of God and my exercise is that no-one may miss them. We read of the elder son, he heard the music and the dancing – (we have heard the music and the dancing; we have heard the enjoyment of the saints in the great things of God) – yet he would not come in. If there is anyone listening to this preaching who can hear the music and the dancing and has not come in, God in His grace is saying ‘Come in’. The door of God’s grace, the riches of His mercy are open and unhindered and you can come in. It is not good enough to hear the music and the dancing; in the earlier verses where we read there was the younger son and it says, “they began to make merry”. God wants you to be part of His world; He wants you to come into the music and the dancing. He does not want you outside listening to it and saying you will not come in. God wants to use His grace in the gospel to break down those barriers in you heart.

Just as I am – Thy love, I own,

Has broken every barrier down.                (Hymn 446)

Are there some barriers here this afternoon? Let them be broken down by the love of God.

The scripture we read is very solemn. Do you realise you are nearer to eternity than you have ever been in your life, and so am I, and when eternity will begin for you, you know not. The man in Luke 12 made plans and he was so near eternity that really he needed to make no plans, because God said, “this night thy soul shall be required of thee”. Remember that occasion of the preacher in North America who said that if anyone had been unaffected by his preaching they could come back next week? Someone walked out of that preaching and was killed by a tram and that dear preacher said that never again would he give persons time to make up their minds as to God’s gospel. Dear friend, if you are not assured of the salvation of your soul, if you do not have Jesus as your own personal Saviour – dear young people, your mother and father may know it, your brothers and sisters may know it, you can know it too, by putting your simple faith in the Lord Jesus and owning Him as your own personal Saviour. No-one else can do it for you. God would love to have that personal link with you, and let none of us trifle with it – we know not what a day may bring forth. Eternity for you may begin today and it could be a lost eternity for you. Think of that, think of someone sitting here, maybe someone who has sat on the platform, and they are plunged today into a lost eternity. You say, ‘Well, he was a good brother, he made good remarks’, and so on. He did not have a personal link with the Saviour, he was not washed in the blood of the Lamb. No, I am not predicting that of anyone sitting behind me here on the platform, but as a preacher I cannot afford to abrogate my responsibility by thinking that everybody here is saved. The preacher has that responsibility – there could be someone, it might even be the preacher. Have you ever thought of that? A preacher himself being saved? I am sure that has happened over the course of the testimony, a man preaching to others and suddenly being convicted by what he was saying himself. These things are real, you know; do not delay, eternity for you could begin today, and it could be a lost eternity.

Thank God, I would say that for the majority in this room, it will be an eternity with Jesus. I say again, we are nearer eternity, all of us are, than we have ever been in our lives. What a thing for believers! Nearer to the moment of seeing our Saviour! I had a grandfather who had a gun held at his head and was told that if he did not join the union he would be shot, and he said ‘Well, you will just help me to see my Saviour sooner’. I do not know whether I could do that in those circumstances, but this is the reality of our link with the Lord Jesus, that we are waiting to see Him. Does that rejoice your heart, that you could see the Lord Jesus actually, be raptured, changed, and be with Him today? But the awfulness of the other side of that is that there could be someone, if the Lord came, who was left behind in this room. Would that not be sad, to think that you had been here, maybe all three days, and if the Lord came you would be left behind? There is no need for you to be left behind. You can accept the Lord Jesus as your Saviour, you can accept the saving power of His grace, you can accept the efficacy of His blood, you can embrace the mercy and grace of God.

The only claim you have on God is His mercy. “God, have compassion on me, the sinner” (Luke 18: 13), and you know that of those that have cried, the millions that have cried to God in their need and asked Him to save them on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus, not one has been refused! No!

Thousands have fled to His spear-pierced side.        (Hymn 169)

And not one of them has been denied, not one, and God will not make an exception for the cry of faith and the plea of mercy from you. God points you to Christ, the preacher points you to Christ, if he does his job properly. That is what the evangelist did in Bunyan’s book: Christian met him and he said, ‘Do you see yonder light’ and that is all the preacher can do. He cannot save you, no, no-one can save you but Jesus, but a preacher can point you to Him. That is all a preacher can do, but let it be that as we preach we point persons to the One whom we know and love and with the reality of love for souls too.

On Monday or Tuesday we will go back to work and we will be working alongside persons who do not know the Lord, people we have worked alongside for years. Do you feel in your soul that there are persons there who could face a lost eternity at the same moment as you are ushered into an eternity with Christ? Do you feel that? It is God’s sovereignty, of course, as to salvation and there are those who refuse the gospel and will not have it. Men generally have said, “We will not have this man to reign over us” (Luke 19: 14), “Away with him”, (Acts 21: 36), “When will he die, and his name perish?” (Ps 41: 5), but we should have feelings for men, especially those He brings us into contact with day by day. This man in Luke 12 was nearer to eternity than he realised. These things are very real; do not put them off, put your faith in the Saviour.

When we come to Luke 23, how close these two men were to the blessing. They could not have been closer. They had both lived lives of debauchery, they had both been wicked men, so wicked in fact that their fellow men had condemned them to death. Think of the grace of God that had followed these two men through a lifetime of wickedness and arranged that when they were put to death they would be alongside the Saviour of the world! Think of a God like that, taking two hopeless men, two men who had spent their lives in a godless way and arranging it so, that at their crucifixion they would have this blessed Man between them! That is God’s grace, God’s grace to the most wicked of persons. Men have a real sense sometimes that persons are too wicked for the gospel; dear friend, if you remember that one of your sins could blot you out from the presence of God eternally, I think you would have to put yourself in the category of being too bad for God, but not for God’s grace. God can arrange things in your life; God may have arranged that you are at this meeting, He may have arranged that you have come to this preaching. He may have arranged that you have come to Malvern for these three days specifically to speak to your soul in the preaching. God can do that and God loves to do it, to arrange circumstances so that you cannot miss the blessing.

God arranges things, you know; He arranges things for believers: “all things work together for good to those who love God”, Rom 8: 28. Even a blow-out on the motorway can work together for good to those who love God. I am sure our brother here spoke to those who helped him about the One he knew could help him; I am sure he told them that he had been praying for help and God had sent some angels to look after him on the motorway! If our brother had done that and if someone had received salvation through our brother’s word, God would say, ‘I think that is something that will bring me glory eternally, and well worthwhile missing the first ten minutes of a three days meeting!’ You see, these things work together for good to those who love God.

Now, these two men illustrate that you can be very near the blessing and you can miss it. One man got it, of the other man it is not recorded that he got it. Do not go beyond scripture. I have heard it said that one man was saved and one was lost. Scripture does not say that. It says one man got the blessing; it does not tell us exactly what happened before the other man died, but I think we can use it as an illustration that you can be so near the blessing, and you can miss it. What a gospel preaching this was! It was short: “This man has done nothing amiss”. That is really what we have been having in these days: “This man” – “Wonderful, Counsellor …” (Isa. 9: 6) and so on – these two men were by Him. The Lord Jesus did not preach, it was the malefactor who preached: “This man has done nothing amiss”. And then that cry: “Remember me, Lord” and it was answered immediately. Redemption’s earliest trophy, by the grace of God! Dear friend, you are near to the Lord Jesus by the eye of faith as this man was. The Lord Jesus is near you:

Sinner, see thy God beside thee,

In a servant’s form come near.                (Hymn 112)

You can put out this plea, you can have this appreciation of Jesus. What was in this man’s soul I do not know. What he knew about Jesus we are not told, but he saw the perfection of Jesus and he saw that his salvation was in Him and in none other. He put out the cry of faith and he was taken into the blessing of God’s grace. He was taken to where love wanted him and he was next to the One who was going to bear his sins in His body on the tree. Think of the issues that were about to be resolved at Calvary, the resolving of the whole question of good and evil, the solemnity of God abandoning His own Son because He had been made sin; and yet God in His grace had time for one malefactor to bring him into the blessing of the gospel. That is what God will do for you, you are so near. It just calls for that cry of faith and all the blessing of heaven that is suggested by the thought of paradise can be yours.

Now, I refer to the elder son in Luke 15. Perhaps there are some here who are not in the fulness of the joy of what is proceeding amongst God’s people, who are on the periphery. We hear things, but we are not prepared to commit ourselves. We think we have been pretty good – the elder son had never transgressed a commandment of the father. He was near enough to hear the music and the dancing. Think of what is proceeding among God’s people; think of the music; think of the activity, the dancing; think of these wonderful things that are happening, as we were saying in the reading, within Jerusalem, this peace and prosperity that is among God’s people, and you are going to stand on the outside? You are going to go away angry? You are going to miss the opportunity of coming into the fulness of what is being enjoyed? You are going to say that your own sphere of activities, your hobbies, your sports, your job, is going to keep you from fully participating in the music and the dancing? He was there, he was a son, he had as much right to be in the music and the dancing as the younger son, but his self-will, his self-opinionation and his self-righteousness – “never have I transgressed a commandment of thine” (v 29), came between him and the blessing. He did not enjoy the music and dancing. Again, we have to be careful in what we say about scripture, because we do not know the end of this story, and in another sense, as beloved Mr Darby says, the real application of this scripture is to the Jew, and God is going to bring the Jew in. This man would not come in. The nation, on whom there is a veil at the present time, God is going to bring into blessing. What wonderful grace that is! But he missed the present enjoyment. As we were saying in the meetings, dear young people do not leave your enjoyment of Christianity until you get old. Enjoy it now and bring life and vitality into the situation and the locality where you may be.

You say, ‘Well, you do not know the problems there are in my locality, all the brethren are old and the meetings are sometimes difficult to understand and I do not think the older brethren really understand my exercises’. You just try joining in the music and the dancing and it may be that some of us older brethren start singing and dancing, too! What life it brings into a meeting when a young brother gets on his feet and just says something simple, but real, from his heart. It does us good, and I think God delights in it. As we said yesterday, and it has often impressed me, in the temple there were all these half-opened flowers, as though God has particularly in mind in His service that there is what is developing. How often we have exhorted one another to make the situation better by one. You young people, you can do that, you can cheer us older ones up, you can cheer some old brother or sister up by a visit. Just bring in something of this music and dancing, but make sure you are in it yourself. Make sure you do not go away in self-righteousness. You want to be part of what is proceeding on earth for God’s pleasure and as you participate in it you will find that you will enjoy it. Do not be a spectator.

God would have you in the centre of the music and the dancing. It is something that is done together, this is not individual. Your salvation is very individual, your enjoyment of the things of God can be individual, it can also be in the company of those who love Jesus. I thought of that this morning as we gathered, (a slightly bigger company than I am used to) with all these persons who love Jesus to make much of Him together. You make much of Him in your own prayers and in your own relations with Him, but we gathered together, a company of some fifty people, all of whom love Jesus and had gathered with a specific object of calling Him to mind and having a real sense of His presence. That is music and dancing, that is prosperity, that is peace, and you and I do not want to miss it. It is so near and yet this man was so far away from the enjoyment of it.

I just touch on Revelation 3. This is a word perhaps to those who are more responsible, that we may feel we have what is real and yet we may find that the Lord is outside. But He is very near: “I stand at the door and am knocking”. I appeal to anyone here who feels that in these meetings, in this preaching, the Lord is knocking at their door. This verse addresses the individual – “if any one hear my voice and open the door, I will come in unto him” – it was not Laodicea as it were responding as a whole. The Lord came into this condition through individuals being exercised and opening the door and proving the fulness of His love. Maybe you feel you are not as committed as you should be, maybe you feel you are not giving the Lord enough of your time, maybe you feel that other matters are flooding into your life and spoiling what is for God. If you just stop and listen, you will hear the Lord knocking at the door. Open the door, dear friend, the Lord is so near. He is not forcing Himself on you, He is not forcing you into committal, no, He is waiting for that knock to be answered and He will come in. It does not say He will present you with a list of things He wants you to commit yourself to. No, He will sup with you, He will give you a sense of the fulness of what there is in Christianity and appeal to your heart that you might be committed to Him. So near – you are surrounded tonight by persons who have answered to the call of the Lord Jesus, you are surrounded by a very sympathetic company, sympathetic to God and His overtures in the gospel and He wants you to be committed in reality; not in pretence, no. Laodicea was marked by pretence. They got into a situation where they thought they were all right. Oh, get to the Lord, dear friend, if you have any sense of distance from the Lord, and see whether you have any of this pretence about you, and then just quietly listen and hear the Lord knocking. Our lives are so busy, are they not, that perhaps we do not make time to listen to whether the Lord is knocking. Perhaps, He is just saying, ‘There is just something I would like to draw your attention to just open that door’. You could enjoy so much more of communion with me, so much more of the richness of what I have got if you just open the door and listen to me and what I have’.

Well, these are simple thoughts, but the Lord would attract our hearts. It would be a very, very sad thing if any of us went away from these meetings unaffected in some way or other. You may need a Saviour, you may need to prove the reality of the music and the dancing, you may need to open the door to the Lord and to find out that your committals are perhaps not as real as you thought they were, to get the Lord’s mind: “What shall I do, Lord?” Just open that door, make time to listen for the knock. How near divine Persons are to us, how near they are in the gospel. Do not leave these things, do not forget how near eternity may be, it could be today that the Lord comes for His own. It would be heartbreaking, would it not, to think that anybody in this room were left in their seat if the Lord were to come now. It would be heartbreaking, would it not, that any soul should be left behind, but especially those that had sat under the sound of the gospel perhaps for weeks and weeks and weeks – God’s grace towards them continually – and to find that they had no link with the Saviour. What a precious thing a link with the Saviour is; dear young people, do not start off in life without a link with the Saviour. You may be unfaithful to Him, you may let Him down, He will never let you down. He is a “friend that sticketh closer than a brother” (Prov 18: 24), but it begins with a personal link with Jesus.

May we all be helped in these exercises, for His Name’s sake.

 

MALVERN

28 August 2005