“Jesus Christ, the Risen Saviour”

“Behold, everything is new!”

What is conversion? It is called “New Birth”. It is birth into the Kingdom of the Son of God. It is a spiritual kingdom. That is, men who are born of the Spirit are in this kingdom. Everything in this kingdom is operated by the Spirit of God. It is a new kingdom with all new laws. In this kingdom God becomes your father. When you say “Father” you really feel He is your father. A sense of sonship is growing in your soul. “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6). When we use the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Our Father who art in Heaven.” This sense of God’s fatherhood will begin when our sins are washed away. That means we have repented. When we repent we will get a broken and a contrite heart. Then God’s Spirit can work upon our soul. God cannot do anything with impenitent people. If He does anything it becomes a terrible punishment.

We have entered into a new kingdom. It is like a foreign land to you. Jesus who died and rose again has given you a passport into this kingdom. You have entered into a new covenant. “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them” (Ezekiel 36:25-27). Now by this covenant you have received a new heart. And God’s Spirit dwells within you, enabling you to follow His covenant and do His statutes with all your heart. It is a spontaneous obedience that springs within your soul. Your tastes are changed. Your inclinations and propensities are utterly renewed and changed. You do good without knowing why you are doing it. You speak the truth for you cannot help doing so. All the time a spiritual harmony is developing in you, reducing the tensions that once existed. Once there was a struggle in you when you wanted to do good. A force used to drag you down into evil action and evil thinking. Those forces become less and less. Your morning prayer becomes a time of communion revealing your day’s duties and coming temptations. The Word of God becomes a spiritual nourishment and, as it is life and spirit, your life in your soul becomes enriched. The Spirit that guides you gets intensified. If you are careful you will soon notice you are becoming more like your Master. You do not like evil companions and evil desires leave you. Your old friends do not feel at home with you. They leave you unmasked. The spirit in them is very much grieved when your spirit impinges upon theirs. Your relatives will give you the slip and behind you they criticise and before you they are silent. Your advice is always a whirlwind that shakes their balance. You will not find real fellowship in the men of the world. You are more and more estranged from this world of sin. And God’s children, however few they are, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, make you feel at home. You want to worship with them and pray with them. Nobody needs to compel you to do these things.

Before conversion you were your own master. Now you will say, “I can do of myself nothing.” “I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgement is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me” (John 5:30). “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6). You acknowledge a higher authority, a superior mind that can guide you unerringly, a holy wisdom that makes you clever in an innocent way. You are wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. Still the old man in you when you are careless wants to put up his head and create the worldly desires. But your faith in the Cross suddenly gives a stunning blow and the pride of life, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes are completely shattered. “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him” (Romans 6:6-8). Again and again this happens and so your habitual thinking and ambitions of life are changed. These are sorrows but they are not of the world, which creates sickness and death. The sorrow of this world, however justifiable and natural it is, is an enemy of the body. It saps out the greatest amount of energy from the body. But the sorrow of the spirit, in other words, the sorrow that comes through repentance, is a great blessing. When a bad thought occurs to you, you weep in your soul. The beautiful complexion of Christ in you suffers; the beauty of the Lord leaves you. It is like a beautiful woman getting a wound in her face and a permanent mark that mars her beauty and she feels so sad.

Your spiritual mirror, the Bible, and the inward light throw abundant illumination causing such deep grief within you. Sometimes you are grieved because you could not be happy at another man’s prosperity. You are full of sorrow for not rejoicing with those that rejoice. An impure thought makes you halt, sit and weep. You are suddenly awakened. For a long time you were free from such thoughts. If by any chance the devil can make you ruminate over that evil thought, the poison gets in. The Holy Spirit will teach you that you should not ponder over that evil thought. When your neighbour gets promotion, which you ought to get, you will always make an effort to rejoice in it. It is a great triumph. It is not worldly prosperity that keeps you healthy, happy and useful. But when God gives you promotion, as in the case of Joseph, you are a blessing to tens of thousands and you find yourself always spiritually resourceful. When you miss your promotion you will know in the long run it is a blessing in disguise. Your neighbour who never prays gets it and on that account is sent to another place where the envious around him harm him and he is crippled for life. You will then realise the promotion was not ultimately a blessing. You help your enemies, kiss your kith and kin with a forgiving love and show that great love of God in an unmistakable way to the world. You will feel sad when you are not able to help others. One thing you must know [is] that men and women in sin cannot be comforted or helped by you. There is nothing in you that satisfies a sinful heart. But you will pray for them and speak to them some words which they may not understand immediately, but the prayer of faith soon makes your thoughts penetrate the hearts that are encrusted with sin. One day they will come to your point of view. 

It is a new world and God can trust you with the gifts of healing, prophesying, and He may even give you money. When money comes into your hand, you tremble to handle it lest at any time you make wrong use of it. It is a trust from the Lord. Some people may have an amount of money which they have never seen before, but it is a holy trust. Here many miss the way, for you become an object of respect and attention. Flattery sometimes brings poison into us. You must be guarded with much prayer and the spiritual fellowship of God’s servants will always save you. Your life must be a life in the open. You are not afraid of eavesdroppers; you are not afraid of people looking at your letters. Well, the envious will attack you. You can easily overcome such things.

—N. Daniel

“Reality Check”

“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him” (Matthew 17:5).

“Vibrations—Power through Prayer”

A bang and a crash, and a cloud of dust that when it cleared showed a picture of ruin. One of the pillars that support the gallery of our old Arab house had fallen down into the court and lay shattered on the pavement, carrying with it a block of masonry and a shower of bricks and blue and white tiles from the arch above it.

Down below, alongside of us, a native baker had installed himself six or seven years ago. This means that for hours every night two men had swung on the huge see-saw which in some mysterious way kneads their bread, and every blow backwards and forwards had vibrated through our house, and now at last the result was seen in the shattering of masonry that had looked as if it would last as long as the world.

The town architect came, confirmed this as the probable cause of the collapse, and obliged the baker to do his kneading after another fashion! 

But God had meanwhile given an object lesson concerning a truth which had glimmered out before in thinking of the strange power of vibrations. . . .

For there is a vibrating power going on down in the darkness and dust of this world that can make itself visible in starting results in the upper air and sunlight of the invisible world, “mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds”, “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” Each prayer-beat down here vibrates up to the very throne of God and does its work through that throne on the principalities and powers around us, just as each one of the repeated throbs from below told on the structure of our house, though it was only the last one that produced the visible effect. We can never tell which prayer will liberate the answer, but we can tell that each one will do its work: we know that “if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us; and if we know that He hear us, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.”

There are two parables in St. Luke’s Gospel that translate this matter of the power of vibrations in the prayer world out of the region of theory into that of revealed truth: the parable of the three loaves in chapter 11 and that of the widow and her adversary in chapter 18. It is not a question in either of them, it seems, of prayer for the personal needs of our souls; for these we do not need to come again and again to wring an unwilling answer out of our Father, but to search in His Word till He gives a promise which meets our case and then to step out on it in the bare faith which believes that it receives.

But the question of prayer becomes more complicated when it concerns others—complicated not only by the independence of their individuality and their personal wills, but by the action of the principalities and powers of the rulers of the world of darkness. We have a glimpse of this in Daniel 10. The answer was sent out from God’s presence “from the day that he set his face” but it took three weeks to battle through the opposing hosts, and all that time God needed, in some mysterious way, the help of Daniel’s fastings and prayers down in the darkness, to help fight through and reach him.

Compare the two parables. . . . Both begin with helplessness—midnight in the first, a shut door, a far-off voice that only answers “not now” [and] loneliness in the second, a widow with no one to take her part, no brother or son to stand for her. And yet in each case “because of importunity” they will not recognise defeat and they both fight through all odds to victory.

But the aim is different in the two. The first is the cry for supply for the individual souls who come to us in their journey through life, the second is the battle that we learn further on, against the principalities and powers in heavenly places, headed by “our adversary the devil.” In both there is the stepping down into the place of helplessness first, the Peniel of the crippled Jacob, where power with God and with man is to be found. . . .

“I have nothing to set before him.” And not by our own power or holiness can we produce any supply. Our cupboard bare, all resources closed around us like the bread stalls in the deserted street—shut up to hope in God alone, that is the first condition. And the second is the importunity which holds on to the end, until the answer has come. A break of faithlessness gives the enemy time to regain his power and to seize again the ground we have gained, like the Amalekites prevailing when Moses let down his hand, “the hand upon the throne of God” (Exodus 17.16 margin) and through that throne upon the powers of the enemy. With our hands placed there upon the place of power we learn the secret of prevailing. “Men ought always to pray and not to faint.”

There is one keynote that, once struck, can move heaven and earth; its mighty vibrations ring up to the throne of God and thunder upon the gates of hell: “that in the Name of Jesus every knee should bow.” When once the prayer-beats have struck that note of the Name of Jesus, it is only a matter of going on. . . .

We cannot have the Spirit’s commanding in prayer until we have before been living under His law in secret. . . . “The minding of the Spirit is life and peace”—what far-reaching life and peace for other souls as well as our own, none can tell. . . .

Only dim glimmerings come as yet of what it means to wield the power of the Name of Jesus against the world-rulers who lie behind the needs of those around us.

With these overwhelming powers against us, the overwhelming needs around us, our own entire helplessness, only one little life on earth, ebbing so quickly, it is essential that if there is a secret of power to be had we must learn it. . . .

God does not as yet withdraw the mysterious powers given to the prince of this world, but He can and will send out on our side a “power above all the power of the enemy”, and that comes to the same thing, as we see in Esther’s story [see the story of Esther in the Bible]. In her heart, in the heart of the widow, was the same thought: an answer is to be had, and I must have it; and so on they went in the absolute simplicity of this one idea till the answer came, the “vibrations” took effect at last, the last barrier was broken through, and victory was won. . . .

Can we not begin to see the working of the Spirit in the cry that is going up from the hearts of so many of us to learn the secret of a life of prayer? Is He not preparing us to join in the last cry of the Bride [of Jesus Christ, the Church], “Come, Lord Jesus”—the cry that will not only “vibrate” but will rend the heavens and destroy the power of “the last enemy”?

—See Lilias Trotter, “Vibrations”

“Healing”

A Bible woman in China, Mrs. Li, had a little grandchild whose right arm had become paralyzed. The father was a trained doctor. Everything had been done for the child, but the arm remained limp and useless. At one point, Mrs. Li accompanied some Christians to Linching for a week's revival meetings, a time when God could visit His people.

One morning, when a wonderful spiritual movement was on, Mrs. Li became deeply convicted of certain things in her life. Humbly and quietly, not aloud, she confessed all to the Lord. Then there came the remembrance of her beloved grandchild's condition. She pleaded earnestly that the Lord might heal the child.

A few days later, at the close of the meetings, Mrs. Li returned home and was welcomed by her daughter-in-law holding the child, both of whose arms were outstretched! On enquiring when the healing came, Mrs. Li found it was at the time of the revival meeting, while she prayed. “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: Is there anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27).

—See Rosalind Goforth, Climbing: memories of a missionary’s wife

About Us

This newsletter is produced six times per year by the Laymen’s Evangelical Fellowship International. It is printed and distributed in the US, UK, Germany, Singapore, Canada, and Australia and is supported by unsolicited sacrificial gifts of young people. For a free subscription or for other enquiries, please contact any of the addresses below.

This Fellowship is an inter-denominational missionary and prayer group working for revival in churches and amongst students in several countries. We invite every layperson to become God’s ally in changing his or her corner of the world. We train people in evangelistic work and to be self-supporting missionaries.

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