Derek Prince - By One Offering He Provided For Everyone
Hebrews 10:14, which speaks about what Jesus accomplished by His death on the cross: For by one offering, or by one sacrifice, He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. The one offering, or the one sacrifice, is the sacrifice He made of Himself on the cross. And by that one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. That means to say He has provided every need for time and eternity in every area of the life of every person who trusts in Him. There is nothing more that He has to do. He has done it all. It is one complete all sufficient sacrifice. That’s the first part of that statement. Then it speaks about those who are being sanctified or set apart to God or drawn closer to God. That’s an ongoing process. What Jesus has done is once for all, it’s total, it’s complete. But our appreciation of it, our appropriation of it is progressive. But we need to start from the fact that the actual sacrifice is totally complete. When I minister in the Third World, as I do quite often, I try to use very simple pictures. That will help the people to understand.
The same simple pictures will help people in New Zealand, too but people in New Zealand might not realize it. So I just want to share with you two pictures that I used. First of all, in Pakistan a year and a half ago. Pakistan is a 98% Moslem country with 84 million people. The Christians, and they’re only nominal Christians are just a tiny, oppressed, despised minority. But the Lord opened the way for Ruth and me with a team of five others to go and spend nine days in three of the main cities proclaiming the Word of God. It was announced in advance that we would pray for the sick. Well, our first meeting was in Karachi, which is the main port. A city of about 8 million people. And before we went to the meeting the leader of team that had invited us, a team of indigenous local Pakistani Christians, took us to see the Christian quarter of Karachi.
And I’ve seen a lot of poverty in my life but I have never seen such poverty and such squalor. It really almost made my physically ill. And I got a little glimpse of what it’s like to be a Christian in a Moslem nation. They announced that they just had one meeting in Karachi, because other preachers had been there first. Then they were going to take us to other parts of the country, where other preachers had not been. So I said to the leader, I said: Where are we going to hold this first meeting? He said: In our church. Having measured the total economic state of the people I wondered what that would be like. I said: How many people are you expecting? He said: About 600. I said: How many does your church hold? He said: 300. So I didn’t bother to reason that out. So they packed our team up in a little van, and drove to the area of Karachi where the meetings were to be held. True to Pakistani time we arrived one hour late.
When we got near the church, we never saw the church. Because at a main intersection - it was not main roads, it was just dust roads, there were about 3,000 people just packed in this intersection. This was the congregation. The reason why they had come, very simple: They heard we would pray for the sick. So they squeezed me in through the crowd and got me onto a little platform, just big enough for me and my Bible and a pulpit. And I was surrounded on every side by Pakistanis. I mean, there were no space, there were no aisles, nothing. And they were all squatting on the ground. So I thought to myself: God, what am I to say to these people? And God gave me this thought which I'm sharing with you. I said to them: Now, if you people were all hungry and I were the owner of an orange grove. There’s two things I could do for you. I could get an orange from my grove and give you one. Which would temporarily stave off your hunger.
The other thing I could do is take you to my orange grove, show you the trees laden with fruit and say: Help yourself. I said: Tonight I’m going to take you to the orange grove, and you can help yourselves. That’s what I’m going to do here tonight. I’m going to take you to the orange grove. The orange grove is the truth about the cross. I preached to them in brief outline what I’m going to preach to you tonight. And then I said: Now how many of you would like to receive Jesus as your personal Savior? And I suppose half the people stood, which was about 1500 people. Now of those at least 500 or more were Moslems. I can’t take time to explain to you the differences between Islam and Christianity. But one thing is they do not believe that Jesus died on the cross. And they do not acknowledge that Jesus is the Son of God. So when these people stood up - all this was through an interpreter, I led them in a prayer and asked every one of them to follow me.
And I began the prayer this way: Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that You are the Son of God and the only way to God, that You died on the cross for my sins and rose again from the dead. And they all repeated those words out loud after me. Now I’m not saying they were all saved. But to get 500 or more Moslems in a Moslem country, in front of their own Moslems to say those words, could only have been achieved by the power of the Holy Spirit. Then I said to myself: We’ve got to redeem our promise to pray for the sick. There was no way to get to them in any case. It would have taken hours. So I said: How many of you want to be prayed for for healing? I think about 90 percent raised their hands. And I mean, they were sick. People in Pakistan are sick. There aren’t many really healthy people. That’s really quite typical of quite a lot of the Third World.
So I said, I’m going to pray a prayer for you. And I want you if you’ve got some part of your body that’s sick to put your hand on the sick part. And as I pray believe that God will touch you. So I prayed a prayer - all this had to be interpreted into Urdu. And I finished praying. I thought, we’ve got to do something about this. So I said: How many of you believe God healed you? Well, a few people rather timidly began to put their hands up. Then there was a disturbance about ten feet away in front of me. One of the Pakistani Christians went down and discovered what had happened. A Moslem boy of 12 had been born deaf and dumb. He had never heard and never spoken. And when I prayed he received his hearing and began to try to speak. They got him up on the platform and the place just went wild. Every Pakistani lady in the congregation determined that we ought to lay hands on them. And they didn’t ask our consent, they just grabbed hold of our arms and placed our hands on their heads.
Well, news spreads. And the next place we went to, the crowds built to about 16.000. And the local Pakistanis estimated that in nine days between 8 and 9.000 people prayed for salvation. The leader of the group told me a year later that when he went there he was responsible for five churches. A year later he was responsible for eighteen churches. Well, that was taking them to the orange grove, see what I’m saying? Then I was in Zambia, a little bit earlier if I remember rightly. And I had a crowd of about 7.000 Africans, mainly leaders, gathered. I planned to teach them on the cross systematically. And I did for about six successive mornings. I said to them - they were all professing Christians basically: Now, God has a wonderful storehouse. And it’s filled with absolutely everything that you could ever need. Whether it’s spiritual, material, physical, in time or in eternity. It’s just got everything you need, but the storehouse has a keeper. And in order to get anything out of the storehouse, you’ve got to make friends with the keeper.
I said: Do you know the name of the keeper? Some of them said Jesus. I said: That’s a good answer, but it’s not right. The keeper of the storehouse is the Holy Spirit. All the wealth of the Godhead, Father and Son is in the hands of the Holy Spirit. How important to understand that. You can have all the right doctrine, you can have all the right theory. You can say all the right things, but you only get as much as you get from the Holy Spirit. He keeps the storehouse. Then I said to them: The Holy Spirit has one key that opens the storehouse, only one. And it’s got a very special shape. Do you know what the shape of the key is? They didn’t guess so I said it’s the cross. And only when the Holy Spirit uses the cross to open the storehouse, do the treasures of God become available to you.