Channels of blessing

Now I'd like to take a reading from the book of Genesis and chapter 12. The book of Genesis and chapter 12. Genesis chapter 12 and we commence to read at verse 1. Now the Lord hath said unto Abram get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee and I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee and make thy name great and thou shalt be a blessing and I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

It would be interesting to read further but I think we'll draw the line there and trust the Lord's blessing upon his word. It was in the early 70s. I was just a young believer and I attended a ministry meeting that was addressed by a brother from England, a renowned Bible teacher.

His name was Mr. Frederick Condick. You may have heard his voice on recordings. I'm not sure if he was ever in these parts.

He was certainly in North America but he was a very, very noble brother well worth hearing and he said at that particular meeting that he wanted to speak about and draw attention to the first missionary map that had ever been put on display and so I looked around the hall. I couldn't see any missionary map. I wondered what he was going to talk about the first missionary map that was ever put on display.

He went on quickly to explain to us that this missionary map was hanging upon the walls of the book of Genesis. Genesis chapter 10 and the Genesis chapter 10 we have a list of the 70 descendants of the sons of Noah and those three branches of the human family as they emerged from the ark and they populated the post Deluvian world and out of all those Gentile nations, sons of Ham, sons of Shem and sons of Japheth, the world was populated. Then in Genesis chapter 12 God called out a man, chose him, called him.

The man's name was Abraham. We've been reading about that and he told Abraham, I'm going to bless you and I'm going to make your name great and you ask yourself what about all these other people? What about all these this multitude of nations that were written in the map in chapter 10 and chapter 11 and now God selects one man. Has he forgotten about all of these other people and he's going to bless this man.

Well of course when you get to the end of just where we've been reading, the Lord says to Abraham, he said, I'm going to bless you so that in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. He said, I'm blessing you because I want to reach all of these other people. He said, when I called you out, I hadn't forgotten about these other people and you're going to become the channel through which blessing will flow to the nations of the world.

So that Abraham was not just to be merely a container of blessing. That was certainly true. God was going to pour into the container of Abraham's life abundant blessings, but he wasn't just a container of blessing.

He was to become a channel of blessing that would convey that same blessing to others. It's the same with us. The Lord has saved us.

We have been enriched by abundant blessings, blessings supernal and eternal, but God intends that the blessing which he has given to us that it might be shared with others and reaching out to those who as yet are in their sins and in the darkness of their natural estate. In thee, said God, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. What I want to do this morning very quickly, I want to show that how right throughout the course of human history, even into the future, God has used the descendants of Abraham as a conduit of blessing to Gentile people.

And the revelation of God's truth, the revelation of God's name, the revelation of God's character, it has been communicated at the highest level in the most unusual way. And right down the line of history, I'll be speaking mainly about kings, kings of different empires, kings of different, in different stages of human history. And through the descendants of Abraham, these kings were touched by the communication of the knowledge and the truth of God.

We'll begin right here in the book of Genesis. We turn over the page and Abraham himself, who has been blessed, is standing before the king of Sodom, most unusual character. As the king of Sodom, he represents a collection of cities that have become infamous for their corruption.

And as the good patriarch Abraham stands face to face and eyeball to eyeball with the king of Sodom, he says, sir, I want to tell your royal highness that I have lifted up my hand to the Lord, to the most high God, to the possessor of heaven and earth. And as Abraham speaks to the king of Sodom, he introduces that man into a recognition of the greatness of God. I say that was a good message for the king of Sodom.

I'm not sure if he ever benefited from that. If he had taken the message, which Abraham communicated, if he had taken it to heart, if he had taken the revelation seriously, it might have stirred the man's spirit to true repentance before God. I doubt if that happened, but nevertheless, God saw to it that Abraham made contact with a notorious figure like the king of Sodom.

And before the judgment drastically fell upon Sodom and her daughter cities, those same cities had their king exposed to a message concerning God. It's amazing, dear believers, how many people, some were in life, some situation, some set of circumstances, they're introduced to a knowledge of the gospel. Some believe, some don't believe, but God through various means and various avenues and various conduits is reaching out to people.

And it's great. It's great. If we could become channels of communication to others, just as Abraham was to the king of Sodom, we turn over a few more pages in our Bible.

What about the great kings of Egypt? Well, you say that was a very secular empire, the dynasties of middle Egypt and all their fabulous wealth and all their idolatry and their spirit of independence. And there they sported their materialism. And you say, how would you ever reach the great Pharaoh? Well, God said, I'll reach them.

I'll bring in a lad called Joseph. Then I'll bring in a man called Jacob. And then I'll bring in a man called Moses.

And he said, Joseph and Jacob and Moses will all speak to the great kings of Egypt. Joseph came in before Pharaoh when he was 30. Jacob came in before Pharaoh when he was 130.

Moses came in before Pharaoh when he was exactly halfway between when he was 80. Joseph spoke to his Pharaoh and he told him about the God that shows. He said, listen, sir, God will show what will happen in the years of famine.

When old Jacob walked into the presence of the noble Pharaoh, he said, the God who has shepherded me all the days of my life, the God that shows, the God that shepherds. Then Moses comes in and he tells Pharaoh about the God that shelters, that will shelter his people under the cover of blood. And you say to yourself, well, did it have any effect? I think perhaps it did.

I think it did register. I won't be altogether surprised if I meet Joseph's Pharaoh in heaven. And God saw to it that the message of the true God, it touched the highest level, not only the king of Sodom, but those great kings of Egypt with all their pyramids and all their pageantry and all their great display of wealth and education and wisdom.

The book of Psalms actually tells us that God sent the teenager Joseph down into Egypt to teach the senators of Pharaoh wisdom. There was a spiritual wisdom that came in the mind of that teenager as he increased in his knowledge of God and he was able to carry a message that touched the heart of the great Pharaoh. We'll move across a few more pages in our Bible.

And this time it will be a queen. We're going away down into, into sent into the lower parts of Northern Africa, maybe Arabia. And there's a country called Sheba.

And in that country, there's a very influential queen. And she hears the message of the fame. You remember the statement, don't you? First Kings chapter 10, the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of King Solomon concerning the name of the Lord.

She said, here's a man that seems to know God. And she travels her 1500 miles with her royal retinue. And she stands in the presence of the great Solomon.

Her questions are answered. Her spirit is bowed. She sees not only the wisdom of God and the wealth of God.

She hears, sees the very worship of God, the great temple and the burnt offering and the whole service of the sanctuary until, until there was no more spirit left in her. And she said it was a true report, but the half has not been told. And God saw to it, not only the King of Sodom and the Kings of the great Egyptian dynasties and the queen, the noble queen of the South.

She was over a great region, the Southern regions, and even that very impressive and influential queen. She heard the message, heard the revelation of the one true God, the God of David and the God of Solomon. You turn over another few pages in your Bible and Israel is encountering a different nation.

It's now Syria, still problems between Israel and Syria to this present day. And of course, there's quite a length of prolonged warfare between the two nations. And you say, well, I tell you, you'll never get a message of grace and you'll never get a message of God to the king of Syria.

He's untouchable. He's betterly opposed. He's an outright inveterate enemy of God and his people.

He will never listen. Oh, the Lord says, just leave it to me. Just leave it to me.

And there's a little captive girl. Well, you say she'd never be able to pull the levers with royalty. Just a little captive girl, just there.

Her master takes ill with poise, with confidence, with conciseness, with clarity. She tells her master, you can be healed of your leprosy. He goes to the king, goes and gets his leprosy healed, comes back to the king of Syria and tells him what the gods of Syria could never do.

The God of Israel has done. And here I am, the living proof of his miraculous power, an enemy of the people of God, now blessed by grace. And the link in the chain was the testimony of a little captive girl.

And the message was carried until it touched not just the king of Sodom, kings of Egypt, queen of Sheba. Now it is touched the king of Syria. God's seen to it as history moves along quietly, sometimes in unusual circumstances and through unexpected channels that through his people, the Gentile nations receive the blessing of hearing the word of the Lord.

Isn't it great to be a channel of blessing, communicating gospel truth and divine truth and the message of grace and hope and salvation to others? Well, you say the Syrians, that's what you say. The next nation was a very, very wretched nation. It was the Assyrians.

And if ever, if ever there was a nation that was infamous for their cruelty and their capricious treatment of God's people, it was the Assyrians. They crunched in the teeth of their mighty military machine. They crunched the bones of the people of God.

You say you'll never touch that king. I'll put, I'd put a fella in a whale's belly and I'll get him a free passage. He was a disobedient sort of a character.

And one day they're walked into the, into the capital city of the great king of Nineveh, a strange preacher. Of course, preachers are strange. You'll always find that some of them more so than others.

And this one most, most true that he was strange. There he is bleached and marked and contorted and configured by his three nights in the fish's belly. And he walks through the gates of the big city and he starts to preach and he doesn't know too much of the language.

So a strange preacher with a short sermon, just one sentence, probably all he knew, yet 40 days Nineveh shall be overthrown. And before you know what has happened, the king of Assyria, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, brings the whole city to a standstill. At the very capital of the empire, at the very throne of the empire, the great king himself, his heart is touched and humbled.

And he learns about God's warning, not just God's wisdom and wealth and worship and wonder, God's warning. And the God of heaven is a God who will send judgment upon all kinds of national sin. And the man repents in sackcloth and in dust and ashes.

And again, again, through most unusual means, the God of the Bible uses the children of Abraham to bring the message to the highest level of Gentile kingdoms so that they too might be enriched by the knowledge of the true God. And that through the instrumentality of the testimony of Israel, these pagan Gentiles might be introduced into a relationship with the covenant God of Israel. We could stop and sing again, God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.

You would never think, if you just glance back and let me rehearse what I've been saying, who would have thought that in order to reach the big Pharaoh, God would have allowed Joseph down into the prison. No, you say that's a problem. Is there not a shorter way? Is there not an easier? No, what about Moses? I'm going to get the Pharaoh, put them out into the desert for 40 years, 40 years in the desert.

The time just trundles along and you would think nothing is happening. But in that desert, God is, what about the little girl carried away captive and her life completely ruined, finds herself dislocated and she becomes better and paranoid and very, very hostile. No, even though she's dislocated, she has a good testimony and with a generosity of spirit, she gets the message through, through the commander of the army to the King of Syria.

And here's our good friend, Jonah. He's down into the whale's belly and all of the things that happen in the sea. You say, God goes to, takes a lot of trouble.

He takes a lot of trouble and he takes his people and he puts them there and he puts them down here and he brings them out yonder and he puts them through all kinds of hoops and he refines them and he improves them and he shapes them and he moves them in order to get the message to the top. Yes, I'm glad that God sees to it that the message which he wants the world to hear, it goes out in most unusual ways through the instrumentality of a great variety of agents. Some of those agents have to suffer so that the message has a sounding board against which it can echo into the higher echelons of society.

That's the great God who we serve. Well, you say, what about the next big empire? That's the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Assyrians. What about the next empire? The Babylonians.

Oh, you say they're untouchable. They are absolutely untouchable. They are so proud and so distant and so independent and so self-sufficient.

The mighty Nebuchadnezzar, he struts upon the stage of human history as a most imposing figure and he looks down his Babylonish nose of pride at all the other nations and the lowest and the smallest and the most contemptible of those nations is the little nation of Judah. Well, God takes a teenager. He says, Daniel, I have a job for you.

I'm going to send you down a place called Babylon. Before you know what has happened, Daniel standing in the presence of noble Nebuchadnezzar moving out of the imperial college of Babylon, standing before his austere majesty, whom he slew, whom he kept alive. Everybody was quaking at their knees just in case they would go into the slicing machine of Nebuchadnezzar's assassinations.

Little Daniel stands, supported by his friends, speaks to the king. I'll not be surprised if I meet Nebuchadnezzar in heaven. You say never.

Nebuchadnezzar? Yes, and it was a teenager who became a statesman, one of the seed of Israel and the descendants of Abraham that got the message right through to the great king of Babylon. Well, you see, it goes on. Well, you see, what about the next ones? The Persians.

You see, they have a massive empire with its 127 provinces, and there they are with their very, their very strong administration, and it's a clue shop, and everything's carefully sectionized, and there's nothing left to chance, nothing left to freedom in this very, very structured empire of Persia or Iraq, as we say in our present day. And God says, well, he says there's a girl, her name's Esther. And he says, he says, well, arrange a wedding, and she'll get married to the great Ahasuerus.

The great Ahasuerus. Here was the wedding of the century. The most noble Xerxes, the great commander of a million of a Persian army, turned his face towards Europe and thought he would build a bridge across the Hellspont and conquer Europe as well as nethered Asia.

Right beside his side is a Jewess called Esther, and she brings to that man the knowledge of a true God, helped by her good cousin Mordecai. You say, I don't know, what is God doing? A little captive girl? And then another captive lady who becomes a queen and gets the knowledge right into the very ear of the great Persian empire. Well, that goes on.

You say, what next? Well, the next empire was the Greek one, Alexander the Great. The Bible doesn't talk about him, Josephus does. So because I haven't too much time, I'm going to drop him.

But I tell you, he made a great contribution. And God saw that he got the message too. Tomorrow, is it tomorrow? What day is this? Nine, 10, 10, 10.

They're not just sure when he died. He died in a drunken stupor, fell unconscious, and they're not sure whether he died today or tomorrow or the next day. But somewhere about the 10th of June in the year 323 BC, the noble Alexander breathed his last.

And all I say is this, he founded the city of Alexandria. And a few years after his death, that's where the Old Testament Hebrew was translated into the Greek Satuagint, spread across the world like wildfire. People that couldn't read Greek, couldn't read Hebrew, they now had a Bible in their own language.

And so even Alexander was used for the propagation of God's truth. But we leave that. Well, step into the New Testament.

And there's a very ruthless bunch of boys in the New Testament called Herods. They didn't come to the last series of gospel meetings, I can tell you. And they didn't turn up at gospel halls.

And they hated the Bible, and they hated truth, and they hated God. And they represented a mongrel monarchy from the Edomites. And they were most haughty and most hostile.

And they were a blood-drenched dynasty, the Herods. What are we going to do with them? Nobody will ever get preaching to them. Oh, God said, I'll get a man to preach.

And there's a man called John the Baptist stands in right before Herod Antipas. And old Herod Antipas actually trembles before that sterling, sturdy preacher, John the Baptist. And God gets the message to the Herod.

Herod Antipas's nephew in Acts chapter 12. God gets the message to him through James and through Peter. I say again, it's most unusual.

God moving in a mysterious way. What about the Roman Empire? What about the great Caesar? All you say, they'll be untouchable and they'll be uncontactable. You'll never reach the mighty Caesar.

Well, the Lord says, leave that to me. He gets a man a free passage across the Mediterranean. The Apostle Paul sails to Rome.

He stands in the great basilica of Nero. When Paul appealed to Nero and said, I want to speak to Caesar, the first five years of Nero's reign were very good. He was a very capable man.

And he had some very wise decisions and made some very good pieces of administration. That was the first five years of his reign, 54 to 59 AD. In AD 59, Paul said, I appealed to Caesar.

Just at that time, something snapped. And for the next years of his reign, Caesar became a paranoid monster. Some kind of a megalomania took over and he was just an unbearable monster, just a wretch of wickedness.

Well, God said, I'll get the message even to a man like that, that doesn't want to listen. His ears are closed, his heart is hard, his mind is warped. And he heard one of the greatest preachers that this world has ever known.

Paul says, I stood before Caesar and all the Gentiles through my mouth heard the gospel. I can just picture the scene, dear believers. One of those great basilicas with all its galleries filled with representatives from the whole Gentile world.

Sitting at the bench is the great Nero in his purple and gold, standing in the dock is a little bedraggled prisoner. So insignificant in the presence of such ostentatious chief estates. And he begins to speak on the whole Gentile world.

As this lonely little man represents Christ, they all, including the Caesar, hear the message of the gospel. And you say, is there nobody to help him? He's just there on his own. Is there no one to give him a little bit of moral support? He said, there was no man, but he said, the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.

He said, the Lord put me there. And he said, the Lord supported me when I was there. And I got the message to the great Caesar.

You say, well, are there any kingdoms left? The worst is yet to be. There's going to be a kingdom, which the Bible calls the kingdom of the beast. And all the ferocity of previous kingdoms will be concentrated in this great volcano of violence and vice in the end times, the kingdom of the beast and the antichrist.

You say, well, there'll be no voice there. God says, I'll have two witnesses, two witnesses in Jerusalem, two olive trees, two lampstands. And when the kingdom of the beast is full of darkness, he said, there'll be two bright lights that will shine for me in the darkest of those days.

You say, what's all that about? What that is about is that to try and encourage us. You might not preach to royalty, but I say to everyone here, younger brethren like Daniel and Joseph, older brethren like Moses, single sisters like the captive maid, married sisters like Esther, every age and every stage of life. You have your circle of contacts.

You have your circle of influence. The Lord has blessed us richly with grace and joy and peace and salvation. I trust the Lord will help us and encourage us.

Dear child of God, you can be an influence for good. You might have to go to a whale's belly. You might have to face a prison.

You might suffer confinement. You might like Paul, be tossed about on the billows of the Mediterranean and suffer one or two shipwrecks, but you put your life at God's disposal and he will use your life where you are, who you are, as you are, and he will use you as a channel of communication to get his message to the hearing and to the hearts of those that need it. He has done so throughout history, from Genesis to Revelation.

He has moved in a marvelous way, has stage managed the movements, the messages, the ministry of his children so that he might reach the maximum number of people, that Gentiles from every art and part might be saved for his glory. So be encouraged, dear believers. Let us not despair.

You know, I hope, I hope the conference at this particular year, as in previous years, I hope it will be a time of blessing, but I hope more. I hope when the conference is over that we will have so heard the voice of God that we will go away here, there and yonder, better equipped to become channels of blessing to people with whom the Lord allows us to come into contact. I trust the Lord will bless his word and the further ministry of our brethren.