John Sands - Continuing On - Berkshire, United Kingdom - 1959

"Ye are Christ's and Christ is God's." I thought of this as I looked at Gods people in the meeting here this morning, my first convention in England. In Jeremiah, it speaks of God's people as a beautiful flock. I feel a lot of precious things have been pressed into this meeting this morning. I thought of those words, "And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, this is the way, walk ye in it." I feel glad for the time when I heard those words through the Gospel in Wicklow, and for the years I have spent in. Canada and the United States. There's no people like God's people and no king like our King.

In Isaiah 3, Isaiah had a vision of the Lord's way, but in Chapter 6, he had a vision of the Lord Himself. "His train filled the temple." I felt the presence of God in this tent this morning. In Isaiah 1, there was a very dark vision - the people had got down to a very low ebb, but there was a silver lining to this chapter. It's good to see the good in others. It's wrong to underestimate God's people, because they are very precious to Him. There was much encouragement in Chapter 40 - the vision there is of the Lord's comfort.

The sole purpose of God's comfort is to help and encourage us. On the boat coming over, there were two boys - I believe they were Japanese and I said to one of them, "I could give a good guess that you are Buddhists." He replied, "No, I am not a Buddhist. I am ten per cent a Christian." I felt I would like to aim as high as I can to be a Christian, and not be only satisfied with 10 per cent. Chapter 40:28, "Hast thou not known? Has thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, The Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not neither is weary? ... He giveth power to the faint."


That word power means a lot to me. You take the five letters: P for prayer, 0 for obedience
W for waiting on God, E for exercising of
our minds, R for Rest as the result of all the prayer, obedience, waiting and exercising. It's one thing to fall down, but we don't want to fall away. "Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall." If we fall, we can up and go on again, but not if we fall away. The motto of a school was, "Failure is no crime, but low aim is."

"They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint." I thought of the eagle, often we may feel like them and feel we can't make it. The older the eagle gets, the longer its peak grows and it hinders the eagle from eating. It goes away to a high mountain and sits on a rock and picks away at the rock, until it wears. The peak down and is able to eat. It would be sad if anything was hindering us from getting bread.


I thought of that word in Luke's Gospel, "importunity." A man goes to a friend to borrow three loaves of bread from him. The loaves speak of Faith, Hope and Charity. Because of the men's importunity they have to rise and give him bread. Sometimes in prayer, it is only because of our importunity or persistence that we get bread. I saw somewhere, "Do not be afraid to go slow, but fear lest you should ever stand still." It is not a bad mark to peg away slowly, but we would not like to be seen standing still.