I want to bring a short but important
message to you.
Important not because I bring it, but I
bring it because it is important.
In the book of Jeremiah, the 31st chapter,
verse 3, the Lord hath appeared of old
unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee
with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness have
I drawn thee.
If you have your Bible in your hand,
a King James Bible, you will notice that
the word Lord is spelled in four capital
letters.
In the Old Testament, in the King James
Bible, wherever the word Lord is spelled with
four capitals, it is the word Jehovah.
The old Jews believed the name Jehovah was
too sacred to pronounce.
They called it the incommunicable name, the tetragrammaton,
and so they disguised it under the name
Lord and spelled it here, and we have
it in English, L-O-R-D, in
capital letters.
That name, that word, is Jehovah, spelled in
four letters in the Hebrew and called Jehovah,
a kind of anglicized word.
So what it says here is that Jehovah
hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea,
I have loved thee with an everlasting love,
therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.
Let me begin by reminding you that the
world we inhabit is a lost world, and
there are reasons for this.
The earth itself is a lost planet.
It is a lost planet not in the
sense that it has been lost, as you
might lose something and not be able to
find it, but it is lost in the
sense that if a province of this country
or a state of the Union of the
South would secede and set up its own
government and refuse to, speaking by a province
here, refuse to come under the national government,
would reject the currency of the dominion, the
laws of the dominion, and set up its
own laws, elect its own president or prime
minister or king or whatever they might call
it, and wrench itself loose from the dominion
and be a country within a country, it
would be lost to Canada.
That's what I mean when I say this
is a lost planet that we inhabit, lost
not because God doesn't know where it is,
but lost because it's been lost to God
and lost to the kingdom of God.
Cursed be the ground for thy sake, thorns
and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee.
Now, why the never-ending, gigantic struggle that
we read about in the Bible?
Listen here, this strange passage so hard to
understand and yet so necessary that we do
understand it.
Romans 8, for the earnest expectation of the
creation waiteth for the manifestation of the sons
of God.
For the creation was made subject to vanity,
not willingly, but by reason of him who
has subjected the same in hope.
Because the creation itself also shall be delivered
from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain together until now.
Not only they, but ourselves also, which have
the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves,
groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to
wit, the redemption of our bodies.
Here is a statement that would not have
needed to be made.
That is, it's not revelation, it is simply
a calling attention to what we already know.
That is revelation which could not have been
discovered and would not have been known, but
is told to us by God.
But this is not revelation in that sense,
though it's an inspired utterance.
We know that the creature is subject to
vanity.
The whole book of Ecclesiastes tells us that
the creation is subject to vanity.
We know that it's under the bondage of
corruption, change and decay in all around us,
and we know that the whole creation groans
and travails in pain.
We know that.
Now, there's something worse yet than that, and
that is that the race that inhabits the
earth is also lost, the human race, the
race to which you and I belong and
of which we are a part.
It is a lost human race, lost not
in the sense that God doesn't know where
it is, but lost in the sense that
it doesn't know where it is, and lost
in the sense that a province would be
lost to Canada if it seceded and pulled
itself loose and set up its own government
and became an independent country.
I hope that never happens.
It would be ridiculous if it did.
They tried it down south and had a
civil war over it.
But the human race is lost to the
Kingdom of God and lost within itself.
Now, does it seem reasonable that a being
like human beings, does it seem reasonable that
they should be given such a brief turn
in life?
Does it seem reasonable that just when we
get ready to live, we die?
Does it seem reasonable that just when we
have gone long enough up the highway that
we know all the signs now and we're
not likely to make any more of those
blunders we made when we were kids, and
just when wisdom was settled upon us and
poise and a certain sanity we didn't have
when we were younger, just about that time
the arteries start getting hard and the hair
getting gray or getting gone, and we're ready
to die.
Just when you're ready to live, you've got
to die.
Now, that doesn't seem like God, doesn't seem
like anything reasonable at all.
Does it seem reasonable that a being as
God-like as man should take his God
-likeness to the grave with him, as though
God were to load a man down with
treasures and then tell him, now do you
see that hole in the ground over there?
You take your treasures and go to that
hole in the ground.
Look, it wasn't very long ago that a
man died by the name of Albert Einstein.
Now, we won't talk about his religion.
He was a Jew, but he was not
too much of a Jew either.
So we're not for the moment thinking about
his religion.
We're only thinking about his amazing ability, his
genius.
He was a genius, an old, fluffy-haired
genius who looked way past the end of
the future.
Some young fellow was working out a mathematical
equation on the board, and it took him
a long time, and there were a lot
of explanations, and a whole blackboard covered with
it.
Mrs. Einstein was sitting there, and she said,
My husband worked some out like that on
the back of old envelopes.
He was like that, you know.
He just had that ability.
Now he's gone.
He's taken that tremendous mind of his down
into the grave with him.
I think of old Stormy Beethoven with his
great overhanging brow and his wild hair, that
great Stormy genius that literally played upon the
sun, moon, and stars, and made all the
four winds of heaven to blow his organ,
and took the very beams of light and
made them into his strings, and gave the
world, in my opinion, the richest music it
has ever known.
And yet he laid down and died, and
he took that amazing genius, that awesome ability
of his, right down into a hole, and
they covered it up.
Now does that seem reasonable?
I don't think that it does at all.
Is it reasonable that a man should live
consistently beneath his own ideals, pride and disappointment,
or go hand in hand in everybody, and
there isn't anybody listening to me but what's
disappointed with himself and frustrated?
Not anybody here.
We look at a man and we say
he's sitting on top of the world.
If you knew what was eating at that
man's heart, you'd know that he was a
disappointment to himself.
Instead of sitting upon the world, he's lying
under it, crushed by it.
That's two playboys and actresses, two of the
leading actresses, the telegram said last night, two
of the leading mayors of the United States.
These curvaceous pink and white females that have
startled and drawn the interest in the attraction
of the world.
Both of them miserable.
One of them so miserable she gets sick
and can't fulfill her engagements.
Quite common for them to take, not those
two, but for others to take sleeping pills,
too many of them, just weary of living.
Everybody wanting their autograph, and everybody wanting to
marry them, and everybody chasing after them, and
everybody standing at attention in droves when they
go down the street, and yet they want
to take sleeping pills.
They're disappointment to themselves, and miserable and frustrated.
Is it reasonable to you that God Almighty
should make a being capable of frustration and
then let him be frustrated, capable of disappointments
and high ideals, and then let him be
disappointed with his high ideals?
I don't think so.
And that he should dream of a shiny
world somewhere and not know how to get
there?
Whither goest thou, Lord?
We know not the way.
How can we get there if we don't
know the way?
And when the man said that, he spoke
for all the human race.
Now I ask you, would it seem reasonable
that a being capable of making a creature
like man should make man to end his
days in a hole in the ground and
leave his work undone and die disappointed, frustrated
and miserable?
I don't think so.
Something has happened to the human race.
The Bible rushes right in by sacred revelation
to tell us what happens, and it declares
that the inhabitants of the world are lost
by a mighty calamitous visitation of moral woe.
It tells us that they are lost but
not given up, lost but not forsaken.
It tells us that the planet we live
on is a lost planet, and tells us
that the inhabitants of that planet are lost
inhabitants, and tells us that in spite of
the fact that they are lost, still they
have not been given up, that there is
a voice calling them to safety and home
as the shepherd searched for his sheep, calling
for it until its weak bleat was heard
somewhere out there on a mountain, and he
went and found it and brought it home
on his shoulder, calling as the woman searched,
not with her voice but with the light
searching for the coin.
Adam, where art thou?
Sounds all over the earth.
I think that I am not a visionary.
I get accused occasionally by some of these
hard-edged theologians of being a mystic, which
I don't deny.
A mystic is simply somebody who believes it
possible to commune with God Almighty right now
through Jesus Christ in the Spirit, and know
it, and have a sense of heaven all
around him, and being in the presence of
God even when he's in the presence of
men.
If that's being a mystic, then I plead
guilty, and I am.
I believe that there are voices sounding throughout
the world, voices sounding right in Toronto, not
always heard certainly because there are other voices
that are louder, but there are voices.
The voice of God Almighty is the voice
of God and the voice of God's love.
I am to speak over the next weeks
and evenings about the voices that entreat us,
this lost planet and the voices that entreat
this lost race and call us back to
heaven and home and God and safety, back
to recover and recuperate and have restored to
us all the lost and more too.
I say that there are voices calling, and
yet they are all one voice, really.
They are simply inflections of one voice, and
it's the voice of God's love.
God is love, says the scripture.
And God, being love, loves himself and must
love himself with a pure and perfect love,
and because he is holy and blameless, he
can love himself with a holy and blameless
love.
And the three persons of the Godhead can
love each other, the Father and the Son
and the Holy Ghost can love each other
interchangeably and reciprocally and be holy in the
doing of it.
And God is himself the only being that
can be loved directly.
God has to love everything else for his
own sake.
So God loves everything for his own sake.
He loves himself because he is what he
is, and then he loves everything else for
his own sake.
So he loves the new creation.
I believe that God loves his creation.
I think that is why this passage is
ever written over here.
I think that God loves his creation and
that the creature was made subject to vanity,
not willingly, by the reason of him who
subjected the saint in hope.
And the creation itself shall be delivered from
the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty
of the children of God.
I believe that every mountain peak and every
valley and every lake and every flowing river
and every ocean and sea and every planet
and star and moon and satellite that floats
out yonder in the illimitable space is dear
to God and is ultimately going to be
restored again, bought by the blood of Jesus
Christ, redeemed by our Lord.
For don't forget that when Jesus died on
the cross of Calvary, he didn't die alone
for men, he died for everything that touches
men.
He died for the home he gave men,
and he died for the stars that shine
on men, and he died for the sun
that lights their way and the moon that
reflects in glory the beauty of the sun.
He died for the whole human race, that
in Christ the whole creation should be gathered
together in one, as he told us in
Colossians.
So our Lord died because he loves it
all.
All of this mess we're in now is
only the groaning and the travail and the
frustration and the misery that comes because of
sin in the world, because we were a
lost race, live on a lost planet, floating
through space, trying to recover ourselves.
My dear friends, don't be taken in by
anybody that comes to you with the answer
apart from divine revelation, because there is no
such answer.
Nobody knows.
Let me tell you, the liberals don't know
and the progressive conservatives don't know and the
New Democrats don't know and the Republicans don't
know and the Tories don't know and the
rest of them don't know.
Nobody knows.
They may all mean well, and we honor
every man who tries to do what he
can do, but we're all a lost people
and men don't know where they are, and
that's a part of their lostness, and only
God knows where they are.
The United States is going to explode a
bomb, one of the high-power things, up
yonder somewhere in the radiation belt, and they're
wondering whether it won't disrupt all radar and
all the rest, maybe start a chain reaction
that nobody can talk to anybody else anymore
because of the electronic disturbances and interferences.
I don't know about that.
I don't know they're going to do it.
When a nation says, We're going to do
it, some other nation says, Don't do it,
they'd do it just to show they can
do it.
They'll do it all right.
I hope it won't turn out as bad
as people fear, but they'll do it.
And Russia says, Because they're going to do
it, you're driving us to do something like
it.
So we're having our troubles in our time,
like fighting cocks in an arena, making the
feathers fly in the blood.
How long will it be before this Cold
War heats up into a bloody hot war
that will bring a third of the world
to the grave?
I don't know that.
I only know nobody can do much about
it, but there is a God who made
heaven and earth and who redeemed it by
the blood of his Holy Son, Jesus, and
he loves the creation.
He loves it.
I can understand why God loves it.
I can understand that God loves all the
lovely world that he made, because he sees
in it his own wisdom and power, and
sees a reflection of himself.
And he loves the angels and the seraphim
because he sees in them a reflection of
his holiness.
And he loves men because he sees in
them a fallen relic of his own image.
Now, God must and will love men, and
he does love men, and God can't help
it.
God loves because he is God, and God
is love, and he says, I have loved
you with an everlasting love.
It's an everlasting love, and God loves men
because he sees in them his own image.
And he will love them until hell has
erased the last remaining trace and relic of
God-likeness.
But you say the scripture says that God's
love is an everlasting love, then won't it
last forever?
The answer is, God's love is everlasting, but
the object of God's love may not be.
For instance, I do not believe that God
loves the devil any longer, though there was
a time when God loved the devil and
loved the fallen angels and the demons and
all things that he had made.
But they revolted from him, and they too
are lost, lost along with the lost planet
we inhabit, lost along with the lost race.
And I do not believe that God still
loves the devil, because there is nothing there
that the love of God can light on.
You say, why can God love a fallen
sinner?
Why could God love Hitler?
Why could God love Mussolini?
Why can he love old Khrushchev now?
The answer is, in spite of how bad
these men were and are, if you dig
down far enough and go deep enough back
into the deepened spirit of even a man
like Khrushchev, you will find fallen relics and
traces and old ruins that once were the
temple of God.
I don't say that saves him.
In fact, I know better.
Except a man be converted and born again,
he cannot see the kingdom of God.
But I do say that there is something
in man for the love of God to
light on, and there is nothing in the
devil for the love of God to light
on.
Do you remember that beautiful and strange passage
in the book of John, where our Lord
Jesus said, When the devil comes, the prince
of this world comes, he'll find nothing in
me.
He found nothing that was like him or
that belonged to him or any relic of
him in the bosom of Jesus.
Turn that around, and there are those in
which God can find nothing, nothing that reminds
him of himself, nowhere for his love to
light, no handle he can get hold of,
no receptacle for his love.
And still the love of God goes on
loving.
Wherever there is love, there is goodwill.
God is inflamed with goodwill.
This is hard to believe, because the human
conscience says, I know better, I am a
bad, and God is not inflamed with goodwill
toward me.
Such reasoning is false, because it fails to
see that God loves us for his own
sake.
He loves us not because of what we
are, but he loves us because of what
he is.
And if God tells me that he loves
me and I say to him, O God,
I am not worthy to be loved, it
means that I have misunderstood God.
God never said, I love you because you're
so nice.
He said, I love you because I love
you.
That's the only explanation he ever gave Israel.
I suppose there never was.
I'm not anti-Semitic.
In fact, I'm very pro-Semitic and have
always been, and was a member of two,
and now I'm a member of one board
of Jewish missions.
And I fully understand the position and place
the Jews have yet in the future.
They gave us our Bible, it was Jewish
blood that we shed on the cross of
Calvary.
I understand all that.
Yet if you just take the prophets of
Israel alone and let them tell you, you've
got to conclude that there has scarcely been
a nation ever that lived in the world
as unlovely as Israel.
Yet God says, I loved you, I loved
your fathers, and I love you.
I love you, and then he said, I
love you, and maybe they were waiting to
say why, and he didn't give them a
why.
He said, because I love you.
God's love doesn't have to explain.
Everybody else has to explain, because we're all
responsible.
What disappoints me in politicians is they make
so many irresponsible statements.
They're not responsible to anybody.
They can get up and say anything they
want to, and when it's all over, they
receive congratulations and go to the next place
and say the same.
Nobody is going to get up and say,
Hey, would you kindly tell me why you
said this?
Answer me!
They don't do it, never have done it.
Adam and Eve down, not responsible.
They are responsible, but they won't admit it.
All the rest of us are responsible to
somebody.
We've got to tell somebody why we did
it, and they'll have to, too.
And you know when?
Tomorrow, here.
They'll tell them why they said it.
It'll be tomorrow night along about 8 o
'clock, we'll be glued to the radio.
I'll be, I'll admit it frankly.
Tomorrow night, have I got anything?
No, no meeting tomorrow night, so I'll be
sitting there waiting how it came out.
You'll be responsible to somebody.
They made their speeches without knowing there was
anybody going to jack them up and saying,
Hey, why did you say this?
Somebody's going to do it all right.
Wait till tomorrow night.
Well, God Almighty is the one being in
the universe that isn't responsible to anybody.
God doesn't say, Now, if you'll excuse me,
I'll explain this.
No, never, never explains.
He doesn't have to.
God says to the archangels, I love people.
And if the archangels dare to say, But
O God, why?
Look, look at your heaven here.
Look at your golden glory and your silver
beauty and the pearly gates and all the
loveliness of angel and archangel and all the
clean, pure beauty of heaven.
Look at it.
And you say you love that crowd of
liars and adulterers and thieves and deceivers down
there they call people.
Why?
Nobody dares ask God that question.
Why?
Because God isn't responsible to anybody.
He doesn't have to answer.
And so he says, I love them because
I love them, and that's all the answer
God ever gave.
That may sound rather light, but to me
that's tremendous.
I don't have to say to God, Now,
God, I'll never believe you love me until
I discover why.
One song says, I'm going to try to
find out why God loves me so.
I think that's poor theology.
I'm not very mildly concerned about why God
loves me, but I'm powerfully and wonderfully elevated
in my heart to know he does.
That's all I have to know.
God isn't going to tell an archangel why
he loved A.
W.
Tozer.
No.
If he'd start explaining to an archangel, there
would be some kind of revolt, because I'm
sure I wouldn't get the vote of any
archangel or seraph or any creature in heaven,
any creature, unfallen creature anywhere would vote against
me.
They'd vote me the man least likely to
get to heaven, because I just don't deserve
to go.
But God says, I love the fellow anyhow,
and I'll love him through to the end.
Having loved his own, he loves them to
the end.
It says here, I have loved you with
an everlasting love.
So there is yearning, the lovingkindness have I
drawn thee to himself.
A lost race in a lost world, from
God there is a clear call to consider
him, to consider God.
You give attention to the voice.
The voice of reason is speaking these days,
and the voice of conscience and the voice
of Christ's blood is crying to us, and
the voice of judgment and the voice of
all who died and the voice of all
who are saved.
But here tonight, the voice of God's love
is calling us home, calling us to consider
your ways and consider God, to believe concerning
him and believe what he said about himself
and believe what he said about you.
And the voice of God's love is asking
you to turn to him and make a
moral about face and to throw yourself on
his mercy, and to identify yourself with his
son.
This voice, I am hearing it, this voice
of God all through the scriptures, all through
his kindnesses to you, all through the prayers
of his people.
The voice of God is saying to his
lost race, come home, come back, come to
the Father's house.
I have goods unto spare.
Come and receive the ring and the robe.
Come and consider me and consider my right
to your love, and believe about me, and
believe what I tell you, and turn to
me, and throw yourself on my mercy, and
identify yourself with my son in faith.
Believe on my son.
Augustine, that saint of God who lived back
in the early centuries, said something later on
along about the 1200s, I think, or maybe
a little later than that, maybe the 1500s.
A German by the name of Gerhard Terstigen
wrote about it, but he wrote it in
German.
So another man, this time an Englishman by
the name of John Wesley, loved the writings
of Terstigen so much that he brushed up
on his German in order that he might
be able to translate them.
He perfected his German so that he could
turn Terstigen's hymns into near-perfect English, and
he did.
One of them was this, Thou hidden love
of God, whose height, whose depths unfathomed no
man knows, I see from far thy beauteous
light in me, I sigh for thy repose.
My heart is pained, nor can it be
at rest till it find rest in thee.
Thou hidden love of God, he said.
Why is it hidden?
It's hidden because to make a living, and
to get along in the world, and to
keep up with the Jones family, is buried
of many beautiful things under the dust of
civilization that ought to be out.
Thou hidden love of God, whose height, whose
depths unfathomed, nobody knows how high the love
of God goes, and nobody knows how deep
it goes.
To introduce another little song into this greater
one, that song that says, Could I with
the ink the ocean fill, and were the
skies of parchment made, were every stalk on
earth a quill, and every man a scribe
by trade, to write the love of God
above would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though
stretched from sky to sky.
That's the love of God, the hidden love
of God that's height and depth, unfathomed, nobody
knows it.
But he says, I see from far thy
beauteous light.
Have you seen a little bit of the
gleam of it?
A little bit of the gleam of it?
I see from far thy beauteous light, and
inly I sigh.
I like that word inly.
It isn't used any more at all now.
We have other words now, but I like
that word inly.
It's a Methodist word, and I don't know
anybody but John Wesley that used it.
I'm not even sure he didn't invent it,
but it's a beauty of a word.
Inly I sigh for thy repose.
I believe that religion ought to be inly.
If it isn't an inly religion, it isn't
worth talking about.
And he says, I sigh inwardly.
That's what we say now.
I sigh inwardly for the love of God.
My heart is pain, nor can it be
at rest till it find rest in thee.
God made us for himself, Augustine had said,
and we never can find rest till we
find it in God.
Someone else said a human heart is a
God-shaped void and can never be at
peace until God fills the void.
But I want you to hear this voice
calling you back, calling you home, and calling
you to hope and rest and expectation for
the future.
A fine old Christian gentleman whom I unfortunately
didn't get to know very well.
I've spoken to him, but I didn't get
to know him too well, though my wife
and others that have spoken to me about
him tell about what a wonderful man he
was, Mr. Johns.
He left for communion Sunday.
When would that be?
Two weeks ago?
He left for communion Sunday after taking communion
and said, I guess this will be my
last time.
Seventy-nine years old, and that was his
last time.
Jesus, our Lord, said that I'll eat no
more of this fruit of the vine until
I eat it and drink it with you,
eat and drink until I eat and drink
with you in the kingdom of God.
So our dear old friend won't take communion
anymore at Avenue Road Church, but he will
take communion in that great gathering when all
the Saints have marched home and Jesus Christ,
our Lord, sits down with Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob and Jews and Gentiles and black and
white and red and yellow and good and
bad around the world that have all come
through the same washing and through the same
deliverance and through the same regeneration.
The love of God followed that old man,
followed him 79 years and then won.
Followed him and then won him!
I mean, took him home.
He'd been won to the Lord long years
before.
Well, he's calling you now.
My heart is pained, nor can it be
at rest until it finds rest in thee.
God give us ears these days.
Now the summer months are upon us, and
motorboats are going to be putt-putting and
people are going to be busy dashing around
over the world, getting killed on the highways
and all that sort of thing.
And I'm not as tough as the Associated
Press made me out to be when they
ran that piece about my opinion of people
who run away from the Church in the
summer.
But I still think we as the people,
serious-minded pilgrims, homeward bound, that we ought
to take Christ seriously and Christianity seriously.
And I believe that we ought to be
thinking about this voice of God, sounding with
many inflections and in many ways and from
many directions.
And over these Sunday nights, will you do
this?
Don't come to church by yourself.
Bring somebody.
Get somebody in your car.
Somebody will come with you.
Somebody.
You have a relative someplace.
Don't tell me that you're so poor and
friendless that you don't have anybody you could
work on.
You can get somebody to come.
Get them to come.
Tell them we're going to hear about the
voices that entreat us and hear good music
and joy.
Bring them along.
Nobody will embarrass them by running and crowding
them in a corner and trying to convert
them right there on the spot like selling
insurance.
Nobody's going to do that.
We're going to treat them with the respect
we'd want to be treated with if we
went into somebody's church.
But bring them unto the sound of the
gospel.
Talk to them about the voice of God
sounding in all ways and from all directions,
trying to win them to him.
Do you do that over these Sunday nights?
Now, let's pray.
O love of God, thou hidden love of
God, we have found thee, we have found
thee, for thou hast found us.
For we were not looking for thee, thou
art looking for us.
We have found and thou hast found, and
we know thee, or rather as Paul said,
we are known of thee.
How thou bless this fellowship, this group that's
heard these words tonight.
May we go out amid horns and airplanes
overhead and noises of every kind.
May we hear this gentle, insistent, sovereign, authoritative,
winsome voice calling us to be Christians, calling
Christians to be good Christians, and calling good
Christians to be still better Christians, calling us
to put the world away and focus our
attention on eternal values that will be hereafter.
Kingdoms have fallen and democracies have gone down
in the dust.
Great God, help us over these days just
ahead.
We pray in Christ's name, amen.