Thank you, O God, for thy work there
in French Quebec, where the, everything is stacked
against the people, against the true people of
God.
Bless our young brother, we pray.
May thine oil be upon his head in
such measure that everybody there, even though they
hate him for his partisanism, may love him
for the fragrance of his life, and slowly
turn and see that the fragrance of a
holy life comes from the same doctrines that
they hate, and thus give up their opposition
and turn to thee.
With mercy we pray thee, attend the ministry
of this young man, and all those who
labor there.
We ask this in Christ's name.
Amen.
Now, I pray that I may have skill
to help without harming.
I want to speak frankly about our weaknesses
and our needs.
And I know how much injury is done
by a sour, critical spirit, and I'd rather
die now than to turn sour.
But I also know that the shortest way
to the cemetery for any church is to
assume that everything's all right and just let
itself alone.
So I want this morning to appraise the
situation a little here, and tell you what
we can do and what I hope we
will do.
Now, I follow Paul and our Lord Jesus
Christ in this, for they both first appraised
and showed what was on the credit side,
and then what was on the debit side,
and then told what to do about it.
I think that that's a perfect pattern for
any preacher.
What's wrong with us?
What's right with us?
What we can do to correct what's wrong?
That seems to be, I'd say, the most
logical and sensible and reasonable procedure possible, and
I'll follow it along with Christ and Paul.
Now, there is in this church a relative
soundness of doctrine.
I haven't run into anybody yet that is
off his rocker when it comes to his
theology.
I believe that we are theologically sound.
The emphases seem to be falling in the
right place, and that's what especially matters, you
know, where the emphasis falls.
We may believe a thing and not emphasize
it, and if we believe it but don't
emphasize it, it is like money in the
bank that is not used and not drawing
interest, or like corn out in the barn
that hasn't been planted, or like any useful
thing that is lying rusting.
So it isn't what we say we believe
so much as what we emphasize.
And I believe that the emphases are falling
in the right place in this church.
I am quite sure that in the Sunday
school and in young people's and in all
the teaching that we're Orthodox all right, so
you can check that off and say, well,
we're Orthodox at least.
But don't pat yourself on the back yet,
because there's a lot wrong with orthodoxy unless
we do something about it.
And I believe we've preserved a high degree
of social unity in the church.
I mean by that that the contrary-minded
people don't seem to feel at home, and
I suppose they go somewhere else or stay
somewhere else.
There's unity.
I don't think that there is perfect unity.
That is, I suppose that there would might
be one who would criticize another, and so
on, a little.
But I think even that's at a minimum.
So I could say that there's unity among
us, and I think that our unscriptural and
extra-scriptural projects are probably kept at a
fair minimum.
No, not as completely so as I'd like
to see.
And I believe that in some measure we
are enjoying the presence of God.
This is to me is the test of
a church, whether it's people when they need
to enjoy the presence of the Lord.
If they do not, then there's lots to
be done yet.
When the presence of the Lord is felt,
worship is delightful and healing to the soul.
And you come in and go out quite
changed from what you were when you came
in.
You sense the presence of God in the
midst, and you'll love prayer and good singing
and the fellowship and meditation.
You'll love it because the presence of God
is there.
Now, I've been in churches where it was
more marked than it is here, but I
have been in some where there was far
less of it than there is here.
So I would say for the average church,
we are in a fairer condition, but certainly
not where we ought to be yet.
And I believe that our vital relationships are
spiritual, that we're held together by some social
ties, but we're held together primarily by spiritual
ties.
And therefore I think this is good.
I appreciate the interest of the church in
missions that will probably bring in $55,000
or $60,000, this year to missions.
That's good.
And there are some missionaries on the field
from this church, and there are some in
Christian schools.
So that's good, and I would like Paul
and like our Lord Jesus Christ say, I
praise you and I hold you up as
example.
I think that's good.
But now on the debit side, and here
again I follow the man Paul and our
Lord Jesus Christ in honestly pointing out deficiencies
and recommending remedy.
If you don't know what your deficiencies are,
you certainly won't know what the remedy is,
and you won't know there's any reason for
a remedy.
But I want to point out to you
a danger, and that is the danger that
comes to a church, the disadvantage that comes
to a church, which has reached a certain
ecclesiastical maturity.
The young churches that are just starting out
are almost always the most spiritual churches because
they have to trust God more than the
other churches do.
And when the church is new and they
only have a few people around, one man
has to serve as secretary and Sunday school
superintendent and chairman of the board, not because
he wants to or insists on it, but
because the men are so few.
Or even sometimes, as Dr. Simpson once said
in the early days of the Alliance, he
said he had some elect ladies on his
board because there weren't enough men to go
around.
Well, there's something wonderful about a new little
church that's starting out.
Everybody seems to love everybody else, and their
very hindrances are blessed to them.
They don't have big numbers, but like the
fellow who announced at a conference that his
Sunday school had doubled, 100 percent increase.
He said, What's the size of it?
He said, Twelve.
He said, We had six when we started.
And the young, the small new church, just
two new people come in and they're happy
about it, so they tend to be optimistic.
And they're little and struggling, and they have
to pray for everything.
And that's an advantage to the church.
And then time and success come along, and
then the churches tend to become critical and
choosy and used to things.
The little church, the little struggling beginning church
that would take a boy out of NAC
that was shaved with a wet cloth and
that was scarcely a man yet, and they
were glad to get him, you know, glad
to get him.
And they just, Oh, bless God, bless the
young brother, we thank thee you've sent him
among us.
And then when they get established and the
people are there and the money's coming in
and they get a reputation, then the tendency
is to become critical and choosy.
Then to get a man, they parade just
as if they were buying a horse.
They parade a whole number of men across
the platform and examine them in on feel
their muscles and see if they think that
they would be worthy to preach in such
a giant of a church as this.
Well, that's the big church's idea about things.
And so out goes the freshness and the
wonder and the enthusiasm that was there when
they were little and struggling and everything, everybody
that came in was welcome.
Well, it's an evidence of a cooling of
the first love, and Jesus talked about the
cooling of the first love.
And I tell you that I'd rather hear,
I'd rather hear that I had an incurable
disease than to know that my love had
cooled off, at least to know that it
had cooled off beyond repair.
The Lord Jesus said, Thou hast left thy
first love.
That means your first degree of love or
your love first in time, whichever it is.
The scholars don't know and I don't think
I care because both would be true.
You've left your first degree of love.
Some translations say bluntly, you don't love me
as much as you used to.
Well, I suppose that this is more tragic
than to hear that you had lung cancer,
because all a lung cancer can do is
kill the body.
But when the heart has been injured and
the soul chilled and cooled off, then sometimes
that's irreparable and there's nothing that can be
done, though certainly there is much that can
be done if we only knew it and
dared to believe it.
Now, how can the love of God ever
cease to be what it is?
How can God ever become less to us?
How can it be that we love Christ
less than we do, or less than we
did?
If this is true, then I say that
there needs to be a stirring and a
humbling and a repenting and a seeking after
God.
And then another thing that big churches get
the habit they get into, or established churches
by the word big, they may be anywhere
from a few hundred to a few thousand.
But the second is constricted sympathy.
There's great danger.
We get so many things to pray about
in our own fellowship that it uses up
our time and we don't get much chance
to pray for anything else.
Who was it that called attention?
Miss Bailey, who spoke to us downstairs here
some weeks ago, called attention that when Job
prayed for his friends, God blessed him and
doubled everything he had.
Well, constricted sympathies, I pray that we may
be delivered from that.
Now, it's necessary to protect and promote and
pray for and labor and conserve and defend
our own people and our own fellowship.
But that is only in order that we
might grow in grace and spread and expand
and go to the far-out regions.
We want to have a successful and profitable
church here, only that we might have a
larger outreach and a larger outlook to the
ends of the world.
And the constricted sympathies are very dangerous.
Sometimes it's good when you get on your
knees not to pray for yourself at all
and not to pray for your local church
at all, but to pray for others out
there, to name people and pray for them
by name.
And thus your sympathies don't get constricted.
There isn't anything in the wide world that
I know of quite so horrible as an
old person who thinks only of him or
herself, living for him or herself all the
time.
And so there's danger that we should become
self-centered and our sympathies should be constricted.
My constant prayer to God is, year in
and year out, God give me a heart
as big as thine, as big as naked
big, and give me thy sympathies and thy
understanding, so that I will love the ones
that God loves for the same reason that
he loves them.
And sometimes those reasons are not known of
men, and sometimes there are no reasons except
that God loves them, and because he does,
we do.
We've got to war on narrowness, we've got
to war on it, we've got to continue
to war on it until it's destroyed, until
our hearts are as big as the world.
You go with some people and they live
around the world.
I think it was Simpson who wrote a
little hymn of some sort, We'll Pray the
World Around.
They say that when the old man would
get up into his middle seventies and his
mind had rather slipped on him and he
was forgetful and he'd meet people on the
campus and didn't know who they were, would
shake their hand and greet them warmly, God
bless you and go on, he didn't know
who they were.
And the day he died, in the morning
he sat out on his little screened-in
porch there on the hillside of Nyack and
prayed for his missionaries.
There weren't so many then, and he could
pray for them by name, and he did,
and prayed around the world for his missionaries
and then went in and died.
He couldn't remember a friend that he'd known
for 40 years on the campus, but he
knew every missionary by name around the world.
I had another friend, Dr. L.
H.
Zeamer of Toledo, Ohio, pastor of that great
missionary church until the time of his death.
That great man of God didn't know his
own wife, but she came into the room
and he said, Take her away, take her
away.
Didn't have his own wife around, and didn't
know people.
But he'd get on his knees and mention
every missionary from his church by their name
and pray for all the details of their
lives.
God had made his heart bigger than his
brain, and had made his sympathies bigger than
his intellect, so that after the intellect had
caved in a little and the poor mind
wasn't working so well, the sympathies still worked,
and the big heart of the man still
prayed for missionaries in all parts of the
world.
I think that we ought to watch our
sympathies.
They tend to be constricted, and we feed
on ourselves and pray for ourselves and give
to ourselves, and the result of it is
after a while that our ground becomes fallow
and we need to have it breaking up.
And the third thing I notice, and notice
that's a disadvantage of the larger church, is
that we don't have much care for lost
men.
We care more for each other, and we
get to praying about all the little things
that are wrong with us.
There are so many things we pray about
that we well might not need to pray
about at all.
They'll take care of themselves.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and
his righteousness, and these other things will be
added unto you.
You know, there was a man named John
one time, and he prayed for a friend
of his.
I don't know the friend's name, or if
I ever did I've forgotten it.
But he prayed for a friend of his,
and he prayed for his health.
He prayed for his physical health.
But you know, being the man of God
that he was, he made that prayer to
be one of the most all-embracing and
comprehensive prayers possible.
He said, I pray that your health may
be as your soul prospers.
As your soul prospers, let your health be.
And I think sometimes instead of praying in
detail, I'm sure the Lord hears a medical
report on a great many people, and if
God smiles, he must smile sometimes at the
way we tell him about people.
Those medical reports, those charts we give the
Lord, they are not very intelligent because we're
not doctors.
But the Lord knows we mean it.
But I think that we could escape a
lot of that if we prayed, O God,
bless them physically as much as they're blessed
spiritually, and then bless them spiritually so that
their physical health would come up to their
spirituality.
But we're likely to be turned in too
much on ourselves and not care too much
for lost men.
A person will get in an automobile and
ride off to church and never think that
somebody might come along if he would only
invite him to come.
Somebody may have been waiting in your office
or in the shop where you work or
in the store where you work.
Somebody may have been waiting for months to
have you invite them to church, but you
felt you didn't want to intrude, so you
didn't do it.
That's what you say, but actually it's because
you're not too much concerned, I would say.
Well, then there's a lack of generosity, a
fruitful generosity.
What I fear is that we shall become
what they call the bourgeois, the comfortable upper
middle class with all we want and all
we need, and just become the church of
the bourgeois, the church of the upper middle
class.
Now, I think that we ought to learn
to love the simplest people and that we
ought to love the poor.
Jesus our Lord gathered around him the poor,
and I suppose they weren't always dressed as
well as they might be dressed.
One of the hardest things and toughest things
for me to get over that I ever
had said about the church in Chicago was
a woman came to me one time and
she said, Mr. Tozer, I think I'm going
to go to another church.
And I said, why?
She's a very godly woman and a very
prayerful and hardworking woman.
Well, she said, there's not anything wrong with
the preaching or the fellowship, but she said,
here's the trouble.
She said, I have noticed that people who
aren't dressed well don't feel comfortable coming here.
She said, there are lots of poor kids
in the neighborhood that simply can't, their mother
can't dress them.
And if they go to Sunday school, they'll
have to come pretty in a pretty shoddy
condition.
And she said, I am afraid that they
wouldn't be welcome here.
And I don't, when I go through the
neighborhood, I don't feel free to invite the
people that have in good clothes.
And I went to God about that, and
I went to people, and I said, if
this is true, this is true, it's a
terrible charge against us that we should ever
make any difference between those who have the
gold ring and those who don't.
I believe that the true Church of Jesus
Christ doesn't know anything about where we live
or how we live or how we travel
or how we dress, but that we're Christian
brethren, or our potential Christian brethren.
That's all that ought to matter.
So I pray that there'll never be a
moment in this Church when the poor won't
be welcomed, the poorest of the poor that
can't dress well is their welcome too.
So I pray that we may not have,
or that we may not ignore the poor
or care for the least of his sheep.
I am at the present time creating an
anthology of devotional verse which is going to
be published as a book.
And I have been looking over some of
the grand old bits of verse by some
of the masters, and I remember Doddridge.
I don't know what the name of this
hymn is, that is, I don't recall how
it starts out.
But I remember he prays to the Lord
this.
He says, Is there a foe before whose
face I fear thy cause to plead?
He's asking himself the question before God.
Is there a foe before whose face I
fear thy cause to plead?
And when he gets that settled, he says,
Hast thou a lamb in all thy flock
I would disdain to feed?
Is there a man big enough to frighten
me, or a sheep poor and ragged enough
to scare me off?
I pray now may be the answer to
both those questions.
I pray there may be no one before
whose face I fear to plead the cause
of Christ.
And I pray that there never be a
time in my life that God will ever
allow me to live to see the time
when I shall be an ivory tower preacher,
walking about with a waxy smile, being toted
to and admired, but forgetting that I was
once a ragged farm kid who couldn't speak
decent English, that only by the grace of
God and the infinite mercy of my Heavenly
Father am I a Christian at all or
known anywhere outside of the little farm area
of Pennsylvania where I was born.
There is the avoidance of sacrifice.
When our churches are little, the women scrub
them and the men paint the doors.
If they put on a new room, the
fellows meet in the evening and build it.
Unions don't chase them out as they did
in Chicago.
And everybody goes to work, and one fellow
takes on enough work to kill him.
Then we get big and we distribute it
around.
Pretty soon we sort of adopt an easy
way of life.
What a wonderful thing it is to have
an easy, smooth way of life here on
earth, and then to die and go to
heaven at last and wear a great big
crown.
Well, I'm afraid it isn't as smooth as
that, nor quite so neat.
The human mind is surprisingly ingenious at devising
ways to let the flesh take its ease
in religion, surprisingly so.
Did I tell you about the time I
was at a meeting of preachers in Ohio?
I think maybe I might have mentioned it
once briefly, but I'll tell you about it
now.
I was at a gathering of preachers.
They met every month, and they spent the
morning in prayer, they said, and then they
ate, and then in the afternoons they had
a business meeting.
I don't know what business there was, but
they did whatever business there was for this
ministerial association.
And they met in little country towns here
and there, in Iraq and Ohio, throughout from
Ohio.
And the women of the Church, being a
good many of them farm women, they knew
how to fry chicken that would just melt
in your mouth, so that a preacher could,
on the average, eat a half a chicken
after he'd spent the morning in prayer, and
then look around for something for a chaser.
And that's the way they lived in that
neighborhood.
All these preachers would meet once a month,
and boy, the chicken, you know, and the
luscious candied sweet potatoes, and the great big
friendly loaves of bread, and pies that everybody
could have a quarter of one.
And those fellows would pray in the morning,
and then they'd try to have a business
meeting in the afternoon, but they were frightfully
drowsy.
So I was there one time as a
preacher.
I wasn't there as a part of the
fellowship because I was from another district, but
I was there as a preacher.
I was supposed to preach to them and
inspire them.
I guess one fellow or two began to
feel a little bit conscious stricken about their
overeating, gluttony.
So he proposed one afternoon after we'd been
over and eaten everything that wasn't mailed down
in the lovely farmhouse, he proposed that we
cut that big meal down to just a
bite.
He said, let's just have a tiny lunch,
a cup of coffee, a glass of milk,
and have it over and go back to
the business of the Lord.
Well, they were debating it back and forth,
and it began to look as though maybe
this godly proposition was going to go through
and the chickens were going to get off
the griddle.
But instead of that, one young fellow got
up and he was as innocent, you know,
as a lamb.
He said, Mr. Chairman, I understand how this
is and I see what you mean, but
there's not a side to this.
He said, these dear ladies love this.
They take it as a ministry to be
able to make these big meals for us
preachers.
And he said, Mr. Chairman, if we take
away that ministry from them, we're not doing
right.
All in favor say aye, and they voted
for the chicken.
Well, you see, those boys had figured out,
they didn't learn that at night, but they'd
figured out a comfortable way, a comfortable way
to live.
Have a little salary, drive a little car,
have a little parsnip, and preach a few
times, a couple of times a week, and
visit somebody if they're real bad off, and
then spend one day a month praying and
gorging and fellowshipping and telling jokes while they
ate.
That was a comfortable way to live, but
there wasn't any of God in it, and
there wasn't any self-sacrifice in it, and
there wasn't any blood in it, and there
wasn't any grief in it.
He was a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief.
We're too often men of means acquainted with
gluttony.
So avoiding sacrifice.
War comes, we don't do it.
In our business we don't do it, but
in the work of God we do it
habitually.
In our everyday living reflects the world too
much.
Our tastes are strongly influenced by the world.
Know ye not that the friendship of the
world is enmity with God?
Know ye not?
If any man loved the world, the love
of the Father isn't in him.
We can be orthodox in our doctrine, we
can keep our emphasis on Christ as being
all in all, and still break down in
our attitudes toward the world.
You know, brethren and sisters, I find that
outside the alliance, among the denominations, people are
bothered about this.
Incidentally, after all I have said, I was
at two banquets last week.
I had to.
I never liked them, but I was there
and preached to them.
I find out that some of the pastors
are worried about the worldliness in their churches.
I think we ought to watch it and
pray irreverently about it, preach about it, and
do something about it.
Lastly, our lack of spiritual desire.
There is danger of lukewarmness in these last
days.
Some aren't any further along than you were
a year ago.
Now, some are.
Some are.
I've met some of you that have definitely
taken a forward step in the last year,
but there are some of you not any
further along than you were the last year.
You became convinced of your need a long
while ago, but up to now you've never
dared take yourself in hand and do anything
about it, because the desire is not strong
enough.
I've said before, and I repeat it now,
that I believe that the intensity of our
spiritual desire will break down any hindrances, will
defeat every fall.
The intensity of our spiritual desire will create
a vacuum into which the Holy Ghost will
rush.
The intensity of our spiritual desire will make
self-sacrifice to be nothing at all.
The intensity of our spiritual desire will be
so big and so great and so wonderful
that it will drive us toward God like
a bullet driven out of the muzzle of
a cannon, a shell.
But it's the lack of desire.
The lack of desire is the ill of
all ill, said the poet.
Now, what about it?
Break up your foul ground, says the Holy
Ghost.
What's foul ground?
It's ground, I don't know what it is
in Canada, but I know what it is
in the States, and I think I know
what it was here in this book of
Isaiah.
It is a ground that was fruitful and
is a good ground still, but it hasn't
been plowed nor used for several years, and
it's been rain-hardened and sun-baked, and
so it's just lying there.
Nothing grows on it but a few weeds,
a few briars.
Yet it's not that it's not good ground.
It is good ground, but it's not producing
because there's no seed being put in it,
and there's no seed being put in it
because it's not plowed.
It takes a lot of plowing to put
a field in shape.
David, with that sly sense of humor he
had, but also very serious, he said, they've
plowed long furrows up my back.
He felt that he was down lying on
his stomach, and his enemies had a plow
plowing up and down on his back.
It couldn't have been a very pleasant experience
to have your back plowed.
David felt it.
The enemies did it to David, but the
Holy Ghost said here that we're to do
it to ourselves.
Break up your fallow ground, for it's time
to seek the Lord.
You seek him till he come and rain
righteousness upon you.
I'll tell you why I'd like to see
some progress in this church.
I'd like to see some individual spiritual progress
among us.
I want to see it.
I pray that we may see it, and
we'll see it only when we break up
our fallow ground.
But somebody says, what we need is to
get more.
What we need is to get rid of
some things.
What we need is to have the plow
go up and down our hearts until the
hard ground has been softened.
The Holy Ghost brings the harrow on and
softens up the ground, and then the seed
of the Lord, when it falls, produces.
There's a vast difference that comes to the
life when we get, as they say nowadays,
tenderized.
I don't like the word, but it's all
right for the occasion.
When our hearts become tender, what am I
going to do?
Well, one thing, spare not myself.
Spare everybody else, but spare not myself.
Cut away the tangle and plow deep, and
keep on until he come and rain righteousness
upon us.
Here it's this beautiful day.
Tomorrow it'll be May, and pretty soon it'll
be summer, and then the churches accept the
secondary position.
They're not going to do much until the
frost.
I don't know whether I can stand it
or not, people.
I don't know.
I don't know whether I can continue to
pour out my soul to God in prayer
and to you in my sermons if we're
going to be defeatist in our attitude and
take the attitude that, well, season's over now.
Godliness is never out of season.
Prayer is never out of season.
Self-sacrifice and hard work and tears and
sweat are never out of season in the
kingdom of God.
The devil doesn't run his work according to
season.
He runs his work constantly every minute of
the hour and day and night.
Year in and year out he cares not
for seasons and new moons and holy days.
He continues to destroy men and women everywhere.
The Church of Christ, contented and satisfied with
herself, I rode in a car out from
one of the churches where I was last
week.
A couple of men, one of them and
I sure here this morning, one of them
told me about his business, taking him out
after night.
He said, sometimes it keeps me out until
after midnight, and I'm downtown after midnight.
He said, it's common to see 16 and
17-year-old girls on the street thumbing
rides.
Common in the city of Toronto, 16 or
17-year-olds, young kids that should have
been kissed goodnight and put to bed long
ago, thumbing their way.
And the rapacious wolves that ride in their
old cars up and down the streets are
bad to take them in.
And we're comfortable and satisfied, our little flock
is in, and everybody's happy.
I pray God that I may never be.
I pray God that I may see our
Becky there on that street, and your daughter,
in my mind's eye and in my vision
and imagination, that I may not think, ah,
she's a tramp, she's no good.
She is good.
She was a little curly-haired girl not
long ago, a pretty little curly-haired girl
that fell asleep on her daddy's lap.
Now she's out in blue jeans thumbing a
ride in Toronto's downtown, two o'clock in
the morning.
I pray that all this may grieve us
and break us and hurt us and make
us anxious and fill us with prayer and
burden until our hearts are plowed up, until
this business, this Christianity, becomes to us all
in all everything, until there's nothing but that,
until our job is nothing, and our home
is nothing.
God is all, and Christ is all, and
the home and the job are simply gifts
he allows us to have for a while.
And we'll be grateful for them, we'll be
thankful for them.
I thank him for everything he's given me,
that he could take it all away, and
I still have God.
That's at the heart of Christianity.
You don't have to have things to be
a holy Christian.
He'll give you things, he says he knows
what you need before you ask it, and
he'll give them to you if you're grateful
for them.
But if he takes them away, you still
have him, and having him you're richer than
all the millionaires of the world.
So let's break up our fallow ground and
continue to break it up.
Now, I'm not going to break up your
fallow ground, and I don't want you to
break up mine.
Break up your own, and I'll break mine.
Your old MacArthur, Taddy MacArthur, that witty old
brother, he's gone now to heaven.
He always had something in it that nearly
killed you because of the sharp humor of
it, but he also had something in it
that drove you to your knees because of
the intense spirituality of it.
Not many men can combine it, but he
managed to combine them.
He said that when the news came to
Ezra that the people of Israel were sinning,
intermarrying with the heathen and doing all sorts
of things they shouldn't do, working on the
Sabbath day and not attending the temple, he
said when he heard about it he went
down on his knees before God in sackcloth
and ashes, and he plucked his beard and
pulled his hair.
MacArthur said, I want you to notice that
Ezra plucked his own beard and pulled his
own hair.
He didn't pull the hair of the congregation.
I don't want to pluck your beard and
pull your hair, and I wouldn't be comfortable
if you tried it on me.
But shall we work on ourselves before God
these days, and see if we're where we
should be, and see if we're his servants
capable of carrying on his work?
And if it's necessary to lie in sackcloth
and ashes and pluck our hair, let's do
it.
Oh, what this Church could be in this
center, what this Church could be compared to
what we are.
But thank God for everything we are, with
what we could be.
And I, for my part, while I'm around
here, I'm not going to spare you either
in prayer nor in preaching.
I pray that we may have a new
baptism of power and light and fire, and
a new evidence of his presence.
This Church may take a step forward, definitely
forward, in these coming days.
Amen.