And denies me, I'll deny him before my
Father which art in heaven, and let him
take up his cross, and follow me.
And where I am there my servant will
be, and my Father will love him, said
Jesus.
Well, now, to accept Christ, then, is to
accept his friends as your friends.
And when I come to that part, I
get happy about it, because the friends of
Jesus Christ are the loveliest people in all
the wide world.
I am not ashamed of the friends of
my Savior.
Now, I know that there are some Christians
who are a little, tiny, wee, bit cracked
on top.
I know that.
I know they're oddballs, some of them, and
I know they do odd things.
I know some of them put badges on,
you know, as big as a milk cup.
Jesus only, on their lapels, and go down
the street, and they do odd things.
But dear, bless them, they're mean all right.
And sometimes they'll win people to the Lord
when some of us dignified people can't win
them.
You've heard of that fellow.
He was a great preacher, and a liar
friend of his.
He tried to get him to church often,
but he wouldn't come.
And one day, one time, he did come.
Now, there was in that same church a
man who hadn't too much up here, but
he had an awful lot down here.
And when he saw this lawyer, this great
lawyer, saw him come in, this preacher was
worried to death, because this poor fellow, with
a whole lot in his heart and not
too much in his head, he was in
the habit of going around and asking people
if they were saved.
So he just prayed silently that the Lord
would help him to preach a great sermon,
and he would keep that fellow away from
that lawyer, because he knew the lawyer was
a cultured, dignified gentleman who would probably walk
out in a huff if anybody approached him.
So when he gave the invitation after the
sermon, this, sure enough to his horror and
dismay, this poor half-witted fellow went around
to the lawyer, took ahold of his lapel,
and the lawyer went out.
Well, he said, I knew it would happen.
So about midnight that night, the phone rang,
and the lawyer was on the other end
of the phone, and he said, Reverend, come
over here, I want to see you.
Oh, he said, I want to apologize to
you.
He said, I feel so bad about that.
He said, about what?
He said, about that poor fellow that went
and bothered you there in the service.
No, he said, come over, please.
He said, I want to see you.
So he went over, and he said, I
am in distress.
He said, my soul is ready to perish.
He said, I've got to be saved.
Tell me how to be saved.
It didn't take very long for the preacher
to lead the lawyer to Jesus Christ.
So when he had come into the light
of the new birth and was forgiven and
regenerated, the preacher ventured to ask him, now
just what was it in my sermon tonight
that led you to the Lord?
Oh, he said, Reverend, nothing in your sermon.
He said, you remember that odd fellow that
came around and buttonholed me?
He said, yes, I want to apologize.
Don't apologize.
He said, that's why I got saved.
He said, you know what he said to
me?
He said, do you want to go to
heaven?
And I said, no.
He said, well, go to hell, then, and
walked away.
And he said, I was mad, and I
walked out of the church.
But he said, as I went down the
street, it came to me, heaven or hell,
heaven or hell, heaven or hell.
And he said, if it isn't heaven, it's
hell.
And he said, that's why I sent for
it.
So I tell you, brethren, I love God's
people.
And I accept his friends as my friends.
And I don't care what color they are.
If they're holy people and his friends, they're
my friends.
And I'm not ashamed of them.
And I'm not ashamed of my camp meeting
friends.
I preach in colleges and seminaries and among
the big shots.
And I preach to bishops and all the
rest.
But I love God's simple, plain people, people
without much education.
And maybe they don't have all the culture.
And they think Beethoven played right guard for
Yale and all that kind of thing.
But they, they are God's sheep.
And if they're God's sheep, they're mine.
And if they're the Lord's children, they're my
brethren.
Accept his friends as my friends.
Then to believe on Jesus Christ, savingly, is
to accept his enemies as my enemies.
Now, that's another thing.
The enemies of the Lord Jesus Christ will
never get an apology from me, brother.
I have prayed, O Lord, don't let anybody
love me that doesn't love thee.
Don't let me be popular at your expense.
Don't let churches that wouldn't have you invite
me.
Don't let people come to me that wouldn't
come to thee.
I want thine enemies to be my enemies,
and thy friends to be my friends.
I love the friends, and I am not
afraid of the enemies.
What was it, Phyllis, that Dogridge wrote?
Hast thou a lamb, hast thou a foe
before whose face I fear thy cause to
plead?
Hast thou a lamb in all thy flock
I would disdain to feed?
And the answer's no.
Not an enemy before whose face I wouldn't
plead the cause of Christ.
Not a lamb that I wouldn't feed, no
matter how poor he might be.
So I accept Christ's enemies as my enemies.
And I accept his ways as my ways.
I take his ways.
I don't come to him and get a
badge or a ticket telling me that I'm
saved and then go my way.
I come to him and then I go
his way.
Follow me, he said.
That means you go his way.
The way of obedience, the way of prayer,
the way of service, the way of consecration,
the way of love, the way of mercy,
the way of holiness, that's his way.
And then I accept his rejection as my
rejection.
That is to accept Christ.
If they reject him, they reject me.
I've already covered that, I think, and that
on the enemy, so I'll skip it and
point out that I accept his cross as
my cross, or at least I accept the
across as my cross.
Jesus Christ says, take up your cross.
What is the cross of Christ?
Well, somebody gets a toothache and says, I'll
bear my cross.
No, you won't, brother.
That's just a toothache.
The devil might get a toothache if he
had teeth.
I don't know what he does.
He has a tail, I suppose, but I
don't think he has teeth.
But those things that come to you, your
baby dies, or your cow gets sick, or
your corn crop doesn't work, it doesn't come
up, or the drought hits your field, you
say, that's my cross.
No.
A cross is something you take up voluntarily,
and you didn't take up that voluntarily.
That's just one of those things that happens
to the good and the bad like.
If it gets to be 104 degrees as
it did here this week, that isn't a
cross.
Every sinner down the highway was rubbing his
forehead along with you.
So that is no cross.
You're not going to get a reward for
rubbing and wiping perspiration in 104 temperature.
That's no cross.
That's simply, it happened that way.
Every robber was grouping his wings here.
So a cross is something you take up
deliberately.
It is obedience to Christ.
It is doing what the Lord commands you
to do, and then taking the consequences.
And if the consequences mean a cross, then
take the cross.
Jesus Christ didn't choose the cross, that is,
he didn't choose it in the sense that
he wanted to die on a cross.
But he wanted to save you, and he
wanted to obey God, and the cross was
the only way out.
So he went to the cross because he
was obedient to his Father and because he
loved you.
And so a cross is obedience to God
and love for mankind.
And when whatever results that's painful and harsh
and hard and bitter, even death itself, that's
the cross.
So I take the cross as he took
his cross.
And then I accept his life as my
life.
Oh, thank God for that.
You don't stay on a cross forever.
He took six hours to die, but he's
alive how long?
Forevermore.
He came back from the dead, and that
was to the consternation of the devil and
to the confusion of the Pharisees and to
the distress of the Roman Empire.
He was dead, but he liveth again.
And a Christian that's truly a Christian will
die with him, but will come back from
the dead also.
I mean, die in this right now, in
this life.
Die to your ambitions and die to your
pride and die to all of those things
that the world glories in.
You die to them.
The world glories and you die to them.
Brother Brown said the other night, no man
has a right to claim anything until he
dies to it.
And he's perfectly right.
I agree with him 100%.
And then it's to accept his future as
your future.
Oh, wonder of wonders.
He came back from the dead.
He went to the right hand of the
Father.
One of these days he'll be crowned with
all the crowns there are.
The crown that God will put on his
head, and then the crown that his own
people will put on his head.
They'll come from the north and the south
and the east and the west, and they'll
cast their crowns before him.
He is Lord of Lord and King of
Kings, and they'll cry, O Christ of God,
take unto thee thy power and reign.
And you and I are a part of
that if we're followers of Christ.
We can afford to put up with a
little inconvenience now because all the glory lies
ahead.
Let me say to you that that man
who tries to take the inconvenience out of
your life and smooth over the cross and
paint it up and make it acceptable socially,
that man is your enemy.
I don't care if he's a reverend or
a DD, he's your enemy.
That teacher, whoever he is, that tells you
that Christianity is a whooping good time and
great fun, he's lying in your teeth, and
you ought not to accept it.
Christianity has its glory, joy unspeakable and full
of glory, but it also has its cross.
And Jesus Christ bore the cross for the
joy that was set before him.
But we carnal children, we lamblings, we saintlets,
we little pocket editions of a Christian, we
don't want to bear any cross or have
any inconvenience.
We don't want to be kept home from
the lake.
I don't know what you do here, but
my dear friends up in Canada, I've said
nice things about them and I'll say this
about them now.
If this gets up into Vancouver somewhere, amen.
It's all right.
I love Canadians, but I don't excuse the
fact that when summertime comes, they leave and
go to the lake and desert the churches.
I don't know whether you do it here,
but any Christian, listen unto me, that habitually
takes his family away from the Church of
God over the weekend is no true Christian
at all.
He is a make-believe and he is
a hypocrite, and I don't care if he's
on your board and chairman of your board
of elders and a deacon, he's still not
serving God and carrying a cross.
Now, vacation is one thing, and I suppose
everybody ought to have a vacation.
Sometimes I wonder what they take a vacation
from.
They loaf all the time.
Anyhow, men take a vacation from it.
But you probably need some help.
Some of you men love to go out
and play golf or something.
Do it.
It's all right.
But as soon as golf becomes your lord
and boss and you talk about it all
the time, instead of talking about the Lord
and the foreign missions, it's gotcha, brother, you're
a golfaholic anonymous.
I've never heard of that before, and I
hope I never hear of it again.
But if your boat with the putt-putt
on the back takes you away from the
house of God on Sunday, it's a putt
-putt on your way to loss and chagrin
in the day of Christ.
No, no, he calls you to take his
hard way, that he may lay his crown
gently upon your brow in the day of
his triumph.
Now, that's what it means to receive Christ,
to accept Christ, to believe on Christ.
And it means all that, and it doesn't
mean any less.
And any fiddling around or any effort anybody
makes to pat your back and smooth you
down and get you in, it's just too
bad.
But Robinson told about seeing a nest of
chickens, and he said he saw them pick
their way out of the shell, and oh,
what a terrible time they had.
They struggled and fell over and tumbled around,
and he said he pitied them from the
bottom of his heart.
He said, the next hen nest that I
see hatching, the next eggs that I see
hatching, I'm going to help them out.
So he said the next time he saw
a hen hatching, he pushed her off and
picked them all out of the shell and
said they all died.
And that is what's matter with so great,
so many of our Christians.
We have picked them out of the shell.
In order to get them at all, we
have rushed ahead and picked them out of
the shell.
The result is they die all around us,
and we say they backslid.
They never backslid because they never were regenerated
to start with.
To accept him is to accept him with
a revolutionary acceptance.
It's to accept him completely, all of him
to all of me.
It's to accept him exclusively and not any
other hope but him.
He alone is my hope.
It's to accept his friends as my friends,
his enemies as my enemies, his ways as
my ways, his rejection as my rejection, the
cross as my cross, his life as my
life, and his glorious future as my glorious
future.
That's what it means to be a Christian.
And my dear friends, it's worth everything.
And if we all had to believe on
Christ tonight and die tomorrow, we'd spend one
eternity thanking God with tender affection that he
allowed it to happen.
Yes, sir, you can't afford to be lost.
You can't afford to take for granted you're
saved when all's happened, somebody has picked you
out of your shell and tried to make
a Christian out of you, and you've never
known what it is to be born again.
Moral sanity requires that I settle the matter
of whether I am in rights-saving relation
to Jesus Christ or not.
I don't ask if you've signed a card.
I don't ask if you've been baptized.
You can do both of those and be
lost.
You can be saved and do both of
them too, but they don't save you.
But moral sanity requires that I settle it.
Will you settle it?
Now, don't take it for granted.
Remember, you're not gambling.
You're guaranteeing that you'll be lost.
To fail to come into right relation to
Jesus Christ is to commit moral suicide.
Young people particularly, in this terrible hour of
putrefaction and corruption, in this frightful hour of
shallowness and superficiality, when our youth are being
led astray by people who ought to know
better, and they're romping and kicking up their
heels and playing their way into the kingdom
and playing their way off to heaven, only
to find they've played their way to hell.
You dear young people, I could love you
till I'd lie down, let you walk over
the length of me from now till morning,
if only I could save you from the
false teaching that would make acceptance of Christ
to be a lark.
Acceptance of Christ is a revolutionary act that
changes you from the ground up.
But you say that's true only for older
people.
That's true for every person.
I knew a boy, a Jewish mother and
a Gentile father.
I married them.
Then that boy was born.
He grew to be about 18.
He was in great danger of becoming a
juvenile delinquent.
One night I gave the altar call and
he went into the prayer room, the inquiry
room, where we used there in Chicago.
His name was Dave.
And everybody knew what kind of a scoundrel
Dave was.
He went into that room.
I thought, well, there goes Dave.
It probably won't much come of it.
So God knows my faith didn't help much.
Pretty soon Dave came bounding out.
He came out like a racehorse out of
the whatever they are.
And he hunted me up.
His face was aglow.
He'd been converted.
Well, I thought, very good.
But he's an emotional boy.
Let's see how it works.
Well, you know, it wasn't very long till
he was one of the leaders in the
church.
It wasn't very long after that till he
came to me with a shining face and
said, I'm going to Bible school.
Off to Bible school he went.
And when he got there, he just shook
that school.
And he's been going right on ever since.
That boy's name is Dave Shaper.
My dear friends, he was only a kid
too, just a kid.
Don't wait till there are gray in your
temples.
This message of acceptance, radical, revolutionary, exclusive, final
acceptance of Christ with all that you have,
that's for everybody.
That's for the youngest person that can hear
me tonight, as well as for the oldest
person that hears me.
Let's pray a moment.
Dear Lord Jesus, we're with thee in this.
We're with thee in this.
We attach ourselves to thee now with deliberation.
Thy word has been given by invitation and
explanation of what it means.
Now Lord, if they follow thee well and
good, if they do not, then I don't
know what I can do.
O Christ, this night we beseech thee, thou
wilt help every one of these listening to
reconsider and rethink and decide whether heaven is
more desirable than hell, whether the inconvenience of
cross-carrying and the persecution and troubles that
brings to follow the Lamb, whether these things
are worthwhile in the light of eternity.
We beseech thee, O Lord.
We pray thou will save us from superficiality,
save us, we pray thee, from this pseudo
-Christianity that's going about, save us from fool's
gold, save us, we pray thee, from alkali
water that kills us, save us, we pray
thee, O God, from all this watered-down
stuff that leaves us where it finds us,
only that we think we're right when we're
not.
Have mercy upon us, O God, have mercy
upon us.
Bless these dear friends.
And before they go to their place of
rest this night, may they make sure that
all these conditions have been met and that
they can sing, I am my Lord's and
he is mine.
It is done, the great transaction's done, I
am my Lord's and he is mine.
Underscore and emphasize every word, knowing it's true.
Grant this, we beseech thee, O Father, through
Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.