In the second and third chapters of 1
Corinthians, beginning with verse 13, maybe verse 9
would be better.
As it is written, I hath not seen
nor ear heard, neither have entered into the
heart of man the things which God hath
prepared for them that love him.
But God hath revealed them unto us by
his Spirit.
For the Spirit searches all things, yea, the
deep things of God.
For what man knoweth the things of a
man, save the spirit of man which is
in him?
Even so the things of God knoweth no
man but the spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of
the world, but the spirit which is of
God, that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God, which
things also we speak, not in the words
which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy
Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things
of the Spirit of God, for they are
foolishness unto him, neither can he know them,
because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judges all things,
yet he himself is judged of no man.
For who hath known the mind of the
Lord that he may instruct him?
But we have the mind of Christ.
And I, brethren, could not speak unto you
as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even
as unto babes in Christ.
I have fed you with milk and not
with meat, for hitherto you were not able
to bear it.
Neither yet now are ye able, for ye
are yet carnal.
That is part of 1 Corinthians 2 and
3.
And this is the second in a series
of talks on the deeper life.
What is the deeper life and how can
I enter into it?
And we have as our general text that
one in the Hebrews, the 6th chapter, which
says simply, Leaving the first principles, or the
principles, let us go on unto perfection.
And I'll be talking over the next Sunday
mornings on the deeper spiritual life.
Now, there are three kinds of persons mentioned
here in Paul's description in 1 Corinthians 2
and 3.
They are the natural, the carnal, and the
spiritual.
The natural man simply means the unregenerate man,
the man who is simply of body and
intellect and his appetites and temperament and all
that is natural in a man, that every
human being has that's born into the world.
That's the natural man.
And it's said about him that he receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God,
for they are foolishness unto him.
Neither can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned.
You may test the quality of religious teaching
by the enthusiastic reception given it by unsaved
men.
If it is received enthusiastically by a natural
man, it is not of the Spirit of
God, because Paul says plainly that spiritual things
cannot be known by unregenerate man, and that
they are plain foolishness unto them.
There is a type of religious teaching which
is understood by and received by and seems
perfectly logical to the natural man.
But that which is of the Spirit of
God is not known to the natural man.
He has not the faculty to receive it.
Now, that's here plainly.
Then in verse 15, there is what is
called the spiritual man.
He that is spiritual judgeth all things.
And he says that I have talked to
you not as unto spiritual, but as unto
carnal.
And thus he spots and describes another type
of man, the spiritual man.
First, I think I ought to say a
little more about the natural man.
The natural man is the man who is
in a state of nature.
He may be in perfect health, he may
have an I.Q. of 180, he may
be as handsome as a Greek statue, or
if it's a woman, she may be at
the top and be a perfect example of
fine womanhood, or youth, a perfect example of
young American youth, we would say here.
And the natural man, though he is in
this state, he is in a state of
nature, he is unblessed and he is out
of grace.
Then there is the spiritual man, that is,
the Christian who is mature and who is
led and taught and controlled by the Holy
Spirit, to whom the Spirit of God can
speak and who is led by the Spirit.
Then there is the carnal man that Paul
talks about here.
The carnal man is the immature Christian.
He is not a natural man in that
he has been renewed by the grace of
God and is in a state of grace,
but he is not spiritual.
He is halfway in between.
He is immature and thus carnal.
That is, he is regenerated, but he is
not advanced, he is retarded in his spiritual
life.
He is not influenced by nor led by
the Holy Spirit, but is controlled by his
lower nature.
Now, here we have these three.
And in the Old Testament, incidentally, the spiritual
man is the man that I would say
is living the deeper spiritual life.
He is enjoyed by, led by, taught by,
influenced by, and controlled by the Holy Spirit.
Now, in the Old Testament we have a
prototype of these three.
That is, in the story of Israel.
Israel at Kadesh Barnea is a perfect example
of the immature Christian who is not advanced
and will not advance, who will not go
on with God, though he is not unsaved,
he is not in a state of nature
but in a state of grace, and is
blessed and does know God as his Savior.
Here was the Old Testament picture that, corresponding
to the natural man who is not in
a state of grace, was Israel in Egypt.
They were in a state of bondage there.
You know the story well.
Four hundred and some years they had been
in Egypt, and a good part of that
time they had been in bondage to Pharaoh.
Then came Moses with blood and atonement and
power, and he brought the children Israel out
of Egypt, and the Red Sea closed between
Israel and Egypt.
Now, that is corresponding to the new birth,
the regeneration which makes the natural man a
Christian, which takes him out of nature and
puts him in a state of grace.
Israel came out of Egypt and went across
the river, and the river crossed the sea,
and the sea closed behind them, and the
enemy died on the shore, and Israel was
for the first time in four hundred years
a free nation, redeemed by blood and by
power.
Now, there you have the Christian.
He has been all his lifetime subject to
bondage.
Bondages of various kinds, chains and shackles and
manacles have been upon his spirit.
But now, through the blood of the Lamb
and the power of the Spirit, he is
brought out of Egypt, and the Red Sea
closes after him.
We used to sing, I've crossed the Red
Sea of his blood and left the world
behind me.
And that's exactly what has happened.
Well, then there is the spiritual man.
That's Israel in Canaan.
This was God's benevolent intention, that those who
had been natural men in bondage in Egypt
should come out of Egypt and go straight
eleven-day journey to the holy land, to
that land offered to Abraham by God in
covenant, the holy land, the land of promise,
Canaan variously called.
And that was to be the homeland of
Israel.
That was to be their spiritual homeland.
And there they were not only to be
out of Egypt, but they were to be
in the holy land.
He brought them out that he might bring
them in.
This is what is lost, the note that
is lost so much in our teaching.
He brings us out, not that we may
be out.
He brings us out that we may be
in.
God saves a gangster, not that he might
tell about it once a year for the
next forty years.
He saves him from being a gangster that
he might become a saint.
He takes him out that he might lead
him in.
And the further in the man goes, the
less he will have to say about where
he used to be.
It is not the mark of spirituality when
I talk at length about what I used
to be.
Israel wanted to forget what she used to
be and remembered it only occasionally to thank
God.
But we magnify what we used to be
and write books to tell the world what
we used to be.
Paul said those things ought not even to
be mentioned among the people of God.
They are not even to be mentioned in
conversation what you used to be.
What you used to be, God brought you
out of.
But he didn't bring you out to leave
you in a vacuum.
He brought you out that he might bring
you in.
And it was the will of God that
after he had brought Israel out of Egypt,
he should then in eleven short days march,
they tell us, they could have been in
the land.
The enemy could have been driven out and
they could have had the holy land of
promise which God had given to them centuries
before.
They were not stealing it, they were occupying
it as their proper possession.
God who owned it had given it to
Abraham and his seed after him.
But Abraham's seed had been driven out there
and driven to Egypt.
Now God brings them back to put them
in the land, not, I say, to be
usurpers and to take the land, but to
occupy the land which was properly theirs by
a gift of the one who owned it,
namely God.
So God brings us out of sin that
he might bring us into the spiritual life.
And he never has a vacuum in between
anywhere, unless you would count that short five,
eleven days march a vacuum.
But it was to be a God-blessed,
hovered over and Chicana-enlightened march straight through
to the holy land.
And when they got in the land of
the homeland of their spirits, back into the
land from which Abraham had come centuries before
Jacob, then they were to be spiritual men.
And they corresponded to the spiritual men.
But now what about the carnal man?
The carnal man is the immature Christian who
does not go on, he is not advanced,
he is retarded, he is not influenced nor
controlled by the Spirit, but by his lower
nature.
Now when Israel came to Kadesh Barnea, after
they had marched a little while in the
direction of the spiritual promised land, they stopped
at a town sometimes called Kadesh and sometimes
called Kadesh Barnea.
And there at Kadesh Barnea they stopped.
And Moses said to them in effect, Well,
you are about to enter into the land
which is the object of your hope toward
which God started to lead you when he
brought you out of Egypt.
But they said, We are a little afraid.
Let us send out twelve men.
So they sent twelve men up into Canaan.
And those twelve men went up to examine
the land and report back to see whether
they could take it or not.
And when they came back, all of them,
they reported that it was an exceeding good
land.
They said there were brooks there.
One of them was called Eshkol, brooks of
water.
Well, to a people in that country, in
that land, water was water.
It was riches untold.
It was more valuable than silver and gold
and diamonds.
And to come back and say it is
an exceeding good land in which there is
much water was equivalent to saying that it
was Atlantis, or the paradise.
They found their grapes so large that they
took one bunch and carried them between two
men.
They found figs, and those figs would be
their sugar and their candy and their preserves
and would be to them what you and
I have by way of marmalade and jellies
and candies and sodas and all the people
liked their sweet tooth, they had their figs.
And figs and dates meant almost altogether the
sweet element in their diet.
Then there was pomegranates.
I don't think pomegranate would be classified among
the citrus fruit, but it is near to
it, very near to it.
And of course, if you've ever eaten a
pomegranate, sometimes go to a fruit store and
ask for a pomegranate.
They may have them.
And cut it loose, cut it through, and
eat this pomegranate.
It's all full of seeds, but it has
a tart, pungent taste to it, and very,
very juicy.
You could squeeze them and get good juice.
And I don't know for sure, but knowing
that they grow in the sunshine, and knowing
where they grow, and knowing how they taste,
I think I'm not too far away when
I say that they would literally be packed
with what we now call vitamins.
They would be well worth their having.
Then there was milk and honey.
And the scripture says that the milk and
honey flowed.
Now, when it said milk and honey flowing,
it literally wasn't using careless language.
Why, there were those great bee trees back
in the state where I come from, Pennsylvania.
Men would find bee trees where they put
so much honey in that it wouldn't hold,
and it was dribbling.
The honey was literally dripping down.
And so the great rocks where they made
honey literally dripped with honey, and there was
milk abundant.
Now, that was the land so different from
Egypt from which they had come only a
little while before.
Now, ten of these men came back and
they said, that's what the country is like,
but nevertheless we advise you do not go
up into the land because though it is
an exceeding good land with brooks of water,
grapes and figs and pomegranates and milk and
honey, yet the people are large and strong,
and there are giants there, and their cities
are great and walled up to heaven.
They were excited.
Walled here up to heaven, they said, and
the land eateth up its inhabitants.
Now, a land that had brooks of water
and grapes and figs and pomegranates and honey
and milk didn't sound to me as if
it was in busy eating up inhabitants.
Beside that, they hadn't stayed there long enough
to watch the land eat up anything.
They were simply frightened and filled with unbelief.
And they said, we advise against going up.
Let's stay here in the wilderness.
We're out of Egypt, thank God, the slavery
is behind us and we're not slaves anymore.
We're in the wilderness and it isn't the
best, but we'll settle for it, rather than
go up among those giants in that wonderful
homeland called Palestine.
But Caleb and Joshua appeared and stepped to
the head of the line and said to
Moses, that we urge you to go in
and pay no attention to these pessimists.
We can easily take the land.
They'll be bred for us.
It belongs to us.
Our father God gave it to us and
gave it to Abraham, our father, and it's
ours.
Let's go take it.
Let's go up.
They saw the rich advantages in the land
and they were unwilling to allow the large,
strong, giant and walled cities to keep them
out.
Well, now the effect on the people.
It's always that way, brethren.
It has been down the years, all of
this modern teaching about the Church being a
perfect democracy and that there should be no
leaders.
It's just plain poppycock and there's nothing in
either Old Testament or New Testament that gives
support to it.
The leaders were sent up to spy out
the land and the people were more or
less dependent upon what the leaders said, just
as you and I are dependent in this
democracy upon what our leaders do in Washington
to a large extent.
And in the Church of Christ, it's the
same.
And the people, when they heard the unfavorable
report of the ten men, that is, the
majority report had been read, Caleb and Joshua
gave a minority report, but there were only
two against ten.
And so the people wept and fell down
in front of their tent doors and wept
and wished they had not come out of
Egypt and said, would God we were back
in Egypt.
And they pleaded the presence of their women
and children.
All they could see was walled cities and
giants.
They couldn't see grapes and great cattle with
their great udders dripping with milk and great
rocks and trees drooling sweet honey down onto
the grass.
Couldn't see that.
They couldn't see the rolling lawns and the
brooks and rivers.
They couldn't see that.
All they could see would be the great
giants in the land.
They forgot that God had said, go up
now, I'll give it to you.
And so they said, oh, you'll kill our
poor women.
You'll kill our children.
And this always is this unspiritual man's argument.
His argument always is, I've got to think
about my family.
I've got a family after all, brother.
And God wants us to be wise.
And I can't push this too far.
I can't become too spiritual because I've got
to think about my family.
I can't subject my wives and children to
difficulties.
I can't lay burdens on them.
Always pleading their wives and families, forgetting that
the best heritage you can leave your family
is the memory of being a good man.
You'll forget that, sir.
You'll forget that, mother, that if you become
a spiritual woman, your family may fight you
and they may burn you with hot language
and scald you with sarcastic speech and oppose
you and make you feel like an idiot.
But when you're gone, they'll walk quietly away
wiser and sadder and will admit that the
best heritage you left them was that you
were a good man.
I said here two weeks ago, I can
leave nothing to my family.
I can leave them nothing except a few
books.
But if my boys scattered all around everywhere,
all of them but one in church, all
of them some kind of Christians, singing in
choirs and all that sort of thing around
here and there among the Baptist and Presbyterian
churches, all some kind of Christians except one.
But I don't know what they think of
the old man, but I do know this.
If I can have lived so that when
I'm finished, my family will have to say,
he said in an example that I could
safely follow, and the memory of a man
who lived for God in a bad world
is more to me than all the riches
of LaSalle Street.
Then I will have left them a heritage
the like of which no rich man can
leave to his son.
And if these had only known, they could
have taken those wives and women and families
of children of theirs up into the Holy
Land within a few hours, and they would
have had all that land.
But for 14 years they wandered in the
desert, in a desert land, and those poor
wives and children that they had been so
afraid were going to get killed if they
went up into the land, the spiritual land.
Those same wives and children walked on their
feet for 14 years, aimlessly round and round
and round and round in the desert, now
circling back near to Egypt where they had
been, now in a wide loop circling back
close to the promised land where they should
be, back around again to Egypt where they
were, and then round again in a wide
loop again near to where they ought to
be, 40 years until those children were grown
to middle age, and those old ladies were
dead, and the young were old, or at
least middle-aged.
Forty years of it, because they had whimpered
and said, we can't go up, it's costing
us too much, we can't mistreat our families.
I've got to be with my family Sunday
nights and Wednesday nights and all during missionary
convention.
I've got to be with my family.
I can't make juvenile delinquents.
You won't make juvenile delinquents out of your
family.
The best way to save them from delinquency
is to show them an example of a
man who loves God uncompromisingly and who seeks
to be spiritual if it costs him his
blood.
I don't know whether you saw the Alliance
Weekly or not some weeks ago when there
appeared an article in it called They Hang
Their Prophet.
Friedrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran who lived at
the time of Hitler.
Friedrich Bonhoeffer was a man of remarkable spiritual
insight, and I have a certain marginal delight
that the people are reading him and talking
about him now, because of my little art.
But anyway, he saw Hitler rise and knew
what Hitler would be, and he'd get up
to a microphone and told Germany, look out
for this man.
And then he began to preach Jesus Christ,
preach Jesus Christ as the Savior of men,
and preach what he called costly grace.
He said, the grace of God will cost
you everything you have.
Don't try to get into the heaven cheaply.
The grace of God is costly because it
costs Christ his blood, and it costs us
everything, and maybe it costs us our lives.
So they caught him and they put him
in prison.
They oscillated him back and forth and shuttled
him from one concentration camp to another, and
everywhere he went he was preaching Jesus and
comforting people wherever he could.
He was engaged to a lovely young woman.
He had a sister, I believe a father
if I recall, and another one or two
other relatives.
And they pulled their old trick, the old
totalitarian trick.
They pulled it in Red China, in Russia,
Czechoslovakia, in Poland, and pulled in Germany when
Hitler was alive.
It was this.
You better buckle down to me and shut
up.
I've got your children.
I've got your wife.
I have your sweetheart.
I have your mother as a hostage, and
if you don't do what I ask you
to do, woe be to them.
That was their technique and their trick.
They said, You surrender and shut up about
costly grace and freedom and the gospel of
Jesus Christ.
Stop warning against Hitler and the Nazis, or
we'll kill your woman you're engaged to marry.
We'll destroy your family.
The young man, still in his thirties, said,
My family, or to an effect, My family
belongs to God, and you'll never get me
to surrender by threatening to kill my family.
When God calls a man, he calls him
to come and die.
Do your worst.
So they hanged him, and along with him,
the same time or nearer to the same
time, they destroyed the woman he was to
marry.
They destroyed his sister, I think, and the
father, if I have it straight, for I'm
speaking from memory.
You say, What kind of a beast was
he?
He's the kind of beast John saw in
heaven.
The beast and the four and twenty elders
fell down before the throne and said, Holy,
holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty.
He was a man you couldn't threaten a
family.
You couldn't say, I'll get your family.
That's the devil's trick.
It's always been the devil's trick.
You give more than you should to the
Lord's work.
If you seek to become a spiritual man,
you'll harm your family.
That's the devil's trick.
Well, they wandered forty years to God's judgment.
God said, Doubtless ye shall not come into
the land.
Their fear of death and their doubts and
their complaining displeased God, because God said, You've
slandered the land.
And every man who stands out in the
shadows and slanders the deeper spiritual life is
slandering the sunshine.
Every man who refuses to enter into the
holy life is, in the wilderness, slandering the
homeland of the soul.
So for forty years they wandered aimlessly about.
Just wandering.
God was with them, kept them with them,
didn't destroy them.
He let them die one at a time.
Occasionally he would punish them.
You know those stories.
But he didn't destroy them as a nation.
And what's the meaning for us?
The meaning for us is that if you're
a natural man, no matter how learned, how
talented, how handsome, how desirable, a natural woman,
no matter how beautiful, you don't know a
thing about God.
And you don't know a thing about the
spiritual life.
You haven't the faculties to know it.
If there was a man post-death, stone
-death, sitting, and there was a Mozart symphony
on playing, you wouldn't blame the man who
was deaf because he would rather read than
listen.
He couldn't hear.
He hasn't got the faculty that can enjoy
the music.
Or if you were in an art gallery
looking at pictures, and there was a man
completely blind that could not even see light
sitting on the bench, you wouldn't say, what's
that Philistine doing sitting there?
Why doesn't he get up and look at
pictures?
He doesn't have the faculty to look at
pictures.
The thing you look at pictures with is
dead in him.
And the deaf man, that which you listen
to symphonies with, is dead in him.
So you, my friend, no matter who you
are, nor how learned, nor how religious, if
you have not been regenerated, renewed, made over,
brought to life by the quickening of the
Holy Ghost, you can't know God, you can't
know Christ, you can't know spiritual things at
all.
You can only know the history of it.
And all your enthusiasm for religion is a
delusion.
For the Holy Ghost says you don't have
the faculty to know spiritual things well.
Then what else does God say to us
through this?
He says that we Christians who are quickened
to life, who are his children, who are
not in a state of nature anymore but
in a state of grace, to continue without
progress year after year, as some of us
are doing, is to wander spiritually, wander, walk
in circles instead of straight ahead, round and
round and round in circles.
Sometimes a little closer to Egypt than to
the Holy Land, but again a little closer
to the Holy Land than to Egypt.
So we oscillate in our circlings, round and
round.
Occasionally we can look over the sea and
see where we used to be slaves, that's
getting pretty close to sin.
Then again in a prayer meeting or in
some revival, we put our arms so close
we can almost look over into the Holy
Land.
But we're not going either place.
We're not going back into the world and
we're not going to push on into the
spiritual life.
So round and round we go, oscillating between
nearness to the old world where we came
from and nearness to the new world where
we ought to be in our spirits.
I say to continue without progress year after
year is to acquire a chronic habit, harder
to break as time passes.
The best time in the world to plunge
into the deeper spiritual life is when you're
a young Christian.
When you're young, you've got enthusiasm and you
have informed the habits.
Now for instance, suppose that I were to
learn or try to learn, say, Japanese.
At my age, I couldn't learn Japanese.
I'm positive I could learn to read it
and write it.
I can learn anything men can print, I
think, and you can too.
But I could never speak it so as
to be understood.
Why?
Because I've been around too long and the
muscles of my tongue and lips and palate,
if palates have muscles, I don't know whether
they do, but anyhow, I guess they do.
That whole structure that forms words has been
formed to English, to English.
All the little twists and turns and slurs
of the English tongue, they fit my mouth.
And the older I get, the harder it
will be for me to learn a new
language.
But little Joy here, when they go to
wherever they're going, she doesn't know yet, she'll
be able in years' time to be rattling
in the language of their heel with perfect
fluency, picking up from the other little kids
around, because her little mouth hasn't really learned
English yet.
And the younger you are, the easier it
is to learn and speak a new language,
because habits harden you.
And I know there are Christians, and to
me it's a very, very heavy burden.
I don't say it discourages me, because I
refuse to be ever discouraged about anything, but
I do say it gives me a heavy
heart to be forced, as I do much
of the time, to walk among Christians, not
only here but all over where I go.
Even old people who have wandered for 40
long years in the wilderness, not going back
to sin but not going on into the
holy life, wandering around in the aimless circle,
sometimes a little warmer and sometimes a little
colder, sometimes a little holier and sometimes very
unholy, but never going on in.
Habits have been acquired, and it's hard to
break.
And it makes it almost certain that they
will live and die a spiritual failure.
To me, this is a terrible thing, brother,
a terrible thing.
A man decides to be a lawyer, and
he spends years learning to be a lawyer,
and he puts out his shame.
But he finds that there's something in his
temperament that makes it impossible for him to
make good as a lawyer.
He's a failure, a complete failure.
Now here he is, 50 years old, and
he was admitted to the bar when he
was 30.
He's had 20 years, and he hasn't been
able to make a living.
He's a failure as a lawyer.
He's a businessman who buys a business, tries
to operate it.
He does everything he knows, but he just
can't make it go.
Year after year after year, the ledger shows
red.
He's not making a profit.
He borrows where he can.
He has a little spurt and has hope.
That spurt soon dies down, and he's back
again.
Finally, he settles out, hopelessly in debt, a
failure in the business world.
Here's a teacher who trains in the schools
to be a teacher, but just can't get
along as a teacher.
Something in the constitutional or temperamental structure that
just won't allow her to get on with
children or young people.
So after being shuttled from one place to
another, and out and out toward the margin,
finally have to give up, go somewhere and
run a stapling machine.
He said, I just can't teach.
A failure.
I've known ministers who thought they were called
a priest, and they trained and studied, learned
Greek and Hebrew, and what have you, but
they just somehow can't make the public feel
they want to hear them.
They just can't do it.
A failure.
Now, it's possible to be a Christian and
yet be a failure.
By that I mean, just as Israel in
the desert wandering, they were Israelites, they were
God's people, they were protected and fed, but
they were failures.
They weren't where God meant them to be.
They were compromising.
Halfway between where they used to be and
where they ought to be.
And that describes so many of the Lord's
people.
Live and die spiritual failures.
I'm awfully glad God's good in times when
poor failures crawl into God's arms, but alas,
to say, Father, I made a mess of
it.
I just couldn't get free from the tugging
and the dominance of my flesh.
I wanted to, and often I wept, you
know, and wished I could.
But Father, you know, I just couldn't make
it.
I'm a spiritual failure.
I haven't been out doing evil things exactly.
Certainly I've not been where I know I
could be.
So here I am, Father, and I'm old
and ready to go, and I'm a failure.
You know what?
Our kind, gracious, heavenly Father will take us
in.
And he won't say to us, depart from
me, I never knew you.
Because that person has and believes and does
believe in Jesus Christ.
That person has been renewed and the seed
and root of the matter is in him.
But oh, what a failure he's been all
his life.
What a failure.
Unready for death and unready for heaven.
I wonder if that's what the man of
God meant when he said, For other
foundations can no man lay than that which
is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Have any man build upon this foundation, gold,
silver, precious stones, wood, haze, Every man's work
shall be made manifest, for the day shall
declare it, because it shall be revealed by
fire, and the fire shall try every man's
work of what sort it is.
If any man's work abide which he hath
built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
If any man's work shall be burned, he
shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be
saved, yet so is my fire.
I think that's what it means, all right.
We ought to be the kind of Christians
that can live not only to save our
souls, but save all our lives.
When Lot went out of Sodom, he had
nothing but the garment that covered him.
He got out all right, dressed alone in
the garment he had on.
Thank God he got out.
But how much better if he could have
had a farewell at the gate, with candles
and donkey trains loaded with his goods.
He could have gone out, head up, chin
up, saying good-bye to old Sodom, been
changed, transformed.
He could have marched away from there with
his family, heads up.
How much better Paul says, or Peter it
is, see that you have an abundant entrance.
Thank God we're going to make it.
But are you satisfied to make it the
way you've been, wandering, wandering, roaming aimlessly, when
there is a place where Jesus sheds the
oil of gladness on our heads, a place
in all the world more sweet, it is
the blood-bought mercy seat.
And it's the will of God that you
should enter and live under the shadow of
that mercy seat, and go out from there,
and circle and come back there, always being
renewed and recharged and refed back there by
the mercy seat, living a separated, clean, holy,
sacrificial life, a life of continual spiritual victory.
Wouldn't that be better than the way we're
doing?
I want to talk again next Sunday morning
further about the deeper spiritual life and what
it means and how to enter in.
Heavenly Father, we pray that thou wilt single
us out as though there weren't any others,
in lonely singleness, and speak to us.
Lord, it isn't thy will that we should
fail in our Christian progress.
Lead us, Lord.
Thou hast spoken this morning, of that we
are quite certain.
Continue to speak.
Save us, we pray thee, from the result
of our own foolishness.
Save us from the traits of our own
nature.
Save us, we pray thee, from our own
laziness.
And make this afternoon, for some, a time
of crossing over.
And now may grace, and mercy, and peace,
and the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost be with us forever.