So for a brief word tonight, I have
two texts.
They are found in Isaiah 118.
First, the words of the Lord, Come now
and let us reason together, saith the Lord.
Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall
be as white as snow.
Though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as wool.
If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall
eat the good of the land.
But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall
be devoured with a sword, for the mouth
of the Lord hath spoken.
I'm only concerned tonight with that opening word
from God, Come now and let us reason
together.
Then in Haggai, the first chapter, Haggai
one time, and also the same was repeated
in the seventh verse.
Now therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts,
consider your ways, consider your ways, come
and let us reason together.
Now I want to reason with you a
little bit tonight, and I'll start by saying
that which you already know.
The difference, the chief difference anyway, between a
man and an animal is that man reflects
and a beast does not.
A man and an animal, the man and
the animal, they start out with about the
same amount of data and the same kind.
When a new puppy is born into the
world, or a new cat, they have about
the same data furnished to the senses.
The sun is there, or it isn't there.
It's a warm day or it's a cold
day.
Things are comfortable or they're not comfortable.
The mother is near or she isn't.
The data is about the same.
The senses tell the newborn cat about what
they tell the newborn baby.
So that we begin just about where the
beast begins.
And the Bible doesn't hesitate to say that
man and beast are very much alike.
It also says that there is a gulf
fixed between them, a difference that's so vast
that it can never be explained.
But it also says that there is a
certain likeness there.
But the chief difference will begin to manifest
itself very early.
For the man reflects and the beast does
not.
The calf born on the range or in
the barn lives by its instinct.
And it can grow to be old and
die of old age if they're permitted to
do it.
And still it will be living by its
instinct, will have learned very little.
And what it learns will be very low
grade and require practically no projection.
But a child of three years old is
already a walking question mark.
You know that.
The child reflects and the beast does not.
The man can reflect and the beast apparently
cannot.
Both are hurried into the world, as the
poet has said, hurried hither without asking.
Nobody asks to be born.
No animal asks to be born.
But after they are born, the man begins
to ask questions and the animal never does.
This is the difference.
The farmer and the horse, there aren't many
left, but we'll, for the sake of the
argument, invent a hypothetical horse, put him out
the head of a plow and start him
through the field.
And as you go by, you'll find that
they're a good deal alike, the tired, dusty
man and the tired, dusty horse.
But there is a difference that is as
vast as the difference that separates heaven from
hell and the earth from the stars above.
It is the difference in ability to consider
our way.
No horse ever stops to consider his way.
The man often does.
But even though we almost always, at some
time in our lives, do consider, it is
the tragic fact that after a while we
stop it and most people do not reflect
on their own way.
They may reflect, but they do not reflect
on their own way.
You know what I wish, and now wishing
is a word I don't use much.
It's only a carelessly used word, and to
me it simply means that it's a wild
imagination that I can give no body to.
But do you know what I wish?
I wish that I could get the men
of the city of Chicago and Environ, or
of St. Louis, or of Milwaukee, or of
New York, or Brooklyn, or Pittsburgh, or Cleveland,
or Detroit, or Cincinnati.
I wish that I could get the males
above the age of eight and under the
age of a hundred, one week, just one
week, to give as much consideration to their
own soul as they give to the standings
of their particular teams, and I have named
the cities that have the teams, to their
own ball clubs.
Now I just wish it.
I wish that as many people today, as
many men today, in the city of Chicago,
had spent, say there was a doubleheader today,
that would take about how many hours, about
four hours.
I wish, and I could pray, that we
could get as many, I would, I don't
know how many were there, I know they
were there, but I suppose maybe there were
35,000, I would guess that.
And if we could get 35,000 people
to spend four hours considering their soul, and
their lives, and their future, with the concentrated
attention that they considered the strikeouts, and the
stolen bases, and the rest.
Now I don't mean there's anything wrong with
strikeouts and stolen bases.
This isn't an attack on Billy Pierce, or
whoever pitched today.
This is merely saying that a three-year
-old asks basic questions, but a 30-year
-old is long past that.
A three-year-old says, Mother, where did
I come from?
It came from God.
How did I get here?
Well, Jesus sent you.
Is there a God, Mama?
And can God see me?
And if I'm in a room with no
doors or windows, one little chap actually asks,
could God see through and see me?
Well, those are basic questions.
But who is going to win the pennant?
That's not a basic question.
And yet people for four, at least four
hours today, listen, they're watched and listened to
men playing a game of arbitrary.
That is, the thing was arbitrary.
Did you ever stop to think of the
foolish, arbitrary quality of the game?
Now this doesn't mean I'm attacking it.
It's relaxing, I suppose.
But did you ever stop to think that
a fellow throws a ball that has been
made for him to throw, with great pain,
made for him to throw, and he has
neglected his soul, and neglected God, and neglected
heaven, in order that he might get skill
enough to throw that thing in the strike
zone at least three times before he threw
it out of the strike zone four times?
Now, who said three and four?
Somebody, Ebner Doubleday, they say, invented that gadget.
But did you ever stop to think it's
arbitrary and whimsical?
You could say a man is out on
four strikes just as easy, where's there any
law in the universe that says three strikes
and you're out?
That's invented.
And furthermore, what's the difference?
What happens to that ball?
There's a little artificial spheroid that is flying
through space, and oh, we'll guess 60 miles
an hour, that's a guess, rough guess, somebody
said it, and 35,000 people are spinning
themselves horse about that.
Now, what's the difference where it goes?
It could fall down a gopher hole, it
could get lost under a board or plank
someplace, it could go over onto the street
and fall into the sewer, or Mickey Mantle
could catch it.
What's the difference, my brethren?
You see, don't you?
Now, this isn't, I repeat for the third
time, to say that there's anything wrong with
it, but the point is, it's arbitrary, and
it's nothing, nothing is settled when they've settled
it, nothing's settled.
You say, well, you got him out, but
got him out, what does that settle?
That's an arbitrary expression that doesn't have any
root in nature anywhere, and so have all
games, and so is most of man's activity.
I saw today in a restaurant, a rather
intelligent looking woman, yesterday, for the magazine I
ate after the broadcast, and I saw a
rather intelligent looking woman sitting there, and she
was the very essence of concentration, serious face,
sober, with a pencil in her hand, neglecting
her friends around her, conversation had died, what
a fool she was doing.
I'll give you three guesses.
Yes, sir, you've got it, she was working
a crossword puzzle.
Now, what is she accomplishing, I'd ask you?
Nothing, nothing at all, it's the same with
card games, and the same with almost everything
we do.
I heard old Gus, Gus, is it Gus
Johnson, a great Swedish teacher from Pennsylvania?
Gus Johnson, I heard years ago, with a
sort of a dry, wry sense of humor,
saying that he was out on the golf
course with his son.
He never played, but he was out there
that day, and his son was a bug
on it, and he said, he started to
talk, and his son said, he said, what
did he care about putting?
He said, he wanted to talk, he didn't
care about putting.
Well, brother, all this is arbitrary, and I
suppose it's relaxing, and you don't die of
a nervous breakdown as soon, and your ulcer
may not be quite as large and all
-embracing as it would have been if you
hadn't put it.
I don't know, though, whether they increase them,
or make them smaller, but we'll ignore that.
But man spends this magnificent intellect that God's
given him, that it's this brilliant thing that
can flash out like silver streams of light,
and can reach back and take hold of
history and pull it up, too.
He can reach out into the future and
pull it back, and can examine stars and
moons and satellites and the depths of the
earth and the deeps of the sea and
hold them before him.
He's got all that, and you've got all
that.
How long since you've used it?
And think now of this imagination, this ability
to consider that we have.
God says, consider your ways.
Come now, let us reason together.
God is calling us to this, my brethren,
and he's saying to men who won't have
long to live, they won't be here very
long, they won't be around very long.
I won't, you won't.
You say it's all right to say you
won't, but I'll be.
You may be a little longer, maybe not
as long, but what is a few years
against the solemn space we call eternity?
What does it amount to anyway?
What's the difference?
Look, back in the days of Caesar or
in the days of Hothep, the educator of
Egypt before Caesar's day, one man died at
twenty, one died at thirty, one died at
seventy, and one died at ninety.
There they were separated by a spread of
seventy years.
Yet I ask you, if it really matters
now, who died at twenty and who died
at fifty and who died at seventy and
who died at ninety?
No.
What's the matter of fifty years set against
five thousand years and set against eternity?
And so, with that backdrop, against that backdrop
of eternal years, God says to us, consider.
Here, I've given you, I've given you something.
Consider.
Make no difference who won this day.
No difference whether he sunk that pot or
not.
Makes no difference.
Think on something eternal.
Think about something that matters.
Give a little time to something that matters.
And I believe that the great God of
justice and wisdom and logic and common sense
in the heavens, giving to man as he
does give to man, such an amazing power
to reflect, I believe that that God expects
that man to reflect, and if he will
not do it, and if he will spend
hours and hours, day after day and week
after week, thinking about things that don't matter
and neglect the one thing that does, I
see no place where God is under any
obligation to take that man to heaven.
God puts a door there and doesn't hide
it.
God puts a door there and the very
stars in their courses tell where it is.
God puts a door there leading into the
kingdom, and God calls and he wakes early
and he stretches his hands out and he
says, come, come, come, and he calls and
he invites and he exhorts and he urges
in a thousand ways and keeps it up
for a lifetime.
And yet if a man chooses to ignore
that call and refuses to see that door,
I want to ask you, by what moral
logic is God required to pick the man
up by his neck and take him to
heaven when he spent a lifetime fooling with
things that don't matter and refused to consider
the one thing that does?
God says, consider your ways and come now
and let us reason together.
And it's a deep wrong a man commits,
a deep wrong you will commit tonight against
your own soul if you sit there and
taste the sermon and judge about whether it
was as good as the one you heard
this morning or the one I preached sometime
before somebody else preached.
What a terrible thought, with the judgment coming
and your life having a way that we
should taste and compare instead of do something
about it.
It's a deep wrong we do our own
souls to vegetate like irrational creatures or to
spend our God-given faculties that were made
to engage not stars and planets but angels
and seraphim and God himself.
Say we do a terrible wrong against our
own souls when we use such faculties as
we have to fool and play and neglect
our souls.
For what is your life, James asks, what
is your life?
You possess the most precious thing in the
world.
I was out in the country the other
day with Brother Ty, Brother Olson, Maxie, and
who else?
Rex.
Yes, he's old.
I ought not to forget him.
We were out there and we saw a
hundred purplish spears being patented for the market.
Great, fine-looking colors they were.
I guess they'd weigh 650 pounds.
The man said he thought they would average
800.
Well, they had everything apparently, but they lacked
one thing.
They lacked that which the poorest man in
Chicago has.
The skid row bum that lies tonight in
a stupor on Madison Street has what the
finest-blooded steer doesn't have.
He has a soul.
He has a life given from God.
He has that which he'll have no termination,
but it'll be on and on and on.
What is your life?
You possess it, and it's the most precious
thing in all the world, for it gives
meaning to everything else.
It's the loan of God to you.
I don't know how God makes souls, but
I know God lends them to us.
It's a loan of God.
When the little lube baby crawls his protest
to the round world, his mother cuddles him
warm against her breast, God has lent him
a soul.
And God says to that little one later,
when he can understand it, Consider thy ways.
Come now, let us reason together.
Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall
be as white as snow.
And God does not expect that one to
whom he has lent a soul to act
like one to whom he has not lent
a soul, for you cannot use that personal
human pronoun about an animal.
God doesn't expect us or expect that animal,
however blooded and however fine, to respond, because
there's nothing there to respond.
But God has given us a soul.
Though I were to suffer and have to
suffer the pains of the damned for a
thousand years, I wouldn't give up that which
I know to be my soul.
My soul, that in me that is likest
to God of anything in the universe, I
wouldn't give it up, I wouldn't give it
up.
And though purgatory were so and a man
must roast or boil or broil in some
purgatory for a thousand years, I say he's
fortunate and lucky and ought to thank God
in the fire that he still has his
soul.
I don't believe in purgatory, but I say
that even if it were, I would still
say a man's lucky to have his soul.
What potentialities, what unbounded possibilities God has given
to the man with his soul.
You know, young people, you have a soul.
Some dear young people, God bless them these
days, don't know they have anything but glands.
They live on their glands, they run on
their glands.
Yes, you have a set of glands, all
right, and God gave them to you, and
you oughtn't to be ashamed of it.
But in addition to having glands, you have
a soul.
And think how many millions tonight in this
great favored land of ours who don't know
they have anything but glands.
They live, they live by their glands and
their nerves.
And whoever can stir the glands of the
greatest number of people can make a million
dollars a year.
Elvis is doing it.
And Elvis has never stirred anything but the
glands of the people, the feeble-minded, the
over-sexed, the old and disappointed, and those
who've forgotten that they have a brain in
their head.
Now, this life that God's given us, this
soul, is what you make.
Come and consider, think a little about it.
Consider your way.
Think of that soul of yours.
God won't accept the responsibility for making it
any more than what it is now, because
God gave it to you with potentiality.
It's as though I were to take 20
pounds of the finest clay to a pot
and permission him to make me a vase.
I wouldn't be responsible for anything that's planned.
I would say, I want the vase to
be so high, so large, I want it
to be decorated this way, and I want
it to be painted and varnished and burnt
and painted and varnished and burnt again.
I could give him the instructions or what
I want.
But if I came back and found a
cheap pot, all askew, lumpy and hopeless, I
wouldn't be responsible, because I had furnished the
finest clay and I had laid the plan
and I had given the commission.
And the potter who couldn't come through deserves
no pay.
God has put in your hands that which
is finer than the finest clay.
God has given you a soul.
Think what men have done with their souls.
You're just looking, Chase and I tonight, and
I could be looking at a book up
in the study, by Bernard of Cervaux.
Why, there's music even in the words.
Actually, you can sing it.
Bernard of Cervaux.
Beautiful, beautiful.
He's the man who wrote Jesus, the very
thought of thee with sweetness fills my breath.
It's sweeter for thy face to see, and
in thy presence all.
But Bernard of Cervaux, his soul wasn't of
any finer clay than yours or mine.
Using an illustration, for certainly the soul is
not made of clay, the body's made of
the clay.
But the soul that God put in Bernard
of Cervaux is no finer than the soul
he put in you, or me, or Al
Capone.
And God isn't responsible if with his life
and intelligence and the word of God before
us and the pleading of the Holy Ghost,
we do nothing about it.
You can't blame heredity, blaming heredity when Esau
and Jacob were brothers.
You can't blame environment when one shall be
taken and the other left.
Two shall be sleeping in one's bed, two
shall be plowing in the field.
That's environment.
If environment made the soul, then there would
be no distinction.
The two shall be sleeping in one bed,
one shall be taken and the other left.
Maybe they're brothers or sisters who slept together
from the time they were born.
Maybe they're two brothers or a father and
son plowing there in the field, one shall
be taken and the other left.
So what happens to your soul, you can't
blame on heredity and you can't blame it
on environment.
And if you're so infinitely choddily cheap as
to blame it on your parents and the
way you were treated at home, I haven't
any sympathy or any message, I'm afraid.
He says, I had to go to school
and I didn't have very good clothes and
so I felt ashamed and I got an
inferiority complex.
My parents were very religious and they took
me to church and made me go to
Sunday school and I had holes in my
shoes and that turned me against religion and
that's why I'm not a Christian.
Oh my brother, what a mousy attitude that
is to take, what a cheap attitude, what
an excuse and the thinnest thing in the
world is an excuse.
And the only thing smaller than an excuse
is a man who try to hide behind.
So we blame our parents or our heredity
or our environment.
And Esau and Jacob had the same parents
and one was loved of God and the
other driven from God's presence when one shall
be taken and the other left at the
coming of Christ.
So what is your response?
Think about it a little think about it
young people.
You can't live forever on thrills, you can't
live on the oppression of your glands, you
can't live on parties, you can't live on
long protracted telephone conversations and witticisms and funny
remarks.
Think on your way, consider your way, come
let us reason together.
God sent his son with power to save
from death and darkness in the grave and
he calls you tonight and says consider and
think on your way.
Now when that soul of yours is wasted
it's gone and it's gone for good but
I just want to close by saying three
or four things here.
One is I want you to consider very
carefully that your powers of moral reflection are
getting weaker and weaker.
Do you know what has happened in this
generation?
You know what has happened?
We have quenched the powers of moral reflection
in even in church circles so that we
have our demanding of religious writers that they
give us something condensed, brief, colorful, dramatic and
full of illustrations geared into the events and
the time that requires no thinking at all.
Anybody that wants to do it can start
today and in a short time he can
read completely through Dickens because Dickens tells stories
and nothing but stories and we're demanding stories
in this day in which we live and
we're demanding it to be brief and succinct
and to the point so that we can
get at something else.
Moody Publishers brought out under the editorship of
Wilbur Smith what they call the Wickliffe series
or Wycliffe if you like series.
They were the great books of the purist
and divine but they tell me they stand
on the shelves and gathered.
People are not buying them.
The reason they're not buying them is we
have developed a mentality that simply cannot bring
itself to attack a serious book.
It's got to be fed to them with
an eyedropper like a baby robin that's been
pushed out of the nest in a storm.
And because we feed Christians with an eyedropper
we have weaklings instead of great souls and
great saints.
Consider your power of reflection will be getting
weaker.
The little three-year-old asks more questions
than the thirty-year-old and the thirty
-year-old asks more questions than the fifty
-year-old.
So I recommend most earnestly that you consider
that your powers of reflection, moral reflection, will
be getting weaker as you get older and
your habits are getting set and it'll be
harder to break them later on.
And your prejudices are getting stronger and I
ask you to note that.
And the danger that your stubbornness will be
accepted by God as your response.
You see everybody responds some way or other.
And God waits, patiently waits and waits and
sometimes it seems endlessly waits and then one
day God says, I accept that.
That's his response.
I accept it.
She or he's heard the gospel.
Maybe still in their teens, maybe in their
twenties or thirties.
But they've heard the gospel and heard the
gospel and they have finally made their choice.
They've settled it or they don't know it,
but they've said not tonight, not now.
I've got too many things to do.
And God says, well, that's his response and
settled it.
There's nothing anybody can do after that.
If today you will hear his voice, harden
not your heart.
And in the face of the four last
things, consider your ways.
You know what those four last things are?
You well know them.
Death and judgment and heaven and hell.
And here we are.
We with intelligence and ability to think and
consider and reflect the beasts that perish everywhere
and all their beauty know nothing about this.
But God has lent you a soul for
a while and says, reflect now and think
and come unto me and believe on me
and put away your sins and trust me.
What are you going to do?
And some of you young people, I'm just
a little bit worried, just a little bit
worried.
I wonder how much is of God and
how much is merely social.
I wonder if they can be put together
or if they can be interlaced or they
can't be torn apart.
And I wonder if the social were suddenly
removed, how much of the spiritual would be
left.
I wonder about that.
It seems we have always been doing something
to keep happy.
I don't know, maybe I was different, but
I got converted so thoroughly, so thoroughly that
I never had to do anything, only hold
street meetings and testify and distribute tracts and
study the scriptures and go to another meeting
and pray and do some more praying and
more meetings.
Never had to have a lot of stuff
to hold me together.
But now as they say we do, we
have to have all these things to hold
our people.
I wonder if you took them suddenly away,
how many Christians we'd have left of the
whole bunch.
My God, it's something to consider.
It's something to consider you, my young folks.
You're not mad at me, kid, because you
know I like it.
And you know, even while I'm not in
my teens, I love teenagers.
And they know I do.
And God by his good grace still enables
me to preach to young people anywhere and
have them accept it.
So I love young people, but I'm worried
for you.
Have you thought about your soul lately?
Or are you just in the swim, kind
of a semi-socio-religious or religio-social
stream of things?
Stop a bit, think, look up, hear God
speak and say to yourself, now wait a
minute here, Junior or Shirley or whatever it
is, just a minute.
Am I really a Christian?
Do I really know God?
Am I really right with God?
How long has it been since I've had
a prayer that was anything but mumbling?
How long has it been, young people, since
you've thought God alone is your Bible and
nobody knows?
How long since there's been a tear of
repentance or joy in your eyes?
Are you just living on meetings and social
fellowships and pizza?
Or is there something profounder than that?
Have you met God?
Think, young people, on your way.
And I'd be an evil false prophet if
I didn't say these things to you.
And I know you won't be offended.
Think, consider your ways and let's read them
together.
So the dear Lord waits to do something
for you and to you that will be
so real and wonderful and transforming and revolutionary
that nobody, nobody can cheat you.
At 17 years old I met God.
One year and a half later I met
him in a mighty baptism of the Holy
Ghost and fullness of the Spirit.
Then I began my education.
For years I read atheism and philosophical unbelief
to the point that my head would ache
and I would turn away and get on
my knees and with joy say to God,
O God, I know I can't answer this
man, but I thank thee I have thee.
And I'd have worship on my knees after
having been knocked flat by a book.
And if I hadn't met God, that book
would have ruined me forever.
But I read them and continue to read
them.
I don't recommend you do it, but I
did it.
Atheism and unbelief and philosophy and psychology and
the books that were then current, all the
debunking books and the rest, but they never
dared me.
For I knew Jesus Christ, for myself I
had seen him, I had known him and
he deigns to walk with me.
And the glory of his presence shall be
mine eternally.
You can know God like that, young people.
And then you don't have to be afraid
of what you learn.
You don't have to be afraid of an
unbelieving professor.
You can stand up there and face him
out and say, I can't answer your questions,
but I can tell you my testimony.
I know Jesus from the past.
Come, think, reason.
What about it now?
Let's pray.