Isaac's removal of the Philistine rubbish

.. a renewal of the life of the church as the result of the direct action of the Spirit of God upon an individual or a group of people, a church or even a group of churches, or perhaps even more or less a nation. It is a visitation of the Spirit, an outpouring of the Spirit, a phenomenon, nothing that man organizes or arranges or produces. It is a sovereign action of God.
I ended on that note last Thursday evening, and this is a most important point, this clear definition as to what we mean by revival, and I considered some of the objections which so many people seem to have to this whole notion and tried to show how they were unscriptural. I still would repeat that I believe the greatest factor in causing the whole notion of revival to recede in the thinking of the church has been due to the prevalence of an Arminian type of teaching which is activist and believes that men can do things, both the preacher in the pulpit and the one who listens. It is this assertion of the will and the power of men that has made people put their confidence and their faith in such activities rather than to look to God for some almighty and overwhelming action on his part.
Well, that is more or less a summary of what I tried to say last Thursday evening. Well, now I announced also then at the end that from that point forward I was going to take a number of illustrations of this about which we are speaking from the Bible itself. We can't do anything better than this.
Our ideas must be derived from the Bible itself and it seems to me to be most helpful always to look at some of these biblical illustrations of this great matter. And tonight I invite your attention to what we are told in the book of Genesis in chapter 26 in verses 17 and 18.

And Isaac departed thence and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar and dwelt there.
And Isaac digged again the wells of water which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father. For the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.
Gen 26:17-18

Now here is an incident out of the life of Isaac the son of Abraham.
And the story in its essence is this. He'd been in a certain part of country and had flourished and had succeeded so much so that he'd become the object of the envy of all his neighbors. And life had become so impossible for him that he had to move.
They drove him out. And here we find him arriving at this place in the valley of Gerar and deciding to settle there. But immediately he is confronted by a problem.
And what I want to deal with is the way in which Isaac faced this problem and dealt with it. Now there are certain things here it seems to me that tell us a great deal about this whole question of revival as you see it in the history of the church throughout the centuries. The first thing to emphasize obviously is Isaac was in trouble, confronted by a need.
And the point I would emphasize is that it was a desperate need. It was an urgent need. It wasn't that he was looking for some suitable site for building himself some kind of house or shooting box or something like that.
He wasn't out for a site for some kind of luxury. He was out and looking for and needed the bare necessity of life, water, without which existence is impossible. The need was not only urgent, it was desperate.
And I think this is the point at which we must start today. I find so much of this apathy with regard to this whole subject is due to the fact that people don't seem to realize the urgency and the desperate position in which we find ourselves as members of the Christian church. The problem confronting us is not just that of keeping things going or improving things somewhat.
These things I know need to be done, but that's not really the problem today. Not some modification of the organization here or there. And surely the problem today is this, that we are fighting for the very life of the church.
We are fighting for the very essence of the Christian message. I don't think this is to exaggerate the problem. The forces that are working in the church and in the world outside are forces that are attacking the very essence of the Christian faith.
We're not concerned with mere peripheral matters, matters that are incidental. It seems to me that we are back in this position, similar to that of Isaac, that our whole future is involved. The very life of the church is involved.
The church has shown so many times that she can run on for years on her organization and with various other things. But the time comes when she is face to face with this ultimate question and she is fighting for her very life and existence and being. And I believe that we today are in such a state and in such a situation.
I know that this is being concealed from us in many different ways. And here is perhaps a large part of our problem today. Owing to various activities on the part of people in various ways, an impression of prosperity can be given, an appearance of success.
There are countries, and yours is one of them, which from the standpoint of statistics can put up a very good showing. But the vital question to ask is, what of the life of the church? Is she really functioning as the church? Is this activity and apparent prosperity and success something real or is it something spurious? Is it something that is misleading us? The church is often like a great public corporation. The accounts, as it were, can be manipulated up to a point.
But to the acute actuary or accountant, the position is becoming alarming. The best thing we have to do, I feel, is to look at the church in the light of the New Testament description of the church and in the light of what we see in great periods of reformation and revival, and analyze the life of the church today in those terms. And I think that anyone who does so honestly must come to the conclusion that the position is really a desperate one.
Very wrong. Now the whole question is, what do we do about this? And here I think we can learn this great lesson from Isaac. There was his need, the need of water.
They couldn't live without it. What did he do? Well, it's very important to notice and to emphasize what he didn't do. He did not send for the prospectors.
He didn't send for these water diviners and prospectors and send them round the country to look for possible sources of water and to use and employ their methods of water divining to discover a supply. That, of course, is precisely what is being done in general in the church at the present time. People who do recognize that there is something wrong and something seriously wrong, and they're very concerned, immediately set out to try to discover some expedient, some solution for this problem.

And, of course, the favorite method of all is the attempt to discover what is called truth for this atomic age. Truth that is adequate for this age, with men come of age, men grown up, men in the mid-20th century, men in this scientific age and era, and so on. And the great effort in the life of the church has been for 20 years and even much longer.
This searching and seeking everywhere for a possible supply, and so they've turned to science and philosophy and psychology and almost every conceivable expedient, trying to get hold of this formula, this truth that modern men need and that modern men alone will take. Now, this, it seems to me, is this great fallacy. There it is on the intellectual level.
Coming down to a lower level, you find programs multiply, new ideas come in, they become the rage, everybody tries them and goes after them, and the whole life and organization of the church has changed and geared to suit this new idea. And great energy and effort are put into these things, and a great deal of money. One's not questioning or querying, of course, the honesty and the sincerity behind these efforts.
But all I'm trying to show is that all this is the great fallacy of today. It's a departure from this wisdom that is shown here so clearly by Isaac. Isaac didn't call for a single diviner nor prospector.
What he did was to send for the ordinary laborers. And what he did with them was to send them back to the wells of water which had been digged in the very area where they were by Abraham, his father. Now, this sounds so simple and so obvious, but this is the essence of wisdom in this whole matter.
And as I see things, this is the great call to the Christian church just at this present time. Why did Isaac do this? Well, he did it for one reason only. He knew that his father, Abraham, was a great expert in this matter.
This was one of the things that was outstanding in his life. And Isaac knew this. And he knew that when Abraham had dug a well in a place, you could be quite sure that there was water there.
And he knew that when his father had dug these wells, he had found water there. So without wasting any time at all, or without sending out the prospectors here, there, and everywhere, he says there's only one thing to do. Go back to the old wells of my father.
There is water in them. He did this because he had to make certain of a supply. You couldn't indulge in the luxury of sending out the prospectors when you were on the verge of death because of a lack of water.
This is such an urgent matter. The thing to do is to get an immediate supply, whatever you may do afterwards. And he knows that there is a supply in these old wells.
Now, the principle is what, of course, is of interest to us. And the principle for us, I feel, is this, is the great value of church history and the knowledge of the past in connection with the life of the Christian church. Can there be anything so foolish as to ignore this in the desperate plight and condition of the Christian church at this present time? Is there anything more fatuous than this modern assumption that our problem is something which is absolutely new, and that therefore the past has nothing at all to teach us? And yet isn't this implicit in most of the thinking and the approach of the Christian church today to her own situation and to the whole world's situation? There is this fatal assumption that our position is something quite new, and that no one has ever been before in this position.
And accompanying that, of course, the corresponding feeling that the past has nothing to tell us, nothing to give us, that we are confronted by an entirely new situation...
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You're always moving, and you're always developing, and you're always advancing. And so the modern man persuades himself, and this is true less of the life of the church, that this mid-20th century man is different, and that his problems are different, and that therefore it is idle to look to the past in any shape or form. You must look for something new, and seek for some new solution, some solving word, some new gospel.
And look at the energy that is being diverted to this quest and to this task. Now, someone may say, well, why shouldn't you do that? The simple answer is that God is still the same. How foolish we are to be misled by appearances.
The only differences in men are all on the surface. He dresses differently, and his accent may be different, but his fundamental needs are what they always have been. As God doesn't change, and as all our developments and all our scientific advancements make no difference to God, as someone put it, time writes no wrinkle on the brow of the eternal, so there is no difference in men in sin.
Man in sin is exactly today what he always has been. There is not a sin mentioned in the Old Testament, but that you will find it is being committed in Philadelphia tonight, and there is no sin being committed in Philadelphia tonight, but that you'll find it in the Old Testament. Man with all his ingenuity can't invent a new sin.
He just goes on repeating the same old sins that have characterized the human race from the very beginning. There is nothing new. There's nothing new in this problem confronting mankind.
And thank God, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That is the simple answer to this modern thinking. This is the justification, I say, at a time like this for turning back to what has happened in the past, to consult the history of the Church.
We are in this desperate need. We are in a position. We ask, first of all, have we ever been in this position before? Has the Church ever been in this position before? And the answer is that she has many a time.
And surely it is the essence of wisdom, therefore, to start by looking to the past, to see what has been done, instead of rushing madly and wildly in search of some new gospel or some new message adequate for these new men in the atomic age.
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It is this notion, you see, that the past can't teach us. And so they've cut themselves off from the history of the past. This is something, of course, that God's people have been subject to throughout the centuries.
They forget their own past. A generation arose that knew not Moses. Generations arise, and they have no conception as to what God has done in the past.
It's often been necessary for me to point out in Great Britain... that evangelicalism did not start with Finney and D.L. Moody. So many people seem to think it did. They're not aware that there was such a thing as evangelical opinion in the church before that.
They verily believe that it all started then. The truth being, of course, that what started then was a new kind of evangelicalism, which had lost its contact with the older evangelicalism that had characterized the life of the church in previous centuries. So there is nothing to me that is more urgently important than that we should acquaint ourselves with the history of the church in the past.
This is not merely something for preachers or for professors. It is something for every church member. And indeed, I could deduce evidence to show that more than once in the history of revivals, this mere becoming acquainted with what God had done in times past had been the thing that seemed to spark off a new interest and a new concern and a new zeal in prayer and supplication to God to intervene and to do something amongst them.
So this is the most important matter. And what we do when we do turn to this history of the past, as Isaac turned to the old wells of his father, we find this, that there have been strange variations in the life story of the Christian church. She started, as it were, as we know her on that great day of Pentecost.
And you read about the book of Acts with this tremendous, overwhelming power, this pneumatic condition of the Christian church. But then after a while, this began to wane and to pass. And the church became formal, and you come to the time of Constantine, and the Roman Empire comes in, and soon the Christian church becomes something that you can't almost recognize in terms of what you read of in the New Testament.
And on she goes, like that perhaps for centuries, then God does something again, and back the church is raised. This curious periodicity, the graph of the church is up and down and up and down. Now history shows us this.
It's in a sense comforting if we use it properly. We realize that this isn't the first time that the church has been in the powerless condition in which he is today. But you read, I say, in addition of this time of great revival and of the church teeming with life and vigor and power, prayer and conversions of people added to the church, rich experiences, great hymns coming out of it all.
That's the thing you discover. And then you begin to realize that the life of the church today is a disgrace and a scandal. But then you go back again and read the history once more, and you find that, as I say, God intervenes and does something, and the church is lifted up out of this, back into the position that she occupied at the beginning and subsequently.
And so you're encouraged to think that this is still possible. Well, now there is the general lesson that you learn when you turn back to the history of the church. This is my justification, I say.
That Isaac digged again the wells which they had digged in the days away from his father. He sent his men back to them. He said, go back there.
There you'll find that there is water. My father knew what he was about. Go back there.
Don't waste any time. Start there. I say, we've got to start there.
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Isaac's removal of the Philistine rubbish
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