The Lord in Our Midst 2

Matthew 18 verse 20. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. The proof that this gospel is really true is never found by looking back into the past to see whether Jesus really was born of a virgin, or whether he really did rise from the dead, or whether those healings that are described here again and again actually took place.

The proof of who Jesus is must always be found in the present. In other words, if we're going to know that Jesus rose from the dead, the only way we can know this is by meeting him alive from the dead. And if we're going to find out that this promise that Jesus gives us here in Matthew 18 20 is actually so, that when people truly gather in his name, he indeed comes into their midst, the only way we'll know that that's so is if we experience it.

It may be, for instance, that I have some doubts concerning the accuracy of these descriptions of healings which take place all through the Gospels. See, but if Jesus comes into our midst and lays his hand upon a sick body among us, and that sick one rises up healed and thankful to God, you know, then I no longer have the same problems with these things. They It's not a matter of imagining these things, or pretending, or wishing, or somehow conning ourselves into believing.

You know, if the gospel of our Lord Jesus is true, then he's not going to have any problems manifesting himself to us, and we don't have to help him out. For when two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. If that's so, if we gather in his name and Jesus comes into our midst, you know, then surely we're going to know it.

Surely some things are going to begin to happen among us that would not happen if he were not here. Now, the picture I believe that many of us have in our minds of Jesus coming into the midst of the saints, when they're gathered in his name, is that of a kind of ghost who, you know, who sails in in the invisible and stands there and watches and observes and listens, but never does anything that in any way affects us. But this description that we have in Matthew 18 is not of a ghost who hides behind the curtain and watches and does nothing.

But the description we have here in Matthew 18 is of the risen son of a living God who comes into the midst of his people and acts upon them and does things, so that when he comes, we know he came. Sometimes, how many times? You know, when the attendance is down at the Bible study or the service, you know, we shrug our shoulders and say, well, whatever two or three are gathered, Jesus was here anyway. You know, or the service is particularly dull, and we say, oh well, it doesn't matter, Jesus was here, whatever two or three are gathered.

You know, but where do we get the idea that the presence of Jesus has to be the booby prize? You know, some kind of little consolation thing, nothing else worked out, but anyway, Jesus was here. You know, if Jesus... We're going to be so conscious of his presence that nothing else is going to matter to us. When Jesus, in fact, comes into the midst of his saints, there are certain things which always occur, and if they don't occur, then let's not be pretending that he was here.

First of all, when Jesus comes into the midst of the saints, redemptive signs of the kingdom will always occur. All these things that we see as we read the Gospels begin to now happen before our own eyes somehow. He was sent to bring good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, healing to the sick.

Of course, this doesn't mean that, you know, everybody gets it. You know, for instance, in the school of Bethesda, all kinds of sick people were lying around. One man gets healed.

You know, and when Jesus was finished with his ministry, this does not mean that everybody in Israel threw away his crutches and there wasn't a blind eye left. That's not the way it was. What we had in all this, and if we read honestly these descriptions, is that everywhere Jesus went, the evidence of the presence of God's kingdom was there for those who had the eyes to see, who had any heart to seek these things.

You know, everything that was promised, you know, forgiveness, healing, the quick transformation of a life, the sudden arresting of the attention of somebody who's way out in left field, these things are there as evidence that the victory that Jesus wins on the cross becomes actual down here in this life of flesh and blood. Let's suppose that there's a woman among us right now who for three years has been carrying a burden in her heart that nobody knows about. It's so heavy that it's just destroying her.

Her health has begun to break, and nobody in her family knows this, and nobody among her friends. She's not able to tell anyone, and then suddenly she she becomes aware of the fact that Jesus is here, and instantly when she knows, in fact, that Jesus is here, her pride is gone, her self-consciousness is gone, and she's not ashamed to throw her life down at the feet of Jesus, weeping with joy, you know, and peace flows into her. See, and it doesn't matter what our problem is, and who of us here doesn't have a problem.

You know, whatever that problem is, when we become aware of the fact that our Lord is in our midst, we know that he's saying to us, all right, I'm willing to help you now, not tomorrow, not next year, but right now, in terms of what your need may be. And all we have to do is reach out, you know, and cry out to him, and we get evidence that he heard. We get that.

If he's here, why shouldn't it be this way? The second thing that is always present when Jesus comes into the midst of his saints is liberty. He sent me to proclaim release to the captives, to set at liberty those who are bruised or oppressed, where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, so that the victory of his death on the cross, that blood begins to now become actual in terms of a freedom that we never had before, and that freedom begins in our hearts, and it works out into every aspect of our lives. Freedom, for instance, from self-consciousness.

And when the liberty of the Spirit of the Lord is here, you know, then we don't worry about what everybody's going to think. If you want to worship God with your hands up, you're going to put them up, and you're not going to worry. And if you want to worship God down on your face on the floor, do that.

What more evidence of a miracle of God than when we begin to see the saints have liberty in their worship? You know, people like we are, most of us, very restrained, extremely stiff, awfully self-conscious, terribly inhibited, suddenly freely worshiping God in whatever way we feel we should. You know, and liberty from self, so that we're not forever, you know, thinking about self. Even the most spiritual of us, you know, the most religious of us, constantly standing outside ourselves and looking, how am I doing? I'm set free from this, and my attention is no longer on me and how I'm doing, but on his presence.

And the offering up of myself is no longer some big sacrifice, but it's a tremendous relief to worry, you know, about whether I'm given the proper attention, properly recognized, properly vindicated, proving that I'm right. This doesn't matter as the light of the living Son of God begins to shine upon us. And there comes the freedom from other people's expectations.

I don't have to knock myself out anymore trying to live up to the unspoken demands of brother so-and-so, or to justify myself before the raised eyebrows, but I can now freely, forgetting that, rise up and serve Jesus in union with brothers and sisters who are intent on doing only that. And the presence of Jesus gives us liberty from this legalism that has so many of us bogged down. You know, the blood of the Lord turns God's law into the perfect law of liberty.

It's no longer rules and regulations and do's and don'ts, but the earnest desire to do the will of the living God, so that you come in here with a guilty conscience and you go out free from that guilty conscience to do God's will. Another thing that is always present when Jesus truly is in the midst of his saints, resurrection joy, the joy of knowing, as I look at Jesus, that death has been conquered. In thy presence is fullness of joy.

At thy right hand are pleasures forevermore. Did not our hearts burn within us as he spoke with us on the way and opened to us the scriptures? Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord. And God knows how we need this joy.

You know, how bogged down we can get, and how discouraged we can become, and how hopeless everything begins to look, especially to allow our lives to be weighted down by all this. And we'll never make it unless our journey through the desolation of every single day, and that's going to be like that if we really take hold of the problems, is balanced and offset with the presence of the joy of God. The woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, knew all kinds of sorrow, but the thing that made those tears flow that day was not sorrow.

Joy of being near the man who was her forgiveness. God opened our eyes to see what he's done for us. God moved on us and break loose this log jam in our hearts, so that those tears of joy can flow as the Lord Jesus begins a little world of sin.

And finally, when Jesus is in the midst of his saints, a ministry goes forth, always a ministry. And the disciples went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, confirming the word with signs following. He said to them again, peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, even so I send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.

If you retain the sins of any, they are retained. Even on Pentecost, when the Lord came to them in the Holy Spirit, they could not stay inside the house where the mighty rushing wind came and filled the house where they were sitting. They had to get up from their sitting and go out into the streets and tell Jerusalem.

How in the world do you think it was noise abroad? How do you think, could 3,000 people be crying? The more clearly we apprehend the presence of the living Son of God in our midst, the more we begin to feel the pressure of his zeal driving us out to minister. The proof that it was Jesus who was in our midst and not some religious fantasy is that we go forth in his power and minister in that power. If no ministry goes forth, then it was not an encounter with Jesus, it was a Sam, where two or three are gathered in my name.

There am I in the midst of them. Notice that there's only one thing that Jesus requires. He requires that we be gathered in his name.

Now, true enough, here we are. We're gathered. We're a bunch of physical bodies in one place, but can we truly say that we are gathered into unity? Have we really come together? Have we left our own private world and become one in each other? You know, have we come out of our pride and our critical spirits and our favorite rights and our self importance and come together truly in Jesus? Now, the place where we come together and meet is to be the name of Jesus, and everything that name stands for, we leave our own names and we enter into his name, into the name of the one to whom we say we've given our lives.

And so that I come out of my own compartment, and you come out of your compartment, even if we are both in very religious so-called Christian compartments, and we come together now and we meet in Jesus, and we become one in his love and in his forgiveness and in his commands and in his spirit. So my attitudes are gone and my self-righteousness is gone and all my great wisdom is gone, and so are yours, and I'm not pushing you around, and you're not pushing me. We're being led and driven by the spirit of the living.

Now we are one. Then the miracle happens. Jesus comes and we lose our own petty little selves and lives together as we are just lost and abandoned in the worship of his name.

...serve him this day to forsake our own ways, religious as they may be, and our own thoughts, profound as we may think they are, and concentrate everything we have, all of us, on drawing near to his beloved son, so near to him that we may be in fact gathered in his name, that he may then be able to fulfill his promise and come into our midst. God help us right now, let's just get into prayer. Spirit of God, we ask that you'll deal with anything and everything in us that hinders us from coming into the into the unity that you've called us to have in the name of Jesus.

That all those things that have been a block to us, that you may make us aware of them right now, and that we'll just start tossing them out the window, getting rid of them. Lord, we know that apart from your presence we can't do a thing. How can we call ourselves a body, Lord Jesus, unless we unless we are truly aware of your presence in our midst.

We pray, Lord, that you'll just be right now touching us and delivering us and dealing with those things in us that need to be dealt with right now.