In this sermon, the preacher describes a vision of Jesus as seen by John in the book of Revelation. Jesus is depicted as standing among seven golden candlesticks, with a garment down to his feet and a golden girdle around his waist. His head and hair are white like wool, and his eyes are described as fiery. His feet are compared to brass that has been burned in a furnace. Jesus' voice is said to sound like many waters, and he holds seven stars in his right hand. Out of his mouth comes a sharp, two-edged sword, and his countenance shines like the sun. The preacher emphasizes the importance of believing in Jesus and turning away from sin, and encourages listeners to come to Jesus with love and purpose. The sermon concludes with a reference to John's letter to the seven churches in Asia, where Jesus is described as the faithful witness who was dead but is now alive.

I suppose I have little choice but to be obedient and speak to you now at one elder's command and speak to you on the subject that the other elder proposed. That's the way to be in submission in the spirit. All right then. I want to start off by telling you a story that took place last evening. The person concerned is in the room, but won't care tuppence about me saying it. You know, if you were here last evening, that God spoke to all our hearts on the subject of spiritual virginity and all that that means. And afterwards, having challenged all our hearts in height and length and depth and breadth, I went aside with a little person that's in the room, weeping, concerning things and said, I felt so condemned. And in a moment or two, we came to the conclusion between us that that must be of the devil. Because it's the devil who condemns and you haven't got a foggiest reason why the clouds come. But if the Holy Spirit convicts us and condemns a sin, it's always in light. For he shines light upon it so that we can get rid of it. And all the horrible preachers of the darkness and of the night flee away. That's how you know the Holy Ghost. When you're coming in and can't sort things out in your mind, you come in on instinctive levels. You know instinctively that God is love. You know naturally that God doesn't play nasty tricks with people. You know he's righteous and pure and everlastingly loving. And this is how you begin to know God, which that little person hadn't got thus far. And so for a moment or two, we had a sort of a big hug together. And then again it came up, but you see the past. But I said, you didn't do it, love. Wasn't you did that? You're not the person that did it. You're a new creature. It was the old creature did that. That creature's not there anymore. You're not that person. And you should have seen the light come all over the face. Did you realize that when the Bible says, when you're in Christ, you're a new creature? You were not the person that did that. That person no longer exists. I wish to God that the truth of the Bible was really believed. You see how different your life would have been if you'd have really believed that God actually makes a new creature. The old one has been blotted out. Does not exist anymore. Then of course, there's nothing to be blamed and you've never done anything, have you? Never done anything wrong. Not that new creature. Do you believe in the all comprehensive, totally devastating work of God at the cross? Do you or do you play around with it? Too many people are trying to get the peripheral blessings from Jesus and they're content with them because they're so wonderful, you know, a forgiveness or a sort of a healing or a lovely touch on your life. Or be it is enough to go up to heaven, make us all go up in such a rotten world but these are but the edges of his ways, to quote Amy Wilson Carmichael, with whom you ought to get acquainted if you never have read her works. These are just the blessings by which the Lord hopes that you will come into the reality and into the glory of the new creation. Where everything is just yours. It's all yours. Simply everything is yours. Perhaps at some later time in the conference, and I remember we've only got two more meetings now, I might talk to you about that. Do you believe there is a new creation? Do you believe in the total comprehensive work of God at the cross? Or do you, like most people who say they're Christians, don't really believe it and never really experience it? Though you eat the bread and drink the wine, and the devil keeps you dangling around in self, self, self, self. And hereby we come to the point that Brother Moffat mentioned. In the beginning, God. And this is why God devised the cross. Until Calvary, although for centuries, even millenniums, men had been getting as a sort of a foreshadowing of the cross, for the light shone from behind the cross. Everything comes to us from the future. When you see the light of a new day, it's the dawning of the future. It stretches before you. It doesn't come from behind. And so, the light of the new creation, of which Jesus Christ is the light, you read it in Revelation. Jesus is the light thereof. Hallelujah. And that's shining right at the end of the book. Shining back down through the ages. And those before Calvary, they came into blessings and forgivenesses, gifts, and I don't know what. They talked about redemption. They talked about sanctification. They talked about inheritances. They talked about double portions. And in the dim light that they had, they entered somewhat into it. Only ever a dim light. The great light was veiled behind a veil. They had the dim shining of a seven-branched candlestick. That was the light of the Spirit of God from the golden oil prefiguring the person of Jesus. And they moved in that. That's all they had. They didn't know the new creation. They had to have inheritances in an old creation, albeit it was the promised land. But you see, their lands not only brought forth figs and grapes and grass for cows for the milk to flow and flowers from which the bees should get the nectar and make the honey, but it also brought forth thorns and thistles and sharp things with which latterly they crowned the head of the King of Glory. And they never were in the new creation. That's why forever their prophets were crying out to lift up their heads and look beyond what they had. And see through the coming of their Messiah the wonder of a glorious newness that should so far outdo what the best in highest bliss and most glorious language had ever spoken of. That for that they would leave all things. And David sets a king upon a holy hill. And Isaiah brings up a man from an outpouring of his soul unto death and sees him sitting upon a throne with the earth his footstool. And so the glory to the understanding heart anyway of the truth of God proliferates, comes through and you and I are privileged to enter into the beginning. Who hung on a cross and showed you from whence God made the new beginning. How many of you have really believed that in the beginning God and how many of you have come to the cross to die as part of the old creation and die and die away and finish. So that it isn't in the beginning I, what I've done, my sins, my past. And I said to the little girly last evening, just these words, the past is, and she said, past. I said, yes, that's right. It isn't present if it's past, is it? And it's not future if it's past, is it? Do you believe in the power of Calvary? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the broken heart that took your sin into his heart and broke his heart as part of an old creation? For good and wonderful as God is, he had to come in via the old creation into the creation. He had to come in through flesh and blood. He just had to. So latterly he broke his heart, they who could not break his back, or even the bone of one of his fingers, never broken. But he broke his own heart because he took your hearts in there. He took that to which you joined yourself by love and affection and lust and utter devotion to the satisfaction of yourself and the fulfillment of the basic lusts and hungers of you. Whether they be of the mind or of the flesh, or whether they be the fantasies of spirits going out into a forbidden spirit world, he broke his heart for you. And he broke the pitcher that brought up the dirty water at the fountain. He started a new creation. And you come with your problems and you come with your troubles, the multiplied things of self. Men and women spend hours with you, days with you, because of self. Because you don't believe that in the beginning it's God. And you've never reached the new beginning until you come there. And you wander around the broken heart within you and you wander around the twisted mind. And you go all up and down through the mental processes and the reasonings and everything else and you add psychological knowledge to psychological knowledge until you're nearly as clever as the psychiatrists that sought to analyze you. And there hung a man on the cross. And he says, in the beginning, God. And you haven't discovered that there Jesus came to the roots of everything. He came to the bottom of your tragic story. For your tragic story didn't begin when you were born or when your mother that bore you was born. It began in a garden. Right back there, the mystery of iniquity that works and works and works. But I want to tell you that there's a spirit that works, that lived before the spirit that created the mystery of iniquity and worked. And he came down to this earth. He came down to bottom sin. He came down to destroy the old. But who can believe it? And who can believe it in the way that God wants a man or woman to believe it? To fasten unto it with love and purpose and turn from everything else and seek no explanations in anybody's mind or even from a sympathetic heart. Though God knows you ought to have the sympathy of every heart, but the subtle self plays on this knowledge and doesn't go bare to Calvary. Won't go alone there where Jesus hung alone. God doesn't bare down on you because you didn't know all this. He doesn't expect you to know all the explanations are. The one thing he does expect of you, for I sat there and I'd been sitting there melted all the morning, is that you should know that he loves you profoundly. He's expecting you to believe that instead of come up with your bitternesses and your complaints. Half of people's prayers when they pray to God are their own complaints. They think God's some Shakespeare, moving words like full of compassion come I with complaint. But God isn't Shakespeare. God loves you and people will not believe that. For if they believed it, they'd take the uttermost plunge into it, forsaking everything, especially their own ways and thoughts. They wouldn't seek another sinner with which to talk it over, to find ease for their troubles. They wouldn't go to some ear that lends it sympathetic power because it's in like state. They go on to Him who never was in that state. They go on to Him who is the only Saviour. They go on to Him. This was the terrible trouble. It isn't to say that you shouldn't have help from elders. Please don't misinterpret what I say. It is this, beloved, that we should come through to this glorious revelation of God, that it's Him. And blessed be the church that has in it men and women who know the integrity of God, who know that He began a new creation at the cross, know that He ended the other in totality at the cross. Men who know that they haven't got a dragon as though still they're dragging their sin with a cart rope, even though the cart rope be fifty miles long and the sin's at the end of it, and they think they're separated from it, who know that God has dealt with it all and can preach it and minister it to men and women. Did you know that terrible verse, really, though precious because God has included it in the book, that tells us the basic state of the Corinthian church when Paul wrote to it in the first letter, in the first chapter, this, I say unto you, that every one of you says, I. Did you ever read it? Every one of you says, I. What a church. If everyone would say, God. If everyone could say, Jesus, not because they've jumped on a charismatic bandwagon. Jesus. Who and what is Jesus to you? In contemplation, in meditation, everything. In life, what? In action, what? In attitude, what? I sat there and the voice of God was crying out in me. I am love, he said. I am love. On and on and on he spoke. Have you really come to God? There was this that the writer to the Hebrews had to shout out to these Hebrews, who like Paul would have said of old, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, he was. And God wrote to the Hebrews and he said, but you haven't come to a mountain that burned with fire and that might be touched. And Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake. You haven't come to blackness and darkness. You come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God. To God. You come to God. You come to the new creation. Happy is the man that lives there. He's away from self. He's in a place where God can get a hold of him. He can use him, move in the heights and lengths and depths of him in his love and in his affections and emotions and will and his imaginings and his desires. And he can move in him like a great new world and can produce through him the revelations of God, not revelations of self and sin, inward conflicts, outward quarrelings. Amen. You come to God. In the beginning, God glory. God came into the world and started from God all over again. This time, a God, not just spirit who comes down all invisible and breathes into dust. But this time of God manifest as a human being so glorious that from a human being of bones and blood and flesh. Certain limitations, thank God not so many as we have, but certain self-imposed limitations in order to show you what can be done within the confines and through the powers of a human frame. And from himself, he made a new start. I am, he says. I am he that liveth. Was dead and behold, I am alive. He was only dead as it were a half second surely throughout the great regions of eternity. Not enough to talk about, but sufficient to deal with sin and make a shout forever about the blood of one man who died as it were for a half second of eternity. As a human being, but never died as God. Died as God's Lamb and lived forever. He says, I am he that liveth. I was dead, I am alive. Forevermore. He starts again from himself. He makes his church from himself, not the eroded, erotic mind of human beings damned by sin and twisted and perverted by the devil. He starts from himself saying, he'll make you all over again and give you his entire self by the Holy Ghost pulsing through the living one at the right hand of God the Father. He comes direct to you now from the Father through the glorious glorified human being, Jesus at God's right hand to bring you the entire Jesus. Hallelujah. That's the glory of the revelation of Jesus Christ. He raised him from the dead and the Bible shouts it all out to me. He raised me from the dead with him. That's what the Ephesian letter says. Bless God who wouldn't do anything for me except doing it for me in Christ so that I know where I am and I know the ground I'm on and I know the nature I've received. God helped me to live in all the height and length and depth and breadth of perfect love. This perfect love is perfect man. This perfect God is perfect human. This perfect glorious life into which he's brought me. He said, I am love. I was love when the angels first looked at me. He said to me, I was love before I created them. I was love before Adam was formed. He said to me, I am love. I am love. And I felt myself, as it were, sinking away into it. Not that I'm prone to sinking feelings, but I mean sinking away into the depths of it. And how can you reach the depths unless you sink away into them? And how can you reach the heights unless you let the Spirit carry you away up into them? And how can you know the breadths unless you let the Blessed Spirit expand you on the right hand and on the left and sort of fill your hearts as Paul's speaking to the Corinthians again in the second letter and in that glorious sixth chapter says, Oh, you Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you. Our hearts are enlarged. Oh, glory be to God. So that you can go out and you're a little puny thing called a human being and somewhere inside you there is that which can embrace everything into it. That's why he told the Corinthians again in the first letter and at the end of the third chapter, all things are yours. The world is yours. All God could say to Abraham, though he be a master and a man of faith was, Arise, walk through the length and breadth of the land. I've given it to you. He never said to Abraham, the world is yours. He never said to Adam, perfect as he was. Arise, walk through the length and breadth of the land. He says, the garden is yours. And he says to you, the world is yours. You've got a heart big enough to take it. You've got something that can soak it under the burdens and see the needs of other people that your long lost self never revives to talk about self and I anymore. Have you? You young beginners. You people at the beginning. I say to you, you're at the beginning of the greatest thing you'll ever know. It's greater than experiments in sex. Everything's yours except sin. You can't touch it. Joy is yours. Sorrow is yours. Glory is yours. Shame is yours. It's a shame. As long as you don't touch sin, it's the right shame. Didn't Jesus take shame? Peace is yours. Conflict is yours. I talk in the polemics and the opposites. Everything's yours. God's yours. Now you're not going to say the devil's mine. Yes, he is. You're his master. You can tell him to get behind you. You can cast him out of other people. Heaven's yours. Earth's yours. And God not hell. Though the foretaste of it may become yours, in the sense that you go there so that the gates of it shall not prevail against you, but you bring out those who through misery are behind bars stronger than steel. Everything's yours. Not just a pound we're with to trade, nor a talent to use, or just a few gifts in the charismatic list. Everything's yours. When you let him take you and make you again through another personality, through another nature, through another's blood and another's flesh, to belong to another's body, and yield yourself over until you're his. And the things that happen in the home won't weigh you down so that you come depressed. The people you live with may think they're frowning at you like the devil, but to you they'll smile at you like the sun. You say, what divine miracle lies here? God, he's the greatest miracle of the book. He's the greatest miracle in the universe. He's the greatest miracle there is. I am. Seeing that he was the origin of everything in its purity in the beginning, that by Lucifer's results much of it became spoiled and marred. He still, as he says, has the key to everything, for he was the creator of it all in its original glory before it was spoiled. And he can get down to it all. And he knows whence Satan came. And he knows the principles upon which he operates, perverted, twisted principles. He cannot introduce new laws. He's not a creator. And that's why God can do it. And that's why God came down. And that's why the living one we read of in the book of the Revelation says he has the keys of hell and of death. And he is the key of David. Amen. And then he's given to the church the keys. Not only Peter had them, except in one special sense in which he had to operate and minister in the beginning for the outpourings of the Spirit and the introduction of the kingdom to the various strata of men. He gives keys to men and women. And they begin to understand. Keys that fit every lock. If the church had really believed God, Freud, Ardor, and Jung would never have arisen. The church had only believed God. There wouldn't have been any need for them if the church had believed God. If new men had preached to men, if men that had the keys and knew the secrets opened their mouth to speak, there wouldn't have been any need for these others. But the church of Jesus Christ is a called-out people. The church of Jesus Christ has come out of the veins of Jesus Christ, come out of the heart of Jesus Christ. Amen. And it shall have the psychology of Jesus Christ. Because it has the spirit of Jesus Christ. And psych comes from spirit. In the Bible, or pneuma, whichever you want to say. That's where it comes from. I'm sorry. It seems to have gone on so long. I didn't think I'd been speaking five minutes. We're going to read the scriptures. Revelation, chapter one. Listen. Will you listen now? There's not only hope for you, but there's light for you this morning. There's not only instruction for you, there's power to reach a need. There's not only an academic understanding, there's love to take you right over. There's faith in that man who conquered sin and death and hell and Satan. By faith, working through love. And you can come in, providing you die. Stop seeking a peripheral blessing. Come in to the center. Come away from the edges. Start there. Let's have a look at him. John, chapter one of the book of Revelation, verse four. John, to the seven churches which are in Asia, grace be unto you and peace from him which is and which was and which is to come. And from the seven spirits which are before from. And from Jesus Christ who is the faithful witness. He's God's testimony to you. He's God's witness to you that you should be as he. But you can only be like that witness when you've gone through the processes. Of which, for you, since he put away sin and did the key fundamental work, his death and resurrection is the prototype. The faithful witness. The first begotten of the dead. Then there was a second begotten and a third begotten and a fourth begotten. Where were you begotten? Some millionth or trillionth of number down the line. Hallelujah. I can't tell you my number. God doesn't give us numbers. He gives us names. We're not a faceless crowd. And the prince of the kings of the earth. Under him, we sang it earlier. Doesn't God knit a leading together when it's in the spirit? Under him that loved us, washed us from our sins. And that word washed is loosed us. They've gone. Not just loosed our sins from us, but loosed us from our sins. The cumulative burden of them. Oh, God. Glory to God. Loosed us from our sins. In his own blood. Think of it. He did it all there in his own blood while it was still flowing warm in him. On the cross. In the heat of his love. It was your sin. It's a miracle. God invites you to enter into it. Loosed us from our sins in his own blood and has made us a kingdom of priests unto God and his father. To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. See where he starts in the beginning. He just has to put John. Tell you he's writing. And then he keeps on. He can't stop. Behold, he cometh with clouds. Every eye shall see him. And they also which pierced him. And all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Bless God that we are kindred of heaven. Even so. Amen. I am Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the ending saith the Lord. Which is and which was and which is to come. The Almighty. There it is. God first. Now comes John. I John. You see in the writing of the Bible. God first. The revelation was not to John first. It was to Jesus Christ. Read the opening verse. The revelation of Jesus Christ. God first. Bless him. Bless him. I John who also am your brother and companion in tribulation and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. Bless God. He exhorts his king first. And we're talking about a kingdom now in which God is first. And it appears the only one that really is. And we buy him. I was in the isle that is called Patmos. For the word of God. And for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the spirit. On the Lord's day. May it bless it. Be in the spirit. In the kingdom. On the Lord's day. And God is first. And all. I heard a great voice. As a trumpet. Saying I am Alpha and Omega. The first and the last. And what thou seest. Write in a book. Send it unto the seven churches. Twelve. And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. Being turned. I saw seven golden candlesticks. And in the midst of the seven candlesticks. One like unto the son of man. Clothed with a garment down to the foot. And girt about the peps with a golden girdle. His head and his hairs were white like wool. As white as snow. And his eyes were flame of fire. Strange combinations. How are you going to describe him? Snow and fire. Snow and fire. And his feet like unto brass. As if they burned in a furnace. And his voice as the sound of many waters. Jesus had you really just stepped out of the furnace? To come and talk to the churches? Ever seen molten brass? Had he just stepped out of the fire? To come and talk to us? No wonder he is looking for virginity. Amen. His voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars. And out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword. And his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. That's where it all starts. From the death of John. People want to know where revelation comes. How does this man get such revelation? Simple. In the beginning of God. The Bible is self-explanatory. I fell at his feet as dead. And revelation would never have been written, beloved, unless Jesus had laid his right hand upon John, saying, fear not, I am the first, I am the last. I am he that liveth, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Praise God. Praise God. I don't want to laugh or cry. I don't want to shout or be silent. I don't know whether to be a man or a departed spirit. Hadn't it all come that way? Isn't this how the Bible talks to you? Hadn't he fallen as a man dead? And whence this spirit? Paul said, I don't know whether I was in the body or out of it, when he gave his revelation. Am I right or wrong? Who comes here? Save those who are prepared to come on the basis that in the beginning God. Amen. Are you ready? I know we've got to stop. I know you've got some very precious understanding elders here. They never rebuke me. They don't even drop hints. I apologize to you for making you late for your lunch. But don't make that an excuse for coming late to a meeting, as you won't get a seat this afternoon, so I'm told. And it'll be a pity if you have to stand up for about two hours. Now let's pray, shall we?