Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Power: 40. The Real Battlefield
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Power (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 40. The Real Battlefield
Other Subjects in this Topic:
The Real Battlefield
But now the main topic we are to talk about is making and breaking connections. First, making connections with the source of power. How may one who has been willing to go thus far in these talks go a step further, and have power in actual conscious possession?
There are many passages in this old Book that answer that question. But let me turn you to one which puts the answer in very simple shape. John's gospel, seventh chapter, verses thirty-seven to thirty-nine. Listen: "Now, on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, if any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." Then John, writing some fifty years or so afterwards, adds what he himself did not understand at the time: "But this spake He of the Spirit who they that believed on Him were to receive; for not yet was the Spirit given, because not yet was Jesus glorified."
There are four words here which tell the four steps into a new life of power. Sometimes these steps are taken so quickly that they seem in actual experience like only one. But that does not matter to us just now, for we are after the practical result. Four words-thirst, glorified, drink, believe-tell the whole story. Thirst means desire, intense desire. There is no word in our language so strong to express desire as the word thirst. Physical thirst will completely control your actions. If you are very thirsty, you can do nothing till that gnawing desire is satisfied. You cannot read, nor study, nor talk, nor transact business. You are in agony when intensely thirsty. To die of thirst is extremely painful. Jesus uses that word thirst to express intensest desire. Let me ask you-Are you thirsty for power? Is there a yearning down in your heart for something you have not? That is the first step. No good to offer food to a man without appetite. "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst." Pitiable are they that need and do not know their need. Physicians find their most difficult work in dealing with the man who has no desire to live. He is at the lowest ebb. Are you thirsty? There is a special promise for thirsty ones. "I will pour water on him that is thirsty." If you are not thirsty for the Master's power, are you thirsty to be made thirsty? If you are not really thirsty in your heart for this new life of power, you might ask the Master to put that thirst in you. For there can be nothing before that.
The second word is the one added long afterwards by John, when the Spirit had enlightened his understanding-"glorified." "For not yet was the Spirit given, because not yet was Jesus glorified." That word has two meanings here: the first meaning a historical one, the second a personal or experimental one. The historical meaning is this: when Jesus returned home all scarred in face and form from His trip to the earth, He was received back with great enthusiasm, and was glorified in the presence of myriads of angel beings by being enthroned at the Father's right hand. Then the glorified Jesus sent the Holy Spirit down to the earth as His own personal representative for His new peculiar mission. The presence of the Spirit in our hearts is evidence that the Jesus whom earth despised and crucified is now held in highest honor and glory in that upper world. The Spirit is the gift of a glorified Jesus. Peter lays particular stress upon this in his Pentecost sermon, telling to those who had so spitefully murdered Jesus that He "being at the right hand of God exalted... hath poured forth this." That is the historical meaning—the first meaning of that word "glorified." It refers to an event in the highest heaven after Jesus' ascension. The personal meaning is this: when Jesus is enthroned in my life the Holy Spirit shall fill me. The Father glorified Jesus by enthroning Him. I must glorify Him by enthroning Him. But the throne of my heart was occupied by another who did not propose to resign, nor to be deposed without resistance. So there had to be a dethronement as well as an enthronement. I must quietly but resolutely place the crown of my life, my love, my will upon Jesus' brow for Him henceforth to control me as He will. That act of enthroning Him carries with it the dethronement of self.
Let me say plainly that here is the searching test of the whole matter. Why do you want power? For the rare enjoyment of ecstatic moods? For some hidden selfish purpose, like Simon of Samaria, of which you are perhaps only half conscious, so subtly does it lurk underneath? That you may be able to move men? These motives are all selfish. The streams turn in, and that means a dead sea. Better stop before you begin. For thy heart is not right before God. But if the uppermost and undermost desire be to glorify Jesus and let Him do in you, and with you what He chooses, then you shall know the flooding of the channel-ways of your life with a new stream of power.
Jesus Himself, when down here as Son of Man, met this test. With reverence be it said that His highest purpose in coming to earth was not to die upon the cross, but to glorify His Father. That memorable passage opening the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, which Jesus applied to Himself in the Nazareth synagogue, contains eight or nine statements of what He was to do, but closes with a comprehensive statement of the underlying purpose "that He might be glorified." As it turned out, that could best be done by yielding to the awful experiences through which He passed. But the supreme thought of pleasing His Father was never absent from His thought. It drove Him to the wilderness, and to Gethsemane, and to Calvary.
Is that the one purpose in your heart in desiring power? He might send some of us out to the far off foreign mission field. He might send some down to the less enchanted field of the city slums to do salvage service night after night among the awful social wreckage thrown upon the strand there; or possibly it would mean an isolated post out on the frontier, or down in the equally heroic field of the mountains of the South. He might leave some of you just where you are, in a commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. The fighting and agonizing are here. Not with God but with yourself, that the old self in you may be crucified and Jesus crowned in its place.
Will you in the purpose of your heart make Jesus absolute monarch whatever that may prove to mean? It may mean great sacrifice; it will mean greater joy and power at once. May we have the simple courage to do it. Master, help us! Thou wilt help us. Thou art helping some of us now as we talk and listen and think.