So in the 57th Psalm, the one that
was read last Sunday in our morning worship
hour, I want to use a few verses,
particularly one, beginning with verse 4.
My soul is among lions, and I lie
even among them that are set on fire,
even the sons of men whose teeth are
spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp
sword.
Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens,
and let thy glory be above all the
earth.
They have prepared a net for my steps.
My soul is bowed down.
They have digged a pit before me into
the midst whereof they are fallen themselves.
My heart is fixed, O God, my heart
is fixed.
I will sing and give praise.
Wake up, my glory, wake, soldiering harp, I
myself will awake early.
I will praise thee, O Lord, among the
people.
I will sing unto thee among the nations.
For thy mercy is great unto the heavens,
and thy truth unto the clouds.
Then he repeats the verse again.
Verse 5 is repeated word for word.
Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens,
and let thy glory be above all the
earth.
This was written by David when he was
fleeing from Saul and was surrounded by his
foes.
David, in that brilliant way he had of
describing things, said that he found himself among
lions, men whose teeth were spears and arrows
and whose tongues were a sharp sword.
He was surrounded by them, and he had
the authority of King Saul back of them.
They had back of them, and he had
nobody but God.
But he had enough.
So David, being taught in the ways of
the Spirit, did something that we probably wouldn't
have thought of doing.
David immediately put God between him and his
enemies.
David knew that he must have victory, but
he knew that if he was to have
anything like permanent victory, that he couldn't ask
God to exalt him.
So he didn't say, O God, I am
thy King, to be successor to Saul, the
sinning king.
Now, God, I want you to come to
my rescue and crush these enemies under my
feet.
He knew better than that.
So he prayed, or I don't know whether
you would call it a prayer or not,
it's an ecstatic exclamation rather than a prayer.
Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens,
and let thy glory be above all the
earth.
Whatever happens to me, God, be thou exalted.
Whatever these men with sharp teeth and claws
and spears and arrows do to me, God,
let thy glory be above all the earth.
My heart is fixed on this, O God,
my heart is fixed, and I will sing
praise because I want thee to be exalted,
O God, above the heavens and thy glory
above the earth.
Here is God's way of doing, and it's
backwards to ours, and it needs a lot
of attention.
We need to sing about it and pray
about it and preach about it until we
get a hold of it, for we are
very slow to learn.
God must himself be exalted above all, or
else the victory of the King, David, would
have been a treacherous victory.
He would have been defeated.
Instead of winning, he would have been defeated,
even though he had won over his enemy.
It would have been a treacherous win, a
pyrrhic victory that would have cost him too
much.
So he put God where he belonged, high
above all, exalted above all, and then David
came out all right because he put God
where God belonged.
That's the little secret, and I could stop
right here now and pronounce the benediction, and
we would have learned something, I'm sure.
We would have learned one of the most
important things that's possible to learn, because the
trouble with the world is that there is
an inverted relationship between God and mankind.
That's the whole trouble, that moral derangement.
God belongs above all.
When we say we magnify God, we don't
mean we make God big.
You couldn't do that.
God is already vastly perfect.
But we mean that we see him big.
And when we say that we exalt him,
we don't mean that we raise him, we
mean that we acknowledge him to be as
exalted as he is.
And the trouble with the world now is,
the trouble with the race of men, that
we have not put God where he belongs
in our thinking, in our conduct, and in
all our philosophies and in all our attitudes
of life.
There are millions who call themselves by the
name of God, there are millions who pray
to God, no doubt.
But the true place of God in the
heart is to be learned by where we
put him when we are in trouble, where
we put God when difficulties come, and where
we put him at other times in our
life.
I want to ask you some questions here,
and you can answer them for yourself.
I don't ask that you should arise and
ask for the floor and give a verbal
answer.
It wouldn't do any good, because we already
know.
But I want you to answer for yourself.
Who wins when it's a choice between God
and money with the average person, even who
calls himself a Christian?
Who wins when it's a choice between God
and money?
I want to ask you, who wins when
it's a choice between God and ambition?
A lot of young people turn to the
Lord when they are in their teens, and
then they become ambitious, and they find they
have some talent, and they go on and
develop that talent, and the world finds it
out and sends for them.
Then they have to make a choice between
following that ambition, which will take them to
the world and away from the Church, or
following the Lord.
I think a keen 97 percent of them
will follow their ambitions.
Who wins when it's a question of fleshly
enjoyment or doing the will of God?
I would say that out in the world
God has much at all and would never
get a vote.
But in the Church it would seem to
me that God ought to get all the
votes there are.
I don't see where there could possibly be
any excuse for anybody voting on any other
side but on God's side.
And yet when it's a choice between fleshly
enjoyment and God, the Church usually votes on
the side of fleshly enjoyment.
Now we might as well face that.
You see, I am not a backscratcher.
You knew that before you invited me here,
and I think that I have shown it
by what I have said from this pulpit
for the last year, that I am not
a backscratcher.
God did not say, Tozer, go ye into
all the world and scratch the backs of
my poor, undernourished sheep.
But he said, Go tell them the truth.
Preach the word to them and tell them
the truth.
And I find that there are enough people
who like that kind of thing to make
a Church succeed.
There are enough people.
Anyhow, I nearly got off for there, Madeline,
because I wanted to remind you that I
was saying that between fleshly enjoyment and God,
we usually vote for fleshly enjoyment, provided we
can somehow strike a compromise and have God,
too.
And then between God and marriage.
Now, I have known one or two instances
in my ministry, and I have read of
a few here and there in books of
Christian biography, where men and women separate because
one or the other is not a Christian.
They are going together, and they decide to
marry, and then one of them, as being
a Christian, decides he or she can't do
it.
Somebody told me just the other night, some
young lady telling me about going with a
young man, and they were quite friendly, and
there was some little thought, anyhow, that they
might hook up for the rest of their
lives, and because he wasn't the kind of
man he should have been, she turned away
from him and said no, and broke it
off, and it's still broken off.
That happens once in the blue moon, but
it doesn't happen very often.
Usually a young man or woman follows the
Lord blissfully and happily along.
They are the first one to young people's
service and the last one out.
They are the first one to take part
and to witness and to testify, until they
meet the man or the woman, as it
may be, the boy or the girl.
Then God gets them to decide whether they
are to marry and whom they are to
marry.
If it's a choice between God and marriage,
they marry.
Then a choice between God and friends.
There aren't very many people who will give
up their friends for Christ's sake.
There aren't very many many people who will
give up self for Christ's sake.
So now who wins when there's a vote
between God and these things?
Usually the other things win, and God loses.
That's why we're in this state we're in,
you see.
The curse doesn't come causeless, and neither does
the blessing come causeless.
And we're living at this poor, dying rate
because we are violating the laws of the
kingdom.
Now if a young man wanted victory in
his life, and he wanted to know the
secret of victory, when it came to a
beautiful young girl, she's beautiful when she's galled
up ready to go, but he ought to
see her in the morning.
Anyhow, when it comes between the choice between
a beautiful young girl and God, the young
man says, Be thou exalted, O God, above
the heavens, and let thy glory be above
all the earth.
Then the victory comes to the man's life.
And you would find many victorious young people
walking about if they'd learn when it comes
to their ambitions to say, God be above
my ambitions, let thy name be above all
my ambitions.
God would give the victory, but God won't
give it to you directly.
He has to give it to you by
way of the throne.
We have to put God where he belongs
first, and then when we do, God blesses
us and gives us the victory.
But if we try to get the victory,
as they say, unilaterally, that's a good word
now, and we go straight out one direction
to get the victory, we don't get it.
The world staggers on to no foreseeable future.
We who believe that the Lord is coming
back again and believe that there is going
to be a new heaven and a new
earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, we were looked down
upon as being a little bit off in
our heads.
They said everything will be all right, peace
and brotherhood, throw your arms around each other
and squeeze hard enough, and finally we'll all
be squeezed together.
Well, they're over there squeezing in the Congo
now, and what's happening over there?
Everywhere it's the same.
We're so busy being brothers that we're cutting
each other's throats all over the world, even
in such places as the cities that ought
to know better.
New York and Washington and London and Paris,
where everybody ought to be ashamed of themselves
for acting the way they do.
Look at the way they're acting.
We're having a mixed-up time of it
because we are putting God down and putting
men up.
When humanism came along about a generation ago
and made the human mind to be the
criterion of all thought, and put God down,
and theology ceased to be the queen of
the sciences, and the queen of the sciences
became science itself, or it became humanism or
sociology, then of course we went down because
we had not put God up.
If you exalt God, God will exalt you.
But if you put God down, you will
go down, and the world is in the
mess it's in because God has no place
in the minds or hearts of the people.
The work of God in redemption is to
restore this inverted order and to put God
up and put man down in order that
he might put man up.
In order that he might do that, God
came down, and he came down just as
far down as he could get.
It was impossible for him to get down
any further than he got.
You'll remember what it tells us over here
in the epistle of Paul, that he considered
not being in the form of God something
to be hung on to, but he made
himself with no reputation.
He voided his reputation, and that's the last
thing anybody wants to do, but God could
afford to do it.
He took upon him the form of a
servant, and that was humbling himself.
He was made in the likeness of man,
and that was still going down further.
Being found in the fashion of a man,
he humbled himself self-still farther and became
obedient unto death, and that's another step down.
Even the death of the cross, and you
couldn't go down any further than that.
Now there's a big word, wherefore, there, or
a little word.
Wherefore, also, God hath highly exalted him, and
given him a name that is above every
name, that the name of Jesus every knee
should bow, things in heaven, and things in
earth, and things under the earth.
So you see, we are exalted when we
have exalted God and gone down.
Then God takes us and lifts us up,
but when we try to climb up, it's
the business of God to keep us down.
If we will humble ourselves under the mighty
hand of God, he will exalt us in
due time.
But our carnal hearts want to be exalted
right away.
We want to get up there now, and
God said, You can afford to wait, children.
My son went down and stayed down thirty
-three years, and then went still down further
and further and further until he touched the
utter bottom of all possible humiliation.
And then because he did that, I raised
him and gave him a place at my
right hand, fulfilling the text that he that
honored me I will honor.
Jesus Christ honored God even in bloody death
and degradation.
And because he did, God put him at
the right hand and has given him a
name that is above angels, for unto which
of the angels said he at any time,
Thou art my beloved son.
So remember, my friends, that redemption does a
lot of things for us.
You and I are inclined to simplify or
take the kindergarten attitude.
We think that salvation makes us happy, and
nowadays it's abroad everywhere.
People are writing books about it, how to
be happy and how to feel good inside.
Just take Jesus and you'll feel good inside,
forgetting that the whole purpose of redemption is
not to give you a tickle inside your
heart.
The whole purpose of redemption is to reverse
the inverted order of things and put God
where he belongs so man can be where
he belongs.
It can raise God and exalt him to
the throne and put man down in the
dust where he belongs, in order that God
may from the dust raise him to the
throne.
But never, never does God raise a man
to the throne except from the dust.
Never does he lift him to his right
hand except from the low place of humiliation.
Part of the message of Christianity is the
integral part of it, letting take up his
cross and let him follow me, let him
forsake houses and home and husband and parents
and his life.
Oh God, it's a choice between me and
my house, between thee and my house.
All right, I'll take thee, God.
It's a choice between my home and thee,
I'll take thee, God.
It's a choice between husband and God, I'll
take God.
And you look after the husband, it's a
choice between parents and God.
Now I'm not talking out of the left
side of my ear.
I know what I'm talking about, my brethren.
I went through it.
I went through it when I was a
lad, 17 years old, I got converted.
My mother wasn't converted, my father wasn't, there
were a lot of brothers and sisters buzzing
around there, and the relatives weren't, and my
mother looked down on a fanatic, she was
a good, starchy Presbyterian, and looked down on
a fanatic.
She later got converted, but she looked down
on everybody.
When I preached on the street, she thought
it was terrible.
She said, Can you imagine my son preaching,
and not only preaching, but preaching on a
street corner?
Oh, it was a terrible thought to her.
Later on, when she got converted herself, and
saw what the Lord was doing, why, she
humbly admitted that the Lord would have been
right all the time.
But you got to know these things for
yourself, and I happened to know them for
myself.
My parents, I had to walk out, I
had to, I don't mean leave the house,
but I had to live in a way
they didn't approve.
But the Lord saved them, and it's wonderful
to remember the Lord saved my father, and
he saved my mother, and he saved my
brother-in-law, and he saved two of
my sisters, and all because I exalted God.
When the choice came between my parents and
God, I took God.
When it came between my friends and God,
I took God.
Now, what the Spirit is trying to say
to you this morning and to me is
that we are to exalt God above all
things, and to live and to be so
that his glory is exalted above the heavens.
This is the ladder by which you climb
to the kingdom of power, and this is
the lever by which you can move mountains,
there is no question about it.
For each one of us there is yet
a place of richness of inward experience that
we don't know very much about.
A richness of inward experience.
I have just been reading, in fact I'm
in the process of reading the biography of
Teresa of Avila.
Now, Teresa was a nun, and we tend
to avert our faces and walk by on
the other side.
But an awful lot of you Christian women
would do well to trade with her, if
you could, by the grace of God.
Not her crucifix and her holy water, she
can keep those, they didn't help her anyhow,
and she was sharp enough to know it.
But her knowledge of God, my brother, her
knowledge of God, the inward experience that she
had, her inward experience of Christ in you,
the hope of glory.
Oh, there were an awful lot of Protestants
before the Protestants ever came into being in
North.
An awful lot of Protestants before Luther's time,
an awful lot of Evangelicals who didn't know
they were Evangelicals.
I sometimes can quote back to our Catholic
friends and some of their own, the sayings
of some of their own people who were
Evangelicals didn't know it, because they found God
in Christ and they found salvation by grace
without the works of the law or merits
of mankind or the Saints.
Well, there's a richness of inward experience that
the Saints have had down the years and
that God promises to his children, and it's
all, this is the secret of it, it's
all by this.
And there is a deep satisfaction to the
total nature, and there's a usefulness in the
kingdom of God, there's fruitfulness and growth, and
there's a ravishing knowledge of the Most Holy
God.
A ravishing knowledge of God, I repeat, and
it is when God is exalted and we
are of base.
Now, I wonder if you can say this
morning and mean it, be thou exalted over
me, my God.
Be thou exalted at my expense.
Be thou exalted, O God, and let it
cost me what it will cost me.
God has too many bargainers, he has too
many Jacobs who sit down with a lead
pencil and figure out, if you will bless
me, God, I will give you a pencil.
And Jacob lived like that for a long
time at any rate.
He became a better man later on after
God got everything.
He didn't get only the tent, he got
his wife and his children and his property,
and he got everything, and it was all
over there, and Esau was on his way
to kill him.
And there was Jacob, not with his tent
gone, but with everything gone that he hid.
He just had what he was wrapped in,
that's all.
And there he was on the bank of
the river, and he prayed to God, and
God wrestled with him at night and changed
his name from Jacob.
We tend to dicker with God and jew
God down and try to get an easy
way.
Lord, I want to be blessed, but I
don't want it to cost me this much.
Couldn't we talk this thing over?
No, says God, we can't talk this thing
over.
My rules are my rules and my word
is my word, and my will is made
known in the word, and there isn't anything
to talk over.
So you come my way and you will
be blessed.
Go your way and you'll lose everything.
That's so simple that I can't see why
the Church has missed it, but the Church
has missed it.
Let thy glory be above my possessions, O
God.
Why, people, they say that no Canadian is
ever really what he ought to be until
he has $25,000 in the bank's drawn
interest.
I heard that up here, they didn't say
that down home.
They told me that up here.
And that's okay, you can have it, and
I don't mind at all.
I wish it was $50,000, and you'd
give half of it to Avenue Road Church
and to foreign missions.
But that's not the point.
The point is, who do you work for
on this?
If it were a choice between giving it
all up or having God's highest will, which
would you do?
Most people would seek a compromise.
They'd take a little of God and a
little of what they have.
And there are friendships.
Penny Long said, you know, that we found
it hard to give up our friends in
order to find a friend.
He spelled the word friends with lowercase letters
and the word friend with uppercase letters.
There is a friend that sticks closer than
a brother, you can capitalize that.
Then there are friends, and we have them
of all sorts and all degrees.
Some friends who would do anything for you,
and some friends who would grumble if they
had to do anything for you.
But we have friends, and we've got to
give them all up in order that we
might have the friends.
And when we have the friends, we'll have
friends.
You know, the Lord never takes anything away,
but when he gives something better back, it's
always so.
I gave up the approval of my parents
and the respect for a little while of
my friends, because they thought that I was
going off a little without left field because
I was following the Lord and was down
among those alliance people.
My father said that my head had been
filled with things.
Well, my head got a little in it,
but there wasn't much room for too much.
But I hope my heart got a whole
lot more.
Well, I lost some friends, but I gained
a friend, and now I have friends around
the whole wide world.
I don't think there is an island or
a continent anywhere that I don't have friends
on it.
And I mean friends that I know, people
that I know and have talked with and
prayed with and preached to, and they've preached
to me, maybe.
I was just reading a book, reading some
45 reviews somebody sent me from Germany.
I didn't know there was any book of
mine published in Germany, but here I found
out there was, and it had 45 reviews
from the magazines on it.
I had somebody translate them for me, and
I didn't know what they were saying about
me, whether it was good or bad.
And it turned out to be good, at
least we read the good ones.
Now, I have friends over there, and I
wouldn't have the faintest notion how my German
Christian friends would greet me.
I haven't the faintest notion.
And I would say hi to them, but
I don't know what they would say to
me.
I don't know.
But they are my friends.
I gave up my little handful of friends
for God's sake, and now I have friends
all over Germany.
And they tell me in India and Japan
the Lord is letting my books have a
sale, and I have friends there that I've
never seen, as well as in Armenia and
Spanish countries.
I mention that only because I want you
to know that when God takes away friends
for the friend, he gives friends back again.
But he gives you better friends than you
had before.
My friends now are Christian friends.
They are good people.
They are not perfect people, but they are
the best people on earth nevertheless.
I'd like to stand right out on the
street corner down here at Bloor and Young,
or wherever your main street is, and I'd
like to tell the round world that the
best people in the world are Christians.
They are the best.
Now, they are not perfect, and part of
my job has been to chastise and to
lay the lash on the Lord's little sheep
occasionally, in order that they might not lie
around and wither up, but go out and
buy the green pasture.
But while I am doing it, I love
them and respect them as the best people
in the world.
Christians are that.
So God will give you back, take away
people that wouldn't do you any good anyhow,
and he'll give you back the best people
in the world for your friends.
Then your comforts.
Some of you never show you up.
If we saw you at prayer meeting, I'd
faint and the pianist would tumble over in
a dead heat, because it's not comfortable for
you to be there.
You are not there because you stay by
your comforts.
I don't know what there is on Wednesday
nights on the Tiwi, as the Swedes call
it, but that's no doubt one of the
reasons.
But anyhow, we give up our comforts.
We lie down there and turn around three
times and lie down in front of the
fireplace of a cold night.
It's really something.
But Jesus Christ, our Lord, got up and
went out into the cold, bleak world and
gave his all, and so did his apostles,
and so have the saints all down the
years.
So give up our comforts.
Be thou exalted, O God, above my comforts,
and be thou exalted above my pleasures, and
be thou exalted above my ambitions, all these
private projects that people are having.
Be thou exalted above my reputation.
Now, that's always a pretty hard thing to
die to.
We desire to have a reputation.
Then when we find we can't get any,
we want a reputation for being happy that
we don't have a reputation.
You see, that's the way it works.
We find we don't rate, then we smile
like St. Francis and say, Well, I don't
rate, praise the Lord.
And then people say, Isn't she saintly?
She's happy because she doesn't rate.
But it's another way of rating, you see.
It's just another way of getting your ambition
fulfilled.
And then there are my likes and my
dislikes and my health and even, finally, my
life itself.
I have had to shoo off and chase
off and chase away all my life friends
who were afraid I'd kill myself.
They say, Oh, I'm afraid you'll just kill
yourself, you'll work yourself to death.
Don't you worry about that, my brother, because
working yourself to death in the kingdom of
God is a wonderful way to die, but
God doesn't let many people die like that.
Phineas used to teach in the Alliance that
you ought just to get to repose and
rest in the Lord and wait patiently for
him, and you'll never die.
You won't least die until you're 70 plus.
But Phineas used to teach that you could
kill yourself in the kingdom of God.
He said, Lots of preachers kill themselves serving
a lazy church that won't help, and they
die.
And he said, The Lord will judge that
church.
That was Phineas' belief.
But don't worry about my health, because I've
put my health on the line a long
time ago.
The Lord can have my health.
Why would I want to hang around a
dirty world like this after my work is
done?
Why vegetate and hang around the last leaf
on the tree in the spring, the last
rose of summer withered and wilted and pathetically
hanging on the end of the stem, waiting
for the first wind?
Why should I want to do it?
No, give your health to the Lord.
Get up and pour yourself in, pour yourself
in, and in your life itself.
People are so afraid.
I know a preacher, and I think I
told you this once before, but I've been
here long enough to repeat now.
I knew a preacher, and they came to
him and said, Now, you've got angina pectoris,
and if you don't take care, you'll die.
So he whimpered like a puppy that had
been fanged, and off he went to California
and retired.
Settle down and live.
They said to another man, another friend of
mine, You have angina pectoris, and if you
don't watch out, you're going to drop over
dead.
Well, he said, That's all right.
I want to die in God's kingdom and
in God's work.
So he went to work, and work he
did, and kept on working.
One morning, his wife, who had gotten up
to get breakfast, came back to hunt her
husband, bring him down to breakfast, the way
some new women have to do.
And there was my good friend lying on
the floor, a great, tall, handsome fellow, stone
dead.
He died between the time she got up,
or at least she had gotten up without
knowing it.
He tumbled out there.
But he had given his last breath to
his God.
He hadn't gone to California and pulled in
his horns and said, I'm afraid I'll die.
Die, brother, for God's sake, die!
It's all right, you can afford to do
it.
Christians can die when they can't do anything
else.
We can always die.
And it's the last thing most people ever
do, and it's not at all bad.
Give yourself to God.
Oh, God, be exalted above my health, be
exalted above my life, and I don't worry
about the length of my days.
Long time ago the Lord said, The number
of thy days I will fulfill.
I haven't given much thought to it since.
The number of thy days I will fulfill,
and as thy days, so shall thy strength
be.
I have those two texts, and the Lord
gave them to me, and I've been living
by them.
But we worry so much about our health.
They don't out there in the world.
A man who is the President or Vice
President of a big concern, he comes staggering
home at 11 o'clock at night with
a briefcase and says to his wife, I
had an awful day in the office.
The doctor says, Now, if you don't look
out, you'll die, you're in terrible shape.
And he goes right on living like that.
Boy, to make sales, so we can have
a bigger yacht next year and a bigger
car the year after that, he goes right
on for money.
But when they come to a Christian and
say, Now, look out, because you need to
protect your health, he takes them for granted.
I have a friend down in New York
City now, McAfee, who was with me for
16 years.
He was a bachelor, never married, a handsome
fellow, but never married.
I introduced him one time, and I said,
This man is a Bachelor of Theology.
And I said, One Northern Baptist gave him
a Bachelor's degree, and he thought it was
tremendous.
And he just stayed single all his life.
Anyhow, there are some people who take things
too seriously.
And when some doctor says, Now, now, ease
up, ease up, don't take those meetings, don't
go out there and preach in the mission,
say, Goodbye, doctor.
I knew the Lord before I knew you.
Go ahead and you'll live anyhow.
I've found people that stopped and tried to
protect their health and just tumbled over and
finished off in no time.
Well, give up your friendships, give up your
possessions, give up your comforts and your ambitions
and your reputation and your health and even
your life, and you'll find that God will
give it all back to you.
Push down, shaken together, pressed down and running
over.
This is very hard to comprehend this kind
of teaching, because it's not the kind of
teaching we hear about now.
We hear something else altogether.
Breezy, self-confident Christians tell us about how
wonderful it is to accept Christ and then
have a good time all the rest of
your life.
The Lord won't demand anything of you.
Yes, he will, my friend.
The Lord will demand everything of you.
And when you give it all up to
him, he may bless it and hand it
back, but on the other hand he may
not.
Do you remember Betty and John Stan of
25 years ago or so?
He led them out and they said, Now
you give up this Christ business or you
die.
He said, We'll not give up Christ.
They said, All right.
He said, Kneel down, they knelt down, bend
your head over, they bent their head over,
and John and Betty Sam were beheaded.
We have Christians who have been called upon
to give all, but they are richer than
Midas, richer, richer than all the kings of
the earth, richer, richer than all of the
misers of the world, because they were permitted
to give themselves and to give themselves to
God.
One of the Saints, I have some letters
that he wrote, he was a great Saint
of God, and the Lord had blessed him
and given him a lot of things, but
he had a desire, it was back in
the Roman days when they were killing Christians,
this dear old Saint had a desire to
die as a martyr.
He wrote to his friends, Christians in Rome,
and now he said, I want to ask
a favor of you.
He said, I have a yearning in my
heart to die for my Lord.
He said, I've lived for him and I've
given my all.
But he said, It's not enough.
I want a crown to set on all
other crowns, I want to die for my
Lord's sake.
Now, he said, the way things are going,
I'll die.
He said, they've got me sentenced.
But he said, if you intercede, you can
get me off.
Now, he said, what I'm afraid of is
that you'll intercede.
Please, for Christ's sake, don't do it.
He said, let me alone.
He said, don't go to the authorities and
ask to get me off.
You disappoint me and do me a disservice.
He said, I'm an old man and I've
given my all and now I want this
crown, yet let me have it.
Let me alone.
He said, I hear you want to go
intercede, don't do it.
He said, he didn't, and he didn't, and
the Romans did.
So that man got his crown, thank God.
That's the roster of the great, I might
name them, the roster of the spiritually great.
What made them like they were?
Well, they all found a secret.
O God, be thou exalted above all.
Thy kingdom come and my kingdom go.
And be sure of one thing, before his
kingdom can come, yours has to go.
I don't know eschatologically, which means according to
the teaching of prophecy, that's what that long
word means.
I don't know whether that's good theology or
not, but I know it's good Christian experience.
That before the kingdom of Christ can come
within me, my kingdom has to go out
of me.
I've got to get off that throne and
hand it back to the one whose it
has been all these centuries, even Jesus Christ
our Lord.
Now, can you this morning, and will you,
do this one thing and I'm finished.
Are you willing to say, O Lord, exalt
thyself above me and all that I am.
Possessions, friends, comforts, pleasures, reputation, health, life,
everything.
Now, God, I mean it.
Now test me, Lord, and see whether I
do.
Bring my life into line so that I
won't be fooling myself, but that I will
really know that this is true.
O Lord, set a chain of circumstances in
motion that will bring me to the place
where I can say and mean it.
Be thou exalted above the heavens, O Lord,
and thy glory above the sky.
That is the language of heaven.
Have you ever wondered what language they speak
in heaven?
This is it.
This is the language of heaven.
They will come from the north and the
south and the east and the west.
They will come from German-speaking countries and
Spanish and Latin and Greek and Syrian.
They will come from all around the world,
and they'll never have to sit down and
go through the painful process of learning a
language.
In the kingdom of God we'll all speak
the same language, and the key word will
be, worthy is the Lamb that was slain
to receive glory and power and wisdom and
might and honor.
So you'll know heaven's language when you get
there without studying it, and you'll not speak
with an accent unless you haven't learned the
language of heaven here.
If you learn the language of heaven here,
you'll not speak with an accent there.
But if you learn the language of heaven
here, I don't know but what it might
be noticed in that day.
Paul spoke about being ashamed in the presence
of Christ, and I wonder if it isn't
possible to live a life here that makes
us ashamed when we go get there to
see how little we've been and how poor,
compared with what we might have been.
Then we might speak with an accent.
But I hope when we arrive in that
place we'll all be able to sing together
all hail the power of Jesus' name, let
angels prostrate fall.
I want you to close by seeing not
the one in the bulletin, but another one.
Number 394, let's sing all stanzas and let's
sing full-throated to glorify Jesus Christ our
Lord.