John 14, beginning with verse 16, I will
pray the Father, and he shall give you
another comforter, that he may abide with you
forever.
Even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world
cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither
knoweth him.
But ye know him, for he dwelleth with
you, and shall be in you.
The world cannot receive the Spirit of Truth,
because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him.
Then in 1 John 4, 4
-6, Ye are of God, little children, and
have overcome them, because greater is he that
is in you than he that is in
the world.
They are of the world, therefore speak they
of the world, and the world heareth them.
We are of God.
He that knoweth God heareth us.
He that is not of God heareth not
us.
And herein, or nearby, know we the Spirit
of Truth and the Spirit of error.
Now, it would be hard to think of
it as being made any clearer than this.
Greater is he that is in you than
he that is in the world.
They are of the world, and talking about
the people who had the Spirit of Antichrist,
they are of the world, therefore speak they
of the world, naturally.
They speak out of their own hearts, and
the world heareth them, because it recognizes its
own language.
But then there is a sharp line drawn.
But we are of God.
He that knoweth God heareth us.
He that is not of God heareth not
us.
And by this you know the Spirit of
Truth and the Spirit of error, that along
with the verse quoted from John 14, the
Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive.
Now, the Christian faith, and this is very
hard to make clear because you fly in
the face of almost the total weight of
popular teaching, but the Christian faith teaches that
there is a complete antithesis, that is, a
complete flat contradiction between the world and the
true Church.
The two spirits here are sharply different from
each other.
You see, man is spirit by nature.
He is God-made in spirit.
He is spirit with a soul and a
body.
And out there in the world, the fallen
world, the spirit is fallen.
But inside the Church there is the Holy
Spirit and the redeemed spirit of man, and
there is a sharp difference between these two,
a difference that is incompatible with each other,
and they are not conformable to each other,
and they are hostile toward each other.
Now, I've prayed and I believe God will
help us to understand this, that there is
a division between the unregenerate world and the
Church which is incompatibility and non-conformability and
even hostility.
Between the spirit of the world and the
Spirit of Christ, there can only be forever
irreconcilable enmity.
It was that spirit in Jesus that the
world recognized.
Not the Roman world, but the religious world.
They recognized that spirit in Jesus, and they
recognized that it was their natural enemy, that
spirit, and so they rose up against Jesus,
and they crucified him because he had in
him a spirit which altogether apart from anything
he said and did brought hostility between them
and him.
And this, I say, is a very hard
thing to tell people because it's not what
we're hearing all the time, but it is
what the Bible teaches, and it is what
our religious fathers taught us, and it is
what the Puritans taught, and what the Church
fathers taught.
I refer first to the fathers such as
the Methodists and Baptists and the rest, but
now I refer to the early Church fathers.
Now, this antithesis, this flat and violent contradiction
between two spirits accounts for all of the
persecution that has ever taken place down the
years.
He that is born once always persecutes the
man that is born twice.
We find that Abel, the man who was
born twice, was persecuted by his brother and
finally slain because he was only born once.
Come on over to Esau and Jacob, and
Jacob, though he was a scoundrel by disposition,
he was born twice.
And there was hostility between those two men,
and back of that a little, there was
Esau and Jacob, hostility between them.
He that is born of the flesh persecutes
him that is born of the Spirit.
You hear this, my friends.
This is what the Lord says, and now,
acting on orders from our risen Lord, every
minister ought to, and I do this night,
offer redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ,
the Lord, with the provision that those who
hear the offer turn from the ways of
the world and turn unto the Lord Jesus
Christ and commit themselves to him, to follow
him.
And there can be no compromising the two,
we ought to remember that.
There can be no reconciling ever, or reconciliation,
between the two spirits, the spirit that was
born once and the spirit that is born
twice, the man who was born of the
flesh and the man who was born of
the Spirit.
This has almost been lost from the Church,
but it was the stock and trade of
such men as Spurgeon and others that we've
almost lost it in our day.
We don't attempt to make our faith acceptable
to the wisdom of the world, or to
society in general.
We admit no necessity to make our religion
acceptable to them, or so to have what
they call now the dialogue.
That's a lovely little expression.
We have what we call the political dialogue
and the religious dialogue.
Dialogue is two fellows talking, but that doesn't
sound learned enough, so we call it now
the dialogue.
One man said once, and he thought he
was saying something terribly bad about the Alliance
Witness, he said, outside of the editorials, the
Alliance Witness is not engaging in the religious
dialogue.
Well, of course not.
We're a magazine devoted to foreign missions and
the deeper life and the exalting of Jesus
Christ, and we're not talking to some unbeliever
to try to achieve a compromised position.
We won't compromise our position.
We're not engaged in dialogue, we're engaged in
declaration, which is something else again.
So we don't admit there's any necessity for
us to try to smooth things over so
that we will make our Christianity acceptable to
the world.
First, we know it can't be done, and
second, we know that we don't need to
do it.
Now, the world spirit, they of the world,
they of the world have a spirit, and
they've been baptized into that spirit.
And that spirit is a fallen spirit, and
it's an alienated spirit, alienated from God, and
it's evil, and it's blind.
And the God of this world blinds the
minds of the unbeliever, and it's full of
vanity, and hypocrisy, and stubbornness, and lies, and
pride, and lust, and all the rest.
So the world can't receive the spirit of
Christ whom the world cannot receive.
And when you hear anybody saying that God
is going to pour his spirit out upon
all humanity, you know that they're wrong, because
the scripture says the world cannot receive the
spirit.
He pours his spirit out and makes him
available to all flesh.
But even when the Holy Spirit was poured
out at Pentecost, he was only poured out
to the 120 who were prepared.
The rest did not receive because they were
not prepared to receive.
The world can't receive.
It takes a work of God in their
heart to enable anyone to receive this new
spirit, this spirit which is of God of
which John talks, you know.
John said, You're God, little children, and he
that is in you is greater than he
that is in the world.
They that are in the world, of the
world, therefore speak they of the world, and
the world hears them.
We're of God, but he that knoweth God
heareth us.
You see the bigotry here?
If you talked like this now, they'd say
that's bigotry.
That's bigotry.
No, that's not bigotry, that is simply knowledge.
You know what family you belong to.
Your name is Jones, and you belong to
the Jones family.
It isn't bigotry for you to say, My
father was Christopher Jones, and my mother Mary
Jones, and my name is Jones, I'm Ed
Jones.
That's not bigotry, that's simply you know it's
fact.
And so when we know that we have
a spirit that is from God by the
new birth, by the blood and the fire,
it isn't bigotry to say we know that
we are of God.
But you're not supposed to be sure of
that now in this day.
We are supposed to try to harmonize everything
and get everybody together and work out of
the general religious situation a common pattern that
will please everybody.
But this is not the way God has
it, for the world cannot receive this Holy
Spirit.
They can't understand, the man who hasn't been
regenerated can't understand the simplest thing.
He can't understand repentance, he doesn't know what
it means.
And he can't understand faith, he has no
conception of what faith means.
He can't understand the new birth, he calls
it joining the Church.
He says, I want to join the Church.
He doesn't know what it is to be
born of the Spirit and of the water
and washed in the blood.
He doesn't know what redemption means.
He's all excited at Christmas because the angel
said, I bring you good tidings.
He's all excited at Easter because Lent is
over, and the spring is coming.
But the fact is, he doesn't know what
this is.
The world cannot understand Christ.
He says in John 6.44, No man
can come to me except the Father draw
him.
Now, I want you to hear that.
No man can come to me except the
Father draw him.
And he says in verse 45, But every
man that hath heard and hath learned of
the Father, he cometh to me, everybody that
heard and learned.
The Spirit teaches inwardly, then men can come.
There must be an illumination from heaven when
Peter said, Lord, thou art the Son of
God.
Or Lord Jesus said, Blessed are you, Peter,
because nobody taught you this except my Father
which is in heaven.
Any religious truth that you pass on from
one to the other is passed on from
one mind to another mind.
But there is an illumination from heaven.
There is that Spirit which is in men.
The men of the world cannot feel the
depths of their own heart's sin.
If a man commits murder, and he confesses
he committed murder, or he embezzles and confesses
he embezzled, any sin, we confess, I did
that.
But always we excuse ourselves inside for having
done it.
There is an excuse, always an excuse.
But the Holy Spirit alone can enter and
make the depths of our hearts' sin real
to us.
When he has come, he will convict the
world of sin and of righteousness and of
judgment.
Now, hear me, nobody can repent until he
knows the depths of his own sin, and
nobody can know the depths of his own
sin unless the Holy Spirit shows him.
Nobody can repent properly until the Holy Spirit
shows him.
And the man out of Christ can't understand
the divine communion.
Church membership is simply a getting together, two
or a lot of people getting together.
It isn't very much above the ordinary lodge
meeting or coffee clutch.
It's nice people who have interest in the
same things meet together and chat about the
same things, and maybe they will mumble a
little prayer before they leave, or when they
get together, or just before or just after
their coffee, sir.
It's harmless enough, and I'm not against it
if I were thirsty for coffee, but the
point is that that's not Christianity, and that's
not communion, and that's not the fellowship of
the Holy Ghost.
I believe in the communion of saints.
What do we mean by this?
We mean that there is a fellowship that
is in the Spirit which lifts those who
enjoy it way out of and above and
beyond the natural fellowship, things that are of
nature.
But you know, while the world cannot understand
communion, and while the world knows nothing of
the depths of its own sin, yet God
has his elect.
He has them, always he has them, and
these elect of God, they're not morally better
than other people by nature.
God doesn't select people who have a religious
bent.
Now, let's get that out of our head.
Some people have a religious bent, they say.
Some have a poetic bent.
Some have a musical bent.
Some have an artistic bent.
Some people can paint pictures and make them
look very natural and very beautiful, even though
they've never taken any lessons.
Others can sit down to a piano, and
I had a sister, I don't think she
ever took a lesson.
If she did, it was only at school
in the early grades, and she could simply
make a piano, stand up and beg for
mercy, because she had an inner to do
it.
I think she was the only one in
the family that had, at least none that
I know ever had it, but she had
it.
She had a bent in that direction.
Some old hormone come floating down the stream
and landed on her.
Missed me, missed my brothers, missed my sisters,
but got on her.
That's a musical bent.
Some have a poetic bent.
But there's no such thing as a religious
bent, or if there is, it isn't what
God's talking about.
Some people are by nature religious, and I
wouldn't doubt that there are some people by
nature religious, but that isn't what God's talking
about.
The religious bent is not what's meant here.
The man God finds and elects and saves
and gives of his illumination and of his
spirit is not necessarily morally better than the
other.
I don't think that Jacob was morally better
than Esau.
I don't think so at all.
And I don't think that David was morally
better than Saul.
I don't know about Abel and Cain.
They had the same parents, and they had
no heredity at all.
There was no line that they went back
to anywhere.
They started from scratch.
Parents were the same two people.
Their parents had no parents, and so they
had nothing to inherit.
They were two people who didn't inherit anything,
except directly from their parents, so they must
have been very much alike.
But there had happened something to them inside
of them, and that was what mattered.
One of them inside of him was an
unregenerate man, and his spirit was the spirit
of the world.
The other man, somehow by some mystery of
God, had found a new birth, and that
inside of him was the spirit of God.
And so they were at a source point,
one with another.
They couldn't get along, and yet I don't
think that Abel ever quarreled with Cain.
But Abel's offering was accepted, and Cain said,
that bigot, I'll get him.
He won't engage in a dialogue.
He says he knows God.
He says when he offers a lamb, God
accepts a lamb, and I don't like that.
And so he took him out and killed
him.
They were two brothers, but they were two
spirits nevertheless.
Contrary spirit, contrary the one to the other.
Now, who are these?
Who are these?
Who is this Abel?
Who is this Jacob?
Who is this David?
Who are these that in the midst of
a fallen world manage somehow to get through?
They are they that are touched, touched in
the right sense.
The whole God lays his hand upon a
man, and God calls a man, and they
hear, and God speaks and rouses them, and
they wake, and God enlightens them, and God
moves upon them.
This makes a Christian, this that makes a
Christian.
He hears a message declared.
He may hear it in Sunday school, or
from the pulpit, or read it in a
tract, or read it in the Bible itself.
He may hear it in a testimony, but
he hears that God is calling him.
And so, that touch of God comes upon
him.
He hears that call.
My sheep hear my voice, he says.
My sheep know my voice, and they follow
me.
But a stranger they do not hear.
Blessed are they, for they shall find mercy,
said Jesus, and theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.
These, these strange ones.
You know, if you're a Christian, you're something
of a miracle.
Do you know that?
If you're a Christian, you're something very odd,
indeed, if you're a Christian.
Isn't this odd-sounding talk for a man,
in this day when you can't tell Christian
from sinner, a half-saved Christian from a
half-saved sinner?
You can't tell one from the other, and
everybody runs together, and there's little distinction?
Isn't this a strange situation?
Always down the centuries, armies had uniforms, and
they wore those uniforms.
Down there they had the blue and the
gray, the blue and the gray.
And in the wars, First and Second World
War and Korean War, mostly they knew each
other by their uniforms.
But because in recent times what little traces
of morality there may be in war, has
even gone out of war during the Second
World War, some took the uniform of the
other side in order to infiltrate and get
past the lines wearing the uniform of the
other side, intermingling and mixing.
Instead of the lines being tight between Canadian
soldiers and Nazi soldiers, between American soldiers and
Japanese soldiers, instead of the lines being drawn
tight, they intermingled because they of the other
side took our uniforms and came in.
And many a man died because he walked
up innocently to a man wearing his uniform
with his own insignia on it.
He thought it was his own man who
died because he had been trapped and betrayed
by the other side.
And there was a day when the church
and the world were separated so they at
least knew where they stood.
And the world didn't like the church and
began to try to kill them off, but
the old man said, the blood of the
martyr is the seed of the church, and
he said there's no use to kill these
Christians because every time you kill one, three
others spring up, you might just as well
save yourself the butchering.
So they quit trying to kill them and
set about wooing them.
And when they stopped trying to kill them
and began to woo them, they won.
Today the world isn't trying to kill us
Christians, it's trying to make us harmless by
pulling our claws and our teeth and turning
us into harmless tabby cats that purr by
the fireside while the world goes to hell.
The world passes by and says, what pretty
kittens they are, but we'll lie there harmless.
God means that you and I should have
the life of God in us and that
we should have it there as the spirit
within us, and that the world should know
that and that there should be a division.
And if you're having trouble in your work
where you're working, if you're having trouble, don't
you let it bother you at all.
It's a good thing that you're having trouble.
Don't you let anybody tell you that you're
fanatic or that you're wrong.
If you're living for Christ and you fellas
that aren't living for Christ are making it
hard for you, thank God every night when
the whistle blows that you were counted worthy
to suffer for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake.
And remember, you have not resisted under blood
striving against sin.
I've not seen anybody running around here with
scars.
Somebody may sneer at you, but what's the
difference about that?
It's not nice, nobody likes it, but what's
the difference?
Well, my sheep know my voice and they
follow me.
Our Lord is coming back, and when he
comes back, he'll come back for his sheep.
And there will be many sheep running around
or goats running around with sheep's clothing, but
the funny part about it is the goat
doesn't know the shepherd's voice.
The sheep know the shepherd's voice, and when
they hear the sound of the voice, they'll
start up.
And the goats will say, where do they
think they're going?
Well, they're going up to meet the shepherd
because they recognize the shepherd's voice.
They listen to the voice down here, and
they listen to the voice up there.
But the goat doesn't know the shepherd's voice.
I shall not insist tonight, I'll let it
go, and not insist because I believe the
Spirit of God knows what he's doing.
But upon these that have had the change,
upon these that have had the infusion of
the Spirit, God makes his great bestowal, his
great bestowal.
My sister Mildred, who is a little older,
a little younger than I am, four years
younger, she was a nice, good-looking spitfire
of a girl.
She and I fought.
They used to pull her hair, my mother
told me to quit it.
And she had it coming, and she wasn't
converted.
I got converted, Mildred didn't, and she wasn't
the kind that got converted easy.
Stick her jaw out and you couldn't do
much with her.
But she got the hearing about the Lord's
return.
One night she went to bed, and she
fell asleep.
She dreamed a dream, and the dream was
that the Lord had returned for his people.
And our mother, who was not yet converted,
according to this dream, stretched her hands up
and tried to go because there were other
people going.
My sister in her dream saw other people
being taken up like a magnet, drawing pieces
of iron to be with the Lord.
And my mother couldn't go.
Oddly enough, my sister was so grieved because
our little mother had failed to be ready
for the Lord's coming, and she woke up
so grief-stricken and so badly frightened that
she jumped right out of bed, kneeled right
down, didn't wait even to put a robe
on, right down beside the bed she got,
gave her heart to Jesus Christ and was
soundly converted.
And that's been 40-some years ago, and
Mildred is still serving God.
Pastor Brother Pennington told me a year or
so ago, I'd like to tell you something
about your sister, Mrs. Ling.
He said, She has been my right-hand
man.
He said, I've counted on her prayers, I've
counted on her counsel, I've counted on her.
That's been a long, long time ago, for
she was only, I think, a teenager at
that time.
She's had her family now, and they're grown
-up jazz grandchildren, but she's still living close
to God.
She used to write me occasionally and warn
me, now don't let anything people say about
you puff you up, now don't let anything
puff you up.
I'd get those letters, and now watch it,
watch it, don't get puffed up.
I gave her the idea, I could be
puffed up, but mostly what I got wouldn't
puff anybody, deflated.
But she'd say, don't get puffed up.
Now, that was Mildred.
The point is, some don't believe the Lord's
coming like that, but Mildred did and got
converted over it.
When anybody gets converted over something that isn't
so, I can't figure it, but anyhow, she
did.
I never had a dream like that, so
don't think I'm a dreamer.
Behold, this dreamer cometh, not me.
I never had any dreams like that.
God never honored me with a dream.
I had to always figure things out for
myself.
But the Spirit of God finds these and
gives them the great bestowal.
It's something you have and that the worldly
people just don't have at all.
They just don't have it.
Even though they're good people, they don't have
it.
And charming people, and they take you into
their home and treat you graciously, treat you
so you'll feel ashamed that they're so kind
to you, and they'll smile and look starry
-eyed and try to look past you and
try to get what you're talking about.
But they don't.
The great bestowal hasn't come to them, whom
the world cannot receive.
You see, it's a great mistake to think
that everybody in the world is a scoundrel.
Evangelists, and maybe I've been guilty of myself
in that sometimes, of making out, unintentionally making
out, that the dividing line between the world
and the Church, sinners and Christians, is a
dividing line between all the good people and
the rapists and dope fiends and embezzlers and
liars and cheaters and murderers, and over on
the side of the lost, we put the
murderers and the embezzlers and the rapers, we
put them all over here, and we leave
the impression that over on the other side,
there's the nice people, and there's the converted,
there's saved people.
That isn't so at all.
See, there are many kinds of lost people.
There are lost people who rape and embezzle
and murder and rob banks and shoot guards.
There are those kinds.
Then there are the gentlest, kindest, friendliest, most
cultured lost people, and those people will invite
you into their home and treat you beautifully,
and they'll remember Christmas and they'll do all
nice things for you, but they are of
the world, little children.
But the Christian is one who has been
by a bestowal of a gift of God,
eternal life in the Spirit.
He belongs to a different race altogether.
He's a different person.
He belongs to a different race.
It's a new race.
It's the new creation.
The world cannot receive, not even the good
world can receive, not even educated world can
receive.
Not even the cultured world can receive.
Kind people, but they can't receive, and they
can't receive because they have another spirit.
It's the spirit of the first Adam, and
not the spirit of the second Adam or
the last Adam.
It's the spirit of Adam, and not the
spirit of Christ.
It's the spirit that fell, and not the
spirit that was restored.
You see, there's the dividing line.
My longing, my dream, my hope for Avenue
Road Church is that we shall become a
company of ransomed ones, all of us.
A company who have the second spirit, the
new spirit, the spirit of the shepherd that
knows the shepherd's voice.
This new spirit of Christ comes to the
souls of men.
The dear world out there, the friendly world,
they listen to us talk, and maybe they
think what we talk about is ridiculous, and
so they're amused, of course.
Maybe they think it's meaningless, and so they're
bored with it.
Maybe they think it's offensive, and so they're
insulted by it.
And maybe they don't make any response at
all.
They're the hard ones to deal with.
If you're trying to be a soul winner,
the man who asks you every kind of
question, you don't have to worry about him.
The man who glares in your eyes, nose
to your nose, and tells you off, don't
worry about him, he'll be back.
But the fellow that looks with glassy eyes
and has no reaction at all, he's the
hard fellow to deal with.
The glassy-eyed fellow that nods and smiles
but doesn't know what you're talking about, he's
the hard one.
But there's that spirit, and then there's this
blessed Holy Spirit.
And the Christian groups are those who are
anointed with the spirit of Christ, that new
spirit of the regenerate world, that spirit that
will sometime take over and fill all the
universe, the blessed spirit of God through Christ
and in Christ, imparted to the spirit of
men that the world cannot receive.
I will pour out my spirit, but the
world cannot receive.
God grant that we, through holy living and
humility and repentance and penitence and obedience and
faithfulness and cross-carrying, may grow into a
company upon whom the spirit can rest.
It can rest as the dark, it can
rest as the cloud and fire rested upon
Israel.
Now, there is a song which I want
you to join in singing, if you will,
please.
It's a song a generation old, a generation
and a half old, and I want you
to believe it while you sing it.
Believe it as we sing all four stanzas
in the choruses.
Believe it and quiet your heart before him
while your voice is singing, and let's expect
him to do something that we've wanted so
long.
All right.