Needs Fulfilled

Transcript

Alright thank you very much, and hello again radio friends. How in the world are you? Yes that little greeting establishes the fact that this is indeed your friend Dr. Cook and I’m speaking with you, as I have for some months now, from the studio on the ground level of the house we were enabled to purchase in Tannersville, PA, and it’s now a studio and an office and the place from which we originate these broadcasts. But as I sit before these microphones, I’m speaking not to some pieces of hardware, but you know, don’t you, that I’m speaking from my heart to yours. May God bless His Word to us today, is my prayer.

We’re looking at Colossians, the first chapter and it we’re talking about the fact that, that Christian love, as Paul mentions it, he says, “Epapras declared unto us your love in the Spirit”. Christian love has to do with an appropriation of faith on our part. “Above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfectness”.

You can appropriate everything you need, which Jesus our Lord purchased for you at Calvary, you can appropriate it by faith. This has been of great comfort and help to me through the years because, like all the rest of us, I find areas in my life that are lacking. Some areas where I’m not gifted at all, and some areas where I have qualities, frankly, that need overhauling and working on. To know, then, that the Lord Jesus purchased for me the supply of those needs, the filling out of those areas where one is aware of a deficiency, and the repairing or overhauling or reconstructing of areas in one’s life that need His creative touch.

Martha Minnick I think is now with the Lord, but for many years she was a missionary to the missionaries, and in that connection she came to minister to the church that Coreen and I served in Philadelphia, in West Philadelphia. Weston Memorial Baptist it was called later, merged with Spruce Street Baptist, they later moved out to Newtown Square and still working for the Lord out there, but in those days we were located at 58th and Thompson in West Philadelphia and the dear people came Sunday after Sunday and we had a great ministry for five years or so. Enjoyed it so much.

During that time Martha Minnick came to minister to us and she was, I must say, a great blessing, at least to me, if not as well to all of the dear people of the congregation. One of the things she said then, and this would of been back in the 1930s, has stuck with me throughout all the years. Here it is: she said, “I learned to trust Christ not only as my Savior and Redeemer, but also as my Creator. When I found things in my life”, (areas in my life I guess is the phrase that she used,) “When I found areas in my life that were lacking, I simply turned to the Savior and said, ‘Lord, Thou art my Creator, create in me what I need and that which I lack’. I learned to trust Jesus not only as my Savior, but as my Creator”. “By Him”, it says, “all things hold together. He is before all things and by Him all things hold together”.

The Lord Jesus is the one who holds the universe together and you are part of His charge, and He says, “You are in My hand the no man is able to pluck you out of My hand”. He holds you today and He knows you. He has every part of all of your life classified in the great computer of Heaven. He knows exactly the details of your life and all of your needs, beloved.

What is facing you today, by way of a challenge that you don’t feel you can meet? Is something in your job at your daily work that just gets you down and you can’t handle it too well? Trust Christ to be your Creator and to create in you the ability to meet that particular challenge. Is there some feeling that you can’t master? Trust Christ to be your Creator and to create in you the force and the power that will override those human feelings that keep surging up from time to time.

Is there some gift or other that is required of you, ability that is to say, and you simply don’t have it? Can you trust your Savior, not only to get you safe home to Heaven, but in the process to create in you an ability that you don’t now have? Yes, my friend you can.

Every now and again stories come from the mission field of people who had never seen print on paper, but who had given themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, and I remember one missionary telling of a dear Christian in the land where this missionary was working, and that this dear new believer was so hungry for the Word of God, that just couldn’t get enough of God’s Truth.

But he couldn’t read, and the missionary said that this particular person went alone with God and claimed, by faith, the promise of God would give him what he needed, and somehow or other, I don’t know whether he got some human help, he may have, but in a remarkably short time, that national, that new believer, was reading and understanding the Word of God in his own language.

Now, it doesn’t always happen this way. You and I, if we went abroad, would have to learn the languages, I’m sure, but God in answer to prayer, the point I’m making is, God in answer to prayer, can and does supply for you and for me the abilities that we lack when they’re needed. I don’t have to speak, let us say, German or Italian or French, today. I know a smattering of each of them enough to say, hello how are you and I didn’t do it officer, whatever, you know. I know a smattering of those languages, but you and I don’t have to speak in another language today, particularly, most of us, but there are challenges that face us every day, that demand- here’s my point, there are challenges that face us every day that demand abilities and strengths that we simply do not have. Isn’t that true? Aren’t you glad you can trust Jesus as your Creator, to create in you what you need?

No, He won’t do your homework for you, I keep telling, or did keep telling, the young people at the college that God will never do your homework for you. He won’t help you on a test. He won’t help you remember something you didn’t first forget. You’ve got to put it in there before He’ll bring it out.

God won’t do for us what we ought to do for ourselves, that’s for sure, but oh, in those moments of challenge and of trial, when you know with a dismal and bleak and dire foreboding feeling in your soul that you just haven’t got it, you can look up and say, “Lord Jesus be my sufficiency, be my Creator, be the one that meets my needs just now”. And He will.

I was talking to Bernice Cory, she is now with the Lord, and Mr. Cory founded Scripture Press as you know, and I worked with them for some years, back in the late 1950s and early 60s. I was speaking with them, and we were good friends and we shared a lot of things together that we learned from the Lord, and I said to her, “You know Bernice, it seems to me that every now and again, you come up with something that seems just, just tailor-made in your writing, it seems just exactly right. How is it that you have such a good batting average along that line?”, and she laughed at me and said, “Oh Bob, you should know”, she said, “aside from the fact that you have to get down to the job and stay at it until it’s done”, she said, “often times”, she said, “I have to look up and say, ‘Lord Jesus, I don’t know what to say. Be my wisdom’, and I open the Bible to that verse that says, ‘Christ is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption’, and I say, ‘Lord Jesus, I take you now as my wisdom for this’”, and then she said, “He gives me something to say”.

Well, many of us, yours truly included, have had to lean hard upon promises like that, again and again. Paul says very frankly, “We know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us”. You don’t even know how to frame a petition in prayer, like some stumbling little child all you can do is cry, but God knows, He interprets the heart cry, and the blessed Spirit of God intercedes for you and the Lord Jesus Himself becomes, by faith, your wisdom.

I just want encourage somebody who today who says, “I haven’t got it. I don’t know enough. I’m not strong enough. I haven’t experience enough. I can’t imagine what I ought to do about this situation”. Brother, sister listen; look up in faith even now and say, “Lord Jesus be my wisdom, be my Creator. Create in me what I need now”. He will, I promise you He will. By faith, by faith you can put on, by faith in the Lord Jesus what you need because He is not only your Savior and your Lord, but also the Creator, in you, of that which is needed. Halleluiah for that! Aren’t you glad that’s so? Oh, I am. I’m so grateful for the Lord Jesus and what He means in the great, gaping areas of need in my life.

Well now, First John has a reference to the love of God. We’ll look at that briefly before time is out and then we’ll go on, Alright? Over and chapter 4 of First John, he says that, “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him. We have known and believed the love that God hath to us”, says John. “God is love and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him”. The mystery of the Christian experience is that it works two ways; you hide your life in the very life and nature of God by faith and He invests in you, His very life and nature as an extension, so to speak, of His own wonderful personality, “Dwelleth in God and God in him”.

Now, John didn’t think that up all by himself, as you know. He is quoting something that the Lord Jesus said years before that to His disciples, “Abide in Me”, said Jesus in John 15 verse 4, “Abide in Me and I in you”. “He that abide within Me and I in him the same bringeth forth much fruit, for without Me, ye can do nothing. If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask what you will and it shall be done unto you”.

This word abide is a life word- if I abide at your house, that means I stay there, I live there, and so He says, “Abide in Me”, stay in Me, like you stay in a house where you live, “and I in you”, let me stay in your heart house where I live. You see the idea? “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth within God and God in him”. You put on Divine love by faith, you end up with the beautiful experience of knowing that God dwells within you by His Holy Spirit and you, in your moments of surrender to Him, become an extension of Divine life and power. Oh may that be true of every one of us, is my prayer.

Dear Father today, by faith may we put on what Jesus can mean to a needy heart, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!