Let's look at the eighth chapter of Luke
a little bit, Luke, the eighth chapter.
Much people were gathered together, and they were
come to him out of every city.
He spake a parable, and here was the
parable.
He said a sower went out to sow
his seed, and as he sowed, some fell
by the wayside and was trodden down.
The plows of the air devoured it.
The wayside was a little path, a little
lane that went through the field.
It was beaten down, never was plowed.
And so, of course, when the seed that
fell there was trodden down by the passage
of the people's feet, the birds came along
and devoured it.
Some fell upon a rock, and as soon
as it was sprung up, it withered away
because it lacked moisture.
Some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang
up with it and choked it.
Others fell on good ground and sprang up
and bear fruit a hundredfold.
Then he said to them, Now whoever has
ears, let him hear.
The disciples asked him, saying, Lord, what might
this parable mean?
He said, I'm interpolating a little here, but
I think I'm giving the meaning.
He said, strange that you don't know, because
unto you it's given to know the mysteries
of the kingdom of God.
But to others I speak in parables that
seeing they might not see, and hearing they
might not understand.
I wrote something in the Lent Witness not
too long ago which I said that preacher's
illustrations were given to throw light and illustrate,
whereas many of the parables of Jesus were
given for the purpose of obscuring truth.
Presbyterians liked that all right, and they reprinted
it, but some other, at least one other
man, wanted to know how come.
Well, it's true, isn't it?
It says here, but to others I speak
in parables in order that seeing they might
see, and hearing they might not understand.
Deliberately, purposefully set here to shut out those
who were not prepared, not ready, and would
not come.
But he said, nevertheless, I will explain it.
He said, here it is.
The seed is the word of God.
Those by the wayside are they that hear.
They just hear.
Then comes the devil and takes away the
word out of their hearts, lest they should
believe and be saved.
Then they on the rock are they which
when they hear receive the word with joy.
These have no root.
For a little while they believe, and in
time of temptation they fall away.
Then thirdly, that which fell among thorns are
they which when they've heard go forth and
are choked with the cares and riches and
pleasures of this life, and they bring no
fruit to perfection.
And fourthly, those that on the good ground
are they which in an honest and good
heart, having heard the word, keep it and
bring forth fruit with patience.
Then he says in verse 18, Take heed
therefore how ye hear.
Whosoever hath to him shall be given, and
whosoever hath not from him shall be taken,
even that which he seemeth to have.
Now when the great God would bring salvation
to fallen men, he put it in the
form of a message, and according to Paul
over in the Corinthian epistle, he decreed that
men should be saved through preaching.
That is, they should be saved through hearing
that message.
We call that message the gospel.
And they heard a hear, and that was
to begin something in their lives.
Now what there was before that, we have
to leave to the theologians to quarrel about
prevenient grace.
That is, the grace that God brings to
their heart before they hear and before they
believe.
Prevenient, the getting ready grace.
I don't know too much about that, and
I don't think anybody else does.
So when you hear anybody expostulating on that
learnedly and at length, write him off, because
he knows more than the Bible reveals.
But there must be some preparation of God
in the heart, or there would be no
believing at all.
But on the other hand, there isn't enough
preparation to save the man, so he has
to hear something.
Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the
word.
Now shall they hear, except somebody preaches.
Now shall they preach, except they be sent.
So God proceeds according to known laws.
One of those laws is that men can
change.
They can change.
That's one of the laws of fallen life,
the fallen world.
Men can change.
They are not fixed.
They can change.
Concrete is set and cannot change.
There it is set, but the soul of
a fallen man is not so set and
settled.
He can be changed.
Now, that's one thing we've got to keep
in mind.
And you who are soul winners, and are
seeking earnestly, and sometimes not successfully, to win
people to God, you're having a hard time
with it, and little result.
Don't give up, because that person can change.
He is not fixed in his lost state.
He can change.
And then also, there is this law that
he can learn, and that he can change
by learning something, and he can learn by
hearing something.
And that which changes him, which he has
learned, comes to him through the preaching of
the scripture, particularly the gospel.
Now, that's there.
That's taken for granted throughout the Bible, that
the human race is a flowing, ebbing sea.
It's not a solid concrete ramp.
It is a growing, expanding, changing thing, and
that it'll go one way or the other,
and that if it hears the wrong thing,
it'll go the wrong way, and if it
hears the right thing, it can go the
right way.
That's there in the scripture as a basic
doctrine of the faith, that men can change,
that they can change by learning certain truths,
and those certain truths come to them as
a revelation from God.
Now, salvation is the divine human thing.
You can hyphenate those words, divine human, for
it is that.
So, redemption is a divine thing, and a
divine thing only.
Salvation is a divine human thing.
Now, I know that my brethren and friends
would back away from me right here, but
I'm preaching what I believe to be true,
not what I have heard somebody believe, and
therefore trying to please them.
I'm not doing that, but I'm saying that
redemption is a divine thing without any human
admixture at all.
When Jesus Christ became man and was joined
to human nature by the incarnation, and went
out to die on the cross, that was
a divine thing without any human element in
it.
He had by himself purged our sins, and
he sat down on the right hand of
God.
It is finished, he said, and he finished
it.
Not Peter there in the shadows, not John
there looking on pensively with tears, but he
finished it.
Redemption is a divine thing.
No hyphenation there.
God alone saves men and saves me by
redemption.
But salvation is a divine human thing.
That is, if I'm going to receive the
benefits of the divine redemption, there must be
a human response.
Now, that's so well known, and so widely
believed, that I scarcely need to develop it.
Redemption is a highly spiritual and divine thing,
and the working of redemption is too high
for me.
I cannot understand it, but our part is
human and understandable.
God makes salvation conditional upon our response to
a message, and that message is the message
of the cross, the message of redemption of
a dying and risen Lord.
And our faith in God's declaration of intention,
the thing God declares that he plans to
do, and will do if we believe, we
must have faith in that and make a
response to it.
Now, God is not going to do confirmatory
work.
Many believe that there ought to be a
confirmatory work done.
Oh Lord, if you want to save me,
do something unusual.
One man I knew said, Oh Lord, if
you were calling me, let that little bird
come sit on my shoulder.
Well, the birdie didn't come, and the man
went his way.
That's silly.
We want God to do some kind of
sleight of hand in order that we might
have the truth confirmed.
The truth has been confirmed.
When God raised his son from the dead,
and set him at his own right hand,
and sent the Holy Ghost as a confirmatory
witness, no further confirmation has ever been needed,
and is needed today.
But our eternal wheel of the world depends
upon how we hear.
Let he be said how you hear, because
there are at least four different kinds of
ears, ways of hearing.
Now, I don't think he shut it up
to four ways, but he did tell us
there were four different ways of hearing.
I don't think for a minute that we're
limited to four, because I think these are
capable of subdivision, and those subdivisions capable of
subdivision.
Just as when our Lord taught us to
pray, he said, When you pray, say, Our
Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy
name, and so on.
But he didn't mean that we were to
pray that prayer and no other prayer, and
he didn't mean that we were to begin
with Our Father and end with Amen, and
never pray anything outside that prayer.
That was a sample prayer, and that was
a comprehensive prayer, but it wasn't an exhaustive
prayer.
There is more to praying than that.
We know that by the fact that our
Lord himself prayed otherwise, and we know that
Paul prayed otherwise, and we know that Peter
and the rest of them prayed otherwise, but
that was a sample prayer.
And so, here in this story, we don't
have everything that can be said on this
subject, but we have a broad outline of
it, and within that broad outline we have,
then, it's possible to find ourselves.
Just as in the Lord's Prayer, it's possible
to pray a half an hour, to talk
to God for a half an hour, and
still be praying within the framework of the
Lord's Prayer, within the bracket of the Lord's
Prayer, though not actually repeating the words of
the Lord's Prayer over and over.
So he said, Now, salvation is the result,
or redemption is the result of what I
do, what God does, that is.
And salvation is the receiving of that redemption
by your response to it.
And you can only respond when you hear,
and you can only respond rightly if you
hear rightly.
Therefore take heed how you hear, because your
eternal wheel of woe depends upon your response.
Therefore take heed what your response is.
Look out how you hear.
Now, notice here, he said, I'm warning you,
be careful how you hear, because there are
at least four different kinds of hearers.
He said there are the hearers that are
like a willside, that is, they're like a
little path through a field.
The field has been plowed, but the path
has been gone around, and it's been beaten
down over the years, never plowed, left just
to lie there.
It gets rained on, and then sunbaked, and
then rained on again, and beaten down by
the feet of thousands of people.
And there you have a wayside.
That is, not a paved road, but a
beaten down highway side.
And he said some people, our Lord was
not like a lot of these theologians today.
Dr. Barnhouse went over to Germany, and he
went to see Karl Barth.
Not that he was a follower of Barth,
but he knew Barth was an important voice,
so he went to see him.
They were talking it over, and he said,
Dr. Barth, you're so hard to understand.
He said your writings are so difficult, so
hard to understand.
He said, did you never read that the
Lord said, feed my sheep?
He didn't say feed my giraffes.
He said, you put it way up there
where only a giraffe can get it.
Well, our Lord was feeding sheep, and sheep
reached down to get their food.
So it was so simple here.
He said, now you listen to me.
He said, remember, this is simple, almost childlike,
but heaven or hell may depend upon this.
He said, I've seen how some of you
listen to me, and you're like a wayside,
like a path.
And when my words fall on your ears,
words that could save you, they fall and
lie there.
A thing comes of it because it's hard,
it doesn't sink in.
Then I haven't got my back turned until
the devil comes and takes away the word
out of your heart, and then you don't
believe, and you're not safe.
I don't know but what great many of
us in a land like this have become
wayside hearers.
We hear, but we don't hear with any
response at all.
I suppose that there's hardly, let's illustrate, let
me see, how can we do it?
I suppose there's hardly a word in modern
politics that means less than the word freedom,
say.
Freedom, freedom, everybody wants freedom.
And the word peace, peace, everybody wants peace,
peace, peace.
There is no peace.
It's a sour joke down the states that
a scoundrelly politician will grab the star-spangled
banner and fling it across his shoulder and
start to hurry.
And he can talk for three quarters of
an hour and never say one lonely thing.
It's an art, it's a gift brother, it's
a gift.
Not everybody has it, so not everybody gets
elected.
But the ability to talk in cliches.
I won't talk about Canadians because they're mad
about the Americans at the moment, and so
let's keep friends about it, and be good
friends even if the politicians are glaring at
each other over the fence.
But I say about Americans, they'll talk about
our founding fathers, and freedom, and liberty, and
our way of life, and all that.
They can talk that right on for three
quarters of an hour, not say one lonely
thing, because they're using cliches that have no
meaning.
And I believe that in the church of
Christ, that's the reason that the churches have
to put on shows to get anybody to
come out.
It's because they have beaten down, they've been
beaten down into hard highways, waysides, and the
word of God falls on them, but it
falls on hard hearts, and they can't and
they won't change.
The devil takes the seed before Monday morning,
if there's any seed given.
So he said, now take heed how you
hear.
Watch this, because it's possible to hear the
good gospel of Christ, possible to hear men
talk about Jesus dying and rising, and all
of these beautiful words that mean nothing because
they have become conventional expressions, religious expressions.
And he said, I've noticed also that some
of you are like seed that falls on
the rocks.
Now that's not, don't think of a huge
rock, think of the little flat rocks that
are in fields.
My father used to take a stone boat.
Some of you old farmers ought to stone
boat in, and we'd take those out of
there.
But many of them didn't, and evidently they
didn't there.
And when the seed went over on a
rock, it had no soil, and yet there
it lay.
It was warm, and maybe a little rain
fell, and so it began to sprout immediately.
It says, they take up the word of
God with joy.
I'm always suspicious of the man who's too
easily converted.
Hear me, I'm always suspicious of the man
that gets converted too easily.
If he's too easily converted, chances are he'll
just be, is easily unconverted.
So they received the word of God with
joy, but they haven't any root.
You can't make a root on a rock,
they haven't any root.
And as soon as the sun comes up,
they die.
That's temptation.
Said with joy, these have no root, which
for a while believe, and in time of
temptation they fall away because they have no
root.
And he says there's a third.
These are they that fall among thorns.
They are the ones that go forth, they
hear and go forth, and then are choked.
How are they choked?
They're choked with cares and riches and pleasures
of this life, and so they never bring
any fruit to perfection.
Dear God, I wonder if we're awoke to
this.
Here are the thorns of Toronto, the thorns
of modern 20th century, the thorns of living
in a world like this.
What are those thorns?
Cares, oh the cares of life, the cares
and the riches.
Young couple, their eyes all aglow, they're going
to get married.
First couple that ever got married, to look
at them you'd think, and it's going to
be wonderful.
Heaven is going to come down their souls
to greet and glory, crown their mercy seat,
and from there on it won't be anything
but just glow, just glow.
They look at each other across the table
and glow.
It'll be glow, glow, all the time glow.
After a while Bill started coming in, and
after a while he comes home and finds
her knitting.
Then after a while, the little thing she
knit for her arrives with a pretty little
body and a mouth that could wake the
dead.
Anytime in the night, anytime, if she's been
reading the wrong book, she puts him on
a four-hour schedule.
A four-hour schedule means that dad gets
up every four hours and cares, cares.
And they find out that all that glow
and that glory and that romantic beauty, it
may still be there, but it's harder to
find now.
He hadn't time looking for it, baby's crying.
Cares of this life, cares.
Young fella says, I can just get that
job, I've made it.
And he gets the job, and after he's
settled down to the job, he finds that
there are a thousand things that he didn't
know was in that job.
Little nasty things to beat him down and
worry him, and send him to bed at
night full of cares and anxieties, and get
him up in the morning tired and tense
and full of anxieties to go off on
his work full of anxieties.
Cares and riches.
And if we listen to all four parties
here, and both two parties down across the
border, any one of them will bring in
the millennium.
Utopia.
Any one of them, all you have to
do, you know, is to give them a
glass of water in an audience, and he'll
lean back and give you the millennium right
there.
Well, then suppose we did get rich.
Suppose everybody did get rich, huh?
It says riches.
They're choked by riches.
You know, you can get your spiritual life
choked more on ten thousand a year than
you used to be able to do on
five thousand a year.
You can get your spiritual life choked more
on fifteen thousand a year than you can
on ten, and more on twenty than you
can on fifteen.
I get around some of these conventions and
summer camps, and I see some of the
middle-aged fellows.
They never put their shirt tails in.
They always let them hang, you know.
They're always flowers and birds and all these,
these shirts.
They just hang, and they appear, and they
come, and they sit and say amen and
listen, and they go row a while, and
they fish a while, and they lie around
on the sand a while, and then they
eat, and they lie around some more.
They're there.
They're there because they have the money to
get there, and they're never any good because
they're always on their way somewhere from somewhere
else.
I used to tell them down in Chicago,
in the summer you go to Canada to
fish, in the winter you go to Florida
to fish.
You only do that when you got money,
you know.
Fellow doesn't have the money, he just stays
and sweats.
Get out in the summertime and puts on
an extra coat in the Florida.
Cares of this life and riches and the
pleasures of this life, the pleasures of this
life.
Our Lord is talking here.
He's talking.
He says, I've noticed that some of you
are like patches of thorns, and the seed
filters down in among those thorns, and roots
in and starts to grow, and then the
thorns, because they were there first, they take
precedence over the new seed, and pretty soon
there isn't anything but the perfection.
And I think he smiled and said, but
I have noticed also that some falls on
good ground, and those that are good ground,
they in an honest and good heart hear
the word and keep it, and bring forth
fruit with patience.
Notice he said with patience, bring forth fruit
with patience.
We want our Christianity to go up like
a skyrocket.
We want them to go up like a
missile.
Countdown and away we go, with a burst
of steam and smoke and a roar, and
somebody's converted.
The Lord says you've got to be patient
if you're going to keep your soul.
So you see, there are different kinds of
hearers, and everything depends on what kind of
hearers we are.
The old Jews were faithless hearers.
They heard the word, but they did nothing
about it.
Israel heard the gospel, Paul said, in Romans,
but they did not believe the gospel.
It's possible to hear it and not to
believe it.
And there are the dull hearers.
Dull hearers, I don't know, I think we
might as well be honest about it, we
preachers, and admit that we make them dull
sometimes.
We say the same thing in the same
way, the same old clichés and the same
old conventional speech, until people get very, very
dull of hearing.
The dullness primarily is a result of a
failure to obey the truth.
If I get truth and don't obey it,
the second time that I go in for
truth I don't get as much, and the
third time I get less than I did
the second, and the fourth time I get
less than I did the third, and so
on.
The law of diminishing returns takes over, and
even though I'm hearing truth, I'm not getting
very much out of it.
And of course, there are always the critical
hearers, the ones that depend more upon the
grammar of the preacher on his delivery, or
his poor delivery, or good delivery.
And then there are the forgetful hearers that
James tells us about, that they hear the
word and it's like looking in a mirror
and forgetting what kind of man he was.
It doesn't say what kind of woman she
was, because women don't forget what they look
like, but men do.
They'll look in the glass, and then when
they walk away they forget what they look
like.
But James said that.
I didn't think of that.
James thought of it and said it.
Forgetful hearers.
God help us, brethren, help us.
Thousands of people in church tonight that are
more concerned over whether Russia or Canada won
the hockey game today than what the preachers
say.
And on the way home they'll not discuss
God, and they'll not discuss salvation, and they'll
not discuss heaven and hell.
They'll not discuss God's relation to them, nor
their relation to Christ.
They'll discuss whether the Canadian trailblazers, or whatever
they call them, won or whether Russia won.
Now, I'm not against hockey.
I never saw a game, but I wouldn't
mind looking if I had time.
I'm not against it.
I'm just saying that there are some things
that ought to take immediate priority and keep
that priority, so nothing matters but God.
Nothing matters but my relation to God.
And yet there are thousands of people who
will hear the gospel in gospel churches this
night, but they're forgetful hearers and neglectful hearers
and dull hearers, and they're not going to
do anything about it.
And I read also those trembling hearers in
the scriptures who trembled and ran in and
said, what shall I do to be saved?
And those blessed submissive hearers, they heard the
gospel, Cornelius's household.
He said, we're here before you.
Do you know what God wants to say
to us?
So they submitted themselves.
Ah, how precious is this little time of
probation, dear brothers and sisters.
How very wonderful is this little time of
probation that you and I have.
In the meantime, that mighty dynamic we call
redemption, that tremendous, awesome, awful, glorious thing that
has saved millions and is saving more and
will save more until the Lord returns and
judgment strikes.
That glorious redemption is still operative in the
world, still operative.
Out there is a little silver affair.
It looks like a huge tube of some
sort.
You look at it, you pass it by,
nobody thinks anything of it.
They pick it up with a crane.
It isn't very heavy, reasonably heavy, enough men
could lift it, but at the same time
they pick it up with a crane.
And then the day comes, I pray, to
God above that it'll never come, but the
day comes when the great nations confront each
other without mercy.
One of them will drop that little thing
in a city the size of Toronto.
They would probably, if they could pinpoint it,
pick out to, say, Yonge and Boer, or
maybe a little further north.
There it was, a little thing they'd pick
up with a crane.
Didn't amount to very much.
You'd pass it by and not know it
was there.
But when it goes off, everything's a cinder
from the lakefront to Willowdale.
They call that a hydrogen bomb.
There is in the gospel of Jesus Christ
infinite, limitless power, not to destroy but to
save.
He said, The Son of Man has not
come to destroy men's lives, the Son of
Man has come to save men's lives.
And there's as much power in a gospel
message as there is in a hydrogen bomb,
only it works backwards.
It works to save and to redeem and
to purify, whereas the other works to destroy
and to kill.
It all depends on what you're going to
do with it.
How precious is your little time, and how
long, long, long the future will be, and
how vital it will be.
Have you ever stopped to think?
Have you ever considered?
Have you ever let yourself think?
And say to yourself, I wish, I wish
that I could know, I wish about the
future, about tomorrow, and the next day, and
the next day.
The man said, What are you going to
do?
He said, I'm going to graduate from such
and such a university next spring.
Then what are you going to do?
He said, I'm going to go into business.
Then what?
Well, he said, I expect to make good
in that business.
What after that?
Well, he said, I expect to become president
of my company.
What after that?
I expect to have some estates, perhaps one
here in Canada when it's summer.
I expect to have another when it's cold.
I expect to...
What do you expect to do?
I expect to have a family.
But after that?
Well, I suppose I'll grow old like other
people.
After that?
Well, I expect to die.
After that?
He said, I don't get so personal.
I don't know.
What after that?
That's it.
What after that?
God help us, every one of us, all
of us, we Christians, and we unsaved, the
unsaved.
How precious is your little time of probation
that you have now, and how long the
future is going to be.
How sensitive, even though I've been saved many
long, long years, I sometimes think to die,
to go out with my sensitive, sentient being,
capable of feeling the most exquisite, awful anguish,
and to go out from this world, to
be laid away in my physical body, but
to go out from this world into darkness,
to be denied entrance into the presence of
God, to be sent out to spend a
long eternity with the Judases, and the Sauls,
and the Hitlers, and the Jack the Rippers,
and the Bluebeards.
You say, ah, but then I'm not that
kind of man.
No, but there's only one hell.
There's only one hell.
Though you might have been as moral as
could be, still if I die, if I
do, we die without Christ.
We die and take out our sensitive, conscious,
intelligent being into the world beyond.
Thank God for the gospel.
Thank God for the voice.
I said, now take heed how you hear.
There's a voice, a life-giving voice sounding
in the gospel.
Take heed how you hear.
Hear it right now.
Everything depends upon how you hear, said Jesus
our friend.
Thank God, he said.
Take heed how you hear, because the voice
is sounded.
It's sounding.
You're hearing it.
God help us.
What do we do?
You that are not saved, you that are
half saved, you that are allowing the cares
of this life to go up like thorns
around you, God help you.
Take heed how you hear.
We're going to sing in a moment.
We're going to sing again that number, the
old Terce Deegan number, God calling yet shall
I not hear, pleasure shall I still hold
dear.
But before we sing, we want to pray.
Let's pray.
Oh, our kind father, we thank thee thou
hast not left us.
In our sins thou hast thought of a
way for us.
Thou hast planted in Christ Jesus thy son,
our Lord.
Thou hast worked it out by blood and
tears and groans and death and the miracle
of resurrection and the wonder of ascension to
the right hand of the throne.
Thou hast sent the Holy Ghost to say
everywhere throughout the world, ye that believe on
him shall not perish.
Whoever calls on the name of the Lord
shall be saved.
Oh, we thank thee, heavenly Father.
Time is running out, and it's later than
we know, and then thou hast warned us
gently and carefully to be careful what we
do with this message.
Be careful lest we take too much for
granted, to be careful lest the devil get
the seed, lest the cares of life take
the seed, lest we be Christians only in
name and have a name that we live
but be dead.
My God, it would be better that we
should perish from the naked slopes of the
Baleen Valley and from the rich precincts of
Toronto.
Better that we should die pagans cutting off
the necks of chickens, to try to appease
some bestial God, than to die Canadians and
Americans and Englishmen and Scotsmen who heard from
their childhood this wondrous message, but have let
it go.
Oh God, what do we say to thee
in that time?
What answer can we have from the Baleen
naked, savage men smeared with pig grease and
clay, and stand up and say we never
heard it?
But who here can say it?
Oh God, we've heard it, and we've heard
it, and we've heard it until we're bored
with it.
God, forgive us.
Give us a new something, a new baptism
of interest, a new afflatus of fresh interest
in the things of the gospel.
Oh God, we pray that thou would help
the friends here tonight.
Lord, we pray for those who are well
saved, that they might become so keenly concerned
for others that aren't saved, that they would
continue to work for their salvation, hard and
struggle and pray and labor until one by
one they're gathered in.
Grant, we pray our God, that there may
be a harvest of souls at Avenue Road.
We're overdue, Lord, it's long overdue, but God,
we're not giving up.
We expect to see it.
We expect to see it farther.
We expect thee to give us a harvest.
We expect to see young people and brought
in and older people.
We expect to see the new faces and
hear new voices and see the travail of
thy soul, O Lord.
We expect this, because thou art God and
because Jesus Christ thy Son said, if we
wanted anything, ask in his name and you'll
give it to us.
Because that's why the gospel is being preached,
that's why we're here, so expect to see
it, God.
We don't believe that thou dost speak to
men vainly or say anything to anybody carelessly.
We believe that when thou dost make a
promise, that promise is as good as gold.
So we're expecting, Father, we're expecting thee to
do it.
O Lord, round the margins, our relatives, our
friends, our neighbors, people all around here that
are not here tonight, but they can be
here and they can be brought in and
they can be one.
We pray to you, O God, fall on
the churches, fall on this church, fall on
our people.
We pray with a new affluence of love
for men, that we may not depend on
the word from the pulpit only, but that
we might supplement that word with earnest soul
winning efforts.
Now, come on us, Father, we're looking for
help, O God.
Once more, we remind thee that we have
for this church a vision of a strong
Bible-based, morally right, solid, vigorous, active, loving
church that the people will feel when they
come in here that surely the Lord's in
this place of a truth.
The Lord may be slow, but we believe
it'll come.
Now, as I said first, the little sprout
and then the stalk and then the ear
and then the full corn in the ear.
So put us through those stages fast, Lord,
because we need the corn and we need
it fast.
We need it soon.
Pray, God, meet us for trusting thee.
We pray thee for any tonight that are
not committed, but the Holy Ghost has found
them somewhere.
They're among the rocks or on the wayside
or among the thorns.
The Spirit of God has found them.
We pray thee that they might come out
from there and be good ground and receive
the truth into honest hearts and bring forth
truth with patience unto perfection.
We ask this in Christ's name.
Now, let's sing this number, please.