Don't you all want to sleep by now?
Well, I believe that we must, as we've
never been taught to do, and I believe
we must all become proclaimers of the gospel.
I believe that's exactly what revival would be.
We keep talking about we want revival.
Well, when they had something of the real
New Testament, the apostles stayed in Jerusalem and
the church was scattered from everywhere they went.
They went and said, won't you accept Jesus
most?
They went and preached, and they preached the
gospel.
There's a passage in Scripture where one of
the bishops talks about some which I believe
has never come to the knowledge of the
church.
And I believe that our message, however blessed
they may have been, in order to ask
them a blessing to thank God for, I
believe they're utterly unfit for the anti-Christian
spirit we're living in today.
And I think that this church must not
depend upon the Texas School of Theology all
together to prepare people to preach.
I believe that every member of this church
must be saturated with God's message and God's
method so that when we do that, when
we go there and get inside, we can
do more than we've been able to do
under the spectator type of Christianity that's all
been raised under.
Where the preacher does the preaching and we
do the listening, we've got to do what
they did in the Bible.
I think I've called your attention to it
so many times before.
But when God sent Peter to preach to
Cornelius, he didn't go on and try to
get Cornelius to do anything.
He went on and preached the gospel to
him.
And while he yet spoke the word of
the Holy Ghost, hell remained but hell.
Now we've got to become totally disciplined people.
We've got to, folks.
We've just got to.
Now the Lord knows that.
Now we've got to put this upon us
in religious good of being a God.
We've got to become trained institutes with sharp
weapons if we're going to have a big
God in this state.
You ever heard Francis do that?
I'm somewhat encouraged by what's happened in the
last few years.
If we can pick up the results, truthfully
I've talked to some of the missionaries who
were there and some of them I've talked
to since going back in Indonesia.
And so far this preacher, and I kind
of think this is right, that evangelism, for
the first time since Pentecost, brought revival.
Now he said we've got to have revival.
I don't know if it's my fault, but
if there were a revival in me, what
would be the cost of having folks who
said we've got to have revival?
What on earth would that be?
Huh?
Well it would be men and women for
the gospel, preaching it their full time.
And they're not in our houses of worship.
Huh?
We've got to learn how to be skillful
leaders of the world of God.
Now how to call your pastor in, and
get him to say a word, that's not
necessary.
You get all the way around.
And I'm that God.
If there's anybody in Africa, anywhere, even in
Canada, there's a very simple foundation of truth
of Christianity.
And while I've been used to it, they're
just, you couldn't find anybody.
They're paranoid in their attitudes, and they're ignorant
of the simplest tenets of the Christian faith.
Now that you've got faith, this thing will
get next to you.
I don't think there's any use in us
fighting, or having some terms now.
That's what we're talking about if we do
it.
We've got to learn how to be skillful.
As the old, quirky, try-hard becomes more
and more appropriate for us, the service begins
when the meeting ends.
At London's home, the Baptists saw the paganism.
It couldn't have been any more of a
pagan philosophy in the days of the apostles,
and we have to deal with them.
You have to remember that in the days
of the beginnings of Christianity and the planting
of churches, they were planted by Jews, getting
converted, apostolized.
Huh?
And they had some foundation.
There was some kind of contact between that
apostle's faith and the faith he was.
But there wasn't today.
There wasn't today.
A woman was in our services Sunday morning,
and something was said about her, the other
day, the profession of faith.
She was reared in a part of St.
Ignatius Church.
Her father was a preacher.
And she didn't have the slightest idea what
she'd come about by a profession of faith.
Now, let me tell you how the bottom
has completely fallen out.
We've got to start all over again.
Now, I want you, dearly, to forgive me.
And I want you that this Bible study
be mine.
In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 19, and
verse 10, the verse starts with a preposition
or conjunction, and everything we know, whether F
or R, there's a preposition or conjunction.
Look here.
Do you know?
Do you, dumb and dumb?
Huh?
Twenty-nine kids in school.
I've been past my grammar, so I've forgotten
it all.
Well, I'll explain it to you.
I'll explain it to you.
In fact, it's explained in something that's gone
on before.
And here it says, For the Son of
Man is come to seek and see that
which is lost.
And the word lost there has to be
interpreted in the context of the nine verses
above it.
And the word lost there doesn't mean what
we call lost.
The lost there means a man who's conscious
of his need.
The lost there means one who is given
to Abraham in what we call Abraham's covenant,
the gospel covenant form.
And the statement is not there, but Jesus
Christ came down here not to make an
effort to see, but to seek, and not
to make an effort to save, but to
save, and to not make salvation a possibility,
but to accomplish it.
The syllogism gives it down to this, that
everybody who's lost in the sense of this
context is going to be saved.
Our business today, then, is to become skillful
readers of the word of God, cry out
high, for the confirmation of God, the
ministry of the Holy Spirit.
I'm not speaking to any of you as
to what I'm talking about now.
I'm known as a Calvinist.
I don't know what that means.
I know John Calvin wasn't Queen Candela.
But if you do call yourself a Calvinist,
remember that Calvinism, in its essence, is simply
this.
It's not predestination.
It's not election.
It's not irresistible grace.
It's not those terms.
Calvinism, the contribution of Mr. Calvin, was simply
this, that the gospel has to be interpreted
and applied by the Holy Spirit.
That's it.
Now, I'll fight for that.
I won't fight you over these other terms.
I don't need them myself.
You can't do that to me.
You've got all the standing, and if you
don't have the standing, you're going to get
mad at the folks you're trying to pump
them into.
They don't know it.
But the heart of this thing is that
America, the pagan nation now, call themselves Christians,
because it's had a gospel that men could
accept and believe and they hold all the
power in the Holy Spirit.
Interpreting it to their hearts in their own
spirit.
Now, that's so.
Now, that's the issue of this hour.
It wouldn't do folks a bit of good
on God's earth for you to get them
to believe in what you call your five
points of Calvinism.
That's not the issue today.
They'd just probably be a little better than
they are now if they switched their terminology.
But the issue we got to get excited
about is that the gospel itself is a
mystery and that nobody can understand it and
nobody can accept it and nobody can believe
it except in the power of the Holy
Spirit.
Isn't that right?
And that that's in the gospel that has
the power of God in this whole notion.
If there is any good on the earth
I'm going to touch the heartbreak of humanity.
These sovereign days creatures that can never find
it in their characters.
These sovereign days characters that are Christ-filled
in power and they could not go out
in a five seconds and go all over
America in the midst of a million miles.
What's the point of that, everyone?
I'm saying that the issue here is the
gospel of the Holy Spirit of God which
men naturally hate because it annihilates pride and
especially in our days when they have been
made to blissful propaganda that when it's gone
on our head our enlightenment can first be
on our head for your objection and build
a new house upon this earth.
I want you to get the real truth
of the grace of God.
That's the truth!
There it is!
The grace of God!
Oh!
To love man puts the crown on God's
head.
Grace simply means divine initiative.
But God's in the business of getting men
lost!
God saves every human being when he can
get in a lost position.
And if you're going to faithfully go about
it and if you don't you've got no
right to call yourself Christians.
If the manhood and womanhood and young men
and women of this church do not put
their end to the blanket of the Christian
or missionary you're disgraced to the name of
Christ.
And you've got to remember to remember that
that pagan attitude that RCM difference that self
-complacency you'll find in 99.9% of
every home you get into or wherever you
speak didn't get that way all of a
sudden.
That that way recalls what has passed for
gospel message and gospel method and you'll be
a man with more Pelagia than old Pelagia
ever was.
This generation's been made Christian by a gospel
that does nothing short of saying sinner save
yourself.
I want us to get excited and skillful
in the story of God and obedience for
he's not going to bring a revival with
the kind of preaching and method we've had.
He'd have to resign as God if he
did.
I want us to get with our hearts
not as a matter of theological argument that
everything that matters starts with almighty God.
There are just three things that spell Christianity.
First, repentance and prayer.
No man can know he's been born of
the spirit except by the fruits that come
from the earth.
And they're simple, they're just repentance and faith.
You're a very near Christian because you live
to live a bit and have what you
call a glorious spirit.
The devil could give you that but the
devil can't give you a day of repentance
and a day of faith.
That's the fruit of the new birth.
And then of course the heart of what
being a Christian is is a matter of
prayer.
And everyone of them comes from God.
Everyone of them has to start from God.
What may appear to be our human virtues
are really God's gifts.
The very passion and hunger for God has
to come from God.
God creates the hunger and the thirst so
that he can satisfy it.
No man who's too proud for being infinitely
in debt will ever be a Christian if
God Almighty hear me?
If God Almighty can get a man to
cease struggling to merit salvation, get a man
to bow head and heart just to receive
a gift, that's our problem.
Our job is to be instruments of God
in their day and mine in getting people
L.O.S.D. lost.
So lost that they'll receive a gift.
That old pride of yours is going to
take a beating if you ever get to
where you are humble enough and enough of
a beggar and desperate enough to take even
a gift from Almighty God.
Now don't you know I have been of
a nature that don't want to be dependent
on nobody, God included.
How does God get people L.O.S
.D.? He ain't going to get nobody L
.O.S.D. in your day and mine
unless he can set the church members to
where they're skillfully wielding the word of truth
where they've got a chance that's used in
the hands of the Holy Spirit to rob
man of all hope and make him where
somebody's definition of evangelism would be, I propose,
evangelism's one beggar telling another beggar where he
got there.
That's pretty good.
Tell you where I got that which satisfied
my hunger.
That's pretty good.
Young brethren, members of this church, you're known
all over the country already as being people
who've grown the seed on what they call
the doctors of grace.
They say of all of us folks we
can't pray.
We don't care if anybody gets saved or
not.
That's what people think about us.
Huh?
That's what they tell us.
Huh?
How much truth are we?
Huh?
How much truth in us?
Any way of substituting a little knowledge of
truth just makes a fool out of us.
Huh?
How guilty are we of all these things
we say are lies?
This bothers me.
Members of this church, while you're soaking your
souls in these great truths that must be
taught, pour a little of David Bainwood's spirit
on it while you're soaking.
Huh?
Pour a little of holy milk shame.
God, supposes people used to hear him in
his willow and pray, I'm not going out
there unless you go on in.
I'm not going there, I'm not going there
unless you go on in.
Oh, bless his, bless his will.
Jonathan Edwards said the greatest privilege he thought
would ever come his way in his life
was the privilege of having David Bainwood die
in his home just to listen to him
die.
Jonathan Edwards said any interpretation of the gospel
he'll give to the Christian church once every
hundred years.
A man like David Bainwood is worth studying.
That's what you can't study down here.
Oh, cry on your heart that it'll give
you something of what it gave to David
Bainwood.
It'll give you something of what it did
to holy milk shame.
The old Roman Catholic Church, as rotten as
it's been, used to produce some S-A
-I-N-T-S saints.
What we'd call Christianity produced a bunch of
cacklers with a rattle like an old T
-model four.
But David Bainwood didn't get to where he
could leave the snow saturated with his blood
up in northern New York as he agonized
for the salvation of those heathen Indians.
He didn't get that way by switching his
doing of one job to the other and
accepting Jesus.
He got that way by getting acquainted with
the holy requirements of a Christ holy God
and his oracle condition himself.
Here's a man who entered in to that
which my Lord said, you want to go
to heaven, honey?
Agonized to enter in at the straight in.
And he faced some things that we have
evaded.
How shall we obey God in our day?
Honey, we got nothing to lose unless we
pull up all our clothes and plunge in
this battle head form us and get it
in ourselves and begin to demand once again
that the grace of God don't turn out
cacklers, it turns out mighty saints.
What we need is some godly people.
He didn't get his character and reason with
our testimony, mine, yours included, don't get in
harm much than the seed because of the
unholiness of our character.
Listen to David Brainard as he was trying
to get in our language, trying to get
saved.
Instead of evading things now, he faced them.
He got to the place that he became
a seeker.
He wouldn't get to the place that he
could claim an interest in the merits of
the shed blood of Jesus Christ.
That he could claim an interest in the
shed blood of Jesus Christ.
And I quote from him in his struggle,
he searched, and he searched, and he said,
I found in me great struggles, heart rising
and heart empty against God.
Imagine that.
You'd ever face the holy requirements of God?
You'd rather face them?
I think you'd get mad too.
I'd love to see some people mad enough
at God that they'd either get them a
shotgun and try to put them out of
business, or they'd fall at his feet, a
helpless beggar.
He said, I found in me great struggles,
heart rising and heart empty against God.
He said, I often quarrel with God.
Us little folks, we wouldn't do that.
I often quarrel with God for laying the
sin of Adam against me.
He said, I never so much as consented
when old Adam committed it.
He said, I wish God had left me
alone to stand for myself and not abuse
me at that rate to punish me for
what another man hath done.
He may not have understood original sin, but
he did show a grip with it.
And we don't have a spirit now.
We just flipped over that and said, won't
you take Jesus?
And we did, and still going to hell.
Listen to me.
He said, I charged God with cruelty.
He took it seriously, and injustice, and thought
he delighted to oppress and crush poor mortals.
There was a time he said he wished
there were no God, or else there was
another God equal in power with whom he
might join forces.
And I quote him, he said, I longed
to pull the eternal God out of the
throne and stamp him under my feet more
than I ever did to be avenged of
any enemy in my life.
He was enraged at the idea of God's
sovereignty and the injustice of God making creatures
and then subjecting them to everlasting punishment.
And the point I'm making is he didn't
have nobody to interpret the Bible the way
he did.
He just looked at some of these great
bone crushing flesh killing things in the Word
of God and he looked at them and
he didn't have any faith yet and he
didn't have the Holy Spirit yet to interpret
it.
And he looked at them as naked as
they are in the Bible and if you
look at them you get mad too!
You never got mad at God.
You never looked at the kind of God
there is in the Bible and his holy
requirements.
You never would dare to do like David
Brainard said that he did reach up and
pull God off his soul and get rid
of it!
But he did.
He did.
He did!
Uh...
I don't know!
This is some Calvinism I want!
Got some...
He did it!
God ultimately manned through the very valley of
death and hell itself and sent him shouting
all over Mount Geronimo when he gets up
on the other side of Geronimo George.
Uh...
This is what I'm talking about!
Until a man gets a picture of the
snakes and the demons and the ghosts within
himself he will never ever get over the
wonder of sins forgiven.
We've got to come back to it.
And the poor truths of the word of
God that God always has and still uses
to get men from loss are the truths
that David Brainard didn't wink at but looked
at and plowed through to Canaan's happy shore.
Look at them again tonight.
First, the strictness and severity of Almighty God's
holy law.
You ever start there?
That's the only place you'll ever get anywhere.
Starting at the strictness and the awful severity
of the holy law of God.
The holy law of God demands nothing short
of outward and inward perfection.
And the holy law of God does claim
as a bird on a dog's nose that
anything short of perfect perfection will incur the
damnation of hell on the wrath of God.
That's right.
And he kept looking at that holy law
of God and he said God Almighty ain't
got no right to create men and demand
perfection when I came to live.
That's one reason the fella's wrong.
For he's got to.
He's got to be perfect.
And he came.
Huh?
He's got to be perfect.
And he came.
Now if that ain't so, we'll just well
quit it.
I'll tell you how I had you understand
about Charles Jackson.
I'm just as good as you are.
You mean to come around and talk to
me about what a mess I'm in and
about just as good as you are?
Huh?
Well, it's just business to demand perfection.
I can't get no comfort out of saying
what I expect, I'm about as good as
you are.
Huh?
But that's exactly what the holy law of
God demands.
And God's got to repeal this law and
he hasn't done it.
He's got to abdicate and he never will.
Or he's got to punish everything that falls
short of absolute perfection in the keeping of
his holy law.
I tell you right now, if you'd ever
face that, you'd either get mad or say,
Run!
Huh?
That's when we're in the mess where now
we've had some little something, you know, that's
ignored.
It's impossible to be kept holy law.
We've got to become skillful in getting people
lost.
And a man ain't fixing to realize his
terrible condition until we keep facing him with
the absolute requirement of God, that nobody walk
the streets of the world that isn't as
holy as God and as good as Jesus
Christ.
That's right.
And unless there's an imputation of somebody else's
righteousness to me, I'm going to split him
wide open.
And so are you.
And then David Brainard faced the second coming
truth that God Almighty has always been pleased
to show men the truth about their lost
condition.
And that was David Brainard faced the fact
that God requires faith, won't settle for anything
else.
And he didn't have none.
He couldn't find any place to buy it.
And he couldn't work it out.
I'm telling you ladies and gentlemen, you are
faceless now if you do
not, as an act of your own, repent
to God and repent, believe in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
There's no hope for us.
But the reason you and your mess you're
in and come lost is that what God
Almighty absolutely demands and commands and requires you
are utterly unable to perform.
And you're going to get in a fight.
You follow old man Barnett over the course
of the last 40 years.
I ain't going to fight over some term
about whether elections this or that year or
something like that.
You can if you want to.
If you want some real fights, get it
on there together.
It'll get hot.
And this is what it's dying for.
Amen!
No wonder nobody needs to become a seeker
of the Lord who's been exalted, put on
a throne for a day with penance and
forgiveness of sin.
Why honey, they've been taught for the last
60 years by what we call fundamental preachers
in America!
But they don't need God in this business.
They can do it themselves.
That's right.
And you think that this world is mad
at us because we believe in election predestination.
They don't even know how to spell those
words.
But I know what the war is getting
hot about.
It's whether or not the reason men and
women are not screaming for God for mercy
now is not that they believe what they've
been preached and they think that they can
produce repentance and faith any time they want
to.
And that's so a man may be in
pretty bad condition, but he ain't lost for
life.
Long as there's anything God's on earth he
can do to make a contribution to your
salvation, you may be pretty badly whipped, but
you're not lost.
You're not lost.
We've got to become skillful in getting people
lost, lost, lost.
And then David Bain had preached the third
thing, that water gets hotter all the time.
And he didn't evade it.
And thank God there wasn't no preacher around
there telling him just forget about all those
things and just take these.
So Jackson had a good boy.
He found out not only that he had
to be as holy as God and as
good as Jesus Christ, he was going to
be sent to hell.
He found out he had to produce repentance
and faith that was his own act.
God's not going to repent for you, and
he's not going to believe for you, but
you can't do it yourself.
You see, what we call the gospel gets
people to accept Jesus, but the Bible gospel
gets men to be seekers of the Lord,
to do for them what they cannot do
for themselves.
And that's the difference.
Old Brother Rogers and I, we've got gray
in our head and Brother Connolly and Brother
Jackson, the rest of you folks are young,
you ain't got no sense much, but maybe
there's some hope for you.
But we used to talk about old Grandpa
who lived in the day when people sought
the Lord.
Ain't nobody got time now to seek him.
They get saved before they ever seek him.
If you talk about I've been in hundreds
of that, you say, you want to have
a little fight?
I don't advise you to go in there
now, but I've been in a few.
And this is kind of where we've gotten
a little scrap.
Is it so?
Are we going to keep on using the
old methods that have got us in the
mess we're in now?
Got us with a generation of church members
as pagans as all get out?
Are we willing to be knowers?
If that's God's will for us in our
days, preachers of what?
Righteousness.
Huh?
I don't think anybody will even feel the
need of being declared righteous upon the basis
of faith unless they've been held over the
hot coals of the utterly righteous demands of
a wholly righteous God.
You going to repent, are you?
You better start pleading with God to grant
repentance.
You going to accept Jesus, are you?
You better start seeking the Lord who purchased
those rights by his precious blood.
This is the heart of the controversy.
And it comes deeper when we face the
third thing.
David Brainerd kept crying to God, kept fighting
him, mad at him, arguing with him, in
a controversy with him, but he didn't take
out what he wanted to be able to
get in a place he could claim an
interest in the merits of the shed blood
of Christ.
And he ran right smack dab into the
truth of God's word that is the most
humbling and the most pride-killing and the
most flesh-clearing thing I've ever preached.
He found out that God Almighty has the
right to give or withhold faith.
And under God that he exercises that right.
Now, if you want to have a fight,
is that what you want to get in?
Is that your Calvinism?
You better just stay on some terms, you
know, not get involved in this, but this
is what this church has got to invade
this city with.
This is how God gets men from law.
That God Almighty has a right and he
exercises it to give or withhold repentance and
faith.
That's in the Scripture part.
Of course, that's 5th chapter of John.
He gives life to whom he will.
You mean to tell me I ain't got
no way I can come to God and
say, now listen here, Lord, now let's just
do some business here.
I've got a right.
You've got to give me faith.
You can't do that.
He don't have to do it.
Now, if you ever face this, you get
about as mad at God as David Boehner
did, or you might become a beggar.
Oh, Lord, if you put a place, I
sure would be much obliged if you fixed
me so I could turn on myself and
in dust and ashes abhor myself and spend
the rest of my life standing in the
need of mercy.
And then David Boehner, of course, faced the
last thing.
And it's in the Word of God that
God could save him or damn him and
be just and get glory for himself.
I've called attention in this pulpit before you've
forgotten.
And under God, I believe, we're going to
have to come back to it.
Not many years, more than a hundred years
ago, you walked down the aisle of a
little Baptist church house or any other major
nominations in America at that time, and said,
Brother Jackson, I've been saved.
I want to be baptized.
I want to go on this trip.
Brother Jackson and some of the brethren around
here say, All right.
We'll hear your experience of grace.
And if it suited them, they'd take you.
If it didn't, they'd say, We'll have to
deal with you a little more, Brother.
It's been an awful long time since anybody
has been said, Well, we'll have to talk
to you a little more, you know.
They don't do much of that now.
And if he passed that test, they'd ask
him this test.
And if you want to get the heart
of the Calvin theology, Brother Luther, here it
is.
John Calvin said, Nobody will walk the streets
of glory who hadn't been made willing to
go to hell.
Now, you say you're Calvinist?
Can you take that?
That's what he taught.
And the old-time Baptist preacher, a hundred
years ago, if your experience of grace sounded
all right, he'd say, My brother or sister,
are you willing to be damned for the
glory of God?
Now, I don't know whether any of us
here tonight, the preacher included, know anything about
faith or not, but that's what it is.
Roman Catholicism in their day said faith was
a mental ascent.
The Reformers said it's a trust, not a
bargain, but a trust.
Yeah, I am.
You're worthy of my surrender.
You're worthy of my trust, whatever you do
with me.
I don't know about that.
They said this was God-centered faith.
You mean to tell me, old Ralph Barnes,
wouldn't just turn myself over lock, stock, and
barrel to God Almighty and Jesus Christ and
leave it up to him what he does
with me?
That's trust.
God Almighty help us, that's trust.
And it leaves just one safe spot of
ground for Ralph Barnard to walk on on
this whole earth like that leopard following Jesus
Christ constantly here in the days of distress
saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make
me whole.
When a fellow's in that shape and he
hears the gospel, boy, that's awful good news.
For the next verse, the Lord Jesus Christ
said, I will.
That's good news, fellas.
That's good news.
I believe the Holy
Spirit will be given to those who obey
him.
Let's get a Bible, start loving men and
women enough to tell them the truth.
Get them lost.
Eh?
So I'm lost.
Lost.
Can't get out.
Locked up in God's prison house under God's
condemnation.
Sentenced.
Already passed.
Bored from a prison cell.
Locked.
I haven't got a key.
Somebody comes along that's got the key.
That somebody is the living Lord.
Somebody who is exalted, made a sovereign and
a savior for the express purpose that he
could unlock the cell door and make the
men and women to walk forth free.
We want revival.
Let's start shutting men up to God.
That salvation's of the Lord.
Not a doctrine of the head, it is.
Robbing men of all fame, anything they've ever
done or ever will do.
Some people are going to become seekers of
the Lord.
Amen.
This is my message.
The reason I usually just use one invitation
hymn is I believe it's true to what
I try to preach.
We're going to sing it as they softly
play.
Pass me not, O gentle Savior.
Here I am, locked up in the prison
house of the damned.
I haven't got a key.
And He is telling me to walk out.
I can't get the door unlocked.
Oh, I need a Savior.
I need somebody to get me to where
I am.
Amen.
Get me out of jail.
Oh, bless you, God.
Amen.
Oh, I don't know if I know.
Tell the poor old sinners what the Scripture
over and over again says.
Whosoever shall call.
Here I am.
Lord, don't pass me by.
I've got no rights.
I ain't got no way to make a
claim on you.
I just say, don't pass me by.
Stop at my door.
You can break the shackles.
You can unlock the doors.
You can set the prison free.
Stop at my door.
And there wasn't any call on the Lord.
I wish somebody tonight could call on Him.
Let's quietly sing a moment or two together.
Pass me not, O gentle Savior.
Lord, I'm not worthy.
Here I am.
Lord, I'm not worthy.