In the text, the text is from the
passage you previously read in your hearing this
morning, 2nd Timothy, 2nd chapter.
I just want to read the 3rd verse.
Thou, therefore, endure hardness as a good
soldier of Jesus Christ.
Paul is writing to Timothy, the younger man.
The last letter Paul wrote shortly after this,
he was beheaded.
But he was writing to this younger man,
he called his son, his son in the
faith, told him to be strong and to
endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus
Christ.
Now, let me begin by saying to you
that success in the Christian life requires that
we have right views concerning the Christian life.
But it requires something more than that.
It requires that we do not have erroneous
views of the Christian life.
You say that's tautological, you're repeating yourself, but
I'm not.
It is necessary that we have right views.
The views we hold are right views.
It is necessary also that we do not
allow any erroneous views to get in with
our right ones.
You see, a man may have twelve tenets
in his Christian creed or his philosophy of
the Christian life, which he thinks he draws
from the scriptures.
He may divide them up into twelve tenets.
He may say, I believe this and this
and this, and twelve of them.
And ten of them may be right, and
two of them wrong.
So that he not only has right views
concerning the Christian life, that is, he has
ten right views, but he has two erroneous
views.
And while I suppose that most of us
have some erroneous notion somewhere about Christian life,
which we hope not to correct by constant
reading of the scriptures and meditating thereon, but
I repeat that there are views of the
Christian life held and taken by men, which
are erroneous, and because they're erroneous, they're very
harmful.
You know, an error can be deadly, or
an error can simply be a mischief, something
that doesn't harm you too much.
If you have a bottle of something non
-poisonous and a bottle of deadly poison in
your cabinet, and you give the baby the
wrong medicine, that error will cost the baby
his life.
On the other hand, it may be as
my mother once, she baked a cake, God
bless her, and she flavored it.
And afterward, the people that were there, company
was there, and they cried and they nibbled
on it, but it didn't go so well.
And finally, somebody said to her, my mother
was a lovely little woman, everybody called Prudy.
Her name was Prudence.
Prudy, what did you put in this cake?
She hustled out to find out.
She thought she'd put vanilla.
But instead of that, she'd got hold of
a bottle called something vegetable compound.
It was a medicine for women.
And she'd put that in instead of the
vanilla.
Now, that didn't hurt anybody, and if the
medicine was any good, it might have done
some of us some good, particularly ladies.
But it's possible, you know, to make mistakes
and not have them dangerous mistakes.
It's possible to make mistakes that are deadly.
I believe that there is a rule held
of the Christian life.
Nobody ever formulated it, you know, or put
it down in print, that you can get
at it and say this isn't true, but
it's sort of accepted.
The view is this, that the Christian life
is a game to be played.
This is the notion, it's pretty prominent in
our time, that the Christian life is a
game to be played.
Well, that is an error, and it's an
error that has bred a whole spate of
religious activities that are not in keeping with
the word of God.
This notion that the Christian life is simply
another form of entertainment and fun.
We hear young people testify, get up and
say, I used to think the Christian life
was very hard, but I find I can
just have as much fun as anybody.
And now the dear little thing, she's just
repeating what she's been told by some half
-witted leaders that should be off somewhere with
a net thrown around them and led off,
but instead of that they lead meetings and
give talks.
And they lead the young people to think
that the Christian life is a game, a
little cleaner one, but a game.
And so that affects our music, and if
you're going to have fun, of course your
music is going to be that type.
It affects our magazines, so that many of
our Christian magazines.
Next Thursday I'm speaking twice down at Winona,
Indiana, to a convention of religious writers and
editors and so on.
It won't be a meeting where you have
to be nice, it'll just be where I
can let my hair down, figuratively speaking, and
tell those people what I think of a
lot that's printed these days.
This erroneous idea that the Christian life is
a game, it creates a certain kind of
meeting and a certain kind of leader, and
the whole atmosphere of services are determined by
this error.
Now, the Spirit says not that the Christian
life is a game, it says the Christian
life is a warfare, and there's a vast
difference between playing and fighting.
When an apple leaves, or leaps, whichever that
is, goes down here and takes that little
crooked stick and starts knocking around a bottle
cap over the ice, that's a game.
And nobody is going to kill anybody else,
and there's nothing but a game.
It'll either be one by one side or
the other.
And I noticed last night that it was
Chicago that took it again, but Robert wants
more.
But it was a game.
Nobody's going home to Chicago tonight because the
maple leaves beat them.
It's a game.
They're there, they're having fun.
And when it's all over, why are they
going home laughing and they even love to
have a soda with the other team?
They're their friends.
It's a game.
But it's quite different if they had guns
and were standing across from each other, shooting
each other.
When you shoot, you play for keeps.
When you play hockey, you can lose one
Saturday night and win the next.
But when you have war, it's death.
And the Christian life is not a game
to be played that everybody smiles and says,
Well, we'll try it again sometime.
We'll get you this time.
No, no.
The Christian life is a warfare, and we're
fighting with a determined enemy who's out to
get us, and he's playing for keeps, or
shooting for keeps, if you like.
Whether we are or not, he is.
And so we're engaged in warfare, though there
may be many occupations, many things that we're
doing.
Maybe traveling, building, farming.
You will notice in our text here that
he uses the figure of speech of a
soldier, he uses the figure of speech of
a wrestler, and he uses the figure of
speech of a farmer.
Another place he talks about the famous 215,
show thyself approved under God, a workman who
needeth not to be shamed, there's a carpenter.
And elsewhere he talks about us as shepherds
and sheep.
So there are many figures of speech used,
and if this were the only place the
figure of a soldier appears, I would say,
Well, it's a figure of speech, and we'll
pass it over and won't make too much
of it.
But the truth is, the whole Bible teaches
this.
The whole Bible teaches that we're living our
lives under war conditions, that there is a
critical emergency existing, and that whether we're traveling
or building or farming or wrestling or fighting
or whatever we're doing, there is no peace
except in the heart of the Christian, that
there's a war on, that there's a war
between God and Satan, between heaven and hell,
between those who want to serve God and
those who do not, between the flesh and
the spirit.
This warfare is constantly going on.
Now, the Christian is a soldier of the
spirit.
You know, many things that are allowable in
normal times are not allowable in war times,
because of the enemy and the danger.
There are several things that have to go
out as soon as a war comes.
One is ease, one is pleasure, and one
is convenience.
You don't win a war if you fight
it at your convenience.
You don't win a war when you fight
it at your ease.
You don't win a war if you go
into it for the pleasure you can get
out of it.
You only win a war when you take
it in dead earnestness, and a certain number
of men at least dedicate themselves to winning
that war.
And so we Christians ought to remember that.
The Communists know it, and because they have
accepted that as a war, they say we're
at a war, and they believe we're at
war.
And they'll talk about the Cold War, and
it is a war.
And it's a war that's being carried on
now, not with guns, but it's a war
that's being carried on with ideas ready to
be carried on with guns at any time.
And the Communists know it, and the West
doesn't know it.
And that's why the West has been in
retreat ever since the Second World War, before
the Iron Curtain countries.
Because we're going to play and have fun
if it kills us, and the Communists say
we're not out for having fun now, we're
going to conquer the world and then we'll
have our fun.
Now, there are certain things I say that
go out when war comes in.
One of them is ease, one of them
is pleasure, one of them is convenience.
And there are certain things that come in
when war comes.
Hardship, deprivation, hard discipline.
So the Spirit exhorts us in the text
here.
One version says, Take your share of suffering.
Another version says, Be ready to do without
comforts of life.
Another says, Bear suffering.
Another says, Share our hardships.
These things voluntarily assumed they are the cross
of Christ, if they are assumed for Christ.
And there always lies the power and spiritual
greatness.
Remember that.
Always spiritual greatness lies there, and away from
it lies weakness and spiritual failure.
There has been a weak retreat from the
cross in recent times, a weak retreat from
the cross.
Thousands of people have retreated from the cross.
They trust the cross for salvation, but they
don't want any of the cross in personal
living.
They want to be saved by the cross,
and so they will sing that dear old
hymn, I'm so happy and that's the reason
why Jesus took my burdens all away.
And they will sing that, believing that that's
all the cross is for, to take my
burdens away, forgetting that he said, Take up
thy cross and follow me, meaning that the
cross is not only the means by which
God takes burdens away, but that the cross
is the means by which God slays the
flesh of men to fill them with the
Holy Spirit and raise them to newness of
life.
So now I want to talk a little
bit about where that retreat from the cross,
because undoubtedly there has been a retreat from
the cross in recent times, a retreat into
weakness, and it shows itself in a number
of ways.
Multiplied luxuries, for instance.
We preachers preach about John the Baptist.
He wouldn't have owned us, really.
He wouldn't have owned us.
He would have said, You're too well-dressed
and you're too well-fed and you're too
comfortable.
John the Baptist was dressed in camel's hair
and with a girdle around his loins, and
he was living on wild honey and locusts.
Not locust trees, but locusts, little things that
hop and fly.
He was eating locusts and honey.
That's all he had to eat.
He didn't order a filet mignon well done
with mushrooms.
But in the morning he got up and
he had himself some honey, and if he
could catch a locust, a locust.
And when he got hungry at noon, he
had himself locusts and honey.
And then when supper time came, he had
honey and locusts.
He just varied it that way.
But it was honey and locusts, locusts and
honey.
It wasn't a very good diet, now don't
you tell me that it was, but he
lived like that.
And John was clothed in camel's hair.
Now we say, well, you don't think we
ought to dress in camel's hair.
No, I don't think that.
But I do think this, that we ought
to be willing to take some of the
same attitudes of hardship that John took.
If the Holy Ghost calls us to something
hard, we ought to be willing to take
that thing and do that thing.
We don't have to dress like John, but
we ought to have the spirit that John
had.
Now, there are periods of power in the
Church, and those periods of power correspond exactly
with the periods of rugged, simple living.
I want you to hear this.
Those periods of power correspond with the periods
of rugged, simple living.
And just as soon as a denomination gets
over being persecuted and having a tough time
and gets much, and it can say, we
are increased with goods and we are in
need of nothing, they begin to backslide immediately.
And it's the same with the individual Church,
a Church like this.
Dr. R.
R.
Brown claims a Church ought to be always
a little bit in debt for its own
sake.
He says that all Churches should be a
little bit in debt.
He thinks that if you get too much
money, it isn't good for you, and I
think he's right.
I think he's half humorous when he says
it, but I believe he's practically right about
it.
But the little Churches that are fighting and
struggling and getting along with nothing, they love
each other and know each other, and they
pray over every little thing, and they meet
and with shining eyes talk about their plans.
And when a Church gets bigger and lots
of people come and money rolls in, there's
nothing to worry about, then we forget that
simplicity and fellowship that we once had.
I tell you that denominations and Churches prosper
at the times of rugged, simple living, and
they go to pieces when they get too
much.
In multiplied luxuries in lands like this, they
are certainly not good for the Church of
Christ.
It's the same for a Christian.
I'm quite certain that a thousand arguments can
be found to defend luxuries and excessive comforts,
but three facts shatter all their arguments, and
these three facts are the teachings of Scripture
and the light of history and the testimony
of our own hearts.
How many are there of God's children that
can say, when I was poor and struggling,
I got along well, everything was fine, and
I was a better Christian than I am
now, but now I have the money, I
can do as I please, I can go
and come as I please, and the result
is that I am not as good a
Christian as I used to be.
We usually wouldn't admit it, and we wouldn't
be so frank about it all, but I
think generally that's said to be so.
Now, the remedy for all this is very
simple.
Be a good soldier of Jesus Christ, a
good soldier.
A soldier doesn't consult his convenience.
I said to a friend this morning that
it's too bad that the Church has to
run on the convenience of God's people.
Christ did nothing Christ did that was convenient.
It wasn't convenient for him to come down
from heaven and leave his Father's throne above.
It wasn't convenient for him to be born
of the Virgin Mary.
Nor was it convenient to be raised in
this simple poverty of a carpenter's home.
Nor was it convenient for him to be
kicked about and driven and cursed and finally
whipped and lashed and crucified and nailed on
a tree.
It wasn't convenient.
He was not living after his convenience, nor
consulting his feelings.
And it's never convenient for a soldier.
I remember when I entered the military service
many years ago, I never had a heart
heavier in all of my life.
A heavy heart, going away from your friends,
your loved ones, your home, everything you knew,
and going out, and you don't know where
you're going and don't know when you're coming
back.
It's all out there, that's it.
I said to one of my sons who
had been in Italy under the fire, I
said to him, I never myself was under
fire, and so I didn't know, and I
said to him, what do the boys say
when the big guns begin to boom and
the shells begin to scream over their heads
and they know they're up there facing the
enemy?
He said, usually they say, well boys, this
is it.
And this is it may easily mean this
is death.
Did you read the other day in the
newspaper about that famous English flyer that made
so many trips across the Channel and finally,
one of those trips, the machine went out
of control and he was plunging toward the
Channel and he knew, and he yelled over
the intercom system, well chaps, this is it.
And that was the last they ever heard
about him.
This is it.
When a soldier goes out there, this is
it.
He's not out there for his comfort, but
to get something done.
To get it done and get it over
with and get home.
Canadian soldiers and American soldiers, above all the
soldiers in the world, get the homesickest, for
such a word.
They get more homesick, why?
Because they have such lovely homes and so
much to come back to.
So many things to live for.
Not black bread.
Their choice of anything.
But when war comes, you give all that
up.
You live on care rations for whatever you
can get.
You live and you fight.
Instead of having your shower, you don't change
clothes for two weeks at a time.
Stand in the mud, whiskers grow, never brush
the teeth, waiting, always waiting, expecting that bullet
under fire.
And Christians are under fire, my brethren.
This is a warfare.
You're soldiers, do you know it?
One of the first things they do for
you when you get into the service, when
they take a bunch of recruits in the
weirdest-looking outfits no two fellows dressed alike.
Green pants and brown pants and black pants
and blue pants and yellow sweatshirts and blue
sweatshirts and sneakers and all sorts of different
shoes.
There they stand up there.
And a tough old sergeant talking out of
the corner of his mouth starts on them.
And when he starts on them, they start
to snap out of that.
Take your chest out.
Pull your stomach in.
Stand up straight.
Get the hump out of your back.
Soldiers now.
Imagine what they can do in two weeks'
time with a man.
Two weeks' time they've made a soldier out
of that sloppy, over-fat fella that never
sat down, you know, he just sat on
his spine halfway up.
Now he stands up straight.
I smile at MacArthur and Eisenhower.
Never saw a picture of them taking a
bend over, did you?
They're soldiers.
They stand up straight.
They're old men, but they stand up straight
as an owl.
Soldiers of Christ arise, we sing.
And that's supposed to be the topic this
morning.
The remedy, I say, for all this that's
wrong with us is simply to take this
text and take it seriously.
Don't think it's here as a boutonniere to
pin on my lapel and go my way,
but it's something that's supposed to take hold
of me and change my whole life and
shape me in my living.
Obey the holy scriptures and get a hold
of this idea that life isn't a game
but a warfare.
And if everybody listening to me now, every
Christian listening to me now, would get a
hold of this idea and say to himself
today, I believe this, that I am not
engaged in a game but in a war
to change the whole color and complexion of
this church overnight.
Now, we must be willing to put away
whatever childish desire for convenience and comfort that
stands between us and God.
Our Lord God doesn't care if we have
comforts provided.
They don't stand in our way.
But the moment they get in our way,
then they are dangerous and they are wrong.
The military authorities don't mind if a soldier
eats a candy bar, but if they came
upon this situation with battle lines drawn and
seesawing back and forth, one men at one
side pushing ahead, the next men dying everywhere,
and a big lug stood there eating a
candy bar.
Oh, you know what he'd get?
He'd get the guardhouse.
And he'd well deserve it, and I'd like
to throw the key away on him.
There's no time in the munch on a
candy bar when the future of your country
is at stake, and maybe the future of
your life, your own future on earth.
So God doesn't care if Christians have some
comforts.
We want them to have them, but we
want them to have them in a way
that will not stand in the way of
the things of God.
If your Wednesday night comforts keep you away
from prayer meeting, they're harmful to you.
If your Sunday morning comforts keep you away
from church, they're harmful to you.
And if your excessive luxuries keep you from
giving to the Lord's work as much as
you should, they're harmful to you.
And if your love of eating and ease
stands in your way of praying as much
as you ought to pray, they're harmful to
you.
Whatever gets between you and the military character
of your Christian life, that's a harm to
you and a harm to the whole church.
I love the book of Nehemiah.
It's not a spiritual book so much as
it's spiritual, too, but it's spiritual in a
good, tough way.
Remember, they used to take a hammer in
one hand and a sword in the other?
And with one hand they pounded the nails
and whatever they did with the hammer, and
with the other they held a sword.
And if the enemy came, they just dispatched
him and went on with their work.
A sword and a hammer in the hand
of these servants of God under the direction
of Nehemiah.
I believe that Christians ought to have a
sword and a hammer in their hand, and
a man with a sword and a hammer
won't be munching a candy bar in time
of war.
He'll have too much on his hands and
too much to do.
So we ought to put away childish notions
and begin to live like sons of the
new creation.
God Almighty converted you and me, gave us
the nature of God within us, Peter says.
We have the nature of God, the divine
nature.
We're living for the future, living for the
world to come.
Therefore we ought to begin to live like
that, live like sons of the new creation.
Our Lord said, if any man will come
after me, let him deny himself, let him
take up his cross daily.
He said daily there, not weekly, but daily,
not once a year, but daily.
Let him so pattern his life, so arrange
it that there's somewhere for a cross all
the time.
That there's somewhere for him to do something
that he wouldn't have done except he was
in wartime and there was a cross to
carry and an enemy to face.
Somebody says, we've got better poaching, that'll do
it.
No, my brother.
I was reading in the book of Ezekiel
this week.
I confess I got just a little bit
discouraged reading it here.
This book of Ezekiel, where the man of
God says, You ought to live with somebody
that plays well on an instrument and sings
beautifully, but they're not going to listen to
you.
Go ahead, son of man, and preach to
these people.
I'll be with you, and they'll know a
prophet has been in your midst.
But don't expect them to do anything, because
they're too snug, too much settled down, too
much in love with themselves.
They inhabit this land, and they are not
going to live any other way.
So you go ahead and preach, and I'll
be with you, and I'll bless you for
it.
But you don't have to look for people
to do much changing.
That rather discouraged me.
But I wouldn't apply it to Avenue Road.
I said to my own heart and to
God, I won't apply it here to Avenue
Road.
I don't believe it.
We're not going to do that.
We're not going to listen and then say,
Well, that was a good sermon, and then
go home and live the same way.
We're going to let truth change us, aren't
we?
We're going to let truth change us.
When we hear truth, we're going to say,
Well, now that's for me, I'm going to
change.
We don't need more or better preaching.
I'm quite convinced that if we obeyed the
poorest preaching in the city, I don't know
where the poorest preaching in the city is.
No preacher believes in his prophet, I can
tell you that much.
But it could be here.
But the poorest preaching in the city, if
it's gospel preaching at all, is good enough
to make sense out of the hearers if
the hearers won't listen to it.
But we become connoisseurs of good preaching.
We become religious dilettantes.
And we demand good preaching, but we're not
going to do anything.
We say, Well, wasn't that a sermon?
Then go right back and live the way
we've been living before.
That's what God said they'd do.
When Ezekiel preached, I have better hopes of
you and things that become salvation.
I do not think you're going to live
the same.
Some of you are.
Some of you couldn't be changed.
He couldn't change you with a saw and
a hammer.
Nobody's going to do anything with you until
the man with the strayed pants takes over.
We're going to lay you out.
But until that time, you're your own boss,
and no preacher is going to change you.
Well, all right, God bless you, I can
still be your friend, but I'm sorry.
But I'm looking for people, more of them,
more of them.
I hope there will be many of them,
and I have optimistic expectation that there shall
be many of you who will listen and
say, By the grace of God, I'm not
going to waste the word, I'm going to
make the word mean something to me.
So, read better books.
I mailed off last Friday.
The book has taken me ten years to
get ready.
I'm not book-selling, but people are going
to buy it.
I'm sure they're going to buy it, there'll
be thousands of them sold.
But it won't do anybody any good.
Unless when they read it, they say, This
is for me, now, God, what would thou
have me to do?
Well, I think that's all for this morning.
Let's be good soldiers of Jesus Christ.
The Lord awaits to receive such a seeking,
seeking to be a changed man, changed from
a civilian to a soldier, changed from ease
to hardship, voluntarily imposed for Christ's sake.
If we were to do these things, if
we were to stand up as good soldiers
and put ourselves in the fight, it's going
to be over one of these times.
This morning I read out loud in my
study the story of John Bunyan, of a
Christian entering heaven.
A Christian entering heaven, remember, in Pilgrim's Progress.
Beautiful, beautiful.
As you know, the Christian paid a terrible
price for the privilege of entering in by
the gate into the city.
He paid a terrible price, he bore upon
him the scars of a long, hard journey.
He got there, he was welcomed by the
sound of trumpets and the voice of multitudes
of just men mid-purchase.
But it cost him a long, hard journey.
This is a long, hard journey you and
I are engaged in, warfare and fight and
travel and forced march.
But if you keep right on believing and
dare to be a soldier for Christ, the
day will be when you will cross over
and enter through the gates into the city.
You will be welcomed by the sound of
trumpet and the voices of the ransom.
It will be worth it all in that
day.
Soldiers of Christ, let's arise and act like
soldiers.
Amen.
End of sermon.