“Occupy, Occupy, Occupy Till I come”

0: Father, we bless you for this night and this place and this time. And, Lord, we ask that you will work your work tonight here. Give grace to your speaker. Move, Lord, by your Spirit upon the hearing. Give your people a mind to work your works, while it is day, as the night comes when no man can work. Lord, we look to you in Jesus’ name, amen.

1: I thank you for coming, and I am grateful for the invitation.

I had been a Christian for two years in 1952 when I sat in a row in a church. And a rather ordinary layman got up—a Presbyterian church in Baltimore—and he spoke. And at the end he gave an invitation, not for salvation, for I had been saved, but he gave an invitation that changed my life and its course and content entirely. I’m grateful to him, but I can never underestimate the potential power of a single evening or a single pair of ears. And I thank you for bringing your ears to this place tonight.

2: I have, as is sometimes said, some bad news and some good news. And the bad news is that the flesh wars against the Spirit, because those two are contrary, the one to the other, and they are by nature set to war. But it is closely followed by the good news, which is that the Spirit wars against the flesh, and the Spirit being the superior power, prevails when He is given just enough room to do so, because we are not forced or programmed into liberty and holiness, but rather led into it.

3: Before I became a Christian, and I mean right up to that very hour, I was not the master in this house called my body, this mortal body that you now see decaying, but happily not yet actually decomposing, before your very eyes.
But when a man named Christ touched His blood to my soul and to the doorposts, so to speak, of the house of my body, I became immediately the master in my own house, not with tight-lipped self-discipline and screwed up energy, so to speak, but with remarkable ease and given grace, that invisible quantity that no one can see, but anyone can receive and that will sustain you year after year through your lives.

4: And later I deliberately let Jesus into this house as master in my stead. Because He will leave any believer as master in his or her own house with much liberty all through their lives. And He will not impose His sovereignty upon our beings, but He invites us to welcome Him in that way.

5: And, you know, He is quite up to the job. Walking in consistent victory simply by walking in the Spirit, because He is the victorious warrior against the flesh, has a continuously liberating effect.

6: I could say quite a bit about this, but I’m not going to do that tonight because I prize this opportunity to put certain compelling things, compelling to me, before your minds. And I’ll add just this. The fact is that for everyone who has been born of the Spirit, sin shall not have dominion, that is, the power to compel obedience over you… shall not, as a fact. It will seek to attract or lure with a kind of magnetizing power, but that’s all it can do if we assert our wills just enough in concert with God by the Holy Spirit.

7: Do you know, as believers, who you are? Do you know that you are heading for a wedding—the union of Jesus Christ with His bride, the church? We are destined to be coheirs with Christ over all things and co-administrators with Him through all eternity.

8: And I can hear almost someone timidly say, “Who me? I’m not worthy of that.” But you will be, if you’ve been born again. A process has been set into motion that will continue through a series of stages.

9: Do you know what the single judgment of God is upon sin in everything, in every form and upon everything? One word or two words? His judgment is death and destruction upon sin. And nothing, whatever, anywhere, will escape that judgment. Even this present creation that we’re in, this magnificent room, is reserved for destruction by fire (2 Peter 3:7).

10: Well, since sin is always and only dealt with by God, by means of death, what about me then? Well, God has put His blood on my soul and your soul and has cleansed us thereby, and the soul and the spirit of man is made alive in Christ—new life. That work is done. There’s a process of maturing to be sure, but that work is done. But then how about the mortal body?

11: Romans 8:10: “If Christ is in you…” Now I suspect the next words of this verse are going to surprise you. “If Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin.” Do you realize that? You know, I could do a jig out the back door, but this says, “If Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin.” And this mortal body in which I live is going to die. Because in God’s eyes, though He allows us to move in it and live in it, it is dead. And I must shed it.

12: And there are two ways: by death and the destruction of the grave, or if we are alive when Christ returns, it will fall away into the earth. And we will rise in resurrected bodies like His glorious body, and when He arrives we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

13: So, there we are, friends: saved souls cleansed by the blood, resurrected bodies with no iota of sin anywhere upon them or possible (well, maybe I should change that one) or to be of them at any time. And we shall be one with Jesus Christ and the Father through eternity. Well, we’ll be able to be coheirs with everything with Christ.

14: Well, if in God’s sight the body is dead because of sin, we are now able to do what? To mortify, that is, to put to death the deeds of the body, here and now, Romans 8:13. Sean, would you read Colossians 3:5-6?
Sean: This is chapter 3 verses 5 and 6, “Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, in which you also once walked when you lived in them, but now you must also put off all these.”

15: Well, somebody mutters, ‘What if I fail?” You do not so much fall from grace, as you fall into grace. Simple confession to God with godly sorrow brings forgiveness with cleansing because you are sons and daughters and you are loved by Him.

16: Well, all of that or much of that will be there and then, but what about here and now? The state of this nation and of this campus and of a relationship between the two that may be more important than we really know, or at least it is in potential, is so large a subject that I think you might think it is either presumptuous or impossible. I deny that it’s presumptuous, but I can see that it’s impossible.

17: You know more about the state of this campus than I do. But I may know somewhat more about its earlier states than some of you do. Suffice it to say that some of the old stones of this campus have known seasons of revival. For the historical fact is that Yale has been visited by revivals of faith in Jesus Christ almost certainly more often than other campuses also founded out of Christian faith as Yale was.

18: Those who started Yale defined it as a place to train young men—that was all they took in then—for service to God in church and in civil states, meaning the magisterium, the governance. But like Harvard, which rather quickly threw off its Puritan origins, Yale also fell thoroughly away from the faith, under the sway of rising contrary philosophies, so that near the close of its first full century, scarcely any believers could be found upon this campus, among students or among faculty. (There are some seats of a medieval sort along the side here. Would you like to come in?)

19: Faith had fled this campus and unbelief held sway. God did not let Yale go because one man stood before Him as intercessor for this place and he did one other thing: he engaged in prolonged reasoned discourse with faculty and students, standing upon his conviction that the Bible was the word of God. And he did that for several years, getting a reasonably respectful hearing and plenty of challenges, because it was a back and forth, with little visible or observable results. But he had been sowing the seed.

20: And then God sent the rain, the rain of revival, the rain of awakening. And suddenly, this campus that had been taken away from faith was alive with faith. The greater portion of the student body were converted to faith in Christ in very little time. And for a span of more than 70 years, this campus was visited by revivals again and again and again and again and again. And they would begin—this is just an instance—up to 11:17 a.m. of a certain Thursday morning, there would be no state of revival on the campus. But at 11:17, revival would fall upon the campus—conviction at sin, the presence and power of God, people on their knees seeking salvation.

22: Now if you don’t know what revival is, that’s not going to mean a whole lot to you, because most of what is commonly called revival of late is not properly so-called. It may be a religious stirring of some kind or religious effort, it may be an excellent evangelistic campaign, but it’s not revival.

23: Revival is a profoundly effective, convicting, converting and cleansing event, but it is really a whole series of such events—phenomenal series, all occurring in one region at one time. So it breaks out on the left and the right and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Because Joe has been converted and Beth has been converted. And you would never have thought that Charles would be converted, but he is converted. It is as though people breathe in righteousness and holiness. And when they breathe out, the people near them catch it also.

24: Well, I suspect that you would agree that Yale today is not aflame with righteousness and alive with faith in Christ on the whole. It was in the Lord at its start and remained so for a time, and then it was not. And then it was again. And then again, it was not.

25: But I think there’s a comma after the sequence, because this is a campus where I am persuaded that God intends to do something remarkable by way of intrusive and awesomely benign visitation.

Yale is a little bit like a heart—this is a very rough figure of speech—like a heart pump. It draws in streams of students from all over North America and over much of the world and runs them through its system and then it sends them out all over the face of the map. And in the meantime it does some forming of them here. But I think it’s pretty clear that this is an influential place, and I suspect also that many of you will live in the upper stratum of influence in this society.

27: But what I am saying is this, that whatever God does at Yale, by way of revival, will inevitably first be known widely and secondly have wide effects. Just how, just when, and with just who, as an instrument, I cannot say. But He is the God who inspires prayers, intercessions, and we’re told that He stores them up in vessels and then He pours them out.

28: You cannot pray for revival very well unless you know what revival is. And you can discover that if you want to. You can read the autobiography of a New York upstate lawyer turned evangelist named Charles G. Finney. For nine consecutive years unbrokenly, wherever Charles Finney went and spoke, spontaneous revivals broke forth.

29: How many of you have heard of the First and Second Great Awakenings in this North America? Some number have. Those were real revivals and of the outpouring of God’s grace and power upon the little Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles early in this century. Awesome event, streams went out from that. The revival of 1858 before the Civil War in this country.

30: There was a revival on the campus of Asbury College during the turbulent 1960s that began this way. Asbury is in Kentucky. It’s an old Methodist college and they have the old Methodist habit of having morning chapel. And morning chapel was required—you had to be there. And when morning chapel is required and you have to be there and you’re a student at a college, it can be pretty routine, but you’re there. And it lasted 40 minutes and then you were out for the next day.
30: And one morning they came like every other morning to have their morning chapel. And something happened. And by 10 that night they were still there, because God was there and no one would leave. Now on about 2 a.m. people went off to get a little sleep, but some stayed and God stayed. And then they came back. And for days, they worshiped God. They confessed their sins. And faculty members came forward to confess slackness, indifference towards students. [It was a] revival—it’s mysterious in its coming, tremendous in its power.

32: Revival came about 14 months ago to a huge and terrible jail in Colombia, South America, in which over years an average of 63 murders a year had occurred. In the last year there, it is reported there have been no murders, zero. That’s the work of God. Man can’t do that. Revival is the greatest organ of social uplifting known to man.

Well, let’s think a bit about this nation. And Sean, would you read Acts—is it Acts 17 there? (Sean: It is Acts 17.) Yeah, 26 and 27. “And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their habitation so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” So, He is the author of nations, the allotter of territories and times, and His foremost purpose is that they should seek Him.

34: Quite a while ago there was an immensely popular, in name, broadcast called “Truth or Consequences,” on which the hapless guests were asked factual questions: name the governors of Arkansas, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Missouri. And it was dearly hoped that they would not be able to answer them. If they answered rightly, they got a prize. But if they failed to answer, the host would say, “You have not told the truth, so you must pay the consequences.” And then they would send the guest through a series of seven hoops, large hoops, lathered with whipped cream, to see how the guest would look after he had paid the consequences. And the host of this silly season would annoyingly say in a high-pitched squeal with his knees sort of together like he was in sheer bliss, “Aren’t we devils?”

35: And the audience would squeak, “Yesssss!” Next victim. I don’t think they quite made the grade as devils, but that charade and its short name illustrated as well as falsified a quite powerful reality, because nations are always playing a game of truth or consequences under God.

36: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm.” It’s very oversimplified, but this nation in a kind of awkward way said of itself “In God,” meaning God, “we trust.”

37: And Russia was under a government that said, “There is no God.” “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” And “cursed is the arm of flesh.” “The blessing of the Lord makes rich,” the Scripture says, “and he adds no sorrow with it.”

38: I think you might be surprised to know in addition to the many times when the blessing of God is described in the Scriptures, there are quite a few times also when the cursing of God is described in the Scriptures. Well, what is a blessing? What, in specific, is a blessing? A blessing is the active and generous favor of God upon an individual. A blessing is the active and generous favor of God upon an individual, a locality, a nation, a family, or a household, or upon a campus.

39: And what is a cursing, a divine cursing? A cursing is the active disfavor, the active and debilitating and sometimes destroying disfavor of God upon those same things.

40: Jesus went up to a fig tree, seeking a fig. It was luxuriant with leaves, but He found no fig upon it and he pronounced a curse. He just said, “May no fig ever come from you again.” And the disciples were amazed, because the fig tree withered and was devoid of life in a very short time. That is a picture of the effect and the power of divine cursing. For that tree was supposed to yield a faith to God in human form, and when it did not, it was cursed.

41: See that as a symbol of a nation that exists by the authority of God to yield to Him the desired fruit of righteousness, but does not do so and does the other and pours its strength into its own adornments.

42: Philippians 3:19 speaks of those who are enemies of the cross of Christ, and it says their destiny is destruction, their God is their stomachs and their glory is in their shame. So they reject the living God, the source of blessing, and make their bellies into their God. And what is in fact their shame becomes their glory, their empty tawdry, tarnished glory.

43: The judgment of God is always preceded by behavioral causation, by sinful indulgence; do not be deceived. God can be denied, He can be ignored, a whole series of things, He can be argued with, but God is not mocked. Sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption is true of individuals, it’s also true of nations. When God says, “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind,” that is precisely what will happen.

44: And though we are by no means in this nation, while we live off the remnants of blessing, in anything like the fury of the whirlwind, the first stirrings of the whirlwind are upon us, and you can see the evidence in social dissolution and social distress and in some places social disintegration. And a battle for the very character of this nation is now fully on, and its outcome will have tremendous effects upon the population. And this much is certain. That battle will be joined to the full by unbelievers of every stripe. And the question is, will it be joined to the full by believers intelligently, honorably, strategically, and in a fashion that will in some measure actually prevail?

46: What is it that the gates of hell will not prevail against? Gates are in terms of an enemy a resisting emplacement to say, “Keep Out!” Those gates will not prevail wherever the church walks in them.

Jesus gave two major commands before He left us. One is so well known, “Go you into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; he who believes and is baptized will be saved.” And that has been much obeyed whenever the church has been alive.

47: He also said something with very broad implications and it is, “Occupy, occupy, occupy, until I come.” That is, from the time He ascended into heaven until the time He returns, the entire age is the period of the occupation by believers of this present evil world. And we are not to be viewers of the passing parade of history as though it were all somehow preordained, just letting it go by fatalistically.

48: We can exert a considerable influence upon public affairs and even public policy in this nation, if we will run the risks to do so. And I’m not speaking about any kind of an organized crusade—those often have a fleshly character, they often cannot really prevail.

49: We can be, some of us, right where the action is and where the decisions are made that have to do with how things go. When somebody says, “I think you have a worldly vision and not a heavenly vision,” listen, Jesus said… You were saying, in effect, that God’s will should not be done on this earth until Jesus comes again. And that doesn’t make any sense. So God keep us from turning that line of prayer into a mere piety, when it calls for courageous faith action.

50: The Lord said of those who belong to Him, “You are the light of” what? We are the light of the world. And then He told us how light is to be situated or placed. You don’t put it under something but on top of something, because that lamp has the same power wherever it’s placed, the same light, the same source of light, the same degree of light. [That if] put under, the light is diminished, but it illumines. But put on top, that light sheds over the whole scene. So the location, the place where the light is put, makes a very large difference in what it illumines.

52: Jesus also said that we are the salt of what? Of what? The earth. We are the salt of the earth. In the days before refrigeration salt was a preservative that kept the meat from going bad. And since we are salt in a way that no others can be, we must not let our stabilizing, purifying, edifying, and preserving influence be too narrowly applied.

53: There’s a short verse that says of the primary agent of evil, Satan, that he is “the spirit that is now at work in the children of disobedience.” So it tells you that he is a spirit, that he is at work, that he is working in non-believers, and that they are the vehicles for the performance of his evil will.

54: And I would ask you to hear me particularly carefully on these next few words. The powers of evil have a two-pronged strategy for wickedness. First, they energize and inspire and push unbelievers forward—those who are called the children of darkness. And they do so to the maximum degree possible to make their public influence as large as it can be. And second, they endeavor to induce the highest degree of passivity in believers toward all the most sensitive and culture-forming centers of influence or of governance, authority. Energize the unbelievers to the max, propelling them forward, while lowering believers into as much inaction as possible. In that way, the fields of decisive action, which most affect a nation’s welfare, are occupied by spiritually blind people and by the demonically instructed.

56: A poet, a Christian, wrote of living a Christian life in a kind of regular way and doing this and that and said, “And then one day in the quiet place I met the Master face to face.” Not literally, of course, but the writer had a revelation of the beauty of Jesus that was transforming in the life. And life was lived on another plane after that.

57: There is one big step that any of you can take if you will take it, and it has to do with the course and with the content or the vocational pursuit of your life. Now that is already that life course, likely to be morally good, socially responsible, religiously observance, and fruitful in a family situation.

59: Those good things on which Christians have lived a long time in this land are not enough to meet the crises that confront us. They lack sufficient spiritual power and they do not meet the battle where it is. And that battle is not an easy place to be. I do not want you to think otherwise.

1:00: And without battles and pain, suffering, uncertainty, there are no victories. And they are not paper battles or theory battles, and they are not novels. But they are spiritually exacting conflicts with powers of evil leading to conquest.

1:01: And there is only one way to get there. And that is by an exchange of executive authority over what your life will be and where and to what ends it is committed—all of which you are able to manage by yourself and in a godly fashion. But you will never reach the line where the battle really is in that way. And that’s why so many believers know, conceptually only, about the battle. But they do not know the battle itself. (I’m not talking about troubles of various kinds. I’m talking about the battle.)

1:02: A soldier goes to war only at the orders of his commander and goes where his commander places him and stands in battle there. Young Christian soldier, are you willing, not knowing what it will lead to but knowing who will lead you, to give your life course over unconditionally to Jesus Christ, for His highest service for you?

1:03: And I’m just about to close in [x], but here is a fact worth considering. You received eternal life when you were born again. The only time from now, this night, through the ages of eternity when you will have an opportunity to serve the Lord in battle against His enemy is in this present life. That’s the only time.

1:04: When Satan and his legions lie in the lake of fire, prepared for them as the book of Revelation states, and when you are in the new Jerusalem, every battle will be stilled and absolute victory will be secured. And I hope to paraphrase General Patton in World War II that when you get there, you will not have to say, “I never got to the battle when getting there was urgent and the result was glorious.”

1:05: Because I’ll tell you one more thing: if you are sent into the battle of the Lord, you will have a hard time, but you will prevail for Him in that battle, and there will be observable results. I can’t tell you where it will be for you, but I can tell you this. If you will enter into the transaction that I have described, that of yielded executive authority as to what and where your life will be committed to, He will show you step by step by step. And when we meet in the new Jerusalem, we’ll be veterans and we’ll tell battle stories. When the battle’s over, we shall wear a crown.

1:07: I would like to ask the meeting conclude in silence if there are any present who would wish to talk to me or to others who are here, Franklin Fisher, Chuck Cohen, we would be happy to talk to you. I am very grateful for your coming tonight, your listening and staying. Amen.