In this sermon, the speaker shares a story about a missionary in Argentina who would spend time helping young people straighten out their minds, only for them to be easily influenced again by outside factors. The speaker emphasizes the importance of having a spiritual foundation rather than relying solely on the mind. They highlight the example of trying to talk a young person out of a relationship, explaining that the heart's desire for love and the presence of God is stronger than any logical argument. The sermon concludes with a reflection on the book of Matthew and the need to continually seek and respond to God's mercy in order to live a fulfilling and purposeful life.

I remember many years ago there was a friend, a pastor that my father knew, and in the forefront of the charismatic move in the north of Argentina, in the north of the States, he used to put out a magazine, from what I remember, and he used to say that the Church is stagnated because every Christmas time we go back to Christmas, and every Easter time we go back to Easter and we form a little vicious circle and we never get out of it. And I'm sure in a sense in many churches that's true because we go back to Christmas and we say what's already been said last year, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the same thing at Easter. And yet, I'm sure there's a totally different aspect that we need to go back, we need to see more. There's no measure to God, there's no measure to the Word of God. I just want to share a few thoughts this evening. First verse of Matthew 1, the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. I've read this verse I don't know how many times before. It caught my attention, the way that the genealogy is introduced here. I started thinking about it. Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. Jesus was firstly, most importantly, the Son of God. The expression of God, he was God. He expressed everything that the Father was, the nature of God, the thoughts of God, the works of God, the ways of God, expressed through a man. And yet, there was also a human side to his nature. I want to just look at this a little bit tonight, symbolically. Son of David, Son of Abraham. What does David represent? What does Abraham represent? It says the generation of Jesus Christ. In other words, Jesus was generated, just the same as a generator in a car produces electricity, so Abram produced Jesus Christ, so David produced Jesus Christ. In other words, he was Son of Man, all mankind, and yet there were certain characteristics which brought Jesus forth. Am I losing you? My wife is going to talk to me afterward about talking in the abstract. Say you understand, please. I'm not supposed to talk in the abstract. Some of us think in the abstract, and other people are very concrete. Let's try and bring it down to the concrete, then. Out of its chronological order, chronologically it would be Jesus Christ, the Son of Abraham, the Son of David. Here it says Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. I believe it's in the order of its importance. What is David, then? There are two things that come to my mind. David, firstly and most importantly in his relationship to God, was a man beloved. His relationship with God was a love relationship. If we go back historically, you look at the life of David, you look at the ministry of David, you look at David's effect on Israel. He brought about a revolution, he brought about a revival in all that man's response to God in Israel. You've heard about the tabernacle, I'm sure, the tabernacle of Moses. Yet when you come to the New Testament, God talks about restoring the tabernacle of David. The tabernacle of Moses had the outer courts, had the altar, had the... I forget the name of it in English. Yeah, right, I know that. What do you call it where they washed the priests? The laver. Okay. You have the laver, you have the brazen altar, you have the outer court, you have the inner court, you have the holy place, the holy of holies. Each part is representative of the work of God, the appropriation of that work, the altar speaking of the cross, our washing there in the laver speaking of our purification to draw nigh, the altar of incense speaking of worship, adoration, and so on until we come to the holy place, the presence of God. And yet by the time David came along, all of this symbolism, which in its first impact on Israel I'm sure was tremendous, as a coming out of Egypt, coming out of a religious experience where they knew the promise of God to Abraham, they knew a little bit about faith, were suddenly brought into a revelation of all that God was and all that God meant, and all that it meant in the personal realm of appropriation as they desired to draw near to God, the necessity of the sacrifice, the necessity of purification, the necessity of separation, the necessity of the incense, the necessity of worship. And yet by the time David came along, Israel had been through a long history of victories and defeats, mostly defeats, finishing with the total destruction of the first king of Israel, Saul. And when David came there was a fear of the altar of the Lord at Shiloh. So David takes the ark of the Lord and brings it to the tabernacle of David there in Jerusalem, there in Zion. And around this ark, typifying the presence of God, around the presence of God, around the person of God, he forms a whole new order of worship in the praise, in the adoration, the way of coming, the way of expression, the response to the people, of the people toward God. Although the other still exists, yet the central thing was no longer the external, but the internal, man's response, the heart response, the spontaneous response. It wasn't a structured thing as Moses' tabernacle was. And yet at the same time it was something which demanded everything. You look at the expression of David's own heart cry there in the book of Psalms, the depths of his soul-searching, the depths of his repentance, the intensity of his longing, the surety, the confidence of his faith, and you find a person who has found deep relationship with God. And so David is, once again, the person that more than anybody else in all the Old Testament represents the love relationship with God. David, the ancestor, David through whom Christ came, Christ came through, if we apply it down to the personal now, Christ came through a love relationship. There's a sense in which God wants to reveal his Son to each of us, wants to reveal his Son through each one of us, wants there to be, as it were, born of us the Christ. Are you following me? Or is this too, you're with me, two people, three people, good. Okay, that's enough. He wants, God wants us to come into that relationship, he wants there to be born, once again, through our relationship to him, an expression of Christ in us and through us, just as through the generation of David, through the generation of Abram, Christ was brought into this world. There was no Christ, as it were, apart from David and apart from Abram. Once again let me underline, this is the first verse of the New Testament. The first mention of things in the Bible are always vitally important, they're always like a signpost pointing the way, and whenever that fact, that doctrine, that truth is mentioned later on through scripture, it's always in agreement with the first mention, no matter what that truth be, whether it be the mercy of God, the judgment of God, the grace of God, always the first example, as it were, written in capital letters. Later on it might be written in small letters, but the first mention is always in capital letters and with a flashing light. So we're introduced to the new pact. God is bringing in his Son to take away the curse. I don't know, sometimes it doesn't mean too much to us. Sometimes when we see hurt, when we see wrong, when we see lives, families, cities, nations that have been destroyed, taken by the enemy, as it were, just wrung in total destruction, then we start to realize a little bit what it means when the curse is taken away. God says the curse will be taken away from off the face of the earth. We won't see it finally in all its manifestation until that last day when the old earth and the old things are passed away and the eternity commences, and yet spiritually speaking, he's opened the door to all of this. We read there of Jesus coming in Luke, the prophecy of Zechariah, that he'll come that we might be delivered from the hand of all our enemies. We might be delivered from the hand of all our enemies. Once again, God's deliverance, God's manifestation, God's life, God's relationship starts right here. It starts when there's something within us which responds in love toward God, when there's something within us which, even before faith, starts to spring forth with longing, with yearning. It doesn't have to be something we can understand. I think one of the greatest curses of 20th century Christianity, maybe of Christianity in all ages, is that we've mechanized religion. We've made it a series of truths which, if you put in the right order, produce a certain given result. It isn't that way. I think that's what this verse, among other things, is trying to tell us. Jesus is the son of David. Jesus is the son of love. It's an inarticulate thing. It's an indefinable thing. We can't define love. Why do we love a certain person? Why do I love my wife and not somebody else's wife? Why do I love that person and not the other person? That person's my friend, but this person, somehow there's something within me that responds, and how can I explain it to a third person? Well, we can't, except to a certain point. I like that person because I like the way she is. We run out of words pretty soon. And yet, the Spirit of God, the Apostle says those are the led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. When the Spirit of God is within the child of God, there's a longing. It's one of the first characteristics. There's something, once again, inarticulate. It's like a compass. It automatically points to the North. It doesn't do anything else. There's no words. There's no having to plug it in or anything else. That little needle automatically points to the North. There's something that draws it. So it is with the child of God, so it is with everyone that would really come in to that which God desires us to come into. Faith can bring us up to a certain point. Discipline can bring us up to a certain point. Our mind can bring us up to a certain point, not very far along the way. But there comes a point where our mind's not enough. There are things we cannot understand. I think there are things we cannot believe. Our faith is growing, but I think in a sense of all children of God, there's always that sense of so much more out beyond. If I could believe as I've seen, as I've read, as I've heard, as I've participated in different places at different times, if I could have all that I know ready to put into instant action in any given moment, that would be glorious. Those meetings when the Spirit of God has just come down, if I could just kind of raise my hand tonight, like a friend of David's who was in the South Seas, and all of a sudden he said, I don't know why I did it. He said he raised his hand, and he was in a girls' boarding school. He had about 200, 400 girls there, and he raised his hand. These were Methodists, Methodist boarding school. Raised his hand, and he said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. And he said the Spirit of God just swept in. The people started falling off the chairs and crying out to God. And afterward, even he didn't know what he'd done. And yet God came and God met him. And if we could have that that we've seen and that that we've touched at our disposition all the time, wouldn't it be wonderful? But we can't. And yet, and I don't know how to express this, I don't know how to explain it, there is a faith, the Apostle says there in Galatians, the faith which worketh through love. It says it's not in circumcision, it's not in that mechanical thing, it's not in the law, it's not in works that we can do. He said it's not in uncircumcision. It's not going the other route and having something totally unstructured. He said it's neither in the structure nor in the lack of the structure. Rather it's in an inner essence that God does his work. And it's the faith that works through love. As I said, not only are we not able to put into everyday use at any given moment all that we've seen and touched at different times, but I think there are many times we can't even see the way. Think of Jesus there on the cross saying, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Maybe that is a historical moment, maybe it's kind of hard to apply it to us, but those words were first spoken by this man, David. There came a time when David said, My God, why have you forsaken me? And yet even in that expression, there's a yearning. It mattered to him, it mattered more than anything else on this earth. My God, why? He wasn't turning back, he wasn't saying, Okay, God, I quit. He wasn't saying, God, I'm through. He's saying, Lord, why? I want to know the why. I want to know the way. I want to be able to reach that which I cannot yet reach. On and on through the life of David, and we can look it up there in the Old Testament, there was a longing. There was a love that captivated him. He was different than his brethren. He was different than all the people around about Saul. He was different even than all the people around about Samuel. He was different when he went into exile. He was different when he was fleeing. All through his life, he was different. He'd been captivated, he'd been separated. There was one thing that mattered to him, only one thing, the presence of God, the glory of God, the yearning, the longing for God, day after day, year after year. He was captivated, he was inspired by love. Tremendous heights of faith that he reached, tremendous expressions of his own inner surety, knowing that there would come a time when he would be satisfied, when all the old things would be passed away and all things would be made new, when the veil would be taken away, when the darkness would be passed. So Matthew starts his gospel saying, this is the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David. I think if we can learn the secret, and it's not learned in a day, and it's not learned in a year, and it's not learned in ten years, I think it's a little bit like the poem about St. Paul that says, in one part, Go with thine earliest dawn, thou shouldst begin it, scarce were it finished at thy setting sun. If we start with the dawning, we'll not be finished before the end of the day. And yet it's the lesson of life. I think we're only as big as our love. Our faith is only as real as our love. I've seen people doing this with prayer, which in a sense is the expression of faith, the most common expression of faith. It's kind of like, well, I know how to do it. It's kind of like, I found a button which if you hit that button, you get the candy. There's a mechanization. I remember certain people, very spiritual. Apparently from what I gathered, their technique when they met a new brother, they'd come and say, if I can get him to pray, then I'll be able to sense his spirit. It's kind of like, if he says the right words, and if he has the right intensity, and if he yells, and he says, Oh! Then, oh, great! There's ten points. And if a guy says, Dear Lord, why have you left me? He's no good. But we can't do that. We can't do that. The Son of David, inspired by that. Maybe there's one other aspect. That's David in the Old Testament, David in the New Testament. Call my attention, reading there, let's take Bartimaeus and others also. Remember the story of Bartimaeus the blind man sitting by the roadside outside of Jericho. Jesus starts coming by, and Bartimaeus starts yelling. The people tell him to be quiet. What's he crying out about once his sight is back? What's he saying? Saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me. I used to think, why is that in there? Such a long title. Could have said any one of a hundred other different things. Could have just said, Jesus, have mercy. Could have just said, Master, have mercy. The disciples when they're out there on the sea, Master. Carest thou not? A lot of things. Yet he's there, Jesus, Son of David, and they tell him to be quiet. And he goes through the whole long address once again before giving his supplication. Jesus, thou Son of David. I thought about that. I believe it's because in the Old Testament there's the pact of David. The pact of mercy. God saying, my mercy will not be taken from David. Here's Jesus, the Son of David. He's the expression of the mercy of God. Jesus, the Son of David. The Son of love, the Son of mercy. You know, I've said many times, I hope someday before I get through with this earthly pilgrimage, I'll learn to pray some of the prayers of the Bible as they should be prayed. I'll learn to say some of the words of the Bible as they should be said. We say the Lord's Prayer, and to really pray it, I don't know if we ever do. I don't know how many people ever really learn to say it in spirit and in truth. This concept of the mercy of God, I remember some years ago, I forget the exact circumstances surrounding the situation, but anyway, I was praying. All of a sudden, I was reading the Bible, and all of a sudden it was all the Lord said to me. He said, can you respond to mercy? Lord, what's this? What do you mean, can I respond to mercy? I started to see, we as human beings respond to fear, fear of judgment, fear of hell, fear of the consequences of sin. We can respond to that. We can respond to the hope of reward, the hope of attainment, and yet to respond in truth to mercy is a totally different sphere, way out beyond these two, where the mercy of God melts us. When I was a student in the last century, there used to be a lot of the kids there among all the kids of the Bible school who would come back from a Sunday morning or Sunday evening service, and they'd say, well, you notice in the service that the pastor was preaching how this moved and that moved, and all of a sudden that was prophetical and this was this and this was that. They'd talk about meetings, and the presence of the Lord came and I felt like shouting. I thought, wow, that's strange. Every time the presence of the Lord comes, I don't feel like shouting. Whenever the presence of the Lord draws nigh to me, I don't feel like any of that. I must be wrong. And yet as the years go by, I realize they're talking about something out on the periphery of the working of God, the blessing of God. When the blessing of the Lord comes, when the joy of the Lord comes, I feel like shouting. But when God himself comes, there is no real response, apart from the total surrender of all I have and all I am. There is no real emotion except that emotion of just saying, God, I am nothing, I have nothing, I can do nothing. The response there in the Bible of all the men of God, the great prophets, the great apostles, is flat on their face, all of them, all of them. Daniel's saying there's no strength in me. Ezekiel, all the rest, and the hand of the Lord having to raise him up, saying, stand on your feet, I've strengthened you. The Lord, that day was as though it was in, just came to my mind, can you respond to mercy? Do you know what it is? Do you understand what it is? Does it touch you? Does it melt you? Does it motivate you? Or are you on the other wavelength of being motivated by your concepts, your fears, your desires, escaping one thing, trying to reach another thing? Something that starts with mine is born of mine and finishes up with mine? Or can you respond to mercy? When God comes and he doesn't demand anything, he gives everything. And yet because he gives everything, then something within me, and once again we come back to love again. The mercy brings me to love. I respond that way. Remember David at the end of his life saying, Lord, you've given me an everlasting covenant. And he said, my house, I forget exactly how it goes, but he liked saying, my house is not worthy before you. My life was not worthy before you, and yet you've given an everlasting covenant. He was understanding what it was all about. I think there are things that God wants to teach us in our life down here below which go far beyond all our, quote, ministry, all that we do for him, all our reading, all our understanding, all our head knowledge, that we understand the person of God and the nature of God. Once again, I repeat, for us, Jesus was born of David, and if Jesus is going to be born of us, if we're going to come into the full realization, if it's going to be real, tangible for us, then it means that these same things must be in us that will be the generation, will generate Jesus Christ once again for us and the whole level and through us as far as what our ministry is able to produce. I've noticed an interesting thing. There can be the same ministry, the same identical ministry as far as its outward manifestation, totally different results in the hearts of people. Right now there's a tremendous move of God in Argentina, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people being touched in a healing wave and a preaching of salvation, a very clear preaching of salvation, a very careful handling of these tremendous crowds, a very precise making sure that they know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing and not coming forward twice, for instance, for the same thing and so on and so forth. Avoiding anything that would lead to a lack of control or a kind of a mass hysteria. And yet, although God's doing tremendous miracles, there's not a tremendous depth of conviction of sin. Again, I notice reading back and from a little bit that I've seen of other ministry, there are other people can have that same identical ministry. In fact, I was reading somebody today, just a book I happened to pick up, that one of the first healing evangelists, way back, grew up in an old car in front of this person's house. Her father was a preacher, was a girl. From what I remember looking out the window, she saw the car come up. She said, I saw this little tired man get out of the car. And she said, I don't know why I started to weep. He hadn't said a word, he hadn't done a thing. There's something that God transmits. Is this too mystical for you? There can be a healing move where many are healed. And there's a joy and there's an awareness. And like we talked about the students, you know, there's a happiness. God is moving, this is great, this is wonderful, this is glorious. There can be another meeting, another ministry. And yet, because the minister has within him a different experience of God, beyond his words, beyond his expression, beyond his gestures, there is transmitted spiritually a totally different awareness of God to the people. And it's vitally important, not that we have in order to express, once again verbally, but that we have in order to transmit spiritually, spiritual depth, spiritual reality. Jesus, then, the son of David, and the son of Abram. Abram, of course, speaks of faith. I like to think of Abram's faith not as the faith to do, but as the faith to follow. There came the time when his faith produced, but it wasn't always that way. In fact, it wasn't that way right till the very end. But he had the faith to follow. He'd seen something, and because of what he'd seen, or rather he'd heard, and because of what he'd heard, because of that inner vision which he'd captured, he left everything. Some of the effects of faith are just the same as the effects of love. It separated him from all the old. He left that old land. Many times I say to our people down there in South America, you know, we read the Bible so fast and we don't think much about it, but I imagine to walk those hundreds and thousands of miles that Abram walked, it wasn't an easy thing. You know, it's not just Abram woke up one morning and said, okay, I'm going to believe God, and then by the night he had all the blessing and the journey was finished. There were days, I'm sure, of headaches there in the sun, days of choking sandstorms, days of perplexity, days when things didn't go all right with the animals and didn't go all right with his servants, and they wondered if they were going to get to the next waterhole, and all those things that happen to anybody that travels in those regions, he went through it. This wasn't a kind of effete, passive type faith, you know, that sat back, I'm believing God. It wasn't that type of faith. Abram was a real man. He got up and he got the animals and he got the servants and he got the thousand and one things that he needed, and he started his journey, and he never quit. He never quit. And Isaac never quit, and Jacob never quit. I like that. The Bible confirms things by the mouth of two or three witnesses, right? Abram, Isaac, Jacob, Abram, the father of the faithful. And faith separates us from everything earthly. Doesn't mean we can't have a car, doesn't mean we can't have a house, but it does mean that something within us is separate from all of this. I'm following a voice. The story is told of the followers of St. Francis of Assisi. After St. Francis had died, his spiritual life, the group he'd formed was making a big impact, and things started crystallizing, started polarizing. Leaders came in, they started organizing, they started laying down the rules. There was one of the monks there, I don't know exactly how high up he was in the scale of authority there, but he wanted to maintain that which St. Francis had taught, that freedom, that lack of stricture, that obedience to God, that spontaneous thing. There was one of the others, apparently in charge of everything, and he said, Brother John, he said, come down from that mountain. Kind of like, listen, you've left the real country where everybody dwells. You're way up on a mountain. He said, come down from that mountain. And the reply was, but I've heard another voice. But I've heard another voice. This is the kind of faith that Abraham had. It's so easy to think of faith as being that spiritual substance which enables me to produce certain concrete things. Faith to heal the sick, faith to minister, faith to bring conviction. Yet, first of all, it's the faith, and I believe Abraham's faith is this kind of faith also, the faith that works by love. He couldn't believe at the beginning to see all that he saw at the end. It was a long journey, many steps, much testing, much preparation, much trial, much failure. What does the Bible say? The just shall live by faith. Right? And the just shall fall how many times? How many? Seven. Okay. Now, does that mean one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and if I fall eight, I'm out of it? No, no. Seven is the perfect number. We've got a saying in Spanish. We say, any number. Fall any number of times. Fall and fall and fall. You know, you keep on falling. So then he's not just because he fell. Yes, he is. He's just because he gets up. Is a mountain climber not a mountain climber when he falls? No, he's a mountain climber when he quits climbing the mountain. Right? He ceases to be a mountain climber when he quits climbing the mountain. But as long as he keeps going, and this is the kind of faith that Abraham had, there comes the time that you walk without falling. There comes the time when Isaac is born. There comes a time when your eyes on coming out of the tent in the morning see the promised land. When the old things are passed away, all things are become new. But it's because there's something in the heart that's driven it on beyond logic. Like the little bird that hears the call of a springtime and he doesn't know how to explain it. There's just something in it that says, fly. He said, this is all I know. When it gets colder around, the leaves start falling off the trees and something says, fly, and he finally takes off and leaves it all. He's driven by something within until he comes to another land where everything's springtime. Every leaf on every tree, every plant, every flower. It's a land where all things have become new. In the other land, everything's died. And so it was with Abraham. He couldn't explain it. I'm sure he couldn't explain it. But he knew within himself, God has called me. I've got to go on. Everybody else says, Abraham, come down from that mountain, man. What do you think you're doing? You know what you're talking about. You realize the mountain you're going to have to climb, the deserts you're going to have to pass, the ravers, the bandits. Well, later on he knew all about it. It would have been nice to have his autobiography. We don't have it. It would have been nice, you know, How I Reached Canaan by Abraham. We'd have learned a lot of things. But anyway, here's Jesus, the son of Abraham. When there's that faith that wants, that desires, that longs, that longs, it'll cross the deserts. It'll cross anything. It's beyond our mind. It's beyond the arguments. I remember an old missionary in Argentina telling me how to Bible school. He said sometimes the kids would come in, they got problems. He said, spend two hours, time to straighten out their mind. He said, then they'd go out the door and somebody come across their pathway and they'd say two words and it'd all be back to the beginning again. Because that which is born in the mind can be attacked in the mind. But that which is born in the spirit, you ever try and talk a young person out of his girlfriend? It's not in the mind. You can say, listen, you know, you shouldn't get married with this person because of this and this and this, and forget you. I love this person. God is spirit. His words are spirit. Those that worship him, worship in his spirit. The apostle talks about serving him in spirit. He wants to speak to our spirits. Doesn't mean we're going to understand it all with our mind. There's some things we will and there's some things we won't. Won't ever. Some things. And yet, as our spirit understands, look if a woman had to understand when the child was about to be born, when she's awaiting a child, if she had to understand all that's involved, then there'll be any babies born. It's a natural process from within. And so the things of God, I'm not against, you know, reading and understanding and studying the word of God, but the life, that is the structure around it. Life itself is far more simple, far more direct, far more demanding, that I put God before my vision. But like Abram, I walk. And as I walk, the vision becomes clearer. As I walk, the old things are left behind. As I walk, my faith is enlarged. God puts a vision before us. We don't have any chalk, okay. Puts a vision before us this big. You know, we want to possess it, but our life's this big. Now, how do we get, how do we possess it? We walk towards it. We go through trials, and we go through testings. We go through doubts, and we go through fears, and we go through battles, until when we get there, our life, instead of being this big, is being enlarged. And we can possess it. We want something. God has given us a vision of something. But we can't possess it today. We can't possess it tomorrow. But as we keep going, our capacity grows, until the day comes when we do possess. God has promised to give us the desires of our hearts. Once again, not the desires of the mind, not the desires of the emotions, not that which somebody has taught us should be the thing for which we give our lives, but the desire which is born deep within. God will give us those things. So once again, it's Christmas, a time to remember the coming of Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of Man. And in our appropriation of Him, I believe these are two of the most vital aspects. Things we need to seek in God, God give me that love which will carry me through. Give me that love which will separate. Give me that love which will inspire, which will produce faith and a going forth until every earthly thing that I ever knew and ever depended upon, leaned upon, is left behind. I come to that land which you give me. Come to that place where Jesus becomes real, not a historical Jesus, not a mental Jesus, not an emotional Jesus, a real Jesus. Amen.