Our precious Lord, we thank you for this privilege of gathering here together in your name. We have only one desire, Lord, and that is that you and you alone will be glorified in our midst. That every heart will be drawn to you, every eye focused upon yourself, and that you alone will be the focus of our praise. So we commit this morning's time of ministry into your hands and pray, Lord, that you will glorify your great name. Give to us, O Lord, attentive hearts, understanding ears, perceptive minds, but above all, devoted spirits that will be able, O Lord, to live under the control of your Spirit and be taught by Him, being led by your Holy Spirit into all truth. Bless everyone here, I do pray, so that every heart will be drawn to you. Once again, we ask in Jesus' most precious name. Amen.
By the way, I also would like to ask your forgiveness for those of you that I had to greet so far in a great hurry. Just saying hello and then somebody else is waiting to say hello, so I have to turn away and say hello to somebody else. And that makes one's greetings rather superficial. And I ask your forgiveness if I have been very hasty in just saying hello to you. I hope that we will not be so rushed on some other occasion.
Well, today we come to our last message in the camp. And what is the subject about today? Ablaze. I hope we are all aware of today's subject. I was listening to our first speaker who expressed his concern for the poor fellow who was supposed to preach the last message. He was rather concerned that as a result of the efforts of this last speaker, the fire department might need to be called out. Well, I thought, this man has faith. Praise the Lord. He expects results. Because if there were no results, there would be no fire. And if there's no fire, you don't need the fire department. So I appreciate his faith as well as his humor.
Well, we are on to a very important subject. I asked you what our subject is today, not because I didn't know, but I wondered whether you knew. Sometimes, at the end of a camp, you might have lost your concentration. We are now coming into the last days. And I think that fire is going to be ever more a rather frequent topic that will come up in the last days. It seems that fire characterizes or is a mark of the last days.
But let's ponder again. We talked in the first message about being awake. And the second one was concerning the matter of arising. I don't know whether you understood either of those points. If you don't, it makes my job a little bit more difficult today. But we'll see how we get on. You may feel that having talked about waking up, which is difficult enough in a camp, especially if you talk till 2 o'clock in the morning and have to get up at 7. And of course, if you don't awake, you can't arise. So there comes the extra effort that sometimes, even when you are awake, it's hard to get up. But now we are going to take this whole thing further when we have difficulty enough getting up, and then come on to this rather far-fetched subject about being ablaze.
Maybe we should draw the line somewhere. Because this thing about being ablaze seems to suggest that we are going to be on fire. And being on fire, what exactly does that mean? Are the camp organizers wanting us to become human torches of some sort, to be on fire? What exactly is all this supposed to mean? Are we not getting a little bit fanatical here? We are beginning to lose our cool.
North Americans like to say, "Hey, it's cool." They don't like to say it's hot. I'm not sure which one it is. Have you heard of the expression? "Oh, it's cool." I've been figuring out what's so cool. We live in Canada. We are cool all the time. I mean, right now in Canada, the temperature in winter can reach minus 20 degrees. Nobody has to tell us about being cool. And so I don't quite know what is so wonderful about being cool. I've never figured this one out yet. Maybe for those people living down in the south somewhere, it's nice to be cool. For us, I think it's nice to be warm. Being hot is even better. But being ablaze might be going a bit too far.
We are always told something about the middle way, the middle path, the balance and all this stuff. It's so important to be balanced. I'm criticized sometimes for being not very balanced. And I'm very happy about that. I'm not at all afraid to be regarded as radical or whatever. In an age when everybody wants to be average, I'm not so afraid of being a little bit different from average. What's so great about being average?
The other day, Helen, my wife, by the way, I suppose you all know who my wife is, drew my attention to somebody's t-shirt. And on the t-shirt was written, "It's boring to be normal." And she said, "You see that?" I said, "Wow, that is good. I like that." Everybody wants to be normal. You don't want to be ablaze. You're going to be regarded as a nutcase. You're regarded as a fanatic. You're not balanced. You're abnormal. And everybody thinks it's so dignified to be balanced. Well, just look here in this direction and you will see a nutcase. Somebody who's not that afraid to be abnormal, whatever that means. It's very boring to be normal. How many boring people do you know? They're so normal. I like to talk to abnormal people. They're very interesting. They can be irritating. But they're very interesting.
So you're going to say, what are you trying to teach us this morning? How to be abnormal, right? Well, in a sense, yes. Could be human torches, right? Well, that's what Nero did to the Christians. You heard about the Emperor Nero? One of the emperors during the time of the early church. He had great fun persecuting Christians. He thought that putting Christians into the arena to feed a few lions was quite entertaining for his people. But one day he thought of a better idea. You know, since Christians like to be ablaze, why not set them ablaze? Give them what they really want.
So what did he do? He took some Christians and he dipped them in something called bitumen, some form of tar or other. And so being soaked in this thing made them rather easy to burn. So once he had dipped them in this stuff, then he put them up in a nice high place where the citizens of Rome could see these blazing Christians. And then he set them alight and made torches out of them. How would you like that? Like to be ablaze? Make you literally into a torch. Is that what we want? Maybe not what we want, but that's what we are called to.
So maybe you've had enough of this message at this point and you can find something else less dangerous to listen to. Well, as a matter of fact, that's more or less what being ablaze really is. I don't mean literally, like some monk, you have to pour gasoline over your head and then light yourself with a match. We want to do something more enduring, more significant than that. But being ablaze is, of course, what that means, to be on fire.
The Bible gives us the picture that we are to be lights in the world. Now, a light, I'm sure you know what a light is. In those days, a light was something that had a little container, an oil lamp. This little container was made of clay or porcelain, usually just cheap clay, hardened clay. And you put a wick inside. And they put olive oil to soak the wick with. Notice, soak. And then they light the wick. And in this way, you have a fire. And that's how you have light.
Every household in Israel in those days was lighted by means of this kind of lamp, which was simply a wick burning in the oil. Now, when a wick burns, it burns up, of course. Slowly, you have to keep pulling out the wick because it's burning away. And the oil is also being consumed. Now, if we are to be the light of the world, then that means we are like these lamps, like a wick soaking in the oil. What is the oil? I think you know what it symbolizes in the Bible. Olive oil is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. To be anointed is to have some oil, usually olive oil, put on your forehead. And that symbolizes the receiving of the Holy Spirit.
A Christian, then, is like this light. He receives the Holy Spirit. He is a vessel. And his life is like that wick. So outside is your body, the vessel. Inside is the wick, your spirit. And God lights that light when you come to Him with the fire of the Holy Spirit. And there is light. There is no light without fire. Something has to burn.
In those days, there were no such things as neon lights. So when the Bible speaks of light, it means that which burns. If you are not ablaze, you don't give out any light. It's as simple as that. And we are called to be light. If you don't function as a light, you are not functioning as a Christian. But the only way you function as light is to burn. I hope that's clear enough.
Now, of course, when we talk about burning, we think of zeal, of fire, of zeal. And of course, I could have made my work very easy today as a preacher simply to tell you stories. Stories are very entertaining. Just tell one story after another. At the end, you are not quite sure what was the connection of all the stories, but at least you were entertained for that period of time. I am not here to entertain anyone. And therefore, I make my work a lot more difficult.
You see, I could entertain you by simply telling you a lot of stories about those people who were ablaze, who were on fire for God, who were a light in the world shining brightly and drawing many people to Him. I am sure you have heard of John Sung, right? How many people have not heard of John Sung here? That is all right. You will hear about him now for a moment or two.
Well, John Sung, of course, was described as a flame for God. A flame for God burning for Him brightly. And he burned out very fast. He died when he was just in his early 40s. I think he was 41 or 42. He burned out completely. Now, zeal can do that to you. You need to have a lot of wisdom to have zeal. And people like me who don't have too much wisdom in some respects as far as saving one's own body is concerned, that's why you see me hobbling around. I'm almost a physical wreck by now. But zeal has a way of burning you out. There is a burnout in the bad sense and there's burnout in the good sense. But nobody likes burnout in any sense. Well, John Sung burnt out. By 42, he died. And it seems to me I was going the same direction. You see, radicals don't have too much balance.
John Sung was not a balanced man. He was one of these nutcases that I like to talk to. Unfortunately, he was a bit before my time. So he died before I even became a Christian. So I missed the chance to get to know him. But he was no moderate man. He was no normal, boring person. He was one of these abnormal, burning Christians. Well, he was from the province of Fujian, which actually my father came from too. And he studied in the United States where he took a doctorate in chemistry. And having obtained the doctorate in chemistry, he promptly abandoned it because in the meantime he heard God's call to serve Him.
And so he abandoned his doctorate and what it could bring. He was actually offered the chair, that means basically the head of the Department of Chemistry, in the University of Nanking. But he declined. And went out to preach the gospel, roaming around the whole of China, speaking his unintelligible Chinese, because of course he spoke Chinese with such a heavy Hokkien accent that nobody could understand what he was saying. So even within China, he needed an interpreter wherever he went. And of course he was notorious for his impatience with his interpreters. And you see, he was a rather fiery character in more senses than one. He was ablaze in many senses.
He was famous for his preaching, for doing all kinds of rather odd things, something which I haven't tried to copy, of course, such as jumping off the pulpit. Of course, if I get too excited and jump off the pulpit today, don't be too surprised. I might decide that the time has come to imitate John Sung. Other times, he came in wearing his chungshan, all dirty, in a filthy condition, because he wanted to illustrate how filthy are the sins in which we live, and why we needed God's cleansing. And he did all these strange things. But the Lord used him, and many, many people turned to the Lord through him. Aflame for God he was, and he burnt out. But he accomplished more in the short time in which he preached than many preachers and pastors have accomplished in very long lifetimes. In fact, accomplished next to nothing. Because of what? The lack of fire. No fire, no light. Please remember that.
When I talk about being ablaze, we are not talking about an optional extra in the Christian life. We are talking about a fundamentally necessary element of the Christian life. No fire, no light, no Christian witness. You fail to function as a Christian. And I am afraid the church has too many people who have no fire. If everyone in the church had even a small fire, the light of the church would shine out into the darkness of this world such as will draw many, many people to the Lord. Do you have fire? Are you ablaze?
Now, I am going to try not to entertain you with a lot of these examples because I could spend the whole morning telling you stories of people who gave up doctorates and so on to serve the Lord. In fact, I know quite a few people who, like John Sung, gave up their academic training, their doctorates and this and that. I know a dear pastor in New Jersey, still good friends that we are, Pastor Xu, and I think some of our co-workers also know him or know about him. He preached in one or two of our camps in Canada. He had a doctorate in chemistry just like John Sung and he also gave that up. And he too has served the Lord very faithfully and is still serving the Lord very faithfully. There are many such people.
I know quite a number of people who have given up their doctorates in physics or medicine or whatever to serve the Lord. There is one person though, I don't know anybody like him. I think he's the only person with three earned doctorates. Do you know anybody with three earned doctorates? I haven't heard of anyone with three earned doctorates. I don't know how many years you have to study to collect all these doctorates and for what purpose, I'm not so sure either.
Well, he had a doctorate in medicine. He had a doctorate in theology, totally different subjects. And he had a third doctorate in music. Now, it's easy perhaps to collect doctorates in one subject, but three totally different doctorates is not something easy to do. And he wrote two books in theology, both of which are still, as far as I know, in print today. He lived to the beginning of this century. One book was about the study of the life of Jesus. The other was about the mysticism of Paul. Both are very important books. In other words, he didn't just write something for a doctoral degree that nobody wants to read. I'm talking, of course, about the well-known person called Albert Schweitzer.
Albert Schweitzer was outstanding in these things. He wrote his doctorate in music on the music of Bach. He was an accomplished organ player who played very well for concerts as well. So he did not just do those things at average, so-called normal standard. He was extraordinary. He excelled in everything he did. And what did he do? Well, having collected all his three doctorates, he went out to serve the Lord as a missionary doctor in some backwater in Africa that nobody had ever even heard of. He went to minister the gospel to the black people in some out-of-the-way place in Africa.
So if I want to keep on telling you, I can tell you many of these cases. But is God impressed with degrees? I think not. Is He concerned with how many degrees we gave up? I think not. There is nothing more valuable that anybody can give than one's life. What He wants is not our degrees, no matter how many we have or none whatever, it doesn't matter to Him. You know human beings are impressed with degrees. You think God is? I don't think He cares one bit what your degree is. Your knowledge in whatever subject you study is so small, so little, so minute, a small fraction of His creation that frankly He is not in the least impressed with the little bit we know. Do you think a doctorate is more valuable than a bachelor's degree in God's sight? I think not. Do you think a doctorate degree is worth more than a primary school diploma as far as God is concerned? I think not. The difference of ignorance between one and the other from the point of view of God is very, very little.
To be ablaze is not just the sacrifice of certain degrees. That's not to say it has no value. But it is not that. It has to do with the offering up of our lives. Think of Uncle Su, as we call him, from China. I think some of you from the seventh team will remember that I invited him to come and share about his life. Well, he never had a chance to do a doctorate. His son has gotten a doctorate lately, but he never had a chance to study for a doctorate. Why? Because he married as a young man, and three days after he got married, he was arrested. He didn't even have a chance to enjoy his married life. And he spent 21 years in the hard labor camp. And he said, well, I went in as a young man into the hard labor camp, and I came out a middle-aged man. The best years of his life were offered up to God. You think that's more valuable than two or three doctorates, or five doctorates for that matter? Certainly. You get your doctorates, you're the one who gets the glory, not God. But he who humbly offered up his life in the labor camp where he nearly died, gave up the joys of a married life. He needed only to deny the Lord a bit, and he could have gotten on with his married life. But the young man was thrown into the hard labor camp for no other crime than refusing to deny his Lord, determined to remain faithful even unto death.
Well, these are the accounts, but let me get now on with the matter of taking you more behind these stories to the principles by which these people work, the principles that are taught in the scriptures, because unless we understand the principles, we don't know how to function.
I've already mentioned the first point. Zeal, or being ablaze, has to do with being burnt up. Because unless you burn up, you don't give out light. And that, brothers and sisters, is the reason why there are so few lights in the church, because you don't want to be burnt up. You want to get this, and get that, and receive this, and receive that. You want to take in, but burning up is giving out. You're being burned away. It is to be sacrificed. That's what it is. Are you prepared to be sacrificed?
I hear in the churches all the time, they need, they want more training, more this, more that, always more. And that's all good. But you want more to do what with it? You want more oil. Why do you want more oil if you don't want to burn? Oil is for burning. If you drink too much of it, you'll get fat. You'll get fat, you're going to fall asleep. And when you fall asleep, you can't get up. And so you can't burn. If you misuse the gifts of the Spirit, in other words, it will not do you any good. It'll do you harm.
So the first point we must understand: to be ablaze is to burn. And burn, as any fire does, will consume you. It will eat you up. But I got to tell you about another fire. There are two kinds of fire, as far as the scripture is concerned. Did you know that? There is the fire within your being, and the fire outside your being. What is the fire outside? It's the fire that burns you. It's the fire of persecution. So you burn inside and you burn outside. You really have a double blessing here. That's the other reason why many Christians don't want to burn, because they want to avoid the fire, the outside fire of persecution. If you can burn inside nice and peacefully like a Christmas candle, that's fine too. But you're not going to burn like some nice Christmas candle. Because be sure of this, anyone on fire for God will be met with another fire of the world, the fire of persecution. You're going to have double burning. That's why there are two basic meanings of fire in the Bible. Read it and you'll see.
Now, this is not a Bible study, so I'm not going to give you lists and lists of references. I'll just mention the facts and those who want to check them are most welcome. In fact, you should do so. Can you face persecution? Have you faced any? When John Sung decided to throw away his doctorate and refused the chair of chemistry at University of Nanking, his father, who was a Christian, was very, very upset with him. He felt the price was much too high. Serve the Lord, yes. Serve as a professor. Why not? How many Christians like to reduce the cost of their ministry and they call it tent making? Sounds wonderfully good. They should read what kind of tent making Paul was engaged in and not try to misuse the term here. Paul was out there preaching the gospel while he was tent making. Tent making is not you sit there comfortably and give what you don't need of your salary to the church. We know how to compromise. We are masters at compromise. We find ways to avoid the fire. And who is going to burn you when you're a professor of this and that? You're very, very respectable. And nobody wants to try and persecute you because you have the position to hit back and hit back hard. Oh, we know how to protect ourselves.
Remember this, what the Lord said: "Blessed are you when people persecute you." We don't want this kind of blessing, do we? Now, I don't think you like any of the blessings. If you look at the Beatitudes, we all like to talk about the Beatitudes, but look at them. Once you really understand what the nature of those Beatitudes are, I don't think you want any. "Blessed are the poor." You like to be poor? No, no, no. I like to be rich. So what about the Beatitudes? Never mind. I like the part which says "poor in spirit" only. I just like to put in the words "in spirit," you know. We spiritualize the whole thing and we can forget about poverty. By the time you understand what "poor in spirit" means, you'll realize that the difference between poor and poor in spirit is not that great. Of course, there is nothing glorious just about being poor. But those who are poor in spirit are those who also choose poverty. I won't go into that now, but I'm simply saying that you will soon realize that the only way you can swallow the Bible, swallow the New Testament without going ablaze, without catching fire, is first you dilute the whole thing. You put in enough dilution, the thing won't catch fire.
The word of God is the word that comes from the Spirit of God. And the Spirit of God is fire. His word is fire. You swallow that and it will set you alight. Very dangerous to study the Bible. Sometimes I wonder what they do in Bible schools. They come out with no fire. They went in with fire and came out with no fire. You wonder what exactly did they do inside there? Well, I have some idea, having wandered through the corridors of those places. I've had people who have asked me to be their advisor when they go into the seminary and ask me, what should I look out for when I go into the seminary? I say, my dear friend, I'll be satisfied that you keep the fire you have now when you come out of the seminary. They look at me and said, well, that's very negative thinking. I said, don't take me at my word. You tell me one year from now. And one year from now, the brother calls me and said, "Now I know what you mean. I've been struggling to keep what fire I still have." By the time they got their degree, there isn't any fire left to talk about.
And people say I'm very negative about seminary. I am. I'm sorry. Because I walked through those places myself. I should know what I'm talking about. And I have counseled others. And I've been with those who have gone in and come out without the fire. But the word of God should set you on fire. So there must be something wrong when somebody goes in with fire and comes out without it. You wonder what was going on in there, don't you? People wish I would just shut up and say nothing about all of this. I'm sorry. They can criticize me all they like, but I will speak the truth, no matter what the consequence. You see, that's one of the results of being a nutcase. You never care what anybody says about you. You don't care whether people think you're a nice guy or bad guy. You'll hear a lot of bad things about me. Just go around the world. In fact, there's no place in the world you can go where somebody hasn't heard about me already, the bad guy.
Some of our co-workers went as far as Costa Rica. You know where Costa Rica is? I think most of you wouldn't be able to find it on a map. Somewhere in Africa? Oh, wonderful. We have some geographical experts here. I had to study the map because I knew it was somewhere in Central America, but which of those countries? I couldn't recall. Now, surely in a place like that nobody has ever heard of me, right? Well, wrong. I thought I was going to go there for a nice, peaceful, quiet time where nobody knows me and I can slip into the water somewhere on the beach for a little rest. And behold, they've all heard about the bad guy over there. Well, of course, that's not entirely fair because there was someone against me and there was someone for me, so it seems that I am one of those people who divide everybody. A bit like what the Lord Jesus said, "Do not think I came to bring peace on the earth, but I came to bring a sword."
Let me get back to our message here. The first point, I've dwelt some time on this: the fire will burn. But worse than that, worse from the human point of view, is that the fire of persecution will attack you as well. And then when you talk about that, people say you have a mentality of being persecuted. Well, let me tell you, I don't enjoy persecution, but it doesn't scare me either. I've lived with it much of my life. It doesn't bother me too much. I don't have any martyr mentality. The point here is, you need to understand, when you are true to the Lord, you will be attacked. Don't think that being a Christian means everybody says nice things about you. Remember the warning of the Lord Jesus: "Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you." That means nobody wants to persecute you, nobody wants to attack you, nobody wants to slander you, and there is something wrong with you. Strange, isn't it? We thought if you're a good guy, everybody likes you. It doesn't work like that in the Christian life.
Fire. That is the reason there is so little fire in the church. That is the basic fundamental reason.
Let me move quickly to my second point. This fire is not for a few select people like John Sung or some other outstanding name that you might have heard of. This fire involves every person. And that has been implied in my first point already, that we are all called to be lights in the world. We saw that that is found in Matthew chapter 5 and verse 14. The Lord Jesus has another very enigmatic statement, found in Mark chapter 9 verse 49, which I am not going to expound today. It would take me the whole of this morning session to expound it. Mark 9:49, the Lord Jesus made this remarkable and rather strange statement: "Everyone, no exceptions, everyone will be salted with fire." So if you hope to escape the fire, you will be mistaken. Nobody escapes the fire. You either have the fire of the Holy Spirit now or you are going to face the fire of God's final judgment at the end. Fire is something that every person will meet. If you have the fire now, you live. If you have the fire in the day of judgment, you die. Fire destroys. Either it purifies you now or it destroys you in the end. You take your choice. You can stay free of the fire now. You can live as a Christian that gives out no light. And I wouldn't like to be in your shoes on that day. When the Lord Jesus said, "You've been a Christian all your life, have you? Did you shine? Were you on fire? Did the Holy Spirit set you ablaze?" If your answer is no, you gave no light, you were simply darkness in the church where no darkness belongs, for darkness belongs in the world, not in the church. If you were darkness in the church, you were stumbling other people. The very fact that there is no light in you is a disgrace already to the gospel. It is a disgrace. I speak plainly. I don't make friends by my speech. I speak as a servant of God. And I say it again, if there is no fire in your life, there is no light, and if there is no light, you are a disgrace to the name of Jesus.
This was the reason why I didn't want to become a Christian. For years and years, I never wanted to become a Christian, because the Christians I met frankly disgusted me. I said, these are Christians? If these are Christians, I never want to be a Christian. They stumble me. God had to do amazing work in order to turn me around. And that's what I shared in my testimony.
Let me say it again. The Lord Jesus said, "Everyone will be salted with fire." Salt purifies. God is going to purify His creation. God is a holy God, and He doesn't want anything filthy in His creation. He will either deal with it now, or He will deal with it later. You can take your pick, which one you want. But if you let Him deal with you now, you will be saved, because that purifying fire will save you. But if He deals with it later, you will perish. That is the fire of hell. The fire of hell, which will burn away all filth. God must keep His creation pure. What's your choice?
So fire concerns every person. But if we narrow it down to the Christian life, we have a verse such as that in Romans 12:1, where Paul is appealing to the Roman Christians and says, "I appeal to you, brethren, that you offer up yourselves, your bodies, specifically your bodies, as a living sacrifice."
# Awake, Arise, and Be Ablaze (Side B)
Bought you with His blood? Why did He do that for? Just so that you can go on living your own selfish life? No way, brothers and sisters. He did not die to make us more selfish than we were before. And I tell you, some Christians are even worse as Christians than non-Christians. Because somehow they think that God loves their selfishness. He is there to give, give, give. Free gift, all the time free gift. It's like Christmas every day, free gift. And what do you give for Him? Nothing. Just collect.
Well, of course you say, "I give my tithe." If you give your tithe, you have given nothing but what belongs to God. You haven't given Him anything yet. If you give 10% of your income, don't think you have given anything to God. Nothing. That 10% belongs to Him. In fact, everything you have belongs to Him. But only when you give something beyond your 10% have you even made an offering. Beyond that, you haven't offered anything. No, we want God to bless us financially. Bring in the money. Give us good health. Lord, bless this and bless that. And keep us safe on the road and so on and so forth. God is the public servant number one for us. Wonderful to have God around. Wonderful to be a Christian. I mean, the non-Christians don't have God as their servant. But as Christians, you have God as your servant. I mean, who is servant in the end of all this anyway?
I appeal to you as the apostle Paul did. Your bodies must be, everyone, not just John Sung and a few other co-workers here, everyone must be a living sacrifice. Now notice, anybody who knows a little bit about sacrifice in the Old Testament knows that there is no sacrifice without fire. There is no sacrifice without fire. Every sacrifice was laid on the altar and was burned. So now we have two aspects of fire. There is the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical is the one that we find here in Romans 12. That fire goes upward to God. It is an offering to God of ourselves. Nothing to do with man directly. It has to do with God. Any fire that burns in you that is not first and foremost an offering to God is not a fire acceptable to Him.
But the other one we saw in Matthew 5:14 is the fire on the horizontal level. You give light to men. Even here there is the shape of the cross: the vertical, the horizontal, two aspects of the one fire. We never blaze and burn just for other people to see. Light is for other people to see and it's very valuable. It helps them not to stumble in darkness. But we burn first and foremost because we give back to God as a sacrifice what belongs to Him, and what belongs to Him is our very self, and even our bodies. Here the stress is on body.
That then is the second principle. What was the first? The first is: fire burns you up. It burns away. It is sacrifice in the sense of burning up. But now more specifically, the second thing I'm saying is that this fire must be in every person, not just a few outstanding persons, but in every Christian. Every Christian is to be a fire.
Let's come to our third point, and I've already touched somewhat on it already: the two kinds of fire, the fire that burns within and the fire of persecution. I need to dwell on this a little bit more because it seems to indicate that if we burn up within, it seems that we die burning up. It's a form of dying. It disappears. It goes into ashes. The sacrifice you put on the altar, what does it do? It is consumed. You put there a lamb or a pigeon or whatever it is you sacrifice and it is reduced to ashes. That is the part that scares us. We don't like to die. We want to live.
And persecution of course has the same goal. The intention is to suppress us, and if we do not give in to suppression, then it is to destroy us ultimately. Then we face death. I think here we come to the crux of the matter. We think death is something terrible. We are frightened of death.
Now those of you who went into baptism, I am sure that you were told somewhat of the basic meaning of baptism. I hope you did not go in not understanding what you were doing. What do you do? You die in baptism, do you not? When you go into the water, what happens? You got buried. That is the symbol of burial. You don't get buried alive, I hope. Nobody likes to be buried alive. And unfortunately many Christians are buried alive. And then they dig their way out and say, "Here I am again." Make sure next time you get buried, you bring a shovel with you so that if you are not quite dead, you can dig your way out. And I wonder whether this is the kind of so-called resurrection we have among so many Christians. The dead came back again, but they are the same as what they were before. And I am sure you know a lot of Christians before and after. There is no difference, is there? They are the same old people that you knew before. The same selfish people. The same nasty people. Whatever they were before.
The church is full of these people who are supposed to have been buried in baptism and behold what came out of the grave was the same thing that went into it. No wonder you can't burn. You don't want to burn. If you were burned, you wouldn't be the same person anymore. The fire burns and destroys something. What does it destroy? That's what we need to look at. What exactly does the fire of God destroy? It destroys your old nature, your old character. You become less and less what you were before. I grant you that it's difficult to change overnight, but if the fire is burning, it will consume the old person more and more.
But it is a process of suffering. Burns is the most painful injury, I'm sure you know. A burn on the arm, a burn on the hand, it remains painful for days. It is a very hard way to die if somebody is burnt in a fire. And when a certain portion of your skin is burnt, you die. The burn unit in any hospital is one of the most dreadful places of suffering in the hospital. And so through a painful process your old person is dying. It is being burnt up as a sacrifice. And what is more, of course, it is painful because you are a living sacrifice. You are alive in the burning process. If you were dead, you wouldn't feel a thing, would you? I mean, first kill the sacrifice and then burn it. You don't feel a thing. The dreadful thing about it here is not the dead sacrifice but a living one.
And how sensitive we are to burning! Has somebody said an unkind word to you? Wow, you really become ablaze. The smoke is coming out of the top of your head. How dare this person say this thing to me? We are so sensitive as Christians. Oh yeah, Christians. You say one word that offends them, God, they never forgive you for a lifetime. And if they ever managed, by the amazing grace of God, so they say, to forgive you, that would be an unspeakable achievement like climbing Mount Everest. How ordinary we are. A living sacrifice! How easily we speak Romans 12:1. We mumble through those words. Have we even got a clue what that costs? What kind of pain that involves? And what does Paul say? "That is your reasonable service." What reasonable service? I got trouble enough handling one small burn. You want my whole body to be burnt up in the flames? What are you talking about here? Oh yeah, Paul says that's your reasonable service. No wonder this guy is a crackpot, just like me. Or I'm like him. We're crackpots talking this kind of stuff.
That's why I told you earlier on, you cannot swallow the word of God without catching fire. So the only way is to spit it out before it starts burning you. I sometimes wonder how many people come to Bible studies with fireproof garments on. Never touch them. "Keep the fire burning, my friend." "I don't feel a thing." My goodness. Talk about thick skin. We're talking about armor here. We come to the Bible study with, and hopefully the person leading the Bible study has so little fire that he doesn't touch you at all. He manages to entertain you through the whole business. You say, "Oh, that wasn't bad. I was quite refreshed."
Let me tell you, when you come to a Bible study and it really burns you up, I remember people coming to my preaching and they said, "I can't stand this fellow. If I hang around here longer I'll die. I'll never get out of this place alive." I remember a professor of physics who came to our Montreal church. He was telling me afterwards, he said to me, "The first time I came in here and listened to your preaching, I couldn't stand it. I was being cut to pieces. I was being burnt up. I can't stand this kind of preaching." He said, "I've been an elder in the church. I've been sitting in the church for years, and this guy comes along and he burns me up. I was sitting comfortably in church."
And you know what happened? The next Sunday he was sitting there to be burned some more. I said, "Why did you come back?" He said, "I realized I was running from the truth and I had to come back." And so he got burned some more. You know what happened? He came there every week to get more burnt up. And then he was regular in the church. It cuts. It burns. I'm sorry, but what I preach is not invented by me. It is the word of God. You check it and see. I can preach you a nice sweet gospel that will tickle your ears. I can do that too. I'm not going to do that. I will preach what the Lord commands.
Two kinds of fire. The one inside that will burn away the old man until there's nothing left of the old man, and what is seen is Christ. It will be as Paul said, "I am crucified with Christ. I died with Him. And now what lives in me is Jesus. It is He who lives in me." How many Christians are there that you can say, you talk to them and you realize you are talking to Jesus in that person? The old man has been burned, not totally gone but largely burned up. Such people, as I told you about Mr. Macbeth the other day, have gone through a lot of suffering. A lot of fire. A lot of fire that has burned away the dross, the filth, the old man burned away. And lots of Christians cannot take it, and they've decided they've had enough of this Christianity. They're going to switch gear, switch into a low heat version of Christianity. Stay away from the fire.
How many people have been in our churches and can remain comfortable? Not in my ministry, they don't. You either change or you leave. That's what happens in my church where I was pastoring. You change or you leave. I don't let anyone stay the same. Not because of me, because of the word of God. I'm not harsh to anybody. I don't scold people, I hope I don't, except that some people feel that I'm scolding them because I'm preaching the word of God.
There was one lady who came to me after one message in Montreal, and she was very upset with me. She was very angry with me. She said, "How can you publicly expose all my sins?" I looked at her and I didn't even know who she was. She said, "I'm sure you have hired a detective because nobody knows my private life in the way you were preaching about it." And she was so angry with me. I said to her, "My dear lady, first of all, I'm sorry but I don't even know who you are. Secondly, I never sent private detectives after anybody." But she was convinced that I could not know all her sins in such detail. But I spoke as the Holy Spirit made me speak, and the fire of God burned into her heart. I don't believe I ever saw her again. She couldn't stand the fire.
So that is what the fire of God does to us. But if you can't stand that, how do you stand persecution? How many of you have really suffered any persecution for the Lord? What have you ever endured for Him? Not much, probably, in most cases. Being scolded by your parents might have been a pretty hard thing to swallow, and many of you probably have been scolded, and that's probably as far as the persecution goes. And that is quite enough for you. I don't think you want to go much further than that, do you? Two fires. Double fire. That's more than most people can take at any time.
Let me come to my last point as time is running out. Let's fix on the question of what exactly in the Bible is zeal. What is fire? What is zeal? What exactly are we talking about here? How do we define it? Now technically speaking, I have to speak for our co-workers who are technically trained. I want to tell you that my exegesis on this point, for lack of time, is not at all complete. In fact I could not get through it all in one session. So I will limit myself simply to the congregation and so it is not going to go technically further than what I share today.
For example, I will not deal with an important question in exegesis, the relationship between zeal, being zealous, and being jealous. The words in Greek as well as in Hebrew have a double meaning. It means both being jealous and being zealous. For example, in 2 Corinthians chapter 11 verse 2, Paul says, "I have been very jealous for you," that is, the Corinthian church. "Having betrothed you to Christ, I am afraid you are going to fall away from Him." Some translations have "jealous," some translations have "zealous." So those of you who are more exegetically and technically minded, all you have to do is look into a concordance, put "zealous" and "jealous," open both sections, and you will see that actually some translations have jealous in one place and some have zealous in the same place. The words are interchangeable.
But I won't go into all this except to say that intense love is behind any zeal. Intense love for God in this case. Jealousy of course is due to love, but it can be the right kind or the wrong kind. It can be selfish or it can be self-giving. Paul's love for the Corinthians is jealous in the sense that he guards them for Christ, not for himself, but for Christ.
Now what fundamentally is being zealous? It means basically, quite simply, a love that is absolutely faithful to God. It is faithfulness. Now again, there is something you need to know from the Bible, especially the Greek New Testament, and that is that the word "faith" in the Greek has the same root meaning as "faithfulness." To have faith is to be faithful. To be faithful is to have faith.
In other words, you cannot have faith in Jesus if you are not faithful to Him. If you think you can be saved by a faith that is unfaithful to Jesus, you are totally deceiving yourself. Bear this clearly in mind. Don't deceive yourself by thinking, "I am saved because I believe in Jesus." Any faith in Jesus that is not faithful to Him does not save. I put that on record and I'm not afraid to be challenged by any theologian anywhere in the world. So many people are deceived into thinking that they are Christians when they are not, because they did not understand this very simple fact that there is no faith in the Bible that does not mean faithfulness. And faithfulness means being obedient to Him. If you are not obedient to Him, you can claim all the faith you like in the world, and I will say to you, without fear of contradiction from the word of God, you will not be saved by this kind of so-called faith.
I think that is why, in the wisdom of God, the word in Greek which means faith has dual meaning: faith, faithfulness. That is the reason why we speak about total commitment, to avoid using the word "faith" which has been so misused. What is total commitment? Nothing except faithfulness. That's all that total commitment means. It's as simple as that. Because we add in the word "total" because anything that is not total is not faithful. How can I be faithful to you if I say I'm 80% faithful? To 20% I'm doing something fishy. We have destroyed the meaning of faithful in this process. There is no shady place in this. Faithfulness is either total or it is nothing. That's the way it is. It is in the very nature of this word "faithful."
If I am faithful to you 10 times out of 12, I betrayed you twice. Is that faithfulness? Or let's say 10 times out of 11, I only betrayed you once. Would you consider me faithful? Of course not. I have to be 100% faithful before I am faithful. If I betray you once, I am not faithful anymore. Judas betrayed the Lord Jesus only once. How many times did he have to betray Jesus to become a Judas? Just once. That is enough. And everybody regards him as the symbol of unfaithfulness, a betrayer.
Are you faithful? Do you have faith in the biblical sense of the word? Now that is what zeal is, because once you are faithful and you are obedient to Him, you are doing what He wants you to do. Then inevitably you are on fire. How else are you going to do it? You cannot escape being on fire if you are faithful. And if you want to escape, then don't even bother to call yourself a Christian and say that you have faith, whatever that means.
The church is full of people who claim to have faith and are totally unfaithful to the Lord. Does no preacher or pastor understand the basic fact that faith and faithfulness are inseparable in the Bible? And if you understand it, preach it so that nobody in your church will be deceived. Otherwise you have led them into deception.
I say this to those of you who have been baptized. Remember this: you have set up your covenant. You have made your pledge. It is a symbol that you commit yourself to be faithful. A pledge is nothing but a commitment to be faithful, isn't it? What else is it? What is a marriage pledge but a pledge to be faithful? That's all it is. And that is where faith is in that relationship. All relationships between people depend on faith. There are no meaningful relationships where faith does not exist. Faith is simply the fundamental ingredient of any relationship. When that element of faith or faithfulness disappears or is contradicted by actual behavior, no matter what the verbal claims are, then that relationship is dead.
And with these last words I close. Revelation chapter 2 and verse 10. What does it say there? The Lord Jesus says to the church in Smyrna, the one church that was all along faithful, because that is one of two churches out of the seven churches that are addressed, only two are not rebuked. Five out of seven are rebuked. But Smyrna is not rebuked. They are faithful. But it is to the faithful that the Lord Jesus says this: "Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life."
Faithful unto death. Death. That's total commitment. Now and into the future, to the end. Only so will the Lord say to them, "I will give you the crown of life." If they already have the crown of life, they don't need to be faithful unto death. If you already have it, why bother? But they need to be faithful unto death to receive that crown.
There is an English saying, particularly in North America: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Sounds nice, doesn't it? The point I want to make is this: here we are talking about the need for faithfulness, and it sounds good. "Be faithful unto death." Wow. You say to yourself, "I am 21, 23. Death is a long way off for me. So being faithful, I can leave it to the last day. Just before I die, I will be faithful, and I can get the crown of life. How wonderful."
The point is this: you don't get tough overnight. When the going gets tough, the going can get tough very suddenly and you are caught unprepared. But to be tough in order to survive it, you don't get tough overnight. It takes a long training to be faithful unto death. Death may come suddenly, and if you think you can be ready for it in five minutes, you are mistaken. Faithfulness takes long training.
In my twenties I trained myself. I remember once I did long distance cycling. I cycled for four days non-stop right across Switzerland. Sometimes I would like to challenge any of our co-workers to repeat what I did and see if they can do it. You think you're tough? You try. I went over the Alps in one day on a bicycle. Sometimes it was so steep I had to pick up the bike on my shoulder and climb on foot because it was too steep to try and ride it up. And it had no gears. Tough. Is your faith tough? Faithfulness is a tough faith, and that's the only kind of faith that God is interested in.
So faithful unto death takes a long training. That's my point in this last point. It takes a long training to be faithful, to survive the final test. I want to tell you one last thing before I close, to sum up all my points briefly.
I shared with the co-workers the other day in Hong Kong the account of the persecution in the Roman days in the early church. And the account I shared was concerning one young girl. You think young girls are tough? I tell you, they can be tough, much tougher than your mighty muscle man, your macho man. I have great respect for those weak-looking young girls, because when the going gets tough, they are tough. What kind of toughness are we talking about? The toughness of absolute faithfulness to God.
I have read many accounts of martyrs, of people who have suffered and died. But none of them touched my heart like this one. And I have read a lot of accounts, I can tell you. This account concerns this young girl who, in the fierce persecution under the Roman Empire, was sentenced to death if she did not turn and renounce Jesus. She was told, "Are you going to deny Jesus, or do you choose death?" And she says, "I choose death."
What makes this account particularly touching to me, because many Christians have chosen death for the Lord, nothing new about that, but what made this account particularly touching to me in the case of this young girl was that she was pregnant. And her baby was soon to be delivered. What makes this point particularly tragic and touching is that in her death, two people died: herself and her baby. And so many people pleaded with her, saying, "Why not, for the sake of your baby? You don't want to deny Jesus, that's fine, but you have another life to think about, the life of your baby."
And the parents were crying. The mother was crying. Brothers and sisters crying. Everybody crying. It's very hard to deal with crying. This is not fire now, it's water. And this kind of water can really put out the fire. How many people's fire have been put out by somebody else's tears? Just put your head on that person's shoulder and cry, and cry with enough water that all the fire is gone. I've told you a secret how to put out the fire. Nothing is so powerful as tears to flush out the fire.
So they worked on her and said, "How about this? Be sensible. Be reasonable. How about you deny the Lord this time, and then with the next persecution you can go and die then, because by then your baby is born?" What did I say? Faithfulness is 100%. How about deny the Lord once and then make it up next time? But this young girl would not be moved. And what about the husband? The husband seemed to be away at that time, so they couldn't get hold of him. Maybe if he were there, he might have encouraged her to remain faithful. I don't know. But he happened to be away on some business at the time. She was alone, without support, without encouragement, to face the dreadful consequences of her faith.
The cost of being faithful. You see, there's no difference between faith and faithfulness when you are looking at death. No difference at all. That's why the Bible doesn't distinguish between the two.
And you know how they chose to kill her? The authorities always have wonderful ways to slowly kill a person. Not just in one shot and that's gone. That's quick. We all like to die fast. Just give one shot and it's easy to be a martyr, at least not so hard. But slow death, no. Some of you were baptized in the sea yesterday. You were all standing by the seaside. Well, they thought of that. The tide is a good way to kill a person. You know how they tied her to a post at the shore and let the water slowly rise, rise, rise. How's that for a way to die? Now that is baptism, brothers and sisters. That is really baptism. And the Lord said, "I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and how I yearn for it to be accomplished."
I ask of you, those of you who got baptized, remember this account. You went in and you came out. She didn't. She didn't come out alive. I wonder, which mother does not think of her baby? Do you think she has no heart? She didn't feel the pain that her death would mean the death of her baby? Do you think she doesn't feel it? There is no sane mother that did not think of the cost and the agony that she would sacrifice two lives at one go. But deny the Lord she couldn't, and she wouldn't.
And so as the crowds of people stood there on the beach watching the water slowly rise, how long and agonizing to watch the water slowly rise up. And they were saying, "You still have time. You still have time. Give up Jesus. Give up Jesus for a while. Give Him up, please." And the tears there. If you're standing in the water and more tears on the shore, oh how much water there was in one day to wash out all the fire. But her eyes stood fast. Her lips didn't move except in prayer. And as the water slowly rose to her chin, up to the mouth, coming to the nose. And you don't drown in one second, you know. It's a slow process. When finally she drowned, without a murmur, she died.
And I would say that not all the water of the Mediterranean Sea could quench the fire in that one heart. Faithful unto death. And you receive the crown of life. I think that is wonderful. I think of this case as the most touching case I know of anyone who is faithful unto death. She stands forever as an example. And did she die in vain? Not at all. The water could not dim the light that shone from that spot in the ocean, because as a result of her death, many people turned to the Lord. They said, "God must be wonderful. God must be real, that this weak woman, this young girl, was prepared to be faithful unto death." That light has shone from that day to this, and it continues to shine into my heart, encouraging me on to follow in the same example.
So I can wind up my message here. Time is gone. I think we recall now that the fire means that we must be burnt up. The second point we saw is that it speaks to every person. We saw that there are two kinds of fire: the one within and the one without. And we now see that zeal simply means faithfulness, and it means faithfulness unto death, every day being faithful until that day.
Let us pray. Our gracious Lord, thank You for Your mercy to us. Thank You that Your word, Your life-giving word, speaks to us. You tell us clearly what You call us to do, and You have called us to be lights in the world. Forgive us, O Lord, both individually and as a church, where our light has not shone for You because we did not want to burn. Forgive us, O Lord, that we just want to receive whatever we can get from You, but we don't wish to follow as true disciples of Yours, taking up our cross and following You to Calvary. Transform our lives and light the fire in this camp such as will burn from this place to the ends of the earth. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.