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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Prayer Changes Things (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 11. Using The Name
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Using The Name
And, if you will take notice of it, the marvel of that long talk, that Thursday night talk, recorded in John 13, 14, 15, 16, is that the Master gave us the right to use His Name, that is, stepping out as He. To use His Name is to be as Himself, going where He goes! But there are two things that run through that long talk in John. Everybody cannot use the Master's Name. We find in chapter 19 of Acts, that some of the Ephesian men tried to use that Name. They reckoned without their host. The evil spirits knew who had a right to use that Name; and the evil spirits jumped upon them and tore them and left them bleeding. They didn't have the right to use that Name. The demon world knows full well who may use that Name.
If you run through that long talk again, you will find these words — "Abide," "Obey," "If ye love ye will obey," "if ye obey ye are abiding," "The Father in Me, and I in the Father, you in Me, and I in you." These words indicate obedience is the one touchstone of using His Name. He held His mastery through obedience; He won our salvation on the Cross by His perfect obedience. Now He says, "Follow Me." Obey, simply, quietly, sanely, as a child obeys. Abide, — obey means abide; abide means obey. Hold the whole life quietly, simply, fully, subject to His touch; and then you can ask what you will, you may take what you choose, and the evil one must go.
And mark you this, — obedience is always paired with the word "faith." But I think it helps us to remember that faith is this: it is knowing that Jesus is the Victor. Have you any doubt about that? It is not about what He will do, so much as what He has done. Now I have no doubt in my mind that the Lord Jesus Christ is Victor in His life, in His death, on the Third Morning, over all the powers of evil. Faith means that. It is not working my feelings up and saying, "I must believe."
It is just thinking of Jesus. There He is, on the throne — the scars on His face tell the perfectness of His obedience. That scarred Jesus, that crowned Jesus, I have feelings no doubt about Him.
As I step quietly on where He leads, I may take what I will, in His Name, life after life, purse after purse, gold after gold for the need, mules for the wagon for that missionary in South Africa, anything, and everything, I take in Jesus the Victor's Name. And, because He is Victor, every hindrance must go before the man that presses forward in His Name.
Recently I was in Sweden. Sitting across the table from me was a missionary from Tunis. One day she told us this story. She had a friend, a sister missionary in Algiers. And this sister missionary told her of an Arab woman whom she had been used to win to Christ. The Arab woman was a Mohammedan, with all the fanaticism, ignorance and superstition that marks that strange Mohammedan belief or superstition. This woman was won for Christ, and her family members did their best to sway her from her new faith. They coaxed, pleaded, argued, and threatened — made her life miserable, but she showed the quality of her faith by quietly standing firm for what she knew was right.
Then they did what is characteristic of that people. They concocted a poison, very simple, very deadly, and put it into her food — of course, secretly. When she had eaten the meal into which the poison had been introduced, she quickly realized what had taken place for she felt the poison. She knew full well about the poison, was aware of the habit of her people to use the poison, and realized how deadly it was. As she felt the thing in her blood she knew instantly what had happened. And she knew this: through the poison she was doomed to die. She knew it. You can easily imagine her feelings as she felt the poison working. It would, first make the person very irritable and mean in spirit, then very dull, then it would affect the mind still more, and then the body, until death would come. That was the course it usually ran.
And she was greatly startled, and greatly distressed, and didn't know what to do. As she sat at the table, I think without planning it, she commenced to repeat the Name, that great Name. She could not repeat it aloud, for that would mean persecution by those around her in the house and in the family. And so to herself, with all the intensity of one who felt the sentence of death in her body, she commenced to repeat that marvelous Name, above every name, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."
And for two days or three — my friend was not sure which — the struggle with the poison continued. But it gradually receded from her body and blood, the family watching her with strange and apprehensive eyes. This was something new. The poison had never failed before, but it was failing this time. As she herself told the story to the missionary, she said, "I felt as though each time I said that Name, there was something like a wave of life that swept through me, but in between a wave like death." And the conflict continued between life and death for those days, but the death becoming less and the life more, until at the end of the second day, or the third, she was free, to her family's utter astonishment and to her own great joy.
That was a victory in the body, a possible thing as the Holy Spirit guides, but only a small bit of the larger possibility. We have the right, as we are simply obedient, to use that Name. As we use it under the marvelous Holy Spirit's guidance, going step by step as He leads, we may take out of the hand of the evil one, men, and women, and property, and gold, and all that we need, because the Lord Jesus has said, "All authority hath been given unto Me over all the earth." Shall we take, in Jesus' Name, what belongs to us by the right of His death and resurrection?