Identification Truths

This is identification. This isn't where you're supposed to be. It's a good time to go. I think what I'm going to do is format kind of like I've been doing, questions every week. We don't have a book to run on, so we're going to have to rely on the Word of God. Come to that. And so I've got questions for next week that will point us to a lot of verses in Genesis, and that's where we're going to start next week, in Genesis, because the identification truths really start there. And I don't know if you've ever seen them or noticed them there, but they're there. And God's purposes have been the same from then on.

And hopefully we'll discover how that goes. The other thing I'd like you to do is, I'll give you a little job to do every week. And that's to pray for me and Courtney, because we're reinventing the wheel as we go. We're going to write this Course from scratch. And so pray for us that God would lead us in the direction He would have us go. I've taught an identification Course before, but I did it in eight weeks. And this is 26 weeks. So having said that, I want you to understand that the Forum this time, Identification truths are the keys to spiritual growth.

So don't be afraid to ask questions, especially when it comes to this subject. Ignorance is not a problem. 99 out of every 100 Christians, well I'd say that 997 out of every 1,000 Christians have not a clue what we're going to study for the next six months. They don't know what it is. So the more questions you can ask and the more discussion we can get involved in, the better, because it's important. that the Lord teach us as clearly and as thoroughly as we can take in exactly what identification is. It's key to spiritual growth.

So, having said that, here are the questions for next week, so pick them up on your way out. It was easy, I only gave you 13. I know, you didn't... Oh yeah, speaking of that, after class I'll run and get some notebooks, so you can have notebooks to put stuff in.

So what I thought I'd do today is kind of go through a history of the identification truths and kind of where they came from. I mean, obviously they came from the Lord, but at least a contemporary history about the identification truths and how they got to where they are today in English-speaking society. And so what they're designed to do is to create a scriptural basis on which there is a more intimate and personal fellowship with God our Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what they're about. And so, although the identification truths are built on the birth truths, it's by means of the identification truths or the growth truths that this communion with the Father and the Son is developed and established.

The first thing I want to do is talk about birth truths. When I mention the difference between birth truths and growth truths, anybody know what I'm talking about? Are they the same? Are they just a way of saying the same thing and using different words? Or are they, in fact, different? And do we, as believers, need to distinguish between birth truths and growth truths? What do you think? The answer is yes.

Now, in contemporary Christianity, the one guy we have to thank for bringing faith and salvation by faith back into the foray was who? 1483 to 1546, who am I talking about? Our man Martin Luther. He was an obscure Catholic monk, German monk, And this is over 500 years ago that the Lord and our Father moved this man and showed this man in the Word of God that salvation was by grace alone through faith alone. Now, it doesn't seem possible to us that for the previous 1400 years that this doctrine of salvation was lost. Well, it wasn't lost. There were pockets of believers, you know, around. But Martin Luther was the guy who brought it to light. And the Lord used him to bring the life-giving truths of justification out in the open.

Romans 1.17 says, the just shall live by faith.

And so, you know, I grew up a Catholic, and I went to Catholic schools for 16 years, and from a Catholic's viewpoint, Martin Luther's a heretic, right? So when he nails up his thesis on the door of the church, forget the town it was in, You know, the Catholics took one look at it and decided that they were going to invite him to a little lunch conference. Trouble is, he didn't know he was lunch. They were going to get rid of him, you know.

So, it's very interesting that Luther had the courage to do something like that and that God used it to reinvigorate or to reintroduce the Western world, to salvation by faith alone, by grace alone, through faith alone. So, the world of church and the devil haven't been the same since God restored salvation, and that's 500 years ago. 500 years, think about that. So, now, what he started, what we call the Reformation. The Catholics call it the Protestant Revolution. We call it the Reformation.

And it was just an unbelievable event to have this come into play. Now what God did, understand that Catholicism was the religion of the Western world. Every country in Europe was Catholic. When this happened, America had just been discovered. Luther lived from 1483 to 1546, and Columbus landed in the New World in 1492. So it's hard for us to understand that all of Europe was one religion, Catholicism.

So for Martin Luther to do what he did was huge. Now, the way that God protected him was that the German princes and lords decided that they didn't want any more of the political corruption from Rome, and so they backed him, and they protected him. And so that's why the Lutheran Church is pretty much German.

Now, let's talk for a minute. What are the birth truths? And I've divided them up into four. And the reason I've done this is for the purposes that I've mentioned before. That it's extremely important that believers understand and comprehend what the birth truths are, but at the same time recognize that they are not the truths that you're going to grow on. You cannot grow. But if you don't have the birth truths down, you can't grow either.

Okay? Now, a year ago, when we were studying the complete green letters, we kind of went through this. So for some of you, this is a review. So let's talk a bit. What are the birth truths? I've got it in four. What would be the first one? And boy, if you miss this, you need to go to another class or another church. Go to the Catholic Church. What's the very first one? And what do we call that? Born again. That's the first one. That's right. We are born anew in Christ.

In 1 Peter 1.23, born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God which lives and abides forever. That's the first one. That a believer, from a birth standpoint, is born anew. So we're not fixing somebody up. This is not renovation. This isn't a rehab. This is born new.

Okay? That's the first birth truth. The second one is... What would you think? And this is a birth truth. The second one is accepted in Christ. Now, Ephesians 1, 6, "...to the praise of the glory of His grace wherein He has made us accepted in the Beloved." Our Father is able to accept us fully because we're in Christ. Now, this is a birth truth. This is not a growth truth. There's identification in this, but this is a birth truth. Every believer who's born again needs to understand, believe, and settle down on the fact that he's accepted in Christ. He has an acceptance before God that cannot be touched because he's in Christ.

The third one is eternal security, that I am eternally secure in Christ, Colossians 3.3, for your life is hid with Christ in God. Now, I'm born again, I'm totally accepted by God, the Father, and that I am, this is secure, that I have no second thoughts about whether my security is for sure.

I'm settled down on the fact that I'm secure. And the last one is that I am positioned in Christ. And the verse is, God has quickened us or enlightened us together in Christ and has raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Ephesians 2, 4-6. I'm positioned in Christ. In other words, I know that because I'm born again, I'm accepted before God, that I'm eternally secure, and my security is based on what? My position. And my position is that I'm in Christ right now, seated at the right hand.

Birth Truth. Now most churches and most books you read would say that those four things are the substance of spiritual growth. I'm here to tell you they're not. This is the basics of every born-again believer. You okay with that? Now, if this isn't part of your view and belief, then you're not going to grow. Because once we launch into the growth truths or the identification truths, they are based on these truths. If you seek to grow based on these truths, you're not going to get very far. A young believer who understands these things will experience the joy of the Lord because of his acceptance and his position But there's going to come a time when he's going to realize that this is milk of the Word. These four things are milk. They are not meat. Most Christians today view them as meat. They don't even get to them, a lot of them.

And like I said before, in order for you to grow spiritually on the meat of the Word, these things have to be the foundation. of which you're going to launch off of. You okay with that? You buy what I'm telling you? I'm getting puzzled looks. So, these truths are not as foundational and as fundamental as they are. They are not intended to be the means of spiritual growth. You okay with that?

You hear me say that these are the milk of the word, but I have enough experience, ongoing experience, with other believers from other places through John's school and other places, where in talking to them about their faith, They haven't got this settled. If you pick up the latest and greatest craze, which is the purpose-driven church, you will not find these four things foundational in there. They won't be there. And Rick Warren's promotion of the purpose-driven believer and the purpose-driven church is not based on these four foundational truths.

So therefore, what he's doing is, trying to get a Christian to move, of his own efforts, to do what? In order to achieve some personal satisfaction in terms of a position and an acceptance. You see that? He doesn't know, or he doesn't teach, that he's already accepted in the Beloved, that he already has a position that's secure, that he will teach born again, but he doesn't go much farther than that. The term born-again is used, but the premise under which the material is presented is fix-up, is to reconfigure and to re-energize the Christian so he'll act more like a Christian. And his viewpoint is that if they have a purpose and they have the means to carry out the purpose, then they'll be more spiritual. Born again now, you know, as I look at it more and more, the term is there, but is it correct? Born again to a new creation? Or is it born again to a fixed up? It's really contrary to a new creature in Christ. What the question underlines is how important it is for us as believers if God would have us in a position to witness to a non-believer how important it is and how careful we need to be with what we present.

If we take the world's or the Christendom's pop phrases and use them, receive Jesus into your heart. That's not the gospel. Make a commitment to Christ. That's not the gospel. What is the gospel? The gospel is very simple. Jesus died for your sins, then he was buried and he rose again. You believe that, you're saved. That's the gospel. That's the whole message.

And what you find interesting about the gospel is that Non-believers will try to make it about their sins. And it isn't about their sins. What's it about? Believing in the person of Christ. It's about this man Christ. That's what it's about. So that's why you need to be careful. It isn't that Jesus is presented as an aspirant to fix whatever pain you have. The issue is, this man is the son of God and he died for your sins on the cross, he was buried and resurrected, do you believe in him? He's the issue. So, now, important? Absolutely.

And our friend Martin Luther is the perfect example of this, but let's look at the Lutheran Church. Today's Lutheran Church has a little bit of birth truth. They have no growth truths. They're totally legal. They lack eternal security. And they even have a smattering of liberalism. I dare say you walk into a Lutheran Church today, you won't find the gospel. Now, let's talk about Reformed or Covenant churches. They have the birth truths. But there's little or no growth in those churches. It reflects the imbalance of their unscriptural application of the law. See, they believe that the law, the Mosaic law, is the rule of life for the believer.

You understand? So they're non-dispensational? They're non-dispensational. And their whole premise is you're saved by grace through faith, but once you're saved and you're indwelt by the Holy Spirit, what's the Holy Spirit going to do? He's going to enable you to keep the law. And we were talking about the Holy Spirit in the last class. Yeah.

But I, you know, when you say they have the birth truth, they have the one element that's missing is their position in Christ. So I don't think they have that one. They don't have that one, and I'll tell you the other key thing they don't have, is they don't focus on the cross for the old man. If the cross is not adequately explained and demonstrated through the Word, then the old man is still there. Hence, that's why we're going to study the identification truths, because we're going to learn about what God did to that old man.

If that's not part of your theology, how can you possibly grow? Because what are you going to be doing? You're going to spend all your time doing what? What's that? Striving to do what? What are you going to strive to do? Work on the old man. You're going to try to get him to be Christian, right? Do you have a choice? If you don't know the identification truths, You have no choice because of your ignorance. You don't know what happened. You don't know where to focus your faith, so what's the faith focused on? Birth truths, all the time.

And if the old man is the one that, the old man got saved, and now we've got to get the old man to look like he got saved, then what are we going to do? We have to figure out through the Word of God, what God would have us do to get that old man to function. What do I find?

Mosaic law. The problem I have is that if I'm sincere, I start to read about things like, well, the law was there to do what? Not to get me to act like it. It's to condemn me. And if I really am serious about being a law abider, I'm going to be defeated, right? Now, that's if I'm serious. If I'm not serious, you know, I'm going to come up with all kinds of song and dance and stuff and say, well, I can handle these laws but not all those laws, until someone comes along and introduces you into the fact that the Mosaic Law is one unit, and if you break one of them, you broke them all. I'm in trouble.

You see? But it's very tough to get a reformed person to buy that premise. To say to them, look, if you're going to live under the law, that means that if you break one little one, you know, you just skip going to church on Saturday, you're screwed. Because you've broken all 760 of them, or however many there are. And you know what? Here's another problem you've got.

The only way provided in the law to cover your sins was to go get a goat and go to the Jewish temple and to sacrifice it to cover your sins. Well, we don't have a temple. You probably don't own a goat. And you can't find a Levitical priest to do the work for you. So I would say you're in big trouble. He said, no, no, all I need to do is confess my sins. So wait a minute. Where in the Mosaic law does it talk about confession? It doesn't. It talks about sacrifice.

So the key issue in spiritual growth is understanding that the old man was crucified on the cross. So Lutheranism and the Reformed guys, they refuse the rules of Catholicism. they considered the flesh to still be before God. Do you understand that? They said, well, Catholicism and all their rules and all that stuff that they've pumped up for 1,500 years isn't any good, but the flesh is still before God, and that's a fatal error. So refusing the legalism is right, but the retention of that which the laws could be made, the old man was and is the weakness of the Reformation.

And that is the weakness. I'll read a quote from Newell. Almost all the theology of the various creeds of Christendom date back to the Reformation, which went triumphantly to the end of Romans 5. And so far as theological development or presentation of truth was concerned, it stopped there. Consequently, you must not regard yourself as bound to accept all that legal doctrine of sanctification which has been, and still is, predominantly, the sine qua non of orthodox belief."

Now, tell me why Romans 5 is mentioned here. You can run upstairs and go to the Romans class and come back. They won't be there for another year and a half. Why Romans 5? Everybody in this class understand the divisions of the Book of Romans? So far I can't get you to talk.

The divisions of the Book of Romans are all men guilty before God up to the middle of three. From 3 to 5 is justification by faith. It's the work of Christ to pay the penalty for your sins. It's your acceptance before God. Romans 5 says that we have a permanent standing before God. It has everything to do with us being in the heavenly places in Christ. We're totally accepted in the Beloved.

But starting in the middle of 5, what happens? 5.12. What doctrine is presented from 512 to the end? It's the doctrine of the two men. Who are the two guys? Adam and Christ. Why are they really important? Why are those the two most important men ever? Federal heads. They're the heads of races. Adam is the head of the first race, the Adamic race, and Christ is the head of the new creation, the new race.

Now if you put Adam and Christ right next to each other, by looking at them you couldn't tell the difference, if Christ was still on the earth. But now you could if Christ was sitting next to Adam in all his glory. You'd be able to tell the difference. And that's the way you're going to be able to tell in all eternity. All you're going to have to do is look at you, and every creature will know that you're a son of God, and you're a different race of men. Okay?

Now, 500 years ago, justification. 350 years ago, or I'm sorry, 350 years after justification was brought in, the substitution, the new birth, God raises up another guy, and this is an Irish guy, a guy named John Darby. The Reformation is going on for 350 years.

You got guys like Zwingli and Calvin and all of these guys, you know. You have Switzerland as a country that the implementation of the law in the whole life is that they're trying to conform people politically and spiritually to be Christians by implementing the law on them. Here comes this guy John Darby and he lived from 1800 to 1882. and he was the guy that God used to bring the growth truths or the identification truths back into understanding. Now, one of the problems here is this.

If you've studied the history of the Western civilization, one of the things you're aware of is that there wasn't any printing. How did God keep his word intact from the first century to about the 1400s or 1300s. How did he do it? Remember? He had these monks in these monasteries handwriting scriptures, copying. When was the Gutenberg Press invented? In the 1400s? Anybody remember? From their history?

It was around that time because it was about the same time as Martin Luther King. So here comes the invention of the printing press. During the Reformation, there weren't complete Bibles. People would have a book of the Psalms and stuff. It wasn't until the 1600s that there was a complete... Tyndale and Wycliffe and these guys began to develop an entire New Testament, especially Paul's epistles. The Old Testament and the Gospels and the Psalms were available, but Paul's epistles weren't.

Well, John Darby is a guy born at the right time, with the information available and so he became Irish Anglican Anglican priest and he was also a lawyer and as a priest he was two years into the priesthood and two years after ordination the Lord began to show him some things and so what he did was he resigned his office in the Liberal Irish Anglican Church because of his spiritual convictions.

And he knew better than try to reform the Irish Church or the Church of England. So what did he do? He set out to make all things new. He started his own deal. And he began to create these things called assemblies. which ended up being the Brethren Church.

Now, I'm going to give you, and you don't have to write these down, listen to a list of 12 things related to the growth truths that John Darby introduced to the English language. The full assurance of salvation, even though that's part of the basic foundational truths, it was John Darby who put the full assurance of salvation in place He did it through the understanding of the identification truths. The complete acceptance by the Father and His beloved Son, and here's how he did it. Believers before this time would say that they were accepted because the Word of God would tell them that, but Darby was the guy that was able to show them how they got into Christ, the mechanics that God used to put them there. He revealed the Church as the body of Christ. The Reformation didn't know that.

The absolute distinction between Israel and the Church. That's the other problem with Reformed theology. They try to bring the Church in as just an extension of Israel. And if they're just an extension of Israel, what's their rule of life? It's got to be the Mosaic law. And therefore, if you distinguish between Israel and the Church, the next thing that goes with that is you have to distinguish between law and grace. Because if you say that the church is not part of Israel, then it functions based on a different operating system. It goes from Apple to IBM to Windows. It goes from law to grace. The entire way it works. He brought in clearly the basic dispensations in the Word of God. He was able to show them.

He brought in the pre-tribulational, pre-millennial rapture of the church. Do you know what those two terms mean? What's pre-tribulation mean? It means before the tribulation and before the millennium will be the rapture. He brought that back in. The Reformers were not pre-trib. They were not pre-millennial. He brought a lot of light to prophecy that wasn't there before.

He brought in our identification with the Lord Jesus in His death unto sin, His burial, His resurrection, and His ascension. He brought in our deliverance from the reign of sin and the old man via Romans 6. He brought in our freedom from the principle of law via Romans 7. He brought in our position in the Lord Jesus at the Father's right hand, and he brought in God's purpose, which was to conform believers to the image of Christ.

All of that is what John Darby introduced. Okay? Now, what you're going to find is that any... identification writer, spiritual growth writer, are going to trace their roots back to this man. All of them come from John Darby. Every one of the Brethren guys, even the contemporary guys, even Miles Stanford would say, I trace my roots back to John Darby because he was the guy.

So he forms this church called the Plymouth Brethren. And what I'm going to do now is try to move from the Brethren through the Keswick movement down to today. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the Brethren history. But I remember Miles Stanford saying that from about 1830 to 1845, the Brethren Church was probably the most Outstanding example of how the body of Christ is to function on the earth that had ever been from the first century to then. Those 15 years. So the truth that Darby brought in and the other guys that learned from him created this ministry of the Brethren Church.

And they were known initially as the Exclusive Brethren. Exclusive meaning that unless you were of a like-mindedness with them, you couldn't join them in their service. So they had a golden age from 1830 to 1845, but then they began to fragment and there was a decline. Anybody want to guess how come? That's right. When you have an exclusive club, as they begin to die out, what happens to your population? And if they were...

I think it was Ironside that said, the problem was that they began to be more concerned about and focusing on how they met rather than why they were meeting. I want you to do that, and trust me, in my limited experience of being involved here, that is such a danger. It is such a danger, because if there's a problem presented, human nature immediately wants to solve it with a tradition, or with a, well this is what we've always done, or if we implement this tradition, it'll solve the problem.

The great thing about the early Brethren was that their focus was on the glorifying of Christ and that's all they cared about, you know, the study of the Word of God and to glorify Christ. Well, there aren't very many exclusives left, are there? And so now there's the Open Brethren, which there are some left. But a lot of the open brethren today don't understand the basic teachings of John Darby. They don't have the truth that they were the keepers of.

Now, if you're like me, my mind is kind of weird when I read stuff like this. I think, well, Lord, boy, you really had it going for 15 years. How come you let it screw up? You ever ask yourself that? I mean, these boys had it. For 15 years, they had it wired. Why would God let it fall apart? What do you think? I think so. A couple of reasons, I think.

One is that the church is a heavenly organism, not an earthly one. That the dependence is on Him. And that for some reason human nature, even John Darby's human nature and his fellow leaders tried to maintain what they had on earth without trusting the Spirit. Remember we talked last time about the Spirit of God and what His job is within the body of Christ? They forgot to trust Him. So they tried to keep it exclusive? They tried to keep it pure from their viewpoint. So if somebody walked into their group and had a little bit of a different idea, rather than edifying them, they'd shut them out.

I read one place where if you're cruising around England and Ireland or France in this time and you were a brethren and you wanted to break bread in a church or an assembly that wasn't your home one, you had to go in and go through a grilling process before they'd even let you attend. A lot of times you had to bring a letter. If you came from one to another, you had to bring a letter.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So I mean. Oh yeah, and head coverings, I mean they did all kinds of wild stuff. That's still active today. I know. That's a real dividing point in the Brotherhood, the head coverings. So, John Darby dies in 18, what did I say,

82. By that time, the Brethren Movement is 40 years after they had their Golden Era, and they have really begun to lose sight of the tremendous truths that God had entrusted to them through John Darby.

So, the next thing that God raises up is the Keswick Movement, spelled K-E-S-W-I-C-K, the W is silent, Keswick. We talked a year ago about the Keswick. They started in 1875, when they were known as the Keswick Convention in England. And through this method, God began to spread the identification truths beyond the limits of the brethren assemblies.

Here's the way they worked. They had these week-long meetings. And those of you who were in the Principles of Spiritual Growth class, we talked about this. We went through what they did. They had the same agenda, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And they taught the identification and the deeper life church messages.

The problem that they had was how quickly does somebody pick up on the growth truths? Four days? They had two weaknesses. One was chronic and one was progressive. The chronic weakness was the annual week concentrated teachings on identification truths were confounded because many of the believers that went to it weren't prepared for it. Too much too soon.

Their consequence, seeking to reckon upon that which was insufficiently understood, has been the cause of much of the personal failure and delusion. That's why we're taking 26 weeks to do this. So the people that went to these heard that, gee, these Keswick conferences are terrific. I need to go to one. And they weren't ready.

The other problem they had, in the early years, they had terrific speakers. high quality people, most of them from the Brethren movement. Most of them are writers that even we would be familiar with. But as time went by, the quality of these guys began to diminish. So they would not have as great a teachers as they had in the beginning. And when the teachers, maturity of the teachers begins to wane. The thing that wanes with them is the cross of Christ. And so the focus began to not be on the cross of Christ and began to be on things that were really more reformed than they were brethren or they were identification and growth truths.

So the Keswick Movement came to the United States within about three years after it started in England. So now they've got the group in England, and they've got it in the United States, and they're having all these conferences. Where do you think they got enough guys to cover all these conferences? Let's say we were going to have, next summer we're going to promote a dozen Keswick conferences around the United States, and we were going to try to find 12 guys who were going to teach at these conferences.

Where would we find them? It'd be hard, wouldn't it? Well, they had the same problem. And the guys that were really well-known, some of them were in England, couldn't get over, weren't going to spend the summer in the United States, so the quality of the guys began to deteriorate. So sometimes they'd have as many as 15,000 to 20,000 people a week at these things. Isn't that something? Now, this is interesting.

In 1975, there was the hundred-year celebration of the Keswick movement. As an example of what the movement has come to, we find a hundred years of identification truth ministry climaxed by a program featuring a covenant theologian, John Stott, presenting the law as the rule of life for the believer and evangelist, Billy Graham, preaching the gospel message.

1975, that's where it came to. And so the movement in the United States was primarily in Cedar Lake, Indiana, Northfield, Massachusetts, and Stony Brook, New York. And it stayed active in the United States for nearly 75 years. And I still think there are some Keswick conferences around, but they don't teach. Now, here we are historically. We've had the Brethren start in you know, the early 1800s. Now it's 150 years later. God still has the identification truths in play, but he's gone through the Brethren movement and now the Keswick Convention.

So where do you think he went to next? He went to individuals. He went to authors. And so you find that there are guys like Letgers and Griffin Thomas, Charles Trumbull, Gordon Watt, and writers like that who began to create books or write books that had to do with deeper life. And in my class six months ago, I had a list of books and I still have them. You guys are welcome to check them out and read them. that have to do with spiritual growth and deeper life. Guys like Miles Stanford, Born Crucified, L.E. Maxwell from Canada, the book we just did on the Holy Spirit, books like that that were available Starting in mid-1900s, 50s, 40s, 50s, up until recently, now though, in 2005, when we tried to find those books that these writers wrote, I had to search through the web, and thanks to Heidi, she found that one website, that every single book mentioned in the one chapter in Myles' Complete Green Letters, only one could I buy new. All the rest were used.

So, I don't know what the Lord's going to do as we go forward in terms of keeping these truths active. I do think this. I think the identification truths are passed from one believer to another. Even though in this church they're included in the main service, so to speak, But really the identification truths pass from one person to the next to the next, from me to you, you to somebody else, that kind of thing. And the identification truths are not designed to be preached from a pulpit.

They are because they take time and they have to be thorough. It doesn't take a lot of precise faith to get saved. Do you agree with me? but it takes very precise faith to grow in these truths. And so that's why we spend so much time on them, to learn the exact nuances of them, so that your faith is specifically targeted on the precise truth.

I haven't lost heart because I'm watching the Brethren and the Keswick and these books, you know. I mean, you can't go into a bookstore today and find anything that's any good. But God has his methods and his ways. And what I think he's doing is that there are groups of believers around the United States and Canada and other places that God wakes up to these truths. They assemble their libraries. They learn the truths and they teach those that are around them. So I see the Lord still doing what he's doing with these truths. But trust me, they are not well known and they are not well thought of. You use the word dispensation in Christian society today and it's almost like a cuss word. You're what? A dispensationalist? That's heresy, isn't it?

I'll give you some authors that if you can find their books, it's great. Ian Thomas, George Duncan, L.E. Maxwell, Alan Redpath, George Mondell, William Culbertson, Miles Stanford, of course, Evan Hopkins, Hugo, Watchman Nee, but Watchman Nee, there's only two books I recommend, A Normal Christian Life and A Sit-Walk Stand. So they're there. And the other thing, here's what I also think is happening.

Holly Hills Bible Church is very soon going to have an interactive website where you can and anybody will be able to come up on the website and listen to our class. Take the information that's been prepared for the class and download it and study it. I think that's how God's going to spread this word from now on. Because in selling the books that I do, I talk to people all over the country and the hunger out there to know and grow in these truths, the appetite's there. There just hasn't been much of means to feed them. But I think what we're doing and what other people are doing are going to become available and people can get these truths. So, you know, the Lord is not without means. Let's see. And if you can get a hold of John Darby's writings, that's OK. But his complete writings, you don't want to buy. I mean, Stoney is a good one if you can find those. So.

Anyway, that's the basic history of how we got to today. And so starting next week, what we'll do is we'll start in Genesis and we'll take a look at exactly how the identification truths work out. Dear Father, how we thank you for your grace towards us, and that no matter what we as humans do not to maintain the glorious truths that you have for us, that your Spirit continues to work and cause us to get our hands on the material and to see the right things and to be dependent on Him to teach us of our position in Your Son, of our identification with Him in His death, birth, and resurrection, and that we can now, this very minute, behold His glory and enjoy Him, Father. We thank You. We pray in His precious name. Amen.