And it still has as much meaning for
all who listen as it had when it
was written.
It's found in the tenth chapter of the
Book of Proverbs, verse 22.
So, the blessing of the Lord, it maketh
rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it.
Now you can understand this without any strain
or any great heroic effort of the mind.
The blessing of the Lord, whoever has it,
is rich, and here is one man who
is rich without having any sorrow added to
his riches.
That's what it says there, and as I
said this morning, the text is from God's
word, and then the commentary on the text
is what the preacher says about it.
Brother Readhead says that the text is what
God said, and the sermon is what the
preacher thinks God meant.
A little bit cynical, maybe, but I think
there's some proof in it.
So I want to talk tonight about the
blessing of the Lord, and what it is
and what it means to us, and how
it leaves no bad aftertaste.
And the man who wrote this text was
an old man, and he was rich, or
had been rich, one of the richest men
in the world and one of the wisest.
And yet when he was to leave behind
him something for the ages, he doesn't clothe
it in language that you have to have
two lexicons in the dictionary to get the
meaning of.
He says very simply that a man who
has God's blessing on him is a rich
man, and that he'll never have any regrets
or any sorrows as a result of that
kind of riches.
The man was dying, an old man, that
is, he was as long toward the end,
and he had been a very learned man
and somewhat of a genius, and was known
widely around the world as such a genius,
great thinker, great writer.
And a young pastor was asked to go
to see him, and the young pastor girded
up his loins and decided that if he
wanted to talk to that man, he was
going to have to really climb the heights
of intellectual accomplishments.
So they sat down, and the old man
said to the young pastor, Read to me.
So he began somewhere, I've forgotten where, and
he started to read something heavy.
The old gentleman interrupted him and said, No,
no, no, don't read that.
He said, Read this.
Let not your heart be troubled.
Ye believe in God, believe also in me.
He said, Read that.
So the young pastor, quite astonished, went on
and read the Fourteenth of John to him.
Now, that's how I feel about this.
Here was an old man, Solomon, and he
had lived it up in his day, as
you know.
He had plenty of everything, and time was
running out on him, and he was writing
up his proverbs.
And you can read those proverbs without ever
having gone beyond the seventh grade, the sixth
grade, the fifth grade, maybe.
You'll find wonderful truth here, though.
And I'll tell you a nice thing about
this text, is the man who wrote it
wasn't putting sour grapes into print.
So many of us who've never been anywhere
or seen anything or had anything, we condemn
it because we're jealous of it.
You know the old story of the sour
grapes.
The fox jumped and jumped and couldn't get
the grapes, and walked away saying, Well, they
were sour anyway.
And we want something and don't have it,
and we condemn it.
But this man wasn't like that because he'd
had it.
He said he'd had it, and he'd had
it in more than one way.
He'd had it in the literal, proper way,
and he'd had it in a slang way.
He'd had it.
He'd watched the drama of humanity, for he
had taken time out from his eating and
drinking and listening to the music and watching
the dancing maidens.
He'd taken time out to do a little
heavy thinking, too, and particularly he'd observed a
lot.
He'd observed the long parade of humanity marching,
and he'd observed the drama that no poet
ever wrote, but the drama that man writes
himself, the drama of history and humanity.
He'd observed it, and he'd seen his friends
come up and go down, and he'd looked
in his own heart and noticed how empty
it was.
And so he said, The blessing of the
Lord, that maketh rich.
Now, what is this blessing of the Lord?
Well, the blessing of the Lord.
Now, I suppose that if I were reading
this without the benefit of the rest of
the Bible, I wouldn't know exactly what the
man of God had meant.
But when you allow the rest of the
Bible to be a commentary on this, then
I well know what it means.
It began back there when God said to
Abraham, Abraham, come out of thy country and
thy kingdom and come into a new place
that I will show thee, and I will
bless thee and make thy name great, and
so on.
It began there and it's gone all down
the years.
The blessing of the Lord is simply to
stand in the right relationship to God, in
full covenant relationship to God.
It is to be an heir of the
Almighty.
It is to be an heir of the
Almighty.
Every once in a while you will see
a picture of a young fellow or girl
in the newspaper, and they will say that
he or she is an heir.
This is an heiress.
She is the heir to the thus-and
-thus fortune.
She is an heir to the great onion
fortune, or she is an heir to the
great Woolworth fortune.
Somebody has made a lot of money, and
this is the little chick that's going to
get it after they're gone.
That's what it means to be an heir.
It means to stand in relationship to somebody
in such a way that everything they have
is yours.
Everything they have finally comes down to you
and you possess it.
That seems to be the teaching of the
Bible.
Children of the Heavenly Father, says the little
Swedish song, children of the Heavenly Father, they
have it all.
They have the care of the Father over
them, and they are heirs of God and
joined heirs with Jesus Christ.
That's what it means.
It means to stand in right relationship to
God through Jesus Christ the Lord.
It means to be named in the will
of God in the New Testament through the
work of Christ on the cross.
That's what it means, the blessing of the
Lord.
And then this blessing of the Lord, let's
look at it for a little bit, this
standing in right relationship to God through Christ.
It's the greatest possession that anyone can have,
because it's eternal and because nobody can take
it away from you.
If all you have and what you trust
in can be taken away from you again,
you'll never quite be restful because it might
easily be taken away from you.
The blessing of the Lord, nobody can take
it away from anybody, because the riches of
God can't decay.
Peter said, Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath begotten
us again unto a living hope by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto
an inheritance eternal, immortal, incorruptible.
And these incorruptible riches of God, they are
eternal and they are incorruptible, and nobody can
take them away.
Everything can decay.
There isn't anything, they tell me, that smells
quite as bad as a decayed lily.
And there isn't anything that is quite so
pathetic as an old house that families have
lived in, and now it has all gone
down and the roof has blown partway off,
and you'll go inside and the dust of
ages or centuries rises, and you look about
you and you see, I was in one
of them over in the state of Pennsylvania,
where I was born and brought up.
My old friends there, they'd long gone.
A man I knew had been found dead
at the edge of the woods, and the
woman had long gone, and the only boy
had moved away to the city.
There was the old house, and I went
in.
It was standing empty.
I went upstairs and downstairs and looked it
all over, and there's nothing there but memories,
nothing.
They had been there, but they were gone.
Everything about there was evidence of decay, and
that pungent smell that is in an old
house that's been lived in and hasn't been
lived in for a long time, that the
various rodents and birds and various little things
that creep and crawl have made themselves at
home.
There it is, decay.
Well, there's riches that cannot be.
There are riches.
Now, I'll mix that all up because I'm
thinking of it in the singular, really riches,
and I'll probably not be able to unsort
it as I talk, but you'll understand I
know better even if I do make the
mistake.
But the riches of God here, they don't
get old on you, and you can't burn
them.
When I was a boy of ten years
old, our house caught on fire and burned
to the ground.
There wasn't anything left at all of it,
not anything left but a smoking chimney standing
there, and I was quite a little hero.
I took my little brothers and sisters and
took them down safe and kept them there
like a mother over her chicks until the
final thing, my mother and father had got
home and things had gotten under control.
I remember that part about it, you know,
a man would, a kid would.
But everything was burned down.
There wasn't anything left.
We didn't have anything, not anything except the
clothes we had on, burnt.
And whatever you have, whatever you have that
can burn, brother, you are not sure you
have it at all.
I don't disturb anybody, but you don't even
know your house is there now, because things
burn, and it hasn't taken very long.
Then there are two words I want you
to hear.
One is depreciate, and the other is devaluate.
Those two words, and they will wreck everything
we have.
There's that word depreciate, I think, of the
woman who went and said that she had
understood that there was a higher depreciation on
X brand of automobile, and she said, that's
good enough for me, and she bought it.
But the poor woman didn't know that depreciation
was nothing she wanted.
Depreciation was what she didn't want.
The thing depreciates, that is, it goes downhill
and loses its value.
It's worth $3,400 today, and two years
from now it's worth $2,200 and on
down.
That's depreciation.
Then there's devaluation.
Do you know what that means?
Remember back in the days of Herbert Hoover
right after the First World War, when the
German mark went so low that you would
take a whole basket of it to get
a loaf of bread?
They actually literally did it.
They came to the stores with baskets of
German marks, because they had been devaluated to
a point where they were not worth anything.
That's what happens to everything and the glory
of man and everything that we have.
It just goes like that, you know.
Sick transit, they say.
So it passes, and it amounts to nothing.
But the blessing of the Lord, it maketh
rich, and there isn't anything there to decay,
nor to burn, nor to deteriorate, nor depreciate
or devaluate, and there's no sick transit around
there because it doesn't pass.
It stays.
Then another thing is that Satan can't rob
a Christian of anything that really riches.
Satan can't take away.
The devil goeth about as a roaring lion,
seeking whom he may devour.
And if he can't devour you, he'll devour
everything of yours that he can.
But if you're standing in full relationship to
God, the devil can't rob you of that,
because that's yours.
What God wants to know is how much
you have after all of the exterior trimmings
have all been taken away.
When I was a young fellow, about 18,
19, 17 or 18 years old, another chap
and I went for a long trip by
canoe down the waterways of the state of
Ohio, and we had our rifles with us
and all sorts of things.
I remember that one day we didn't pay
attention to game laws at all, and we
decided that we'd like to have some game
deeds.
So I drew a bead on, or one
of us did, I don't remember which one.
It doesn't make any difference, we were all
shooting around.
Anybody drew a bead on a duck and
shot, and the duck turned over, as he
properly should have done under the circumstances.
We went and retrieved him and brought him
in, and he was a pretty big-looking
duck.
Now, I say he, I don't know exactly
whether it was a he or a mama
duck, but it was a duck.
We went to work on it, my friend
and I, and I remembered how my mother
did it.
She heated some water and dipped the birds,
and then the feathers came off.
And do you know what happened?
We dipped the bird and the feathers came
off, and there wasn't anything much but feathers.
It was what they called the mud hen.
Now, if any of you know what a
mud hen is, you know what I mean.
The bird wasn't much bigger, if any bigger,
than the pigeon, but sitting out there in
the water it looked as big as a
mallard.
It was a huge thing.
We thought, what a hunk of meat we'll
have, and we didn't have enough.
As I recall, we threw it away.
But what I mean is, it was a
hypocrite, and it ought to have been shot,
because it had them.
It was telling everybody, look what I have.
All right, all you got's feathers.
You haven't got duck enough to write home
about.
You're just full of feathers, or rather feathers
all around you.
Now, if you could know how little we
are, how small the average fellow is.
Look at this fellow down here.
He lives in a big house with four
entrances and nine bathrooms and people to push
around.
But if you know that when God trims
him down and takes the feathers off, he
isn't a very big duck, I tell you
mostly.
Pretty small potatoes.
You'll excuse the metaphor when I say this.
But God wants to know how much you've
got left and how big you are after
you've been all plucked.
He did that with Job.
Job was a great fellow.
Have you ever noticed in the book of
Job, particularly in the 29th chapter of the
book of Job, what a proud fellow he
was.
He said, I used to be back in
the days of my glory before the depression.
He said, My candle shined upon
my head, and when by God's light I
walked through the darkness as I was in
the days of my youth, when the secret
of God was upon my tabernacle, I washed
my steps with butter and rock, poured out
rivers of oil.
When I went out to the gate through
the city, when I prepared my seat in
the street, the young men saw me and
hid themselves, and the aged rose and stood
at attention.
The princes refrained from talking and laid their
hand on their mouths.
That's what you call a VIP.
And all those held their peace, and their
tongues cleaved to the roof of their mouth.
They said, Everybody, here comes Job.
Well, when God was through with Job, there
wasn't anything left.
Even his family left him and his wife
left him.
She never came back, thank God for that,
I don't know.
She said, Why don't you commit suicide?
He said, You're no good anyhow.
Now, I've always told you that.
And there he was, scraping himself with oil.
His wife said, Curse God and die and
get it over.
He said, You foolish woman.
He said, Did I come into the world
naked, and I'm going out the same way,
blessed be the name of the Lord.
He lost his pride and got back.
God wanted Job to know how much there
was left, and I'll tell you, there was
quite a bit of Job left after the
feathers were off.
And God wants to know how much of
us is left after they've taken everything away.
Well, now look at some of the false
riches that people have.
Popularity, that is one.
People are, I say in the United States,
because I wouldn't say this about my friends
here, you've been too nice to me.
But down there, popularity is a goddess.
Great is Diana of the Ephesians, and everybody
dreams about being popular.
Some people commit suicide, literally, if their rating
slips a little bit on television.
They can't stand it, they want to be
popular.
Well, then we have our beauty queens.
Beauty queens.
I don't know what you think about beauty
queens, ladies and gentlemen, but don't get me
because I'm older, because I've always thought this
about beauty queens.
You can take all the beauty queens from
Dan to Beersheba, and from Vancouver to Miami,
Florida, and put them on one side of
the scale, and put one nice old farm
lady who loves God and knows her Bible
on the other side of the scale, and
she'll go down and they'll go up.
All of them put together with cellophane wrapping
around them, and a bow wouldn't be worth
as much as one dear old lady.
We had visitors, I won't say who they
were, but they were friends from here, out
to the house the other day.
Passed by, you know, to say hello at
Christmas time, and they brought along the mother
-in-law.
And the mother-in-law was a little
Scotch lady.
She told me her age.
Said she'd been in this country, in Canada,
52 years.
And I said, oh, you must have come
when you were just a girl.
I said I was 21.
She told me how old she was.
But my wife and I have talked about
it ever since she went.
What a character here.
What a woman.
Quiet, but you could talk to her about
real things, and she knew what it meant.
And I got my braid Scots New Testament,
and I can read it, but I can't
pronounce it.
And I brought it down, and she sat
there with a shining face and read out
of my braid Scots with the Scottish burr.
Well, now, brothers and sisters, you take that
little lady, a 73-year-old Scottish Saint,
and put her in one end of the
scale, and put all your painted beauty queens
in the other.
And she's worth more than all of them.
Popularity.
Some people give their souls for it.
There's the pugilist.
And the star.
Oh, how we use that word star.
They that win many to righteousness shall shine
as the stars forever and ever.
And we've taken the word star, that beautiful
word, and applied it to people that have
the morals of alley cats.
Popularity.
Let's write that off and say, God, we
don't want it, we don't care anything about
it, really.
Then there's friends.
If all you have are your summer friends
of the world, remember, they don't stay with
you when you're in trouble.
Jesus was forsaken, and Paul was forsaken.
And I remember, was it in Shakespeare's King
Henry VIII, when Cardinal Woolsey had kissed the
hands of the old king for a lifetime
and sold out his soul and his church
and everything else.
Then the king got mad at him and,
as I recall, threw him in prison, and
he was dying.
And they had died, and they said, How
did he do?
How did he die?
And he said, He died better than he
lived.
He said, If he had lived as well
as he died, he'd have been a better
man, somebody said.
Of course, they said it in Shakespeare's cadences,
not in my plain, blunt language.
But the quoted Woolsey is saying this, If
I had served my God as faithfully as
I served my king, he would not desert
me now that I'm an old man.
Oh, you can say that again.
He'd served his king, and the old unpredictable
king turned his back on him when he
didn't need him anymore.
If I had served my God as faithfully
as my king, he'd never have deserted me,
and he never would have.
So be careful who your friends are.
I'm going to talk a little later on
about friends, the kind you ought to have.
But watch out, because your friends easily can
run away from you.
And then possessions.
The heathen have their possessions.
You know, an eagle feather or two around
their head, or some monkey teeth that they
wear and use, or cowrie shells.
A little child has treasures, too.
Everybody knows that if you pick a little
boy ten years old up in the summertime,
pick him up by the feet and shake
him, what drops out?
His treasures.
He's got them in his pockets, all his
pockets filled with them.
Some of the weirdest things.
My kids used to go out and bring
home snakes of all things.
Boy, they'd give me the shivers, but they
seemed to like them.
They'd come in carrying them by the tail,
and they'd be wiggling and wiggling and wiggling,
and I couldn't even stay around.
But there were treasures to those boys.
They'd bring in salamanders.
You know what they are.
A salamander is a kind of a weird
-looking lizard, red.
You bring them in, and you go down
in the basement, and there would be a
salamander in the wash tub.
You never knew when the snake was going
to come slithering out.
They were harmless, but no snake is harmless
when I'm around, because I'd get ulcers from
just knowing they're in the same area with
me.
But they were treasures, and they'd keep them
around.
Notice when they get at a certain age,
they get a magpie complex and begin to
collect things.
They collect old matchboxes, or stamps, or whatever
it is.
It won't amount to much, but it satisfies
the instinct of inquisitiveness, and it's treasures.
And when they get a little bit older,
their treasures get four wheels under them as
a rule, and a marvelous engine.
Boy, what I'd get out of that car!
And we get our possessions around us, and
I'm glad everybody can have anything, even from
the boy who plays with snakes up to
the man who plays with cars.
I'm glad for it all, but if that's
all you've got, I'm sorry for you.
Because the blessings of the Lord make a
man rich, and they don't add any sorrow,
no depreciation, nobody steals the blessing of the
Lord.
I knew a family in Chicago that had
a big Buick, and they left it outside
of all places.
Moody Bible Institute, when they came down with
it, they never did find it.
But here it was a kind of a
poetic justice.
The whole back seat of the car was
filled with gospel tracts.
I imagine those thieves, whoever they were, certainly
got a stomachful of those gospel tracts.
But anyway, the big Buick had gone, so
possessions go like that, and then there's fame.
We all want to be famous, and if
we're not famous, we wish we were.
Remember what Napoleon said to his secretary out
on, where did they banish him to, Alma?
He said to his secretary, You ought to
thank me, I've made you famous.
He said, Made me famous?
What do you mean, sire?
I always called him sire for some reason,
I never figured out.
He said, What do you mean, sire?
You made me famous.
Why?
He said, You're famous because you're my secretary.
And he said, Will you please tell me
who Alexander's secretary was?
Nobody knows, of course.
But fame is a marvelous thing, and grace
and the boast of heraldry and the pomp
of power and all the beauty all that
wealth e'er gave, a way to like
the inevitable hour and the path of glory
leads but to the grave.
They all go the same way, but you
say, Oh, I know, but they'll make a
bust of him and put it up on
his shelf.
But you go out in the graveyard dead,
and they make a statue of you and
put it on a shelf, what do you
get out of it?
Nothing absolutely, nothing at all.
I've often wondered how Shakespeare enjoys his statues
that he's got around all these libraries, when
anywhere there's a statue of Shakespeare, a bust
of the Bard of Avon.
But what's he getting out of it?
I think of the artist that died and
put on his tombstone.
What I was as an artist meant an
awful lot to me while I lived, but
what I was as a Christian is all
that matters to me now.
So fame doesn't mean anything.
It's great, but it isn't worth your trouble.
The Christian is rich.
The blessing of the Lord makes a man
rich.
And why?
Well, he's rich in faith, he has his
unseen glories, and he's rich in relationship.
I've mentioned that already.
Lord, my beloved son, in whom I am
well pleased.
I've been reading old Meister Eckhart.
I read him a lot.
He says that God loves people so much
that when he sees a good man doing
a good act, he's absolutely delighted.
Now, that old German scholar, you can't brush
him off and say he was a mystic.
He was, but he was a lot more
than a mystic.
He was a profound theologian and a great
Saint.
He said that God loved people so that
he just loved everything they did.
Have you ever seen doting parents sit and
look at their little baby, maybe a year
old, anywhere from 9 months to 14 months,
as I recall they walk?
And here he stands balancing himself around on
his little feet or her little feet, whichever
it is, and the parents with shining faces
watch this marvelous act, never performed since Abel.
This wonderful act.
Well, they love the little fellows, and because
they love them so, walking or any little
act they do is wonderful to them.
I believe that's true.
I believe one of our riches is that
God loves Christians and his people so much
that he loves everything they do.
Everything, except, of course, if they fail him
and do wrong, he doesn't love that.
But he loves everything they do.
God loves us and is pleased with us,
and I think God smiles.
We don't think he does, but I always
usually, theologians wouldn't grant it.
He hasn't learned it enough.
But I kind of think God smiles because
I read that passage in the Old Testament
that he bears his people on his shoulders.
I used to call that a riding piggyback
when I was a boy.
Many times my father carried me that way,
and I carried my boys that way, and
I believe God carries us that way.
You can't think of a father taking his
little boy up piggyback that didn't smile while
he was doing it.
You can't think of God that isn't pleased
with us when he takes us up like
that and bears us.
Then I think of contentment.
A Christian is contented that he actually, honestly
doesn't want something.
It's not sour grapes with him, he just
doesn't want it.
Can you think of a lot of things
you don't want?
For instance, money or a big estate or
a yacht.
I hope nobody gives me a yacht.
Now really, I hope you'll pray that nobody
will give me a yacht.
What would I do with a yacht?
And then I hope nobody will give me
a big estate somewhere.
What would I do with a big estate?
The taxes would have me in the poorhouse
alone.
There are so many things that I just
don't want, so don't give them to me.
I don't want them, because I love God
and I have a little, and that's about
it.
The miller at the dee said, I envy
nobody, and nobody envies me.
And the king rode by and heard it
and got off his horse and went in
and said, Don't sing that any more.
I order it.
He said, This is a command.
Don't sing it.
He said, Why, your majesty?
He said, Because I envy you.
He said, I wish that I could say,
I envy nobody and nobody envies me.
So don't sing it any more, it isn't
true.
The old miller had to think up a
revised version to keep from breaking the royal
commandment.
But I don't know how he did it,
but he was just as contented as ever.
The nurse companionship, I saw a picture one
time advertising the classics, the great books, and
it showed a man sitting on a streetcar,
the old-fashioned kind with the side with
the seats pused, running lengthwise of the car.
Here he sat, and he had a book
in his hand.
Beside him sat Shakespeare, and next to him
sat Beethoven, and on over here sat Plato,
and over there sat somebody else.
Here they were all lined up there, and
it said, When you have these books, you
fellowship with the great of the ages.
I'll always remember that ad.
That was a good one.
Well, you do all right.
My days among the dead are spent around
me, I behold, where my roving eyes are
cast, the mighty minds of old.
I have books in my library that are
so valuable to me that the brother said,
I wouldn't take a kingdom for them, because
you can have fellowship with the great and
the mighty.
You ever think of having fellowship with Moses?
Here is a book that didn't cost me
a dime.
Somebody gave it to me, but it would
be, I would suppose, a twelve-dollar Bible.
Well, here I have this Bible, and if
I make good use of it, I can
have fellowship with the greatest moralist that ever
lived in the world.
His name was Moses.
I can have close, warm fellowship with one
of the greatest hymnists that ever lived in
the world.
His name was David.
And I can listen to the voice of
one of the most eloquent poets that ever
lived in the world.
His name was Isaiah.
And I can listen to the deep, beautiful
speech of the greatest mystic that ever lived
in the world.
His name was John.
And I can sit at the feet of
the greatest theologian that ever lived in the
world.
His name was Paul.
Now, you tell me that I have to
go to nightclubs.
Incidentally, have you heard it?
Somebody wrote me and sent me a clipping.
You know what we have now?
Some new thing under the sun.
We have a Christian nightclub.
You know, he got it all right.
He got it in a certain town in
the United States.
I knew these things were on the way.
I saw this coming, but I didn't know
it would be so soon.
One of these times we're all going to
get sick to our stomach, and we're going
out back and be sick, and then we're
coming back and start over.
Then we're going to have something from God.
But as it stands now, we have this
Christian nightclub.
Some fellow wrote sarcastically in the New York
Wall Street Journal and said they supposed that
they would be selling candy cigarettes there and
drinking water on the rock.
Because they said that one thing about that
Christian nightclub was that they weren't to smoke
nor drink.
But they had their entertainers, but they were
Christian entertainers, of course.
Well, amen.
If you like it to amen, take it,
brother, but I don't.
I'd rather fellowship with Moses the great moralist,
or David the great hymnist, or Isaiah the
great poet, or Paul the great theologian, or
even just simple, plain Christian people such as
we have around here.
For companionship, do you ever get bored?
I don't think I've ever been bored in
my life, except when somebody bores me.
But just lead me to myself, and I'm
never bored.
You can always think of something worthwhile in
all ways.
Right along, I've sat way into the night
at railroad stations, but as I recall, I've
never been bored, because I can either write
or I can read or I can get
still and think.
Companionship is a beautiful thing.
Do you ever read that passage in the
16th chapter of Luke where Jesus said to
what we were to do with our money?
He said, "'Make friends with the man of
your own rights,' and that was his word
for money.
"'Make friends with your money,' he said, so
that when you die, the friends you make
will receive you unto eternal tabernacles.
Some of you have given your money to
missions or given your money to help the
poor, and in that great day when our
Lord comes, you will meet people you never
knew, and they will say, I want to
thank you, and they'll welcome you into the
eternal tabernacles.' Now, that's the meaning of it,
all right.
I've looked it up very carefully.
Dr. R.
A.
Torrey said that was the meaning of it,
and Dr. Robertson, the great Greek teacher, said
that was the meaning of it.
So I'm accepting it, that we help people
down here, and they die and go, and
we forget them almost.
But one day we go up there, and
then they meet us and say, I want
to greet you and thank God for you.
Turn your money into blessings.
Think of it, and think of the riches
of prayer and communion, and think at last
of the riches of heaven and its rewards.
Jesus said, I go to prepare a place
for you.
I don't know whether this is good theology
or not, but it's harmless.
It won't hurt you if it isn't altogether
sound.
But I think of the man that grew
up in a carpenter shop.
He knew how to bevel and did all
those nice things I used to hear when
I was a kid.
I never could bevel.
I never could get one bevel to fit
into another one, you know.
But those who know how, the skilled cabinet
makers, I think he was that kind of
a carpenter.
And the hands that used to make the
fine cabinets are working on our mansions.
I go to prepare a place for you,
and I come again, he said.
Well, into that is no sorrow.
I say the test is, how rich are
you at the last?
If you make this world, any of its
riches, any of its false riches, if you
make them to be your final riches, you
will have grief at the last.
But there's no sorrow, no regret to those
who made God all in all.
Nobody was ever sorry that he had served
his Lord.
You will never be.
There are two kinds of the general wealth
that God gives to everybody.
Emerson said the best part of a field
is the part you don't have title to.
My friends all around me grub and buy
great pieces of property and improve them, and
I walk down the road and I get
all the blessing and benefit of their fields
without paying a dime.
The sweet smell floats in from the buckwheat
fields, and I go down and I get
all the taxes.
Well, you can do that.
Those are the general benefits God gives to
everybody, but there are particular benefits he gives
only to his people, God's own few.
I've mentioned them.
Eternal life, forgiveness, fellowship with God, the privileges
of prayer, communion with the Almighty Maker of
heaven and earth, and heaven at last with
all its rewards.
These can be yours.
I'd hate to see you go out into
a new year trusting in the riches that
decay and perish.
These can be yours.
The blessing of the Lord maketh rich, and
he addeth no sorrows, no regrets.
You can be a rich man this year,
my dear friends.
You can be a rich woman, rich man,
rich in the things that don't pass away.
And the way in, as you well know,
too well know, maybe, is through Jesus Christ
our Lord.
That's the way in.
This is my beloved son, said the Father
about Jesus, in whom I am well pleased.
And Jesus said to his people that loved
him and followed him, that thou hast loved
them even as thou hast loved me.
And the Father loves the members of Christ's
body with the same love he loves Christ
himself.
So those are the riches.
I think this would be a great night
for you to make up your mind to
follow Jesus, if you're not now following him.
It would be a great night for you
to make up your mind that if you're
a nominal Christian, that you're going to do
something about it that'll change the nominal Christian
to a real Christian, and have riches that
perish not.
So in that great day, if it comes
a little later soon, that you'll die rich
and be rich forever and ever.
Our dear missionaries, God bless them.
We send them out with such buoyancy, so
much prayer, and they live a lifetime.
And the people that sent them out die,
and they're forgotten, and they get old, and
they're retired, and they can't work anymore.
They come back, and we send them out
to California or Billa Beach or somewhere, and
retire them and put them in old folks'
homes.
We do pretty well by them, I'll say
that.
I don't even know the names of some
of them, but they were one Chinese or
Formosans or Congolese or somebody else to Christ.
They're over there waiting for them now, rich.
When they die, they haven't got anything except
a few missionary letters and a few books
and the Bible or two, and memories.
And we hustle about because we've got the
help and the money, and we hustle about,
and they sit around and dream of the
days when they serve God in the far
fields.
We go and pity them.
I've walked through the great colony in California
where missionaries and old broken-down preachers go
just before they go to heaven.
I've walked through those little cottages and down
those little winding ways and looked them over
and pitied them because I said their friends
are all gone.
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
But I don't think they deserve my pity.
I mean to say I don't think I
should pity them.
They should pity me, for they have earned
riches that can't perish.
Riches that can't decay, they've got it.
Yeah, it's great to be a Christian, friends.
I wouldn't be anything else for all the
wide world.
Christian.
Let's pray.