Malachi 3:6–18

There is something in this last Book of the Old Testament which at first sounds rather doleful and not attractive to the reader, but we may be sure that however dark the passage of scripture, there will be found in it some bright indications of God’s love and mercy and of His good intentions towards those that serve Him and fear His name.

The truth of the matter is this, that what is doleful in scripture is occasioned by the unfaithfulness and even wickedness of those that profess regard for the name of God. It is because God is light as truly and completely and fully as He is love that in the scripture He reveals on the one hand the inefficiency and unfaithfulness of those that fear the Lord while on the other He displays that unfailing goodness and grace which are in Him and which it is His determined will to impart to those who believe in Him, and in Jesus Christ, Whom He hath sent.

Now this prophet Malachi speaks at the end of what was God’s dispensation in the Old Testament, wherein He dealt especially with one nation on the earth – the children of Israel. Their history is given in the Old Testament and it is a history of failure which began at the very beginning of their history and which continued and increased as time went on. It is recorded in scripture because it is good, for us to learn it. The fact is that what was true of that nation is always true with regard to those who have any share t all in God’s dealings of goodness and grace. Men begin well but they soon deteriorate. They soon fall away. The brightness dims, the vivacity dulls. They are no longer what they were at the beginning. They decline, they fade and fall. There is only One who ever trod this earth Who was faithful, true and unvariable from beginning to end. The Lord Jesus Christ is the One alone in Whom there was no imperfection. There was no prominence in any one feature of His character – He was perfect in every way. But all that man has touched has been besmirched with the evil that is within.

You may say “Why present that to young people?” Because it is what they need to know more than anything else. They need to know thot in them, that is, in their flesh, dwells ne good thing. It is written here in the scriptures, but many a young believer in the Lord Jesus Christ has found out that truth to his cost in bitter experience because he has been blind to the truth of God and has not taken it home to himself nor believed that in him there is not some good at any rate. But the scripture tells us the truth about ourselves, that there is no hope, or help, in ourselves, that we may come the closer to our Lord and find our all in Him, our sufficiency in the One Who can sustain in the face of evil, as well as in the face of contrary afflictions, and oersecutions of ell kinds.

Well, you have this failure, this apostacy from the truth, here in this prophecy, set out very clearly. The people whom Malachi addressed were a small portion of those whom God brought in a marvellous way back from the captivity of Babylon. There were something less than 50,000 returned and they formed a nucleus again in God’s land, Palestine, and there in process of time they set up a temple to the worship of God. They left their idols in Babylon and never brought them back again.

What a picture that was. They had learned that God had af licted them because of their evil. They had learned that God, by a high hand, brought them out from their bondage in Babylon and established them in their own land, surely they will be happy, and will delight in the law of the Lord, and. will obey His word with all their hearts. Surely they will take up the law of Moses and think upon it day by day and write it upon the walls of their houses and torch it to their children and walk in the precepts of God! Alas, it was not so. Outwardly, they seemed to be free from idolatry, but inwardly they were deceitful and wrong.

They prided themselves just upon an outward conformity to the things of God. They said, “The Law of Moses commands that we should bring our sacrifices to Jehovah”, and the people brought their sacrifices but they brought what they chose. They brought what they could best spare. If they had a blind sheep, if they had a lame bullock, it would do quite well for an offering to Jehovah. They brought it, and the priests took it and offered it to Jehovah, as if God did not know what He had commanded through Moses, as if God did not look upon the nature of their sacrifices and discern that they were pleasing themselves and, not Him in what they brought. They brought the sacrifices all right, and they came the right day, and brought it to the priests, and it was offered on the altar, but God’s will was flouted. Outwardly they appeared to be obedient, but God Who looks at the heart discerned that they were disobedient, and neglected the plain teaching of the word.

So you will find this chapter opens with that charge amongst other things against the people, and not only the people but the priests who connived with the people to offer these offerings unto Jehovah. They brought to God what they would not bring to the governor of the city. They offered to God that which they had not the conscience to offer to a man of flesh and blood like themselves.

That was here, at the end of the Old Testament. Are you thinking what evil people these Jews were? How they neglected what was due to God? Be careful, my friend, you may be judging your own heart, your own life, your own ways. What have you brought to God? There are some of us here who have had our eyes opened and we have been brought from the corruption of Christendom and taught to worship God in the liberty of the Spirit and to bring our sacrifices of praise to Him. What do you bring, my friends? What is the nature of your praise and worship? Is there anything blind, or maim, or diseased about it? Are you singing and praying to the ears of those who come to your meeting? Because you do not take part audibly in the worship of God, is your heart far away amongst other things? Are you offering to God something that is mixed up with the world, with your business, with the occupations of your home? We worship God, and if we worship God it must be in spirit and in truth.

God has a controversy with these people about it. I say a controversy, because they have their answer. If you read it through for yourselves you will see that over and over again through the mouth of the prophet, what was in their hearts is stated in words, so that the people whom Malachi was addressing, and you whom he is addressing tonight, might realise how far man can go in his conception of the knowledge of God. We cannot deceive God. We may deceive our fellows, but we cannot deceive Him and it is dangerous, and deadly and sinful so to do. That was the charge which Malachi brought against these people, and against the priests. The priests not only failed in the matter of the sacrifices, but they failed also in teaching what, was not the truth of God.

Now, at the beginning of the chapter I read, we have a solemn warning given by Jehovah to those people who were really the ancestors of the Pharisees of our Lord’s day. They did not die out, in spite of Malachi’s expostulations. They lived and they were there in their pride and self–sufficiency when the Lord came in the depths of His self–abasement and humiliation and they did not recognise Him because He was something which they had never thought of. Purely there could be no glory in humbling oneself. Their idea was to lift oneself up and think as much as possible of oneself and if possible make other people think the same. That is the way to go through life. The Lord came amongst them as one who was the Son of God from heaven, the omniscient One with omnipotent power, but yet He humbled Himself to the lowest. They had never met such an one, neither had they conceived in their selfish hearts that there could be one such as He. Pride and self–sufficiency are terrible things to nurture in the hearts of those who profess the name of the Lord.

Mow He warns them of the judgment that is to come. He says: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me”. You see, at the end of the last verse of the preceding chapter the people had been saying, “Where is the God of judgment?” What does it matter how a person lives? What does it matter how I go to a meeting? I go to a meeting, I sit down and get through it and go home again, what does it matter how I pass the time? “What does it matter how I pass that hour and a half? Who is any the better or the worse for it? Tell me that! Where is the God of judgment?” What does God say or do about it? Have you ever thought like that? Has it ever passed through your mind?

That was what was in the minds of these people. They said, “Malachi, it is all very well for you to come and tell us these things, but where is God? Does He interfere, does He speak His mind, does He strike down the wicked? Where is the God of judgment?” So the prophet says “I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple”. God was coming, and coming in judgment to do away with the evil, and “the Lord whom ye seek” – They had said “Where is the God of judgment” implying that God in heaven did not care, but Malachi says, “He is coming” and coming in His temple.

Now we find in the New Testament, in those portions which deal with the decline of Christendom, that the Spirit of God brings before the saints, to check them in the progress of evil, he brings before them the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ, His coming in glory, His coming in power and in judgment, His visible appearance to the world. You will find it in

2 Timothy, and 2 Peter, and in Jude. “The Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saint” is spoken where Jude treats of the appalling apostacy from the faith once delivered to the saints. The Lord is coming.

You may say, “But, we are looking for the Lord Jesus to come and receive us unto Himself, and I like to think of that. That is perfectly right. Think of it more than you have in the past because His coming is very near and He will come and call us to Himself. But be assured of this, that if the Lord comes in that way, and receives His own to Himself, there is not an idle word that men have spoken, that shall escape judgment by the Lord Jesus Christ. He will deal with it in His own way.

It is not a question, of course, of the eternal salvation of a believer. I am not speaking of that at all. What I am speaking of is the life we live, the deeds we do, and the words we speak. There is not one of them that will–disappear. They are not like foam and froth, which come and go in a moment. Our words are solid, so to speak. They have a persistence, they remain and come up at the judgment seat of Christ and will be dealt with there. Who shall abide the day of His coming? It is all very well to say now “The Lord does not care”. He does care. He is waiting, but He will come and every evil word and work shall be exhibited in its real character before His face at that day.

“He is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ sope: and He shell sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. I must say about these words that they have been spoiled in their real effect by fancies that have been woven into them by well–intentioned people. You must know, you have read I expect, commentaries on this verse, applying the words to the dealings of our Lord with His saints at the present time, and that if a person falls into a great affliction or great trial, well he is comforted by this thought, that the Lord is the refiner and that He is there, sitting, and watching him suffering in the fire that He has brought to purify him.

Well now, that is not in this scripture, and I do not think it is anywhere in scripture. The Lord does not deal with His own as a refiner, He does not put them in the fire. This is in the old dispensation and it has to do with a nation. When He speaks of refining and purging out what is wrong, it is the evil persons that are brought out. The Lord does not purge out any evil that is in our ways by affliction, (I mean penal affliction) neither does He sit to do it. Sitting is the attitude of the judge – the whole context is that of judgment. The Lord Chief Justice sits to try, the Lord Chancellor sits on the Wool sack – that is his official position, so when the Lord comes seated on the throne of glory, it is for judgment. But He does not come and sit by the bedside of the suffering saint and watch him there until He has given him enough. No, that thought is all wrong. He does not do it at all, and besides, as a matter of fact, any metallurgist will tell you that no refiner sits down and watches the furnace. He could not do it. (But I must not dwell on that any further now. I think it needs a little word about it perhaps another day).

The Lord is speaking about His coming in judgment, and then He says a word of comfort. “I am the Lord, I change not” – the unchanging One, the One Whose very existence is unvarying; from eternity to eternity. He is, and He exists, and He is always the same. He is unchanging in His very nature. If I may say so, it makes Him God, and it is essential in His nature, as God. “Therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed”. Why you worms of Jacob, look back at your own history. How many times you have been very nearly extirpated from the earth, and something has saved you. God has saved you, because “I am Jehovah. I gave My promise to Abraham. I promised that in His seed all the earth shall be blessed. It has not been done yet, but it is to be done, and therefore ye sons of Jacob will not be consumed. Vrihulotions may come upon you. The Assyrian may come and take away ten tribes, and the Babylonians may take away another two, but I will bring up a small remnant out of those tribes. They go wrong and are exposed to My just judgment, but you must remember that I loved you Jacob from the beginning. You will not be consumed, off the earth and your name is not cut off” –and we know the sons of Jacob remain today, and they will remain until they are established by the power of God in their own land, under the beneficent reign of the Messiah they crucified. That must be, because Jehovah says, “I change not”.

Now in the verses that follow, we find a division in this way. They divide into threes. Verses 7,8,9 are verses which relate mainly to the sinful acts, or works, or deeds of these people. Then verses 10,11, and 12, deal with God’s promise to them on condition that they are behoving themselves as they ought, repenting and returning to Him. Then He promises to pour out a blessing upon them, so that there shall not be room to contain it. Then in the following verses, 13, 14 and 15, He says “Your words have been sinful. What you have said has been all wrong”.

There are those whose works, whose actual deeds, are outwardly good and passable and even better than some of their neighbours’, but their words are not nice. There ore some who say that words do not matter, but God makes a great deal of what these people said and He charged, them with their sayings, with their words. But as against that, in the last three verses, we have His beautiful promise towards those who fear the Lord, and think upon His name and speak often one to another. He says, “You are the people I love, the people I delight in. You shall be Mine, I will make you Mine in a special manner. You shall belong to Me and know what it Is to be in the embrace of an eternal love and favour”.

So we have two charges of sinful works one sinful words and two blessings, one a promise of blessing that would be poured out upon them contingent upon their obedience and would be such a blessing that they would not be able to contain it, and the second promise is of favour exceptional. To be considered choice and valuable to Jehovah was a reward indeed and th.’t is what was promised not to those who did a, great deal, or served a great deal, but to those who feared the Lord and thought upon His name.

Well now, going bock to verses 7–9, we cannot go into all the details, but the particular charge brought is this, that they had been robbing God. They hod boon with–holding from God what was due to Him. It was not now a question of the sacrifices, which were voluntary and optional, so to speak, but it was a question something due to God and to His name.

Tithes began before the law, because Abraham had no law but he gave tithes. It was that which was due from a man to God of his substance, that he might honour God with his substance. Under the law, a definite pro–portion was assigned. There was the tenth of the year, and also of the second year, and also of the third year to be given to Jehovah, and there was the tenth that was to be given to the Levites, and the Levites were to give a tenth part of what they received for the priests. It was a matter of educating the people into this, that what they had was Jehovah’s and He claimed from them a proportion, to indicate that they felt their responsibility to Him.

You remember the man whose crops were very abundant. We had so much that he did not know what to do with it, but it never occurred to him to give anything to God. He never thought a word about the Levites, or the Temple. No, he said to himself, “I have all these crops and bursting barns, I must build more and store more for myself, laying up more goods for my soul, so that I can take my ease”. No thought of God at all!

“Will a man rob God?”, but they said “Wherein have we robbed thee?” Now I think we may be sure about this, that these people were too wise in their generation to keep back all the tithes. They tithed this, and that, and the other, but some things they did not tithe. The Pharisees appeared to be overscrupulous, and tithed their mint, and anise and cummin, so that they should, not miss a single thing. Now the charge here is that in robbing God they left something out. They only gave Him part of the tithe. They may have brought three–quarters, I do not know, but they left something behind and they were deceiving God. Perhaps you say, “That is the Old Testament, and it goes not apply to us. You are forgetting that you arc speaking about the old dispensation. We are in the church, we belong to the heavenly church of Christ!” So we do, and our responsibility is therefore all the greater.

Do you remember, when the church first started, there were two persons who kept back part of the tithe. They went and sold their land and came and laid part of the price at the feet of the apostles. The man and his wife agreed together about it. They said, “We won’t give up everything. We will keep a little for ourselves and nobody will know. James, Peter and John won’t know and God won’t mind. “We will give part of the price. We won’t bring all!” So Ananias went up and laid down his part. He did not say a word; he laid down that part as if it were the whole. He lied against the Holy Spirit dwelling in the church, and he died. His wife came in and she was party to the same deceit, and she also fell a victim to the stroke of God’s judgment. There, in the forefront of the church’s history, is the solemn warning that we must not rob God of what is His due.

If you are a Christian, you ought to be more faithful, more devoted than to give Him a part. You ought to be more faithful than the Israelite. If you have heavenly blessings, you ought to be more faithful than the man with earthly blessings. Those who have earthly blessings cannot take them to heaven. Flocks and herds cannot go to heaven. When we go to heaven, shall we lose one of our blessings? We shall know and enjoy them as we never enjoyed them here, but it does not make any difference to this fundamental fact that you and I owe everything we possess to God and we must not keep back what is due to Him. I am not pleading for myself, I am putting God’s claims before you. I say, “Will you rob God?”

Now we get God’s comfort and counsel. The judge was coming and there is the fact that we have kept back cart of the tithes, what is to be done”? Start at once. Here is a case where you can turn over a new leafe. “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse ...” If you read the last chapter of Nehemiah you have an historical commentary upon what we have here. The priest in the temple were dependant upon the gifts of the people for their sustenance and there was the treasury in the temple, the storehouse where these tithes were kept for distribution as need was to those who ministered to the Lord in the place of worship.

So God said: “You bring all the tithes into the storehouse that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith”. We quote this scripture at our Gospel meetings, and on other occasions, and we say: “Let us pray to God and prove Him by our faith. Let us believe Him more and he will pour out more blessing upon us and give us showers of blessing”. But I cannot see anything about prayer in this verse. You put prayer in – it is not here. Pray by all means. But why are there no conversions in your meetings. Is it because you are keeping back some of the tithes, not rendering to God what is His due? It is very easy to go half an hour before the Gospel Meeting, and pray. We ought to do that, of course, but that is not everything. Why is this leanness, this barrenness, those empty seats? Is it because we do not pray? Is it not because we do not do enough, we do not render to God what is His right, and what is due from us. We are living to ourselves, for our own comfort and status in life, we are not thinking of what is due to God’s name.

But here is His comfort and counsel. “Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it”. It is a marvellous statement, God is personally interested and He Himself would pour out blessing. You may be sure it would not be a dribble of blessing just trickling down drop by drop. He would pour and when omnipotence pours, you will get blessing indeed. You will remember in the days of Elijah and Ahab, that dark time of apostacy in Israel, God shut the “windows of heaven”, so our Lord said when He began to preach the gospel. He spoke of the days when God shut up the windows of heaven and there was no rain or blessing.

But now, here was the promise that He would open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing. What is the blessing? Who can say? Blessing is an act of God’s favour towards us, what He gives us to mark His appreciation and approbation of what is done, a good thing from the hands of God. It may be the blessing of others, but do not forgeet that a real blessing always begins in the heart of the one who is seeking it. If you are seeking it for another, all blessing that God gives must have its effect, its feeling, its experience in your own soul first. We are not automatons. God does not send blessing through us as water flows through a lead pipe, but there is real communion with God. When God speaks of a blessing here, it takes in all kinds of ways in which God. signifies His pleasure towards us.

Now the next charge was “Your words have been stout against me”. I think we rather circumscribe what “speaking against God” means. We may confine it, in our minds, to taking His name in vain, or saying something evil about the person of Christ, or teaching something contrary to the scripture. All that is included, of course, but “speaking against God” is saying what is not true at out God. Have you ever thought of it in that way? There are some people who talk very glibly abnut God. Be careful you do not say anything against Him. Let it be words of truth and soberness, because it is a terrible thing to be speaking stout words against God.

What did they say? “Ye have said, It is vain to serve God and what profit is it, that we have kept his ordinance and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts”. These were the people that had not brought the tithes. Here they were boasting and saying “We have served God all those years, and kept His precepts, walking mournfully and keeping the feasts, as well as the fasts before Him and what is the result?” There is the spirit of the Pharisee who prayed “Lord I thank thee I am not as other men are” – he was speaking against God assuming that God did not know him in his true character, in the way he looked at himself. They said “We have been serving God all this time, and what is the benefit of it, what is the good of it all?”

Let us examine ourselves. Some of us have been on the road for a great number of years (I am not going to tell you how long 1 have been on the road). What is the good of all these years of serving God and spending my time for Him? What am I better for it today? If you ask me to write it down in ways that appeal to the world and the man of the world, he would not think it any value at all. I might say “God has not given me, after all my service and faithfulness, what He might have done. He has been hard and niggardly. He is a hard master gathering where he has not strawed and so on”. If I said that, I should be exactly where these people where. Have you ever been like that? Have you considered – “I have been in such and such an association for so many years, and I think I must give it all up. Things seem to be going wrong, It is no use going on. We go week by week, Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day and things are getting worse. People are getting fewer and there is less interest, and so on”. Do not speak against God in that way. That was just what these people were doing, but they did not realise it, and when a person does not give God His right place, he is wrong in all his judgment.

How did these people judge? They said, “Now we call the proud happy (or blessed)”. The Lord said “Blessed are the meek”. The people in Malachi’s day said, “Blessed are those that are proud, those who take their full place in the world. Those are the ones that get on. Those who spread themselves like the bay tree and show themselves off in the world. They are the ones whom God honours! Do you ever think like that?

If you do, it is because you have your eye off God and you are speaking in your heart against Him.

The Lord spoke of the proud Pharisees that they said much and did little. They were very capable in binding very heavy burdens upon the shoulders of others, but they themselves took care that they never lifted a finger to help. They were good at saddling others, but they themselves never helped. They were too much occupied with themselves. All that God has a controversy with. He would not have it, and He withholds His favour for it. “They that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered”. How awful these words are when judged in the light of scripture.

But now comes the bright part. They were not all like that. Amongst this remnant of a remnant, there was still another remnant – a remnant of a remnant of a remnant, and that remnant was those that feared the Lord, and spoke one to another. I think there is an amazing amount of comfort in these words because we are living in days when institutions and organisations are failing to pieces. Anything that takes the name of God or has a religious character at all, it is the effort of the enemy to smash it and destroy it.

We find here that the counsel of the prophet is in this day. There is one thing which remains, which everyone can do, any believer in the Lord Jesus Christ can do, whether he is in a concentration camp, or anywhere else, he can fear the Lord, can fear God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and it is the end too. It is having God before our hearts. It is not that wo tremble and shudder as we think of Him, but we fear Him and reverence Him and give Him prominence, everything we are and we have belongs to Him. That is fearing God.

The Lord Jesus Christ sought out those that feared God –the excellent of the earth. He found them amongst the poor, He went into their houses and received their welcome, and their care and their service. It is so today. God looks down, not to see those who are making a great name in the world for themselves in the eyes of others, but He looks for those who cultivate a fear and regard for His Name and who consult His Word as the foundation of all wisdom and the source of all light and help. They say “Satan may rage and outward things disappear, but God remains. He is my Father. I will have communion with Him, and with His Son”. That is what we want to cultivate, both young and old. Let it be your constant aim to fear God.

Then they “thought upon His Name”. It is the same thing really. The name of God is what He is, and He is what is His name. To think upon His name is to think of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. That gives beauty and value to assembling as we do on the first day of the week. We come together and what is the lodestone, the invisible power that draws and attracts and brings together contrary people. It is the name that has brought them. There is very little to see, but deep down in their hearts they reverence the name of the Lord Jesus and remember His word “Where two or three are gathered together …”. They come, not because Jones, or Brown is there but because the name of the Lord is there. And where the name is, He is. He cannot be apart from His name. So we come, we think upon His name and our thoughts are too deep for words. We think upon His name. We get together and speak to other people, but when we think, the Lord sees and hears. That is what is valuable, that is the sacrifice agreeable to Him, and it is within your reach to give Him that. So if we are privileged to meet tomorrow morning, let it be that we each come to think upon His name, to consider His lovliness, His glory, His grace, to remember Him in His death. It is what the Lord values.

Then there is another thing. They “spake often one to another”. Hot only fellowship with the Father and with the Son in the family of God, but fellowship one with another. They were all Jews truly, but they did not all fear Jehovah. They had all come back from Babylon, I suppose, but they did not all think upon the name of Jehovah, but there were those who did, those who had not married strange wives etc. and they spoke one to another. They had a common interest – that was the things belonging to the name of Jehovah. That supplied the topic of their conversation one with another, and Jehovah’s reward for this is “They shall be Mine”, because it would be this remnant that would form the nucleus of the millenial kingdom, as far as Malachi goes.

I think it has an application now–a–days to those who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, that is to say, those who are true to Him amidst the confusion of Christendom, every faithful soul, everyone that belongs to Him ond has a, real regard to His name (even though he does not know the blessedness of being gathered simply and only to His name) all those who ponder upon His name, they are the ones who will be His, when He comes.

The Lord Jesus Christ did not go out of this world until He had gathered a little company whom He called “His own”, those that belonged to Him exclusively, and who were eventually “the church”. They belonged to Him. That is the characteristic of the church – it belongs to Him. He loved it and gave Himself for it. He nourishes it, and washes it and is going to present it to Himself, to display it as His own by and bye. So the principle of what we get here, applicable to the Jew by and bye, is applicable to the church now, that they belong to the Lord.

“In that day when I make up my jewels”. “Jewels” would be better as it is in the margin – “treasure”. (I remember as a child thinking that the Lord Jesus took every believer and put him as a jewel in His crown, and that all the believers in the world made up the number of jewels in the crown of the Lord. I suppose it was founded upon these words). As a matter of fact, it is not “jewels”, but “treasure”, a special treasure, a peculiar treasure. It really goes back in reference to Exodus 19 where the promise was to Israel that if they were obedient they should be as a peculiar treasure amongst the nations. And so she will be in the millenial glory.

There is a great deal more in this chapter that is instructive and helpful and needful for us, but let us not go away without feeling that God has called us to consider whether we are rendering to Him all that is His rightful due from us. That is a question which each one must answer for himself, and if we do so, if we give Him His due, He won’t be a debtor to us, we shall have a blessing.

When a man went and paid his tithes, it made a hole in his pocket; he had less wealth than before. “Never mind”, Malachi said “You will have far more then you give. God will give you a blessing more than you can hold, it will overflow. Good measure He will give to you”. That was blessing now, but if you go on fearing the Lord and thinking upon His name, you will have a blessing now, certainly, but that is not the point. There is one coming, and the blessing that is coming is this, that when our Lord Whom we love so much and Whom we desire to serve, when He enters into His rights and reigns in glory, He will have His church with Him, and will say to all the world “This is My church. This is My bride. This is the one that I have chosen to share My glory. She was faithful to Me in the day of tribulation. She loved me when in the wilderness, and here she is, in the place of glory”. This is true. It ought to comfort our hearts. It may be only two or three when we come together tomorrow, but think of the day that is coming, when we shall be with the Lord in glory.

Memorial Hall, 18.03.39

Typescript