Back to sermon search

Full transcript

Well, hello, and once more a very good morning to you. Morning, yes. By the law of both the Medes and the Persians, this morning we ought to advance in the book of First Chronicles to section three. But we have some unfinished business left over yesterday from section two, and therefore I must ask your pardon and forbearance if in the first part of our meeting this morning we linger still in that particular section of the Book of Chronicles. Now, some of you may wonder first why I talk about sections of a book. What does it matter anyway? And so let's begin, if you have your Bible with you, by looking at the way that the chronicler himself has arranged his story. The theme of the book, as we now know very well, is mankind's path to the golden age of peace and glory. And the chronicler has so arranged his story that he will map out for us what are the major stages on mankind's path to the golden age of peace and glory. And in the first stage and section of his book, he traces history from Adam, then the rise of Israel from the nation, the first disobedient king, and his displacement by the king of God's own choice, the king who was not only obedient himself, but was able to organize the nation of Israel to function as the kingdom of priests that they were designed to function as. Let's look, therefore, how the first section of the book comes to its conclusion. It is chapter ten once more. It records the death of Saul, and verse fourteen: Saul inquired not of the Lord, therefore he slew him and turned the kingdom unto David the son of Jesse. On that triumphant note, the first section ends. This was the first great necessity in man's pathway to the golden age of peace and glory, that there should be found a king that could lead them thither. The rest of the sections of the book are the development of the reign and power of that king. So let's look how the second section ends, chapter fourteen and verse one. And Hiram, king of Tyre, sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, and masons, and carpenters to build him an house. And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, for his kingdom was exalted on high for his people's sake. So he was not only king, but now he was established as king, his kingdom exalted on high for his people Israel's sake. And in that confidence, he married a number of wives. Perhaps he hadn't heard our dear brother Lannan and his remarks on this particular. But he, he, he married a number of wives and, uh, built himself a royal house of many a kingly prince. So ends the second section. The third section ends in chapter eighteen. That chapter de- uh, describes for us two series of remarkable victories that God gave to David over the surrounding nations. Says verse thirteen once more, and the Lord gave victory to David whithersoever he went. David reigned over all Israel, and he executed judgment and justice unto all his people. And now once more a list, but this time not a list of his wives and his princely sons, but the, the, the list of his officers of state that would be at his side and in their positions as David executed judgment and justice unto all his people. Chapter twenty three will bring us to David's retirement age. Chapter twenty three verse one. Now David was old and full of days, and he made Solomon his son king over Israel, and he gathered together all the pre- princes of Israel with the priests and the Levites. So we come to the final stage of David's reign in Israel, when he went into semi-retirement in the sense that they made Solomon vice regent, king over Israel with his father, so that whereas Solomon should look to the affairs of state, David might spend his retirement years doing what really lay to his heart, and that is preparing the material for the building of the house of the Lord that should take place under Solomon, and the orchestration of the worship and praise of the Levites, so when the house was built, they might have practice and be able to enter fully into their glorious ministry of conducting the praise of God at the center of the people's life. When those, uh, preparations were completed, chapter twenty nine brings us to the end. Verse twenty two and the second half. And they made Solomon the son of David king the second time, and anointed him unto the Lord to be prince, and Zadok to be priest. Then Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord as king instead of David, his father. And so appropriately, verses twenty six to thirty of that chapter sum up the magnificent reign that we've read about heretofore of David, first in Hebron and then in Jerusalem. So then there are five major stages in this book, and yesterday we were considering together the second stage and found it to be about the unification of God's people. And we saw at once the logic of the story. If the destiny is to bring Israel and the world to the golden age of peace and glory, there can be no peace and glory unless this King David can succeed in unifying the people of God. While the people of God remain warring and fighting and jangling and wrestling with each other, how could there be any reality in the hope of a golden age of peace and glory? The unification, therefore, of the people of God in section two is one of the major stages in man's pathway to glory. The next stage, stage three, deals with an altogether different topic. Not the unification of the people of God, but the subjugation and the pacification of the nations of the world. But that is, you see again, uh, easy to be accounted for in the logic of the story. If there is any reality and validity in this hope that one day God will bring mankind to a glorious age of peace and wonder and plenty, then not only must the people of God be unified, but God will have to deal with the unruly nations of men and all the vast and lesser upheavals, the evil that runs in the nations of men, the endless conflicts, the blood shedding, the persecution of the people of God. You know, in sum, if there's ever going to be an age of peace and glory, the question, the problem of evil in the world will have to be solved. And there's no good being starry-eyed about it. Here, if anywhere, we must be realists. This is a problem that has plagued mankind ever since Cain slaughtered Abel in the garden, and the problem is with us still, and we have the evidence of it in our province. We shall therefore be all eyes and ears alert when we come to section three to ask, what was God's pro- pro- method then? What was his program then for the subjugation and pacification of the nations? And what lessons can that teach us? What hope can it inspire in our breasts as we wait for the wonderful day that yet shall come, when King David's greater son shall come with clouds descending and take over the kingdoms of this world, and the kingdoms, kingdom of the world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. That is then the kind of ground that lies before us, and how far we shall get, who knows, you'll see. But, uh, before we come on to section three, there is a matter of some importance at the end of section two. And here we shall find some immediate profit from our little literary study, because this morning we are to consider David's first attempt to bring up the Ark of the Lord to Jerusalem. It ended in the severe discipline of God upon the people. And so it had to be postponed for a while. And when we come to chapter three, we shall have virtually the same story, David's second attempt to bring up the Ark of the Lord to Jerusalem, and this time, by God's grace, it succeeded with great shoutings of joy. As we consider those two narratives of the bringing up of the ark to Jerusalem, we should notice that the one of them is in section two. It is concerned with the means and methods of the unification of the people of God. The other very similar story of the bringing up of the ark occurs in section three in Chronicles, not in Samuel, but thus in Chronicles. It is concerned with this other even greater matter, God's solution for the warfare of our world, his program for the subjugation and pacification of the nation. And we shall try to take care to expound these two stories, similar as they are, according to their different context. So for a moment, we think again of the topic that concerned us yesterday, the pacification, sorry, the unification of the people of God. And our hearts were filled, were they not, with the genius of that ancient King David that took the warring tribes, the one tribe of Judah and the eleven tribes that had been under Saul, and in spite of the long wars that were between them, brought them together in peace and harmony, and thus unified the people of God. And we studied his secret. First, we found that the secret to the unity of the people of God in that day was David himself. He had that ability to charm the hearts of the people, to provoke their loyalty, to provoke their love, and to do it in such wondrous fashion that even when he gave a sigh one day, so the historian tells us, and said, not expecting anybody to be listening, all that someone would give me of the water of Bethlehem. Bethlehem at the time was garrisoned by the Philistines. The three of his men, just hearing the faintest whisper of a desire of his heart, thought it not excessive to take their very lives in their hands and go to Bethlehem and defy the enemy and get the water and bring it to David. What a magnificent man he was to inspire such loyalty, not mere begrudging obedience on the part of the people, but willing loyalty and love that would lead to the endangerment of life, if need be, laying down of life itself. David, for his part, thought it a magnificent thing. So did he value that love and loyalty that actually he wouldn't drink the water. He says they brought this water virtually at the cost of their lives. I wouldn't drink their blood. I pour it out an offering for God. And we learned the lesson quickly yesterday, didn't we? The secret of ending the strife and the bitterness that has plagued the Lord's people. The unity that we see, the secret of it is the blessed Lord Jesus himself. And we found that the second element, David's genius in leaving Hebron, his capital city, hitherto, taking Jebus and founding the city of Jerusalem, so that all the tribes might feel that Jerusalem belonged to them and not to any particular other tribe. They were all equal, free citizens of the city of Jerusalem, and it gave the nation a heart. And we thought then of the significance of Jerusalem City in history, and not only in history. For eventually, and for the most part, we thought of the Jerusalem that is above, which is the mother of us all, and our hearts leapt a cog or two. As we left the old dreary scene of wranglings and strife, even amongst God's people, and thought of that wonderful eternal Jerusalem city where all shall dwell and all at last be harmony in the service of God. We saw that in that, uh, reign of David, there were, of course, diversities of gift, and we allowed ourselves, or the clock did, just a few minutes to think about it. We come to the final, the final secret of the unification of God's people. For when the nation was united under David and they had Jerusalem as their capital city, David consulted very wisely. It wasn't an arbitrary, despotic, tyrannical decision. It was a united decision upon everybody in the whole of the united twelve tribes that they would go and bring the Ark of the Lord to Jerusalem. What a magnificent idea. And if you've got any concept of what that Ark stood for, your pulse will raise, race along a little bit more just now, you'll see. Because it was the Ark, says David, uh, with the cherubim. It was the Ark of God, the Lord of the whole earth, who sits enthroned upon the cherubim. It was a magnificent, uh, suggestion, wasn't it? That they should invite, so to speak, the very God of heaven into their center of their city. Says David to his friends, you see, in the days of Saul, we didn't seek to the ark. In other words, they didn't seek to the Lord. Let's cure that, he said, and put that right. Let's put the living God at the center of our city and seek the Lord. That remains, of course, the great secret of Christian unity, doesn't it? When we make the Lord himself the center to which all of us seek. But the story has to tell us that, as David counted it, his attempt to bring the ark of the living God to Jerusalem didn't succeed too well. And led to an instance of very severe discipline upon the people. We must try to understand it. Let's start once more, then, with the idea of the ark. Israelites believed, like you believe, in the omnipresence of God. You can't go to a part of God's universe where God isn't. The psalmist put it thus, if I ascend to heaven, thou art there. If I go down to hell, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and go to the uttermost parts of the earth, even there shall thy right hand hold me. You can't go to any stretch of time or eternity where God isn't. The psalmist pondered it when I was a fetus in my mother's womb. Then God knew me and wrote my members in his book. And through the outermost parts of eternity, God is there. He is the omniscient God. But while Israel believed in God's omnipresence, as well as his omniscience, his omnipresence existing everywhere, they had this special belief, and it wasn't idolatrous either, that there was a place on earth, just one place on earth, where the living God had consented to come down and presence himself. It was just one place. God had indicated it to Moses when he commanded Moses to bring the tab- to build a tabernacle. There, on the ark, over the mercy seat, under the cherubim. There, I will meet with you. Don't you go and build any other place. Don't you have any other temple? You don't have a temple to Jehovah, said God to Moses, in every city or village. You are to know that there is just one place on this earth, and one place in your nation where you can come and find God's presence there in that specialized form. It must have been a very eerie thing, wasn't it, for the high priest, if he believed it. One day in the year to pull aside the curtain and enter into the most holy place and stand, as he felt, in the immediate presence of the living God. Magnificent. The centuries rolled on, of course. One day the ark was replaced by a person. John chapter one records the event in magnificent language. The Word, through whom all things were created, by whom were all things made. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. And says John in very picturesque language, and we beheld his glory. Oh, it was as if John came alongside that magnificent tabernacle and reverently got hold of the edge of the outer wrappings and pulled them a little bit and looked inside. And oh, what he saw in that glorious person in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwelled bodily. What days they were. God's omnipresence, undiminished, of course. But now, in that very special place sense, there was one place on earth where God's presence was known in its specialized sense. There I will meet. Oh, it was magnificent. Fallen men and women in their grubby sins, and little innocent children could come and nestle on his knee or touch him, like the veil in the tabernacle, and God dwelt on the other side. All the fullness of the Godhead grows bodily. Ah, that age was to see another tremendous thing, wasn't it? When a soldier took a spear at last and plunged it into his side, there came forth blood and water, that blood that alone had solid and eternal value to be sprinkled before and on the mercy seat of God's throne, that we might come and meet God. Christianity is a historic religion, ladies and gentlemen. Let's never forget it. Where will you meet God? There will I meet you, said God. Re- above the cherubim that are on the mercy seat, between the cherubim upon that blood-stained mercy seat. That is what the ark is. The proposition, therefore, that David should bring up the ark to Jerusalem, that was wisdom indeed, wasn't it? Would God come? Would God, the omnipresent, yes, but would he, the omnipresent, deign to come and make his presence specially here in this place? And as I talk of that, your minds are racing on, aren't you? I can't, you are so Christian people, you are, dear me. Uh, you see, I, I can't stop you from your minds racing on and thinking of Christ again, can I? And of his gracious word, where two or three even, you don't have to be a vast throng. Where two or three are gathered to me, there I am. Lord of eternity, Lord of the galaxies, Lord of the universe, blessed incarnate Christ and the man of Calvary. Now risen. You will see right well, can't you? What is the secret of the unification of the church? The known presence of the Lord and our seeking for it. Oh, my dear brethren, allow the preacher in me to get the better of the exegete. It is so easy to lose it, isn't it? I was in a country, let it be nameless, and one elder was telling me of, uh, the difficulty they had of getting people out to the meetings of the church. He said, you'll say the believers say that if you can't put on a better show than they put on on the TV, um, we shan't come. So who's your preacher, and what's his program? There could be there, couldn't there, a slight suggestion that when the dear folks come, they're not coming to meet the Lord, they're coming to a show. Oh, God help us to get or to regain, if we've lost it, the sense that when we come, we come to meet the Lord and to wait upon the living God. It led, so we are told, to a case of severe discipline. It was not that David wasn't sincere or that the people weren't enthusiastic. They had colossal enthusiasm. God, you could have heard the shouting miles away, couldn't you? And the trumpets and the cymbals, a- and the psalms. Don't blame them for getting excited, would you? Because that was real. If God, so to speak, was coming into the city, how shouldn't people burst forth in excited praise. Why did it go wrong? Because, as David later on told the Levites, they sought God, but they sought him not according to the ordinance. You're of you, say, does does God turn out to be a legalist after all? Is he so fussy? But there it was. And we learned this fact, that the living God in all his graciousness comes to meet us. But he comes on his own terms. And when Israel forgot to do it according to the ordinance, it led to a case of severe discipline. And Uzzah died, and David was displeased. Displey. We shall have to ask what there was so serious about default, can't we? But we shall draw the first lesson. That when God comes, we must learn the true fear of God. He's a living God. Says the writer to the Hebrews, we must have grace that we might serve him acceptably and with godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire. God isn't Tom Smith around the corner. He's not Harry Brown or anybody else. He's not just a spiritual advisor. He's not just the president of the council. He's the living God, creator of heaven and earth, whom no man has seen nor can see. It stands to reason that if it's God we have, the first thing that the Holy Spirit must inculcate unto in us is the holy fear of God. The Corinthian believers, they won't mind my saying it now because they're in glory, but uh, they got into a shocking state of affairs in Corinth. They were a temple of God, and the Holy Spirit dwelt among them, but it is evident as you read Paul's letters to them that while they were a temple and believed that in some sense God was among them, they had lost their fear of God. Riding rod shod over the ordinances laid down by the apostles. And that the Lord's Supper itself, engaging in unworthy, grossly unworthy behavior, they had lost the fear of God. Paul has to remind them that if they go on like it, because God is real, and the covenant is real, God must discipline his people until he brings them to sense. Pray, my brethren and sisters, in our worldly superficial day, that God will restore to us a sense of the awesomeness of his presence, that we might cultivate a proper healthy, sane fear of the Lord. The trouble started when, uh, they brought the ark on a new cart, like the Philistines did, and they meant it well. But here was a very grave danger. The ark being a wooden box overlaid with gold and filled with the tables of stone and other sacred objects. It was, in the first place, desperately easy for Israel to regard it as a magical box. Marvelous with all sorts of wonderful powers, this box had, and all you had to do was to bring the box there, you see, and hey, presto, it was like a ray gun, so if you've got the Philistines coming against you, out came the box, you see, and you pointed it in the direction of the Philistines. Oh, that was bound to dissolve them, you see. And so the first chapters of Da- uh, Trammel tell us that in the days of Eli, Eli's sons, the priests, were grossly self-indulgent and immoral men. Who had lost their sense of God absolutely. But when the Philistines came against them, Israel said, oh, we've been defeated by the Philistines. Let's bring out the ark. And it will save us. Become pagans in their thinking, as though the ark was a lucky charm or a magical box. But it, no it ever saved anybody. They got the symbol, they lost the reality. And of course, when they brought the ark against the Philistines, and Hovni and Phineas were beside the ark, you can guess what happened, can't you? God allowed the ark itself to be taken and go into the Philistine hand. David must be taught it. The ark isn't a magical box. It's only a symbolic meeting place with the living God. The living God's not magic. The living God is not an algorithm. He's not a formula. The living God isn't even a text of the Bible, is he? You can quote the phrase, where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst, but wait a minute. God is more than a formula. And if we should be indulging in sinful and careless living, just to quote the verse, doesn't mean that we know the presence of the living God. David had to be taught that. In the medieval times, the so-called Christian church collected relics. They were bones of dead saints and things, and anybody who had these relics was mighty powerful, and therefore the governments of the time tried to collect as many boxes of relics as they could possibly collect, because in the eyes of the masses, the government that had the relics was the valid government, you see. And they fought over relics like wild animals to get the biggest relics and the most potent relics and the bones of the best saints, you will see. You'll say what horrible superstition it was. You know, when David was driven out into exile by his son Absalom, there came some of his friends, and lo and behold, they got the ark with them, and they brought it to David and said, Your Majesty, we brought the ark. You're going to win now because we got the ark, you see. And when the people see will see that you've got the ark, they'll say, ah, David is the one who's got the ark. You better take it back, said David. We'll wait now to see what God decides. It ain't just a question of having the box. It's a question of the bowing to the government of the living God. It was important, therefore, that they seek God according to the ordinance. That was not legalism. That was God himself. You'll see God isn't there for us to use him. God's method of transport, so to speak, if I might put it that way, was that, um, he should have a whole series of men that were devoted to him, chosen by him, devoted to him, sacred, sanctified, and holy. They carried the ark upon their shoulders. If you wanted God to come to your assemblage, you didn't go and fetch him yourself. You had to let the Levites bring the ark. This time they brought up the ark on a cart, if you please. Let me compare great things with small. You, sir, you've just invented some kind of, uh, milking machine. It's going to be the last wonder in the world. The question is, how do you get this advertised and the whole thing known so that you might spread throughout the whole country with your milk machine. Somebody says, I know, why don't we invite the Queen to come and, uh, do a little advertising for us? So you send a message to the Queen. Uh, good morning, Elizabeth. Hope you're well. Now we have a scheme here. Uh, we have invented a new milk, uh, cow milking machine, your majesty, you see, and we thought it would be a marvelous good thing if you would come, please, and, uh, open our factory and speak some good words for us, and, uh, we've got it all arranged, and, uh, what is more, we're prepared to pay your ticket. So if you get onto the plane at, uh, at Heathrow, we'll buy the ticket, and we'll have, we've got a quite a decent farm carriage here, uh, you know, a halfback, and we'll meet you at the station, and you needn't worry about the program. We've got the program all lined up, you see, and we'll have you speaking here and speaking there, and there's quite a decent bedroom, you'll see. So please come. What do you think the Queen would say? Well, you won't need your pickup to start with. If the Queen comes, you'll probably come on the Queen's flight, and she'll have her own limousine. And it's not you who will tell her what to do, but she who will tell you what she is prepared to do. God is not there to be used, is he? We don't write the program for him. We respectfully lay our programs and our suggestions at his feet, and we wait on his condescending grace to come to us. The result of putting it upon an ark was that the gold cart came upon a piece of un- uneven ground, and the oxen stumbled, and the ark began to fall. Azza, with very good intentions, the best in the world, put out his hand to steady the ark, and in that moment, God smote him. You say, that's unfair because he meant it well. Yes, sir, but if you went outside and you made contact with high power electricity, your good intentions wouldn't matter a lot. It'll kill you. Such is the holiness of God. But behind the severity of the discipline, there were two wonderful positive messages, weren't there? The oxen stumbled, and it looked as if the throne of God was to tumble on the ground. May I give you a little advice? If when you get home to glory and see the throne of God, and you get the impression one afternoon that the throne of God is beginning to fall over, may I advise you, don't, whatever you do, run up to it and try and hold it up. You want to run as hard as you can run, because if the throne of the God of the universe falls over, you'll never keep it up, it will crush you. In that lies the whole difference between heaven and hell, salvation and perdition. You see, the idea of idolatry is that you have to hold up your God. The idea behind the true God is you don't hold him up, he holds you up. So from our stern lesson, let's learn again the wonderful story of the gospel. Isaiah preaches it. When Isaiah, God through Isaiah is trying to show the people the difference between idolatry and the true God. God pictures an ancient town, and in that town are the big idols, you'll see. And presently the dust cloud appears on the horizon as the enemy come to storm the city. And the inhabitants of the city collect their wares in order to flee from the approaching enemy, lest they be overwhelmed. And so they got all their pots and pans together, and they put them on the donkeys to carry them, and the poor old donkeys are buckling at the knees under the weight of the old paraphernalia, and they're about to flee, when they turn around and there's their idol. Oh, oh, you can't leave your idols behind, can you? So in the last minute hurry, they hitched the old idols down from their perches and put them on the poor old donkey's back, and the poor old donkey was already overloaded, and his knees nearly go through the ground, and instead of helping them to escape, it bogs them down. That's idolatry, says God. You have to carry me if I'm an idol. The true God is the other way round. It's I carry you. Oh, what a gospel there is in discovering the reality of the living God. My gray-haired sister, join me in my old age with you in thinking just a moment of this magnificent God. I have made, says he, I will carry even from the womb, even to great hairs I have made, I will carry you. Magnificent Lord, when we discover him, the God who made us, waiting to be God to us, we don't have to carry him. He carries. Our lesson today, therefore, will point us to the power of God, man's path to the age of peace and glory. Man shall sit upon the throne of the Lord. We must now ask the question, by whose power? By whose power shall I rise one day and sit on the throne of the Lord? Oh, thank God I don't have to try to pull myself up by my own bootstraps and somehow climb to those magnificent heights. Listen to Paul praying for his Ephesian dear believers. They're seated in the heavenlies, he's going to tell them, already seated in Christ Jesus, and pray, how did they get there? Oh, says he, I pray daily for you, that the God, the Father of our Lord Jesus, the Father of glory, will give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God, the discovery of God. The eyes of our very hearts opened to see who God is and what God is willing to do and what God's program for us is. The eyes of your hearts being enlightened, that you might know what is the hope of his calling. All that God's spirit in this very moment would open our eyes yet further. My dear fellow believer, what is the hope of your calling? What did God have in mind when he called you? All the glory of it exceeds all our powers of rhetoric to describe, doesn't it? Called you who were but nothings, called you to salvation, called you to forgiveness, called you into his family, called you into the fellowship of his son, and called you to his very throne, where one day you will sit on the Savior's throne, even as he overcame and sat down on his father's throne. The wonder, the hope of his calling. What is the exceeding glory of the riches of inheritance in the saints? Magnificent. He's already counting his riches, isn't he? You'll think of the riches in this tent, few in number though we may be. And God has spent the infinite value of the blood of Christ on every one of you, my dear fellow believers. For what he has in you, and what he's going to develop in you, and all when he's finished with you, and he never will be finished, you shall be like the blessed Son of God himself, conformed to the image of his Son, that Christ may be the firstborn among the many, brethren. All the wonder of the wealth and the glory and the riches of God's inheritance in the saints. And how do we get there? What is the exceeding greatness of his power towards us that he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his own right hand in the heavenlies, far above all principalities, powers, mights, and dominions, and every name had his name. We could do with praying it daily, couldn't we? That we may discover ever more the reality of God, and not my purposes for him, but his purposes for me. When he raised Jesus from the dead and exerted that colossal infinite power that raised Jesus from the dead and set him at his own right hand, God was unleashing power towards you and me. And already are we seated with him in heavenly places in spirit. One day we shall be bodily there. The whole incident had once a s- delightful outcome. For a moment, the bringing up of the ark publicly to Jerusalem proved impossible. And so David took it aside, and the ark of God went and dwelt in the home of a certain Obed-Edom. Wonder what his wife said when the ark turned up at the front door. Wonder whether they're able to get in with the cherubim above them, you know, where they had to vac- empty the, the, the sitting room or something to get the ark in. I don't know what they had to, how they maneuvered the furniture to get the ark in and have the ark in your home and obviously the central place in your home. Goodness me, that made a certain disruption of the program, but there it was. And you know what? For the months it was in the home of Obed Eden, it, uh, God bless. Let's listen now to the second prayer that Paul prays in that epistle to the Ephesians. Bow my knees for you, says he, you individually, that you might be strengthened by his power in the inner man to this end, that Christ shall dwell in your heart by faith. You say he dwells in me already, he just dwelt in my heart ever since I trusted Christ as a teenager. Yes, he has. He wants to do more than that. He wants to come up so, come and take his residence in us, so that he becomes the center of our very personality within us. Christ dwelling within. It's so wonderful, it could be beyond words, isn't it? The Christ will be prepared to come and dwell in my heart. You say, what does it mean? I can't tell you what it means. For you to grasp what that means, for me to grasp what that means, we shall need God by his Holy Spirit to strengthen us inside our personalities, that we may be strengthened with power through the Holy Spirit to experience what it is to have Christ evermore take up his residence within us. Magnificent thing, isn't it? You say, Mr. Preacher, you were supposed to be talking about the unification of the Lord's people. Haven't you wandered from your topic? Well, if I am, I'm coming back to it. Now listen to the prayer. Would you have the Lord's people joined together? Would you have unity in the church and in the home. How shall we achieve it? Well, by bringing up the art, my dear brother, not just into the church, but into the heart. That Christ may dwell in your heart, I say, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, might be strong to apprehend with all the saints. What is the breadth and height and length and depth? And to know the love of God, which passeth knowledge. Mark it well. If we would have cohesion amongst the people of God, then it starts with the Lord Jesus dwelling in my heart. Do you see how it is? And when I have opened my eyes to see this stupendous, this stupendous grace that the Lord of heaven would come and dwell in my heart, the very ark of God in my person, I shall discover presently that you've had that kind of experience too. He dwells in you, and all that woman over there, and him, and him, and him, and him. And the blessed Lord being in our hearts, he will unite us. And those old awkward personality difficulties that all of us suffer from, and I more than any, that keep us ajar with one another, by the grace of his presence, will be gradually resolved, won't they? And they'll disappear. As we can take to the Lord Jesus living within us, our personality difficulties, and ask him to sort them out. And as he lives in me, and he lives in you, and he lives in each believer, we come to realize what is the length and depth and height and breadth together with all the people of God, and are drawn by the sheer reality of the light of Christ within us into you. It is good that we observe the ordinances of scripture. For the mere commands by themselves will not produce the end we seek. It is the Lord's command. We must obey the ordinances, but if we would be united with the people of God, here it is. It's the ark of God in our home. It is the living Lord Jesus taking up his residence in our hearts. The Lord bless our study for his name's sake. Amen.