The men of Issachar, we are told in the Scriptures, had… who knows the next words? Yes, they had understanding of their times, of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. That was a singular endowment that they possessed and a critical one. What kind of understanding was it that they possessed? It was a spiritual understanding. They possessed singular, critical spiritual knowledge that applied directly to their people and their time.

Jesus once said you can discern the face of the sky. You can say tomorrow it will rain because it’s pink or something, or it will be fine because it’s something else. But can you not discern the signs of the times? And, of course, he meant spiritually when using the natural as a figure of the spiritual.

Well, the men of Issachar knew what God was about. And they could relate cogently what God was about to their brethren. And they gave their brethren to possess that without which they could not have forged—the issues of their hour. But possessing it, they were able to forge those issues.

The day of Pentecost, we’re told, came with a mighty rushing wind and tongues of fire. And though it had been thoroughly prophesied or foretold, it was very sudden and very thoroughgoing, and quite spectacularly, obviously. But apart from certain exceptions such as that when a whole era is born in a single day, nearly everything that God does by way of moving His purpose forward from where it is to where it’s going by His appointment has a seasonal quality. It’s a series of seasons or stages before it reaches anything approaching harvest, fullness. And you know it’s no hard thing, when the harvest is full and everyone’s eye can see that harvest, to get many laborers to go out to gather it in at that point, because no faith is required. The harvest is full-grown, oh, it must do. All you want to do is bring it in and put it where it belongs. And that’s a glorious season.

But what of the initial season, far short of anything like a manifest harvest? Then, where is the individual Christian to be found?

Take the doctrine and the reality of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. When was that validated in the Christian era? Who would say when it was validated? The Day of Pentecost. And roughly how long ago was that? 2,000 years. And did God’s purpose then for believers suddenly change about A.D. 90? Absolutely steadfast that they be baptized in the Holy Spirit, throughout the Christian era. But did it continue to be the case? No. It was finally never entirely lost because, here and there, there were those true seekers who had understanding way beyond the commonality of believers. But, in fact, you bring it up to the early 1800’s and you find the great lawyer evangelist Charles E. Finney, having been mightily baptized in the Holy Spirit subsequent to his conversion, writing a booklet called Power From On High, in which with the keenest intelligence he sets forth the Biblical reality of the baptism in the Holy Spirit in the early 1800’s and says, “Here it is, for all believers.” And I doubt that he ever saw more than a handful. He insisted for ministers especially: “Before you enter the sacred precinct of the ministry, be baptized in the Holy Spirit.”

Well, this is just a very thin review here, but along comes Dwight L. Moody, a rough-hewn man of ordinary speech but a large heart for God, who becomes a large public evangelist in this country. And he is one day baptized in the Holy Spirit, having been told of it by two women over many months in [Chicago], who prayed for it, interceded.

And one day, he’s near Wall Street in lower Manhattan, and the heavens open and he’s baptized in the Holy Spirit. And he writes in his recollection that the day was so sacred he hardly could speak of it, to him. And that he appointed a Bible scholar named Torrey to discover or rediscover the doctrine of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, which Torrey did with brilliance.

And then Moody says of Christian ministers generally that he knew in the generation of the latter 1800’s, “They are good men, they are honest men, but they will not receive it.” Receive. A season was early, and the place to be was not waiting to see what the issue would prove to be, as decades more went forward. The place to be was right there where the Scripture is, as quick as you can get there and as thoroughly as you can get there and stick to it. That’s a wonderful [?]. To be there early for the Lord and not later.

And then we see in, just as the new century came in, Topeka, Kansas, on a little Bible college, the Spirit was outpoured and a dozen or more people received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Just as the century turned, the Lord began to enlarge that. 1906 or so, the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where this began to become again not quite the common privilege of all believers, because there was still very much resistance to be overcome, but there was as it were a rush of the Holy Spirit. And the entire Pentecostal movement began to stream out of that outpouring.

I lived myself in the very days when the Presbyterians and the Methodists and the Baptists who were born again would not hear of this doctrine. And I was a friend of some of those who directly found the way in among these people to persuade them, to pray with them, to show them the Scriptures—one of whom went to Yale in the 1960’s, early 60’s, at the request of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, because they had tasted some of that during their summer vacation and they wanted it at Yale. And they had this man come from California. They said, “Come, please, while our hearts are on fire before the enemy puts it out.”

So then this crusader came to Yale and stood before them and set forth the doctrine and prayed, and nothing. It was flat, dead, nothing. And he dismissed the meeting and appointed another session, I think the next day or that evening, one of the two. And he went into prayer and he poured his heart out to the Lord. And they regathered and 21 students—Yale students—were baptized in the Holy Spirit in that weekend, that long three-day weekend.

Well, I’m speaking now of a different matter than the baptism in the Holy Spirit. I’m speaking about the season in the recovery of the Church as what it really is and yet must be: the Body of Christ.

We had the Scripture this morning to be conformed to the image of His Son. You know, one of the major ways that happens is when the church acts as a body. Because that sister over there or that brother over there or somebody gets a sense of something from heaven when they pray or when they read the Scriptures or when they read something else, and they see what it is and they can come and express it. And others receive the blessing and the benefit of it. Or someone else something else. Or someone sees a particular need and they see it clearly in the Lord and they can enunciate it. They have understanding of the matter and they can enunciate it, edifying, and then we all can see it together. We take it from one or two perhaps initially, but then we all possess it in common. And it is the Church primarily that will conform us to the image of Jesus Christ now.

We are in an early season yet of the recovery of the Church as His Body, in which the potential of every single believer who is born again and we trust baptized in the Holy Spirit can begin to be realized, in fact and in truth. Not straitjacketed or hindered or limited. Or unsuspected and therefore [on discard].

How many ministries lie dead in places that might have been, if there had only been opportunity? Of course, we cannot know the matter. We’re still in the early stage.

I cannot know what it would have been with me in the 1800’s, if I had been there. I wasn’t, I assure you. But I would like to think that if I had been around when Finney was around and I got a hold of that book, that I would have said, “Yes, this is God’s truth! And I don’t care how many don’t understand it; it’s for me, now.” Or the time of Moody. That I would have seen that aspect of his teaching and been there before the crowd.

But, you know, being there before the crowd, including the Christian crowd, takes a certain amount of courage and a certain amount of discipline and much persistence and constancy. Because there are easier, quicker, shortcut ways to be sufficiently edified in the Lord, to be able to walk a rather stable Christian life, short of the Body of Christ.

And since the trickle of God’s purpose becomes a stream, and then the stream becomes a river, and that river coincides finally with a tide, let’s get into the stream all the way up, not just to our necks, the heart, the top of our heads, the mind, the understanding. And let us say we possess from no extraordinarily remote source but from the Bible itself a knowledge of what the Church is to be and we will not be less, insofar as we cannot be that, exactly that. Amen.