Tonight I want to speak on a subject
never attempted in my hearing by anybody.
I want to talk on the perfection of
God.
In the book of Psalms, the 50th Psalm,
verse 2, we have the words, Out of
Zion, the perfection of beauty, God has shined.
We have three words in close relation to
each other, perfection and beauty and God.
And while it is Zion that is called
the perfection of beauty, it is the perfection
of beauty because God shined out of her.
She is because God shined out of her.
Now, I'd like to make some introductory remarks
first and say that in trying to understand
today's Christianity, as we have it all around
about us, by that I do not mean
liberalism or modernism.
I mean evangelicalism or whatever you want to
call it, gospel Christianity.
We must take into account two things which
have happened over the last, say, 50 years.
We must take into account the gains we
have made and the losses we have suffered
and that the churches have made some gains
in the last 50 years cannot be denied,
I'm sure, by anyone who wants to be
truthful.
For instance, there are greater numbers now than
before.
A higher percentage of the total population go
to church than used to.
And there are larger numbers of people calling
themselves Christians.
And then there are multiplying theological schools, seminaries,
Bible schools, Christian colleges of various sorts.
And there is an ever-swelling flood of
Christian literature which is being published and spread
abroad.
Then there is the popularity of religion in
our time.
I suppose it's easier when things are popular
to propagate them than when they are not.
And certainly Christianity, the gospel, is quite popular
now.
Then we have to our advantage better systems
of communication.
We have now radio and television, if you
like it, and telephone and all other modern
means of communicating.
And then we have stepped-up transportation that
will allow a preacher to preach in Chicago
in the morning and in New York in
the evening.
And then we have various evangelizing organizations that
have sprung up over the last years.
I was thinking that there isn't a single
group, linguistic group, nor ethnic group, nor social
group, there isn't a group anywhere that doesn't
have somebody bent on evangelizing it.
We have those who want to evangelize the
Jews, businessmen, professional men, students, those in hospitals,
those in jails, and everywhere, everybody.
We have evangelistic groups, and we cannot deny
that a lot of good is being done
and the gospel is being spread around.
Those are the gains that we have made,
and they're not all.
There are many others.
But we have suffered some losses in the
meantime.
These losses I want to name before you.
We have lost from our gospel Christianity, almost
altogether, that that men used to call religious
fear.
We have practically no religious fear in our
time.
And along with our loss of religious fear
came a corresponding flippancy and familiarity toward God
that our fathers never knew.
We have lost also an awareness of the
invisible and eternal.
The world is too much with us, and
we have it with us all the time
and all around us, so that the invisible
and the eternal seem to be quite forgotten.
At least we're not aware of it.
We're only briefly aware of it when somebody
dies.
Then the consciousness of the divine presence, the
consciousness of God, the churches have lost that.
And the concept of majesty.
I said after Bok Shing had spoken last
Sunday night that we had so organized our
churches that God could leave and we wouldn't
find it out.
During the week I received a call from
a lady who had been here, had heard
Bok Shing.
She's from another part of the city and
attends a different gospel church.
And she was not critical nor harsh, but
seemed to be very much brokenhearted.
She said, Mr. Tozer, I heard what you
said, that God could leave a church and
we would not find it out.
She said, I would like to tell you
that God has left our church.
Well, I tried to smooth it over for
her a little.
I didn't want to be guilty of speaking
against the church or of helping her in
her criticism of the church.
So I said, well, perhaps the spirit is
grieved in your church.
She said, oh, it's long past that.
It's long past the spirit being grieved.
She said, God, the spirit has withdrawn.
Now, I don't know how true her judgment
was about it.
She was very kind and tender.
She was not criticizing so much as simply
stating what she believed to be a fact.
And this consciousness of the divine presence seems
to have left the churches to a very
terrible degree.
And then that what I've called a concept
of majesty.
The concept of majesty.
We seem to have gotten away from it
altogether.
This is the age of the common man.
And along with the common man has come
the common God.
We have no heroes anymore because everybody's equal
to everybody else.
And the common man is now in control.
But along with the common man, I say,
is the common God.
And then, of course, along with the loss
of majesty, along with the whole concept of
majesty.
But you say, Mr. Tozer, is there not
a concept of majesty left?
Didn't the whole world carry on when the
queen was crowned here a few years ago?
That circus that they had on television had
no sense of majesty at all in it.
There was no majesty there.
We have crowned pumpkin queens and cotton queens
and other kind of queens in this country.
And it was the same mixture of showmanship
and sex that is found every place.
If that girl had been a homely old
lady, she wouldn't have been much done.
But she was a beautiful young lady and
so we had a big time.
But majesty was missing.
They can say your majesty, but they don't
feel it.
They can't fool me.
So worship has gone along with that concept
of majesty.
And, of course, reverence.
And the modern Christian has lost this.
He has lost his ability to withdraw inwardly
and commune in the secret place with his
own soul and with God in the shrine
of his own hidden spirit.
It is this that makes Christianity.
And we have all but lost it.
Added numbers, yes, but lost fear.
Numbers multiplied schools, yes, but the loss of
the awareness of the invisible.
More tons of literature being poured out, sure,
but no consciousness of the divine presence.
Better communication, certainly, but nothing to communicate.
Evangelizing organizations, yes, but the concept of majesty
and worship and reverence has almost left us.
Now the total result, then, of these gains
and losses, the total result has been that
our gains have been external and our losses
internal.
This is the great tragedy of the hour,
that our religious gains have been external and
our losses have been internal.
And at last our gains may prove to
be no more than losses spread over a
larger area.
Because anybody can see that if the quality
of our religion is impaired, while we are
nevertheless extending it to more people, we are
losing instead of gaining.
If we have only so much glory and
we spread it thin, we have spread it
so thin that we have not gained anything.
And I believe that that is where we
are.
And I believe that we never can recover
our glory until we are brought to see
again the awful perfections of God.
It has been for many years, and it's
growing on me, my conviction that we must
recapture the concept of the perfections of God.
We must see again how awful God is,
how beautiful God is, how perfect God is,
and we must begin to preach it and
sing it and write about it and promote
it and talk it and tell it and
pray it until we have recaptured the concept
of majesty, until the awareness of the divine
is back on religion again, until we have
regained the ability, even the desire, to retire
within our own hearts and worship God in
the silence of our own spirits betimes.
I have tried to turn the direction of
the people away from the externals of religion
to the internals of religion.
I have tried to take away the clouds
and show God in his glory as I
go here and there preaching.
But I have stood almost alone in it.
That's been a strange thing, that I have
stood almost alone in it.
It is very rarely that you hear a
man preach anything about God, the Holy One.
They like to hear about it, and they
invite me here and there to preach on
it, and many are waiting for me to
write a book about it.
But why don't we get hold of this
idea?
I don't know why, but I'm not discouraged.
We will continue if we continue as we
are, spreading our impaired religion, our weakened Christianity
over a wider area, thinning it out.
If we continue until the Lord comes, the
Lord will break through the clouds and will
show himself majestic and wonderful.
And in heaven above and earth beneath and
in under the sea and everywhere, they shall
bow and own him to be Lord and
King.
But I'd like to see it brought back
to the Church before that dramatic hour comes.
I'd like to see us know it now.
Well, now what does perfection mean?
Well, according to Webster, perfection means the highest
possible degree of excellence.
That is perfect which lacks nothing it should
have and has nothing it should not have.
That is perfection.
Perfection is the fullness, the completeness.
It's not lacking in anything, and it doesn't
have anything that it shouldn't have.
And this is a relative word, this word
perfection or perfect.
It's found in the Bible quite a little,
our English translation of numbers of Hebrew and
Greek words.
But as we have it here, it means
that which is excellent, which is the highest
possible degree of excellence.
And, of course, it's a relative word, and
we use it variously.
We talk about this being perfect and some
other thing being perfect, and we're referring to
earthly things.
Well, the Bible does the same thing.
But you know perfection is to be complete
in your nature.
That is, it is to be perfect as
it touches you.
If something else of another nature were to
be like you, it would be imperfect.
Let me illustrate it like this.
When the new baby is born, one of
the first things the doctor does and one
of the first things the anxious mother does
is to look him over and see whether
there's anything missing or whether, as sometimes happens,
there's more than should be.
For sometimes, unfortunately, little chaps are born into
the world of form.
Now, we look for the legs, too.
We look for the arms, too.
We look for the eyes, too.
For the ears, too.
For the nose, one.
And when we find that everything is the
right number and in the right place, we
smile and say, Well, thank God for a
healthy little baby.
Well, now, that's perfection to a man-child.
But suppose that on the farm a little
colt is born.
That little colt is looked over by the
anxious farmer.
And he doesn't look for two legs.
He looks for four.
And if the thing had only two, it
would be deformed.
If the baby had four, it would be
deformed.
Perfection is having just what it should have,
being what it is.
Being a man, it only has two legs.
Being a horse, it has four.
And if it were turned around, the horse
would be deformed and the man would be
deformed.
Perfection, in that relative way, would mean a
completeness and fullness of what you are.
Now, I think you see that all right.
A wheelbarrow has one wheel, and it's a
perfect wheelbarrow if it has one wheel.
And an automobile has four wheels, and it's
perfect if it has four wheels.
At least that far it's perfect.
Now, you know, we can't think of God
like this.
If perfection means the highest possible degree of
excellence, then we cannot apply this thought to
God at all.
When we think about God, we say the
highest possible.
How can you apply that to God?
Is there anything that isn't possible with God,
as though God had been created and that
he had done the highest thing possible, that
he was as perfect as it was possible
for him to be?
No, no, no.
You can't apply that to God.
That's only applied to creatures.
Then the highest possible degree.
When I was preaching on the infinitude of
God, I pointed out that there are no
degrees in God, that God is not at
the top of the heap in an ever
-ascending perfection of being, up from the worm
on up through until finally we reach God.
No, God is completely different from and other
than and separated from, so that there are
no degrees in God.
God is simply God in infinite perfection of
wholeness, and we cannot say God is a
little more or a little less, for more
and less are creature words.
We can say that a man has a
little more strength today, I think he's going
to make it.
We can say the child is a little
taller this year, he's growing.
We can say the man has more of
something or less, but you can't apply more
or less to God, for God is the
perfect one and he's just God.
And then we have the word excellence here.
Did you ever stop to think what the
word excellence means?
It means being in a state of excelling,
and therefore you have to excel something or
somebody.
Excellence in a musician means that he is
a better musician than the other musician.
If he has a high degree of excellence,
we could say he has perfection in his
field.
Well, he doesn't, but we could use the
word.
It means that he excels, that he does
better than somebody else, so excellence is by
comparison.
If there are five poor pianists and they
all test out, the one who's the least
poor will be said to be excellent in
that he excels the other four.
But when you come to God, God says,
to whom shall you liken me, or to
whom shall I be equal, says the Lord.
You don't compare God.
We say that God is incomparable.
And what do we mean by that?
We mean that God stands alone as God,
that he is incomparable, and that there's nobody
that can be or nothing that can be
compared with him.
Isaiah was very strong here, and he wrote
some very beautiful and eloquent language telling us
that we must not compare God with anything
or anybody or any being in heaven above
or on the earth beneath.
And Moses' law said you shall not make
any comparisons.
You shall not make any images.
Some people thought that meant that you should
never make any works of art.
But the fact is there were works of
art in the temple commanded by God.
So God was not against works of art.
He was against ever thinking that they ever
reminded anybody of God or they ever substituted
for God or we ever put them up
there as being like God.
No.
To whom shall you liken me, says God.
And yet the Bible uses this word, these
words, this word perfect.
The Bible uses it all the way through,
applies it to God and applies it to
things that aren't God.
For instance, be ye perfect for I am
perfect.
So it's the same, exactly the same word
in the original, so that the same word
that applies to God applies to people.
Do you know why God uses it?
Because there isn't any other word.
There aren't any other words.
You can go through that great dictionary, this
heavy and this thick, and you cannot find
language that will tell what God is.
So God does the best he can, to
the best he can considering who we are
and what we are, to make himself known
to us.
You see, God is not limited in himself.
He's limited in us.
Paul said you're not straightened.
You're straightened in your own hearts, he said.
It's yourself that you're narrowed in your own
hearts.
So the inability of God to get truth
through to us is not the imperfection of
the great God, but the imperfection of the
man to whom he's trying to get the
truth through.
Now, as we apply perfection to God and
the thought of perfection to God, we mean
when we say that God is perfect, we
mean he has unqualified plenitude of whatever he
has, that he has fullness and completeness of
whatever he has, that he has unqualified plenitude
of being.
He has unqualified plenitude of power.
He also has unqualified fullness of wisdom.
He has unqualified knowledge.
He has unqualified holiness.
By unqualified I mean that there are no
qualifiers in him.
When I say that a man is a
perfect singer, I qualify that in my mind.
When I say that God is holy, I
do not qualify.
It is I mean it fully, completely.
God is what he is and that's it.
And there are no qualifications.
So that God's power and being and wisdom
and knowledge and holiness and goodness and justice
and mercy and love and grace, all of
these and more of the attributes of God,
these are in shining and full uncreated perfection.
They are called the beauty of the Lord
our God.
In the Old Testament, that the beauty of
the Lord our God be upon us, Moses
said in the 90th Psalm and in the
27th, David said, One thing have I desired
of the Lord, that will I seek after,
that I may dwell in the house of
the Lord all the days of my life
to behold the beauty of the Lord and
to inquire in his temple.
So the beauty of the Lord means that
God has all he should have of everything,
that there is a complete fullness of everything
there.
If it is love, then there is no
limit to the love of God.
If it is mercy, then there is no
limit to the mercy of God.
If it is grace, there are no bounds
to the grace of God.
If it is goodness, there's no limit to
the goodness of God and so with everything.
And so this is called the beauty of
the Lord our God.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God
has shined.
Why was Zion the earthly perfection of beauty?
Because her beauty came from the shining God
who dwelt between the wings of the cherubim.
She was not only architecturally beautiful, but all
the concepts of her were beautiful.
Her hymnody was beautiful.
Her ideas of worship were beautiful.
Shining there in the sun, knowing that God
was there between the wings of the cherubim
dwelling in this Shekinah, she was beautiful above
all the earth.
So out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God has shined.
All things as they move toward God are
beautiful and they are ugly as they move
away from him.
The older I get, the more I love
hymns and the less I love secular music.
Because secular music, however beautiful, artistic it may
be and however it may express the genius
of the composer, because it is secular music,
has one jewel missing from its crown.
But even if your hymn is not the
result of the same degree of genius, and
even though a good musician may find fault
with this music, still it is beautiful because
it has God there.
The song that honors God is bound to
be beautiful because it does honor God.
That's why the 23rd Psalm is so beautiful
because it honors God and so is the
whole Bible itself.
This book I hold in my hand is
a shining, beautiful book.
It is lovely no matter whether it is
bound in the cheapest paper or whether it
is bound in the most expensive leather, whether
it is printed on plain paper or whether
it is printed on the finest Indian paper.
It is nevertheless a beautiful book.
And I'd like to say this to you.
Not very many people can hear it, but
I will say it to you because I
pay you the compliment of believing you can
or you wouldn't be here, that theology itself
is a beautiful thing.
Theology is beautiful because it is the mind
reasoning about God.
It is the mind down on its knee
in a state of breathless devotion, reasoning about
God, or it should be.
I know it's possible for theology to become
a very hard and a very aloof thing
and we lose God right out of our
theology.
I know that's possible, but the kind of
theology I'm talking about, the study of God,
is a beautiful thing.
And that's why I suppose that as a
man gets older, he goes to David more
and to Plato less.
That's why he goes to Aristotle less and
to Paul more because there is beauty in
Paul and David for Paul and David celebrated
the perfection of God where the others dealt
with other matters altogether.
The perfection of beauty.
I say as we move toward God, we
become more beautiful.
All things become more beautiful as they move
toward God and they become more ugly as
they move away from God.
You see, heaven is the place of supreme
beauty.
I think that we ought to begin to
rethink the whole concept of heaven.
I think we ought to begin to pray
and to search the scriptures about it.
If you were moving to Florida, you would
want to get at least a folder or
two about where you were going.
And if you were going to Paris, you
would like at least to look at a
brochure to know where you were going.
And if you're going to heaven, I think
you ought to know something about it.
There's a lot told about it in the
scriptures, but we're so busy living down here
that we're not too much concerned about it.
And I'm not going to try to describe
it tonight.
Any man attempting to describe heaven, I'm afraid
that his mind would go bad on him
for very heaviness, for it cannot be done.
But it is the place of supreme beauty,
that much we can say.
And why?
Because the perfection of beauty is there.
Let the beauty of the Lord our God
be upon us.
Was there ever anything ever more beautiful in
the story of Jesus' birth?
Is there ever anything more beautiful than the
picture of Jesus walking up and down among
men in tenderness and humility, healing the sick
and raising the dead and forgiving sinners and
restoring poor fallen people back to society again?
Anything more wonderful than his going out to
the cross to die for those who were
crucifying him?
Anything lovelier than to be the creator of
his own mother, to have made the very
body that gave him protection and bore him
at last into the world?
Anything more awful and awesome and mysterious than
that man of God, that God-man walking
about among men saying, I saw Satan's lightning
fall from heaven for before the world was
I am or before Abraham was I am
and the Son of Man is in the
bosom of the Father?
No, no.
All beauty centers around Jesus Christ.
That is why, apart from the commercialism, Christmas
is such a beautiful thing.
And that is why Easter is so beautiful.
And to me, Easter is more beautiful than
Christmas because Easter celebrates a triumph and Christmas
celebrates the coming of someone who hadn't yet
fought.
He had been born to fight, but he
hadn't fought.
But when Easter had come, we can sing
the three sad days are quickly sped.
He rises glorious from the dead.
And there's beauty there.
And it's not the beauty of color, and
it's not the beauty of outline or form,
not the beauty of physical proportion.
You can worship him in a stable.
You can worship him in a coal mine.
You can worship him in a factory.
It's not the external beauty that is beautiful,
but it is the internal beauty.
God, heaven is beautiful because it is the
expression of that which is the perfection of
beauty.
And while that is true of heaven, I
must also say that hell is the place
of unrelieved, monstrous ugliness because there is no
perfection.
There in heaven, there is only monstrous moral
deformity.
And there is nothing in hell, and nothing
beautiful in hell.
There is only monstrous ugliness and deformity.
And in heaven, of course, there is supreme
beauty.
Now, earth lies halfway between.
Earth lies halfway between.
Earth knows ugliness, and earth knows beauty.
It's halfway between heaven and hell.
And the inhabitants of heaven, or of earth,
must decide whether they are to seek the
beauty of heaven or the monstrous ugliness, the
unrelieved ugliness of hell.
Oh, my friends, people are worrying about whether
there's fire in hell or not.
I have no reason to believe that there
is fire, not to believe that there's fire
in hell.
For what the Bible says, I take it
as the truth.
And so I would not hesitate to refer
to the fires of hell, for the Scripture
talks about the lake of fire.
But if there were no fire in hell,
if hell itself were a country, if it
were a habitable country, if it were a
land, it still would be the ugliest country
in the universe, still the most monstrously, shockingly
deformed place that is known in the creation,
because there is none of the perfection of
beauty.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God
has shined.
And only God is absolutely perfect.
You know, it is not possible for anything
bad to be beautiful, finally.
For the Scripture says that we're to serve
God in the beauty of holiness.
It's possible for an unholy thing to be
pretty.
It's possible for an unholy thing to be
attractive, even charming.
But it's not possible for it to be
beautiful.
Only that can be beautiful ultimately which is
holy, the beauty of holiness.
Worship God, says the Scripture, in the beauty
of holiness.
And there is no, that's no casual remark,
no casual relation of word to word.
The beauty of holiness and the perfection of
beauty and the fact that only God is
perfect, they all fit in together as beautifully
and drop into place for God is beautiful
beyond all description.
How beautiful, how beautiful a sight of God
must be, says the hymn.
How beautiful a sight of God must be.
And when we say how beautiful a sight
of God must be, we must remember how
unutterably ugly must the sight of hell be.
If you could think of a prison, if
you could think of a place where all
hope had fled, and all mercy had fled,
then you would be thinking of hell.
If you could think of a place where
all moral wisdom was absent, and all holiness
gone, and all goodness absent, where there was
no justice, no mercy, no love, no kindness,
no grace, no tenderness, no charity, but only
multiplied monstrous fullness of unholiness and
moral folly and hate and cruelty and injustice,
then you would think of hell.
My brethren, God calls us to himself.
He calls us to himself.
When are we going to raise up a
crop of preachers?
When are they coming who will begin to
preach the perfection of God and tell the
people what they ought to hear, that Jesus
Christ was born and the Virgin Mary to
suffer under Pontius Pilate to die and rise
again, that he might save us from the
everlasting monstrosities, the uglinesses, that are away from
God that are not God, and to bring
us to the beauty that is God.
He came to call us away from all
evil and away from the deformity, from the
eternal ugliness, which is hell, and toward holiness
and perfection and eternal beauty.
I say that he has come to us.
Jesus Christ is God come to us.
Always remember that.
Jesus is God come to us.
And he has come to us for God
was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.
Oh, how beautiful, how beautiful is the thought
that God came to us, came to us
in that lowly manger bed.
How beautiful that he came to us.
He came and walked among us.
He came with our shape and form bearing
about himself, with himself, bearing our humanity, that
he might cleanse that humanity and purify it
and purge it and remake it and restore
it and take it back with him again
to that place which is the perfection of
beauty, the perfection of beauty.
I don't know where heaven is.
I read that they shot a gold-plated
arrow up sixty-some thousand miles into the
air.
And somebody's wondering if they might not be
reaching heaven at last.
We have to smile, my brethren, because God
does not dwell in space, and space is
nothing to God.
And the great infinite heart of God gathers
up in himself all space.
And for man to be shooting at the
planets yonder or even at the sun would
be like a little one-year-old baby
playing with a rubber ball in Wrigley Field.
What can he do?
Bat it around here and then crawl and
get it.
And when he bats it away two feet,
he squeals with delight.
He feels that he's really hit a home
run.
But way out there, four hundred feet stretches
the field, and beyond that, the bleachers.
And it takes strong men to knock a
ball over the fence.
And so we think about God.
We think of man.
We send up our little arrow, and it
reaches the moon and goes into orbit around
it, and then we boast about it for
years to come.
Go on, little boy, go on.
Play with your little rubber ball, but the
great God who carries the universe in his
heart smiles.
He's not impressed, but he's calling you to
himself.
He's calling you to his holiness, to his
beauty, to his love and mercy and goodness.
And he's come to reconcile us and call
us back.
What has the world to offer?
I ask you.
If the world could give you everything, what
has the world got now?
There's nothing.
We are being bombarded constantly by advertisers who
are trying to make us believe that the
gadgets they manufacture are worthy of our attention.
No.
You want to keep your food cold?
They found a way.
Okay, get one.
Don't imagine it's wonderful.
You want to go someplace and you need
a car?
Get one, but don't imagine it's wonderful.
You want to fly to San Francisco?
Fly, but don't imagine it's wonderful.
Don't imagine anything is wonderful.
His name shall be called wonderful, and only
he can engage and excite the wonder of
angels and seraphim and cherubim and archangels and
all beings and creatures.
Only he can do that.
Only he is wonderful, and he came to
us to reconcile us unto himself.
How beautiful, how wonderful.
And so we sang in the song, what
were those words?
Take all my mortal interests and let them
die and give me only God.
So, my friends, if you want to pray,
and you want to pray strategically, if you
want to pray in the direction I believe
would please God, pray that God might raise
up men who would see the beauty of
the Lord our God and would begin to
preach it and hold it out to men
instead of offering peace of mind and deliverance
from cigarettes and having a better job and
having a nicer cottage.
Well, God delivers men from cigarettes and he
does help businessmen and he does answer prayer
and I don't deny any of those things,
but they're only incidental.
They're the trivialities, we might say.
They're the little things.
They're the kindergarten stage of religion.
Why can't we go on beyond it and
say with the old Jew out of Zion
the perfection of beauty God has shined and
look there on the hilltop and see in
the city of our God the new Jerusalem,
Jerusalem the golden, and see it to be
what it is, the shining city of God
and what it is because God is in
it being the wonder of the universe and
what it is because God is shining out
of it and all a busy religion, what
is it after all?
All a busy religion.
What is it if God isn't there?
What is it if we've lost majesty, if
we've lost reverence, if we've lost worship, if
we've lost an awareness of the divine, if
we've lost a sense of the presence, if
we've lost the ability to retreat within our
own hearts and meet God in the garden,
if we've lost that, why build another church?
Why make more converts to an effete Christianity?
Why bring people to follow after a Savior
so far off that he doesn't own them?
No, my brethren, we need an improved quality
of Christianity and we'll never improve the quality
until we raise our concept of God back
to where apostle and sage and prophet and
apostle and saint and reformer held it.
And when we put God back where he
belongs, we will instinctively and automatically come up
again and the whole spiral of our religious
direction will be upward.
But we try to work it out by
methods, try to produce it by technology, try
to create revivals by publicity stunts, try to
promote religion, forgetting that it rests down upon
the character of God and it can only
be what I conceive God to be.
And if I have a low concept of
God, my religion can only be a cheap,
watery affair.
But if my concept of God is worthy
of God, then it can be noble and
dignified, reverent, profound, beautiful.
This is what I want to see once
more among men.
Pray that way, won't you?
Oh, God our Father, God our Father, I
knowest how easy it is to backslide and
not know it.
I knowest how easy it is to have
an aim to live and be dead.
I knowest how easy it is to become
part of a troop of jolly church people
chattering and giggling our way along while the
world grows old and the judgment draws near
and hell enlarges her borders when the Antichrist
prepares himself to take over while the world
is unifying itself and getting ready for a
head, a president, a king.
Oh, God, my church playing and fooling and
saying, I am rich and increased with goods
and have needed nothing.
We have more people attending.
We have more money than we ever had.
Our churches cost more and our schools are
full and our programs are many, forgetting, oh
my God, that the quality of our Christianity
has been greatly impaired.
Oh, restore again, we cry, restore again to
thy church her vision of thee.
Restore again to thy church her sight of
the great God.
Show us thy face, thy lovely face, a
permanent view of majesty.
We will not say a transient gleam, my
God, these transient gleams are too many.
We want a permanent sight of thee in
all I wonder.
Oh, God, men sin on and on and
on and they treat religion, smile at it
and laugh about it and tolerate it.
But oh, God, we have lost our fear
and our majesty and our awe.
Give back to us, we pray, the majesty
in the heavens.
Give back to us a sight of majesty
again that we can know how wonderful thou
art, and thy majesty how bright, and how
beautiful thy mercy's seat in depths of burning
light.
Send us to our homes to pray, to
walk about, knowing that we are in the
garden indeed, even as thou didst walk in
the garden in the cool of the day,
and Adam hid.
Oh, how many of us, Lord, hide behind
one thing or another, because we are not
morally and spiritually prepared to come out and
walk with thee.
But Enoch walked with thee and was not,
because God took him.
And Moses looked upon thy face, and this
face that came to pass did shine.
Oh, God, send us out not only to
make converts, but send us out, we pray
thee, to glorify the Father and to hold
up the beauty of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
All this we ask in the name of
Jesus Christ, our Lord.
And all the people said, Amen.
Amen.