Next Sunday night I hope to speak on
the omniscience of God, which means that God
knows all that can be known.
And I want to explain that, and then
apply it and show what that means to
us.
Tonight I am to speak on the immutability
of God, and try to show what that
means to us.
I have some texts which I'll read, though
the entire Bible is the text.
But in Malachi 3, there is that well
-known verse 6, "...for I am the Lord,
I change not."
And then over in the book of Hebrews,
we read verse 17 of chapter 6, "...wherein
God, willing more abundantly to show unto the
heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel,
confirmed it by an oath, that by two
immutable things is the promise and the oath,
in which it was impossible for God to
lie, we might have a strong consolation, who
have fled for refuge to lay hold upon
the hope that is set before us."
And then in the book of James, these
words, first chapter, verse 16, "...every good gift
and every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down from the Father of lights, with
whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning."
And then that very well-known and loved
verse, in the 13th chapter of Hebrews, verse
8, "...Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today,
and forever."
Now, the immutability of God, to announce that
you are going to speak on the immutability
of God, is almost like putting up a
sign saying, there will be no service here
tonight.
Nobody wants to hear anybody talk about it,
I suppose, just left like that, the immutability
of God.
But when it's explained, you will find you
have struck gold and diamonds and meat and
milk and honey.
Now, the word immutable, of course, is the
negative of mutable.
And mutable is from the Latin meaning, subject
to change.
Mutation is a word we often use, meaning
there has been a change.
There is a change in form or nature
or substance.
And mutability is subject to change, and immutability
means that it's not subject to change.
I think we could get an idea of
what we mean if we would remember Shelley's
little poem on the cloud that you learned
when you were in high school.
It starts out with the cloud talking and
says, "...I am the daughter of earth and
water and the nursling of the sky.
I pass through the pores of the ocean
and shores, I change, but I cannot die."
That's a cloud.
It's cloud now, rain tomorrow, fog the next
day, cloud again, snow the next day, ice
the next day, boiling hot one day and
the next day, cool the next day.
It's vaporized and becomes a cloud again.
It's constantly changing and passing through the pores
of the ocean and shores, and it changes
because it's mutable, but it cannot die.
Now there is in God no mutation possible.
That is, it says there in James, "...with
whom there is no variation or shadow due
to change."
And that verse, "...I am Jehovah, I change
not."
You couldn't make it any cleaner than that.
There isn't one trace of poetry in that.
There is no figure of speech, no metaphor.
It is just as blunt and prosaic as
for me to say, this is February 12,
1961, period.
There isn't any way to interpret that.
There isn't anything you do with it.
You don't go to a scholar and say,
what does this mean?
You don't need to.
"...I am Jehovah, I change not."
Two sentences, "...I change not."
Incidentally, he's the only one who can say
that in the universe.
But he did say it, and he simply
says that he never changes.
That is, there is no change possible in
God.
God never differs from himself.
Now you get a hold of this, my
friend.
It may be to you an anchor in
a storm, it may be to you a
hiding place in danger.
There is no possibility of changing in God,
and God never differs from himself.
One of the sickest pains that we know
in our lives is how people change.
Men smile at you one day, and two
weeks later they'll turn their face away.
A friend to whom you used to write
once a week, you haven't written in five
years now, because there's a change taking place.
They've changed, you've changed, circumstances have changed.
The little babies, I dedicated five, I think,
this morning, they're here now little chaps, little,
tiny, soft things you pick up.
Give them a little while and they'll change.
These doting parents who hold these little, tender,
pink things in their arms and admire and
love them until their love becomes a pain
in them, they'll be startled, surprised and somewhat
confused and somewhat pleased to see one of
these days that little fat body begin to
lengthen out and those little dimpled knees becoming
undimpled and getting bony.
And that tendency to cling to mama disappearing,
and the little guy will put his hands
on his hips and back off, and he's
somebody now.
And that's change, that's change.
We look at their pictures, my wife and
I take the pictures out of the family
every once in a while and just look
at them, such pretty little fellows they were,
and so delightful, but they're great, long, lean
fellows now, lanky and tall and bronze, and
they're not the way they were, and that's
not the worst.
Give them forty years more and they won't
be as they are now.
There is change, always change, change and decay
in all around I see.
The English poet said, O Lord, my heart
is sick, sick of this everlasting change and
life runs tediously quick through its unresting race
and varied reign.
Change finds no likeness to itself in thee
and wakes no echo of thy mute eternity.
There is only one thing God does not
change, and all that changes only proclaims that
God changes not.
But all things as they change proclaim the
Lord eternally the same.
That's a theological fact, that's something you can
build on.
That is revealed truth.
That needs no support of poetry, that needs
no support of reason.
But when once a truth has been declared
and established, then I like to reason in
it.
To quote Ann Selm again, I do not
reason or think that I might believe, I
reason because I believe.
I think not that I might have faith,
but I think because I have faith.
So I'd like to show you tonight, briefly
as I can, three reasons why God cannot
change.
That's reasoning within the scriptures.
For God to alter or change at all,
for God to be different from himself or
change in any manner whatsoever from himself, one
of three things has to take place.
Either God must go from better to worse,
or he must go from worse to better,
or he must change from one kind of
being to another.
That's so plain that there is nothing profound
about that.
Occasionally somebody will say, I preach over their
head.
All I can say is, they must have
their head awfully low, because there is nothing
profound about this whatsoever.
Isn't it reasonable?
If anything changes, it has to change from
better to worse.
An apple out there hanging on the bough
changes from green to ripe.
That's from worse to better.
And if a little boy eats it when
it's green as I used to, he'll get
sick.
I did it once or twice every year
when I was a little chap on the
farm and went to bed with Paul Remorbis
because I'd eaten green apples.
Well, when it ripens, it has changed from
worse to better, from our standpoint.
Let it hang there long enough and it
will change from better to worse, and it
will rot there and fall away.
And so it gets worse from its better
state as it had gotten better from its
worse state.
Now, anybody can get a hold of that.
If you can't get a hold of it,
brother, shake your head real hard and see
if you can't wake up the cells in
there.
That's so simple.
Now, that being true, then if God is
to change any, then God has to either
get better or worse or different.
And God can't go from better to worse
because God is a holy God.
And God being a moral creature, being a
moral being, not a creature, we are creatures,
he's the being who gave us life.
God being eternal holiness can never be any
less holy than he is now.
But of course, he never can be any
more holy than he is now, because he's
perfect as it is and there'll be no
change in God.
No change is necessary.
Changes are necessary in things and people and
creatures, but no change is necessary in God,
therefore God changes not.
And God being the eternal holy God, he
cannot change, and therefore he will not go
from better to worse.
You cannot think of God being any less
holy than he is now, any less righteous
than he is now.
God must remain infinitely holy, therefore fixed forever,
unchanging in holiness.
He cannot go from worse to better for
the simple reason that God being absolutely holy
cannot go beyond himself.
God cannot get any more holy than he
is now, going from less good to better,
on up and up.
God can't increase that way.
You can, you and I can.
Thank God we can.
Let him that is holy be getting holier
still, it says in Revelation.
And I believe that since we are creatures
and capable of mutation upward toward the image
of God, we will become holier and wiser
and better while the ages roll.
But remember that in becoming holier and better
and wiser, we will only be moving on
toward the perfect likeness of God, who is
already all-wise and all-good and all
-holy.
So God cannot become any better than he
is.
These words that you and I use, we
use them about ourselves.
A man is a good man, another man
is a better man.
But you cannot say better about God, because
God is already there.
God is the apex, the fountain, the top.
There are no degrees in God.
There are degrees in angels, I suppose, and
there are certainly degrees in people, but there
are no degrees in God.
Therefore you cannot apply such words as greater
to God.
God is not greater, God is great.
And greater is a word applied to creatures
who are trying to be like God.
But you cannot say that God is greater,
because that would put God in a position
where he was in competition with one else
who was great.
God is simply God.
So you cannot say God is less, God
is more, God is older, God is younger.
You cannot say God is older, because God
has in his bosom all of time, and
time casts no shadow on God and changes
God not at all.
God does not live according to the tick
of a clock, nor according to the revolution
of the earth around the sun.
God does not observe seasons or days, though
he allows us to, because we are caught
in the stream of time and the sun
that goes down at night and rises in
the morning, or the earth that goes around
the sun in 360 days.
This always tells us where we are in
time.
But not God.
God remains eternally the same, absolutely the same.
And I'd like to point out another thing,
that these suffixes that we have that we
apply to ourselves, they are direction words, such
as back and down and upward and all
such words.
You can't apply them to God.
God can't go back because God is already
there, being omnipresent.
God can't go forward because God is already
there, being omnipresent.
God can't go to right or left because
God is already everywhere, and the heaven of
heavens cannot contain him.
So we do not say that God came
from or God goes to.
We use the words, but we don't mean
about God what we mean about ourselves.
Direction words haven't anything to do with next
Monday of the week.
I'm going to get on an airplane and
fly down to Chicago and get on another
one there and fly down to Wichita, wherever
that is, and get in an automobile and
go to Newton, wherever that is.
They're both in Kansas, incidentally.
And I'll preach a while there in a
Bible conference.
I will be going somewhere.
I will be, and then I will be
moving toward somewhere.
But God is not one place moving toward
another because God fills all places.
And whether you be in India or Australia
or South America or California or wherever you
be around the world or out in stellar
spaces, God's already there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and go to the uttermost parts of the
sea, God's there.
And if I go up into heaven, he's
there.
And if I go down to hell, even
there, God will be.
So these words, these greater and lesser words
and these suffixes, backward, downward, upward, onward, these
words can't apply to God.
God the Eternal God remains unchanging, that is,
he is immutable.
Then there's a third possibility in changing.
A man can go, or a creature can
go, from one kind of being to another.
That beautiful butterfly that you squeal over in
the springtime when it's there so lovely, or
maybe occasionally this lovely thing will happen.
I've seen this happen in our home a
few times.
I never knew how they got in.
But a moth, one of those great broad
moths, as large and wide as my hand,
a wingspread as wide as my hand, and
just covered with falcon powder.
You've seen them just go absolutely lovely.
There they are, they usually get on a
curtain trying to get to the light.
They've hatched there somewhere.
And it's so beautiful, we say, isn't it
lovely, isn't that a beautiful thing?
You pick it up and tenderly take it
to the door and let it fly away.
But just a little while before, if you'd
seen it, you'd turn away from it, you
wouldn't want to touch it, because it was
a cocoon, which is a worm all wrapped
up in winter clothes.
And when that beautiful little butterfly that breathes
with its wings, you know they do it
that way, sitting there on the flower, just
a little while ago he was a miserable
hairy worm crawling across the road.
And you wouldn't have touched him, and you'd
have put him down on the table before
he'd have squealed and got up and left.
But now you see, isn't it beautiful?
There is change, you see.
Things go from one kind of creature to
another.
And then there is moral changes that are
made.
A man can be a good man and
change and be a bad man.
And then, thank God, he can be a
bad man and by the grace of God
change and be a good man.
We sing sometimes the songs of John Newton.
Don't you know John Newton was one of
the vilest men that ever lived by his
own confession?
Don't you know that John Bunyan was one
of the evilest men that ever lived by
his own confession?
Don't you know that the Apostle Paul was
one of the worst men, the cheapest of
sinners by his own testimony?
But these men became Saints of God.
And we don't canonize men in the Protestant
Church, but if we did, we'd have St.
John Bunyan and St. John Newton and St.
John Lewis.
I don't know how the Johns got so
many good things, but there are so many
good Johns, bless them.
They change, it's possible to change.
And some of you who are sitting here
now, getting a bit of spiritual help out
of this talk about God, there was a
time when you would have been bored to
tears, as they say, to listen to it.
You've changed, you've changed, there's been mutation.
You're not immutable, thank God you're not immutable.
You're able to change, to change from worse
to better, to go from one kind of
creature to another kind of creature.
But you can't think of that about God.
God cannot go.
That's unthinkable.
The perfect and the absolute and the infinite
God cannot become anything else but what he
is.
Now, let us remember that in teaching the
doctrine of the incarnation, we do not teach
that God became man in the sense that
God left his deity and took humanity.
He did that in that Jesus Christ was
both God and man.
But his manhood and his Godhood, while mysteriously
fused, they never passed over into each other.
The old Athanasian Creed makes that very clear.
Our Father, way back there in the days
of Athanasius, makes it very clear.
They say that Jesus Christ is man, or
God became man, not by the degradation of
his Godhood into man, but by the lifting
up of his manhood into God.
And so while Christ is divine and is
God, and was with the Father before the
world was, when Jesus was born of the
Virgin Mary, he took a tabernacle on himself,
but his deity didn't become humanity.
His deity was joined to his humanity in
one person forever, but God, eternal, uncreated, can
never become created.
Now, I stand by that, my brethren.
I'll stand by that right down to the
end.
That which is not God cannot become God,
and that which is God cannot become that
which is not God.
But God can come and dwell imminently within
this creature.
You do not become God when God comes
into your nature and fills you with himself.
And God does not become you.
There is that pantheism.
But you and God remain two beings.
God is your Father and you are his
child, but he dwells in your heart.
And experientially you are one, but actually and
metaphysically you are two.
Buddhists teach that we pass away into nirvana,
pass on out into the eternal sea of
deity and cease to be like a drop
of water into the ocean.
I wouldn't look forward to that.
If I were on my deathbed and some
priest were to come and say, well, Brother
Toter, you're just about to pass out and
your personality will cease to be and you
will be lost and melted up into the
vast personality that is God, I'd say, I'm
not looking forward to it.
I'm going to hang on to my own
personality as long as I can, because I
like my dreams and my memories and I
like my thoughts and my worship and my
happiness and to see and to hear and
to feel, I like it.
I like to be human being and alive
and have my own personality.
So I never look forward to the time
that I shall be dissolved in God and
forgotten.
I'll never be forgotten.
God will always keep me a being, an
individual being in his heart, but an individual
being capable of memory, capable of imagination, capable
of thought, capable of drawing conclusions, capable of
worship.
Well, oh, I'll skip a lot of this
tonight because we started late, but we come
to this.
Thine own self forever filling, said the same
poet, with self-kindled flame, in thyself thou
art distilling unctions without name, without veiling of
thy features, without worshiping of creatures, God always
the same.
That was Faber, and I'd like to talk
a little more about God always the same.
And remember when I say that God is
the same always, I'm talking about the three
persons.
You'll remember that I quoted before, but it
says that such as the Father is, such
also is the Son, and such is the
Holy Ghost.
The Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated,
and the Holy Ghost is uncreated.
And yet there are not three uncreated, but
one uncreated.
The Father is incomprehensible, the Son is incomprehensible,
and the Spirit is comprehensible, yet there are
not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible.
So you can run through all the gamut
of the attributes of the Deity, and what
you say about the Father you can say
about the Son without modification, and what you
say about the Father and the Son you
can say about the Spirit without modification, for
they are one substance and are together to
be worshiped and glorified.
So when we say God is the same,
we say Jesus Christ is the same.
And when we say the Father and the
Son are the same, we say the Holy
Ghost is the same.
All that God ever was, God still is.
And all that God was and is, God
will ever be.
You'll remember that, my friend.
It will help you in the hour of
trial.
It will help you at death.
It will help you in the resurrection.
It will help you in the world to
come to know that all that God ever
was, God still is.
And all that God was and is, God
ever will be.
His nature and his attributes are eternally unchanging.
I preached about the selfhood of God, the
uncreated selfhood of God.
I'll never have to change that nor edit
it in any way.
I go back over some of my old
sermons and some of the old articles I've
written, and I wonder why I wrote them
like that.
I could improve them now.
But I can't improve it when I state
that God is always the same, that God
is self-sufficient, that God is self-existent,
that God is eternal, and that God is
omnipresent and that God is immutable.
There will be no reason to change that,
because God changes not.
His nature and his attributes are eternally unchanging,
I repeat.
However God ever felt about anything, he still
feels.
However he ever thought about anyone, he still
thinks.
And whatever he wants approved, he still approves.
And whatever he condemned, he still condemns, all
down the years.
You know what we have now in our
colleges, and some of our bright young pastors
have taken it over, and we have what
we call the relativity of morals.
They say, well, you can't be too tough
on people after all, right and wrong are
relative terms.
What's right in Timbuktu is wrong in New
York, and what's wrong in New York may
be entirely right in Buenos Aires.
And therefore there's a difference, you see, there's
a relativity there.
My friend, remember this, that God never changes,
and that the holiness is conformity to the
will of God.
Righteousness is conformity to the will of God.
And the will of God never changes for
moral creatures.
God means that moral creatures should always be
like him, always be right, always be holy,
always be pure, always be true, always, forever,
and never, while God sometimes winked in ancient
days because men didn't understand, and the work
of salvation was not yet wrought out for
men.
And while God puts up with some things
yet in us because we're still children and
don't know and can't yet grasp his eternal
purposes for us, he's not excusing it, my
friend.
He's simply patiently putting up with us until
we come around to ourselves.
But God always thinks the same.
I love to think that Jesus Christ is
what God is.
If you want to know what God is
like, read the story of Jesus Christ our
Lord and you'll find that what God is
like.
For he that has seen the Father has
seen me, or he that has seen me
has seen the Father, either one.
So that however Jesus felt about anything, God
feels about anything.
The Father feels that way.
When Jesus picked a baby up and put
his hands on its head, that's the way
God feels about babies.
Now I can understand how God can love
babies.
There are some things I don't understand why
God loves.
I never have been able to understand why
God loved me.
That is one of my deep theological difficulties,
and I'm not trying to be humble, I'm
stating a fact.
I don't know why God loved me, but
I can know and I can understand why
he loved babies.
I don't understand anybody that couldn't.
And Jesus did, and he picked them up
and brought them to him, and the disciples
said, I'll take those kids away.
Why?
This is a theological school, don't you know?
Here is our faculty, Jesus Christ, and we're
the students.
We're busy thinkers and we're talking theology.
Get those babies away.
And the Lord said, Let the little ones
come unto me, and forbid them not.
And such is the kingdom of heaven.
Over in the city of Chicago they had
a school among the Italians, and one little
girl, Rosie, she memorized the verse, so for
the little children to come unto me.
And she lived on the street, and on
her home playpen was the sidewalk, and her
language wasn't the best.
And the next day, Sunday, they asked her
to quote the passage she had learned the
Sunday before, and whoever could.
And one little brown hand went up and
shook, and it was Rosie, and they said,
All right, Rosie, you quote it.
It was, of course, so for the little
children to come unto me and forbid them
not, for such is the kingdom of heaven.
And she got the essence of it, but
she didn't have the King James Version, and
she said, Let the little kids come to
me, and don't you tell them they can't,
because they belong by me.
She had it all right, she had it,
but she didn't have the King James Version.
Now the Lord loves little ones like that,
and he still does.
And he still thinks the same of a
penitent harlot that he always did, and he
still thinks the same of a tender-eyed
man seeking eternal life.
Always he feels the same about everything, for
he did not and does not and cannot
change.
Now, things serve their end, you know.
Things serve their end.
They change.
We're in the middle of a world that's
changing all the time, and I, for one,
am glad it's changing.
I'm glad weather changes, aren't you?
I'm glad weather changes, that there isn't any
doubt about it, but if we can hold
out, the spring will come around and the
birds will come back, those cowards.
They leave us just when it gets cold,
and down they go to Florida and South
America, and they live down there.
I always did feel just a little bit
put out when the birds that I love
so much all leave me and go south.
They never come back.
Of course, that's not only true of birds,
that's true of a lot of these reliance
birds, too.
They go down south, you know, and don't
come back.
They don't come back until they can sit
out on the front porch.
Some of us have to stick right through
thick and thin, but we're glad for the
change.
We're glad when the weatherman says there'll be
a moderation.
Moderation's another word for mutation, you know.
It's going to change and warm up a
little bit.
We like that, unless it's August, and then
we don't want to hear it.
Well, in the world of nature, I hardly
need to mention it.
You know how a seed will produce a
plant, and a plant will produce a flower,
and a flower will produce a seed, and
a seed will produce a flower, and a
plant again, and so on, around and around
through the eternal cycle.
Things are changing.
And in the book of Hebrews, which I've
quoted before, we learn how God allowed things
to change in order that he might establish
that which cannot change.
The book of Hebrews has this for its
thesis, that the altar changed from the temporary
altar to the eternal altar, that the priesthood
changed from the temporary priesthood of Aaron to
the eternal priesthood of Christ, which cannot change.
He hath an unchanging priesthood.
And the tabernacle changed from the temporary tabernacle
in Jerusalem to the tabernacle eternal in the
heavens.
And the blood sacrificed changed from the blood
that was shed every day or every week
or every month and every year, to the
blood that was shed once for all and
needs not to be repeated.
The permanency, the immutability of God's redemptive scheme
is set forth in the book of Hebrews.
Things changed until they perfected themselves, and they
changed no more.
And all things, as they change, proclaim the
Lord eternally the same.
Now what does all this mean to you
and me?
Well, it means a lot.
It means, as I have preached through the
uncreated selfhood of God, it means that my
dependent self, my poor, helpless, dependent self, finds
a home in God.
God is our home.
M.
Simpson wrote a hymn on God being our
home.
My home is God, and we have found
in God a home.
We look forward, I look forward not so
much to heaven as my home, but as
God is my home in his heaven.
And the eternity of God, we poor victims
of the passing moment, we have found a
timeless one.
Some of you, since I've been preaching, have
been looking at your wristwatch.
Somebody said it will be all right so
long as you don't look at the calendar.
But your wristwatch, you're weary, weary.
These boys are always doing this, always doing
this.
I get the heebie-jeebies when I see
it.
Always this.
They are victims of time, always victims of
time, counting our pulse beating, tearing off from
the calendar that sheet that tells us we've
gone one more month on our way.
Time, we're victims of time, but there is
one who contains time in his bosom.
There is the timeless one who stepped out
of eternity into time in the womb of
the Virgin Mary and died and rose and
lives at the right hand of God for
us and invites us into his bosom where
time is no more.
And instead of our getting old, we stay
young in Jesus Christ.
Have you ever thought that St. Paul, who
would now be over 1900 years old, did
you ever stop to think in that moment
when our Lord returns, St. Paul will be
as young as he ever was.
Did you ever stop to think those dear
old people that we take out old and
battered and wrinkled and caved in and sick
and pale, and we take them out and
with a few flowers unto him we lay
them away, did you ever stop to think
that they're the victims of the stream of
time?
Time has done this thing to them, or
change has done it, for all time is
is a word we use to account for
change.
Change has done this, but there will be
a time, there will be a period there
when they rise in newness of life and
with a body like unto his glorified body,
whereby he is able to subject all things
unto himself.
Then that old wrinkled lady without teeth and
with her poor old cheeks leathery, never looked
in the glass anymore, she was too discouraged.
Now she looked young as the Virgin Mary,
now she looked like an angel in the
presence of God.
I wouldn't put this down as a dogma
that you've got to subscribe to, but we
appear to reach our intellectual and physical maturity
when we're about 30 or a little later.
And if that's true, then Jesus Christ died,
he had his life cut off out of
the living when he was 33.
God raised him from the dead and they
recognized him as being the same one that
had gone in.
He was not younger nor older, he was
the same one who'd gone in.
And I wonder if it won't mean that
forever and ever we will have that supreme
apex of mental, moral and physical life which
a normal healthy person has when he's 30.
We'll all be neither, we'll not be babies.
Some of you are looking forward to meeting
your babies over there.
Well, it's too late and too involved to
talk about that tonight, but there'll be no
babies in heaven.
A lot of babies go there, of course.
I believe that babies go there, but I
also believe that they do not cease to
mature and grow.
And when our Lord comes, even the babes
of a day old shall be like their
Lord, as well as the old patriarchs of
a hundred ripe years shall be like their
Lord.
Timeless God, an unchanging God.
Well, now we sing, you know, that song,
Rest My Long Divided Heart Fixed on This
Blissful Center, Rest.
I suppose nobody paid much attention to that.
Usually we don't know what we're singing about
when we sing songs.
We call that preliminary.
That's preliminary.
I never knew what was preliminary, too.
I've heard some sermons that needed some preliminary
support, all right, and I've preached some.
But we call that the preliminary, and so
we wade through the preliminary waiting for somebody
to be here in person.
He'll be here in person and sing.
I don't know how a man could be
there if he wasn't there in person, maybe
a sandy shirt or something.
But he's there in person.
Of course he's there in person, so he'll
sing.
Well, he does.
He's there in person.
Our brother will be there in person and
will preach, and we sing the preliminary.
You ever start to think that some of
those preliminaries might have more in them than
the sermon that follows?
Listen to this.
Now, Rest My Long Divided Heart Fixed on
This Blissful Center, Rest.
John Newton.
What do you mean?
Rest My Long Divided Heart.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, said
our Lord.
And confusion in the little kingdom of man's
soul, revolution and tumult, until we find rest
in Christ, that blissful center.
Who is that blissful center?
What is that blissful center?
That blissful center is none other than the
Son of God made flesh, crucified and risen.
And he invites us to rest in that
bosom of his, the blissful center.
Fixed on this blissful center, rest.
And there is a real sense in which
nobody knows rest of mind or heart until
they find it in Jesus Christ the Lord.
God has made us for himself, and we
find not rest until we find it in
thee, said Augustine.
Those wise disciples, how wise they were on
that road to Emmaus, they said to the
Lord Jesus, Come on in and abide with
us, because the day is far spent and
the night is at hand.
And he went in and ate with them,
and they made himself known to them in
the breaking of the bread.
You will find that same Jesus makes himself
known in the breaking of the bread.
Ah, I say in the old song we
used to sing, but we sing no more
in the great congregation.
Come, sinners, to the Living One.
He's just the same Jesus as when he
raised the widow's son, the very same Jesus.
Come, feast upon the living bread.
He's just the same Jesus as when the
multitudes he fed, the very same Jesus.
Come, tell him all your griefs and fears.
He's just the same Jesus as when he
shed those loving tears, the very same Jesus.
Calm midst the waves of trouble be.
He's just the same Jesus as when he
calmed the raging sea, the very same Jesus.
And someday our raptured eyes shall see.
He's just the same Jesus, O blessed day
for you and me, the very same Jesus.
And the chorus runs, He's just the same
Jesus, the wonder-working Jesus, O praise his
name.
He's just the same, the very same Jesus.
And you will find him yesterday and today
and forever the same.
He has not receded into history past.
He is the same today as before he
went away.
He is the same Jesus Christ the Lord.
And if you will turn to him now,
as Mary turned to him and as the
rich ruler turned to him and as Jairus
turned to him and many others, you will
find he'll not fail you.
He's not visible to our sight.
But lo, I am with you always, even
into the end of the world.
And if you will turn to him for
clear light, you will find him the same
Jesus as when he gave the blind their
sight, the very same Jesus.
He'll feed you as he fed the multitude.
He'll calm you as he calmed the sea.
He'll bless you as he blessed the children.
He'll forgive you as he forgave the woman
that fell at his feet in her shame.
He'll give you eternal life as he gave
eternal life to his people.
He'll wash you as you wash their feet
back there.
He is the same.
The God we preach is the same, God
unchanging, unchangeable forever and ever and ever.
Let men change, God remains the same.
Let theology change, God remains the same.
I have seen theology change in the last
years, the years of my ministry.
It hasn't been too long, judged by Abraham
and Job, but long enough, judged by ordinary
length of life.
And I have seen it change.
I have seen eschatology change from a vivid,
eager expectation of Jesus to apologies.
We're apologizing for the coming of Christ now.
I've seen that change.
I've seen theology change in evangelical circles from
a severe certainty of the inspiration of the
scriptures, to an uncertainty and apology now in
evangelical circles.
I've seen it.
I have seen it change from believing that
the Church of Christ should separate from the
world, to a slow breaking down of that,
to a point now where men are apologizing
for our attitude toward the world and trying
to strike a common ground of understanding.
Anybody loves the world, the love of the
Father, I've seen all that change.
But God hasn't changed, the Bible hasn't changed,
truth hasn't changed, human hearts haven't changed, and
the blood hasn't changed.
So that you'll come to him for clear
light, you'll find him the same Jesus as
when he gave the blind their sight, the
very same Jesus.
So I recommend Jesus Christ to you tonight,
the unchanging one.
I recommend to you tonight God's answer to
your questions, God's solution to your problems, God's
life for your dying soul, God's cleansing for
your sin-cursed spirit, God's rest for your
restless mind, God's resurrection for your poor dying
body, and your advocate above.
I recommend him to you.
Turn to him tonight, now, and you'll find
him all he ever was, the very, very
same Jesus.
Now, we're going to sing...
This concludes sermon number seven.
For sermon number eight, next in the series
on the attributes of God, please refer to
tape number eight.