I stumbled into the dimly lit dungeon, fumbled
for a chair and mumbled that I needed
a flashlight to read the menu.
When the food came, I ate it by
faith and not by sight.
Gradually, however, I began to make out objects
a little more distinctly.
You know how it is if you sit
a while in a dark room.
And my friend remarked, funny isn't it how
you get used to the dark?
And I said, you've given me a new
sermon subject, getting used to the dark.
For one thing, we're living in the dark.
We're living in the closing chapter of an
age dominated by the prints and powers of
darkness.
And men do love darkness rather than light,
because their deeds are evil.
The night is far spent, and the blackness
is more extensive and more intensive and more
excessive as it deepens just before the dawn.
Mammoth Cave is not limited to Kentucky.
It's universal today.
We're all in it.
Strangely enough, we never had more artificial illumination,
never had less light than we have tonight.
Bosley, man walks around in unprecedented brilliance, but
his soul dwells in unmitigated darkness.
He can release nuclear glory that outdazzles the
sun, but he has gotten so far with
his head that his heart has been outdistanced,
and with his head he plans his own
destruction.
He can put satellites in the sky, but
let himself is a wandering star for whom
is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.
The depths of present-day human depravity are
too vile for any word in our language
to describe.
We're not seeing ordinary moral corruption these days.
These terrible things you're reading about in the
papers, this is not ordinary meanness.
We've always had that.
We are seeing a double distilled and compounded
demonism in weird and uncanny combinations and concoctions
of iniquity that were never heard of a
generation ago.
And this putrefaction of the carcass of civilization
waiting for the vultures of judgment is not
peculiar to Skid Row.
It shows up in the top brackets of
society.
There are plenty of prodigals today living morally
among the swine, although garbed in purple and
fine linen.
Bishop Kilgo of the Methodist Church used to
say there is no difference in reality between
the idle rich and the idle poor.
The crowds who loaf in gorgeous hotels and
the crowds who tramp the land in rags,
no difference except in the cost of their
wardrobes and the price of their meals.
The scriptures speak of gross darkness.
Well, the English language is a little tricky
sometimes.
Gross can mean twelve dozen.
It can mean intense, concentrated darkness.
We had a country preacher in my part
of the country who said gross darkness is
144 times darker than ordinary darkness.
Man lives in concentrated night, and even his
nuclear flashlight can't pierce him.
In the second place, not only do we
live in the dark, but we get used
to it.
Christians get used to it.
I want to warn you tonight, the best
way I know how, of a slow and
subtle and sinister brainwashing process that is gradually
desensitizing all of us to evil.
You're not aware of it.
That's the trouble.
Little by little, sin is made to appear
less sinful until the light within us becomes
darkness, and how great is that darkness?
Our magazines are loaded with sordid crime, the
news stands with corruption, and we're engulfed in
a tidal wave of pornographic filth.
Television has put us in the dark more
ways than one with Sodom and Gomorrah in
the living room.
We get used to it.
We get acclimated to it.
We accept it as a matter of course,
its language and its art and its literature
and its music.
We learn to live in it without an
inner protest anymore.
We don't hate evil.
We don't abhor that which is evil.
We don't abstain from the very appearance of
evil.
We get used to the dark.
You remember a lot.
He was a righteous man, and I would
have known it if it hadn't been for
the New Testament.
But he moved into Sodom, lived in it,
became city councilman.
I know that his righteous soul respects from
day to day with their unlawful deeds, but
he lost his influence with his family, had
to flee for his life, died in disgrace.
I've met a lot of lots in the
last few years, and as it was in
the days of lots, so shall it be,
and so it is.
And they tell us now, even in some
evangelical circles, that we ought to hop off
with Sodom and get chummy with Gomorrah in
order to convert them.
And the argument is that old, that the
end justifies the means, forgetting that the means
determines the end.
If you use an unworthy means, you've already
spoiled the objective before you get to it.
And these dear people are not turning the
light on in Sodom, they're just getting used
to the dark.
I heard of an Irishman who came over
here and stayed a year, and then his
wife came over to join him, and after
a few days she said, don't they talk
funny over here?
He said, you ought to have heard them
a year ago when I came over here.
See what I mean?
We were talking just as funny as ever,
but he was used to it.
Now, the worst of all this is that
we get to where we think it's getting
brighter, just as you sit in a dark
room long enough, you think it's brighter.
Men may dwell so long in darkness that
they think the day is dawning.
I believe that what some people call the
birth pangs of a new age are just
the dying gasps of this.
Science has performed many wonders, we've split the
atom and gone to the moon, but the
scene is not getting brighter, we're just getting
used to the dark.
We call it well-mindedness, tolerance, peaceful coexistence,
it really is, with evil.
And in an effort to establish communion between
light and darkness, this process reaches out in
all directions, even in evangelical Christianity.
It's possible to fraternize with unbelievers until false
doctrine becomes less and less objectionable, until we
come to terms with it and incorporate it
eventually into the fellowship of truth.
Some begin by opening the doors to borderline
sects and cults who believe almost like we
do, and then others want to make a
crazy quilt out of all the religions.
They call it a syncretism.
That's just a highfalutin word for hash.
I never eat hash away from home because
I don't know what it's made of, never
eat it at home because I do know
what it's made of.
These theological chefs today are mixing all kinds
of mulligan stews, and they fancy that the
darkness is lifting, and it's getting used to
it.
Now the same danger exists in the world
of doctrine and conduct.
You can live in a twilight zone in
your conduct, and in conditions of low visibility
until you find the practices of this world
less repulsive than you did.
You think it's your mind broadening when it's
just your conscience stretching.
You renounce what you call phariseeism and the
puritanism of your early days.
You have a good word for dancing and
smoking and cocktails and all the rest of
it, and instead of passing up vanity fair,
you spend your vacation there maybe.
You prefer the borderline to beulah land.
When young people have question and answer periods,
so many times they usually ask about the
same questions, and it generally boils down to
this with a lot of them.
How much like the world can I be
and still be a Christian?
How much of this world can I enjoy
and still go to heaven?
How near to the precipice can I walk
without going over?
Instead of asking how much like the Lord
can I be and how little like the
world, it amounts to this, although they and
old people are the same way, they'd never
put it that way.
The point really is how much of the
world can I incorporate into my program and
still get to heaven?
You remember Bunyan's immortal prose when he told
us about the Christians at Vanity Fair.
I love this old way of saying it.
And as they wondered at their apparel, so
they did likewise at their speech, for few
could understand what they said.
They naturally spoke the language of Canaan, but
they that kept the fair were men of
this world, so that from one end of
the fair to the other they seemed barbarians
to each other.
Now, we don't seem like barbarians to this
world today, we're too much like it.
The operators of Vanity Fair today wouldn't see
much difference in clothes, conversation, or conduct.
The average church member today.
Now, this sort of business doesn't come on
us all of a sudden.
You remember those immortal lines of Pope?
Vice is a monster of such frightful mean
as to be hated needs but to be
seen, yet seen too oft, familiar with the
face we first endure, then pity, then embrace.
If the proprietors of the modern Vanity Fair
could watch the average church member, if those
old fellas back in Bunyan's day would behold
the modern professing Christian, especially in the summertime,
wearing in public a garb which you should
never have come down the stairs at home,
they wouldn't look like barbarians.
I'm always glad when fall comes and the
saints get back in their clothes, if not
in their right minds.
Now, here's how it works.
The other day a secular journalist in a
non-religious magazine said, the desensitization of 20th
century man is more than a danger to
the common safety.
There are some things we have no right
ever to get used to.
One is brutality and the other is the
irrational.
Both have now come together and are moving
toward a dominant pattern.
Now, there was a time when sin shocked
us.
It'd have to be pretty bad to shock
most people, most Christians today.
As the brainwashing progresses, what once amazed us
only amuses us.
We laugh at the shady joke and unfortunately
tragedy has become comedy in America.
We're laughing at things today we ought to
cry about.
It's the strategy of tolerance and acceptance and
this permissiveness that you've been hearing about here
this week.
Dr. Jowett, that prince of preachers, said to
preachers, we are tempted to leave our noontide
lights behind in our study to move among
men with a dark lantern which we can
manipulate to suit our company.
We pay the tribute of smiles to the
low business standard.
We pay the tribute of laughter to the
fashionable jest.
We pay the tribute of easy tolerance to
ambiguous pleasures.
We seek to be all things to all
men, to please all.
We run with the hare and hunt with
the hounds.
We've become victims of illicit compromise.
There's nothing distinctive about our character.
And then he spoke about ministers wearing gray
when they mix with the businessmen of the
congregation and talking gray in conversation with them.
Nothing's definite.
Everything's fuzzy today.
Black and white have become smudged into indefinite
gray.
The housewife who moves out to suburbia and
wants to get along with the group spirit
of the community faces that same problem.
The organization man at the boss's party.
The student on a pagan campus.
All kinds of new techniques are being worked
out now on how to socialize at Vanity
Fair.
But Bunyan's Pilgrims had the right idea.
We're not here to learn how to live
in the dark.
We're here to learn how to walk in
the light.
It's hard to find an old-fashioned sinner
anymore.
They're scarcer than whooping crankies over the country.
Adulterous, free love, the drunkard, the respectable alcoholic,
sodomy, homosexuality have been elevated into good society.
The murderer is temporarily insane.
Parents say, what's the use?
I can't use discipline.
Nobody up and down the block uses it.
Pastors quit preaching on sin.
These things are here to stay, they say.
Might as well accept the status quo and
live with it.
There was a time when ministers spoke forth
rightly and named things.
We don't name anything anymore.
Many have discernment on how to preach so
as to convert nobody.
He said, preach on sin, but never mention
any of the sins of your congregation.
That'll do it.
They'll all go out and say sin's bad,
but they won't get under conviction.
But you name something.
Somebody may get mad, but it's better to
go out mad than just go out.
Anything's better than nothing.
The woman at Jacob's Well did not get
under conviction as long as my Lord talked
about the water of life and where was
the best place to worship, and those are
good topics.
She got under conviction when he said, go
call the husband.
Uh-oh.
She'd had too many of them already.
And she went back and said, come see
a man who told me about what?
The water of life?
No.
Best place to worship?
No.
All things that ever I need is not
this Christ.
We need some more of the preaching today
that names something, that particularizes instead of generalizes.
It's not popular.
I found that out a long time ago.
But it's Scripture.
Now we see this communion between light and
darkness and all directions, TV programs of 30
minutes of foolishness and then they sing a
hymn to give God a tip at the
finish.
He's got the whole world in his hands,
sung to jazz tempo.
Teenagers dancing to God bless America and a
mighty fortress is our God, followed by a
beer commercial.
Hollywood portraying the Bible, and Hollywood is no
more qualified to handle Scripture than a gangster
to lecture on honesty.
I didn't expect many amens from that remark.
Now let me warn you, as I warn
myself, beloved, there is a slow and similar
brainwashing by which we are gradually merged into
this age, homogenized into this faceless mass, world
church, world state, ready for antichrist.
I don't know what's coming.
When Mr. Churchill was over here in 49,
up at MIT, somebody spoke on folk control
and said the day may come when there
will be folk control.
Mr. Churchill said he hoped that he wouldn't
live to see a day like that.
I don't know about that, but I do
know that we're being smudged into gray.
When the Lord's sheep are a dirty gray,
all black sheep are more comfortable.
Will you remember that?
If you're one of these gray Christians, all
the black sheep take comfort in your condition.
You've become a thermometer registering the prevailing temperature,
instead of a thermostat to change the temperature.
And when the salt loses its savor, we
become neither-nor in a world that's either
-or, experts at the art of almost saying
something.
You can go along right in the ministry
today if you learn that.
A lot of folks don't know the difference
anyhow.
Come right up to it, and then execute
a neat detour when you get right up
to it.
And there's a line of papers I'll have
to listen to.
Charlie Wilson was in Eisenhower's cabinet.
Wilson came from General Motors.
He didn't know anything about how to be
a politician.
He didn't know any better than to say
what he thought, which is rare in Washington.
And he said the next time I get
a secretary, I want a one-armed man.
He said, why?
He said, I'm so tired of on the
one hand this, and on the other hand
that.
There's an awful lot of preaching that way
today.
Parity, mild and innocuous platitudes, so that we
become not only blind leaders of the blind,
but bland leaders of the blind.
You know why it's in the dark?
Well, I wish everybody knew the next verse
in John 3, after John 3, 16.
For God sent not his son into the
world to condemn the world, but that the
world through him might be saved.
He that believeth on him is not condemned,
but he that believeth not is condemned already,
because he hath not believed in the name
of the only begotten Son.
And this is the condemnation.
This is the test by which men are
judged.
The word really in the original is crisis,
with a K spelled with a K.
That's the only difference.
This is the crisis.
You talk about the crisis tonight.
It's not Vietnam, it's not the next election.
Here's the crisis, and always has been, that
light has come into the world, and men
loved the darkness rather than light, because their
deeds were evil.
For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light,
neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds
should be reproved.
But he that doeth truth cometh to the
light, and his deeds may be made manifest
that they are wrought from God.
The crisis is that Jesus Christ came to
this world and precipitated a crisis, because everybody
has to take sides about Jesus Christ.
There isn't any such thing as doing nothing
about Jesus Christ.
He that is not with me is against
me, that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad,
and this light shines in the Savior, and
the light of the world.
It shines in the scriptures, thy word is
a lamp to my feet, a light to
my bed, and it shines in the saints,
the light of the world, in the Savior,
in the scriptures, in the saints.
But verse 20 tells you why some people
don't go to church.
Everyone that does evil hates the light.
I had a country church way back in
the late 20s, and I remember a little
woman whose husband brought her every night to
the Sunday night to the services.
He was an old sinner.
He never came in.
He sat out there in the dark, always
in one, in the car, and she sat
over here to the right.
And I thought about this verse many a
time.
The trouble with that old boy was, and
this verse describes him, everyone that does evil
hates the light.
He knew if he came in there, the
light would be turned on, and he'd squirm
and twist and look perfectly miserable.
But his wife wanted all the light she
could get.
It's a pretty good way to test your
Christianity tonight.
Do you honestly want all the light you
can get?
Or do you want this thing shaded down
and arranged to suit your whims and prejudices?
Did you ever walk across a field and
turn over a large stone, and the moment
the sunlight struck underneath, all the creeping and
crawling things began hurrying and scurrying for cover?
That's what happens to your heart when the
light of the world, Jesus, is turned on.
It makes you uncomfortable.
You don't know what's down in a dark
cellar until the light's turned on.
You don't know where all the lizards and
the snakes and the toads and all the
rest of it are until the light is
turned on.
And you don't know the state of your
heart until the light's turned on.
No wonder some people live in the world
all week and sit up Saturday night at
the late, late, late, late show and come
bug-eyed to church on Sunday morning and
wince.
They've got photophobia, fear of the light.
Our business as Christians is to let the
light shine.
Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of
darkness, but rather expose them, turn the light
on them.
Not merely in pulpit denunciation, although that has
a place, but by the contrast of godly
living.
I know the old proverb, better to light
a candle than to curse the darkness.
I know you can't shovel darkness out.
The only way you can get it out
of a room is to turn on the
light.
But there are some things that keep your
light from shining, and Jesus used such simple
illustrations.
He said one was a bushel and the
other a bed.
And he said, is your light tonight under
a bushel that cares of this world that
deceitfulness enriches that cares of this life?
I was with a pastor some time ago
in meetings.
We met one of his delinquent members down
the street, and the pastor asked him why
he hadn't been to them services.
And he said, well, you know, I've got
a business.
And I felt like saying, yes, you've got
another business, too, if you're a Christian.
If you don't have a turning to god,
you won't have any business one of these
days.
And then the bed, resting at ease in
Zion.
Oh, William Lowe used to say, who am
I to lie folded up in a bed
late of a morning when the farmers have
already gone about their work, and I'm so
far behind with my sanctification.
I love that.
That has refreshed me again and again.
I don't know how you feel about it
tonight, but I'm trying to admit I'm way
behind with my sanctification.
Stephen Alford and I have been in a
number of evangelistic conferences in the South.
That man, by the power of God, gets
people under conviction.
And at one time, I won't forget, a
flock of preachers out there that were flattened
by his preaching.
Terrific preaching.
One preacher told me, he said, I'm eliminating
certain TV programs and getting up earlier to
meet the Lord.
I can take it easy.
I'm at the age where I'm supposed to
be, on social security, in a rocking chair,
reminiscing about the good old days that weren't
so good, after all.
I can't take it easy.
And any preacher and any Christian who can
take it easy today is not worth a
salt in their bread.
I can't understand the preacher in good health
who quits preaching.
Boy, as long as I can get into
a pulpit, I'm going to keep it up
until they build a ramp to get me
up in there.
Because I've got something to say out of
the book, and so has any preacher.
And I don't intend to water it down.
There's no time to beat around the bush.
I don't have long to go.
When your money's running out, you better spend
the rest of it carefully.
When time's running out, same way, but you
may go before I go.
Time, the days are evil.
I started out in Western North Carolina as
a little boy, 12 years old.
Got up in the church when I was
11, asked them to license me to preach
the gospel.
Those year old farmers, I know you're not
to lay hands suddenly on anybody, but they
did it.
Said, believe the Lord's got his hands on
you.
First sermon I ever preached was over at
a place called Hickory.
They said, ladies, folks, if you'd like a
picture, come on.
I'm the Hick from Hickory.
That's my hometown.
They asked me to come over there and
talk.
I had their 100th anniversary not long ago.
My father, we were just country folks.
Oh, we were poor folks.
I didn't know much.
My, my, not only didn't know anything, I
didn't even suspect anything.
I remember they take us
in an old Ford over to Hickory, and
I will forget it.
Over to Hickory, I've been in bigger places
since.
Never been one that looked any bigger.
I look like a mile down to the
pulpit, and I went down there, and they
told me to stand in the chair, and
the pastor of the church stood on one
side, and the state evangelist stood on the
other.
And I did the best I could.
And I've been trying to do that ever
since, for 57 years.
Not all God ever asked anybody to do,
just be faithful.
And you can't get around that, friend.
It is required just that you be faithful.
Daddy used to go with me when I
was a little boy, and then when I
was able to go by myself, he'd meet
me and see me in that old blue
shirt suit.
Hadn't been pressed since the day he bought
it.
And I'd go up to him after I'd
get off the train.
He'd always ask me, how did you get
along?
It's been a long time.
Now, one of these days, I intend to
roll into glory.
And I expect to see him there, not
in the blue shirt suit, but in the
robes of glory, and I wouldn't be a
bit surprised if the first thing he'd ask
me would be, how did you get along?
And I'd say, well, thank you, because you
held up a stand.
All God ever asked you to do is
to be faithful.
Just let your light shine.
We're untouched by the need of our own
hearts in this world.
Spend more money for dog food and chewing
gum than for world missions.
Then you get that candle out from under
the bed at ease in a lazy and
different time.
Take that shade off.
You don't have to tell everybody you're a
Christian.
They'll catch on.
If you've got it, they'll catch on.
If you've got it, they'll know it.
You don't have to go around the great
big button, I'm a Christian carrying a Bible,
big as a Sears and Roebuck Capitol.
Just be one.
Let it shine.
We need to get our candles out from
under the bushel in the bed and take
off the shades.
This is the crisis.
But I warn you as a close friend,
watch it.
You good folks, you think maybe that you're
sort of the cream of the crop, make
it your church to depend, but watch it.
Good people today don't like to be reminded
of it, but unconsciously we're all being swayed
by the subtle trickery of this age.
You don't measure a thing these days by
what it is in itself.
You sound like a nitpicker if you mention
something today, and some folks don't want you
to mention anything.
Some say don't make that kind of separation.
I do.
It's always something that I notice, oh I
know that that's a symptom of the disease,
but you sometimes have to deal with symptoms
too.
And so whatever it is tonight, the devil
has a thousand devices to get you used
to the dark, and you think you're subordinate.
I've gotten over my period in this.
Now you can overdo this the other way
on a limb, but watch it.
We've never lived in a time as tricky
as this.
God grant that you may not get used
to the dark.