In that ye have ministered to the Saints
and do minister, and we desire that every
one of you do show the same diligence
to the full assurance of hope unto the
end, and that ye be not slothful, but
followers of them who through faith and patience
inherit the promises.
Now, I hope we can hear the Holy
Spirit speaking to us this morning.
If not by means of the Preacher, then
in spite of him, for these words were
written by the pencil of the Holy Ghost,
and just above he had dealt with a
very sticky and a very unpleasant subject.
Now he says, Beloved, we are persuaded that
there are things of you, and things that
accompany salvation, though we thus speak.
Now, the writer has been faithful to his
readers.
He has been faithful in two things.
He has been faithful in truth, and he
has been faithful in love.
Now, if I were preaching to preachers, young
preachers particularly, I would say to them, There
are two things required of you before your
congregation.
One is to speak the truth always, and
the other is to always speak the truth
in love.
You have heard the truth spoken in a
hostile manner.
You have heard it spoken so that the
one speaking it gave the impression that he
was very angry with the congregation, and that
if they were going to hell, it was
all right with him, and if they were
going to backslide, he would wash his hands
off of them.
This the man of God never does.
He preaches the truth in love, and no
Christian is ever required of God to listen
to a man who does not preach in
love.
But there are efforts made sometimes to preach
in love at the sacrifice of truth, so
that we are in danger of going off
either end into the deep water.
We are likely, in order to be kind
to an audience, not to preach the truth
to them, or if we want to preach
the truth, we are in danger of doing
it in a harsh, unloving way.
Now, the writer was faithful to them both
in truth and in love.
He had pointed to their failure above and
their retarded growth, and it wasn't easy for
him to do it, but he did it,
and he showed the grave danger they had
placed themselves in.
Apostasy and shipwreck could lie ahead, he said,
if you don't watch out, because it has
for some.
And then he set out to rescue them.
And you hear, or feel, rather, the eager
yearnings of the man of God.
And yet I do not give the credit
to the man who wrote the book of
Hebrews only because I hear the pulse beat
of something bigger and grander than the man
himself.
It is nothing else than the love and
care and compassion of the holy God who
is looking down upon us with all the
anguish of the Father over his lost son,
and all the anxious care of the lost
coin.
We find it all here.
There is one thing we may always be
sure of.
Whether we listen and heed the word of
God or not, God is always brooding over
us with the anguished care of the triune
God.
And then this writer becomes a physician to
the souls of these men and women.
He speaks to them with tender affection.
He encourages them with thoughts of God's fairness
to them.
God is not unrighteous, he says, to forget
your work and labor of love.
I remember sitting once and then listening to
a man preach.
In fact, he was preaching in the church
of which I was pastor.
He'd been invited there and was preaching.
He spent a week with us, and the
week was spent in proving that we didn't
have anything at all, that we were spiritual
paupers, hopeless, worthless, and that nobody there was
at all a spiritual person, that from the
pastor to the janitor we were all a
bunch of backslidden, carnal, worldly, deceptive, double-dealing
people.
I sat there and kind of closed up
on the brother.
He had not been there long enough to
know us that well.
Even if we were that bad, he had
no way of finding it out.
So I sort of closed up on him.
The physician never does that.
A physician never tells a man he's sicker
than he is.
He deals with the man where he finds
him as near as he can.
And this man of God spoke to these
people with tender affection.
You'll find it here, but ye beloved, he
said.
And he encouraged them that God hadn't forgotten
them and that he would remember what they
had done.
Maybe they weren't praying as much as they
should, but they were praying more than they
used to.
Maybe they weren't giving as much as they
could, but they were giving more than they
had before.
Maybe they weren't all they should have been,
but they weren't what they had been before
they were converted.
Maybe even they'd slipped back a little in
their way, but they still weren't way back
yonder in Adam's graveyard.
God had brought them out and made something
out of them.
And this is what the man who wrote
this says to them.
He's their physician.
You notice that beautiful word found among our
Anglican friends, the word curet?
I don't know how they use it or
what it means now, but I do know
the origin of the word.
The origin of the word is a curer,
somebody that goes about and cures people.
He's a curer of souls, he's a physician
of souls.
Through the gospel he preaches, through prayer and
through love, he cures people.
He's called a curate.
He cares for them as a physician cares.
And so that's the word curate.
Now, I don't want you to call me
a curate, and I don't give full approval
to everything I have heard about curates, but
that's a good word to start with anyway.
This is the work of God.
Always remember my friend, if the Lord smites
you, he smites you that he may cure
you.
If the Lord rebukes you, he does it
that he may teach you.
If he disciplines you, he does it in
order that you may be holy, that you
may be partakers of his holiness.
And he says now in the text, we
desire that every one of you, we desire,
verse 11, we desire that every one of
you do show yourself, show the same diligence
to the full assurance of hope unto the
end.
Now in every religious company there are likely
to be three kinds of people.
He said he wanted every one of them
to be in the first class.
But in all their companies wherever I have
been, I find there are three classes.
There are a few who find the excellent
riches of the heavenly gifts.
They do find it by the word of
God and prayer and by surrender and faith.
They do find the excellent riches of the
heavenly gifts.
And then there is a larger number satisfied
with the crumbs.
Moody tells about a man who had a
dog, and he fed the dog crumbs and
scraps, just nothing but crumbs and scraps.
And the dog would sit patiently, sad-eyed,
over there on the floor, and when the
meal was over they would pile the scraps
up and he would go out in the
kitchen and have his meal.
He waited.
And one day that company and this man
who was there were talking about the dog
-eating scraps, and they suggested that as a
trial they would offer him a steak.
So among the others they prepared a plate
and there was a nice, well-done, sizzling
steak on it.
And the visitor said, I'll bet you the
dog won't eat it.
Oh, he said, he surely will, he'll eat
it all right.
He said, he'll be so glad to get
it after these scraps.
So they set the plate down containing the
sizzling steak, and the dog looked at it
and then looked up questioningly into the eyes
of the Master, and then turned around and
sat down a little way off.
He had lived on the scraps until he
couldn't even believe there was such a thing
as a steak.
Now, I believe that this is possible, that
we can be satisfied with crumbs.
God will feed us according as we're able
to take it.
And if we have been used to scraps
and we've lived on scraps and we've developed
an appetite for scraps, you know if you
don't eat much your stomach shrinks so that
you don't feel as hungry as you would
if you ate much.
The stomach stretches, and that's what gives the
pangs of hunger.
And when it collapses, that's what gives the
pangs of hunger.
But if after a long while of living
on little bits, the stomach shrinks and we
don't have that feeling of hunger.
Now, I'm not a master on this, but
I have read Reader's Digest, and they tell
us about those things, and when we read
Reader's Digest we get all we ought to
know about such things.
Anyhow, that's the second class.
The people, they are the Lord's people all
right, but they always are second-class Christians.
They just won't, they just haven't found and
aren't particularly looking for the excellent riches of
the heavenly gifts.
But there's a third class, and still a
larger number, I'm afraid, in many churches.
They have only vague intimations of divine truth,
shadows instead of realities, groundless hopes instead of
guaranteed possessions.
Now, the Apostle desires here that every one
of them should come into the first class.
He's not satisfied that we should classify ourselves
as very good Christians and not-so-good
Christians and poor Christians.
He wants us every one, he said.
Now, suppose that in this church, one out
of a hundred only should fail, only one
out of a hundred.
The 99 should make it through into the
excellency of the riches of Christ, but one
out of a hundred, that would be a
most marvelous thing, and it would be a
statistical triumph to find 99 percent of the
membership of the church were blessed, Spirit-filled
Christians.
Only one out of a hundred was failing.
But that would be a statistical triumph, but
for the one who failed, it would be
a personal tragedy.
It's possible to have an airplane crash and
only one person be killed, and if there
are 70 on board, the newspapers happily report
only one was killed.
But if that one was your husband, it
would not be a statistical triumph to you,
it would be a personal tragedy.
If a boat sank and there were 12
people on it, and all escaped safely to
shore, but one, that would be a statistical
triumph.
But if that one was your teenage boy
on a fishing trip, they had to drag
the lake to find him after several days,
they pulled him out with drags, that would
be a personal tragedy.
So it's entirely possible for us to have
a high number, have a high percentage of
spiritual people in a church, but if there's
even one that isn't, that is a personal
tragedy for that one.
And if you should be that one, I
say you would be visited with a tragedy
greater than was ever conceived by the mind
of a Shakespeare or an Aeschylus.
Now he tells us that we are to
seek these treasures, and we desire that every
one of you do show the same diligence
to the full assurance of hope unto the
end.
That ye be not slothful, but followers of
them that through faith and patience inherit the
promises.
No sloth, but diligence and followers of the
best Christians, the best people.
Now, I think of the treasure hunters.
A year goes by, I suppose there's never
a year goes by, but the newspapers and
the radio come out with the story of
some new treasure that is being hunted.
Some vessel has been reported to have sunk
off a certain shore, and they go out
and with radar and other electronic equipment try
to locate it, and then with deep-sea
divers they go down, hoping to discover something.
Explorers have left their homes and have suffered
and labored and even died in order to
find treasures, and adventurers have dived to the
floor of the ocean, and prospectors have searched
for a lifetime.
You go down into the southwest of the
United States, and you will find old desert
rats, they call them, old desert rats.
They've lived in the desert and have panned
for gold for a lifetime.
It's in their blood, they say, and they
can't escape it.
They're after gold.
Maybe they find enough to keep their soul
and body together and the skin to cover
it, but not enough to get a shave
or a haircut or a decent clothing or
a decent anything.
They're desert rats living there, prospectors searching for
a lifetime for gold that they never find
or find in quantities to do them any
good.
And the few that do find these treasures,
these adventurers and explorers, what kind of treasure
do they find?
Well, there's the Spanish doubloon that we read
about in the books, stained with human blood.
Or there are pearls and diamonds once worn
in scornful pride by some beauty who has
long been dead and turned to clay.
Or there are sacks of gold dust to
be wasted in rattus living or hidden away
in the depths of the earth.
I suppose that if there's any humor in
hell, I don't know whether there's any humor
in hell or not, but if there should
be any humor in hell, I can imagine
that there would be roars of demonic laughter
to see human beings made in the image
of God, digging for a lifetime for gold
and then melting it into gold bars and
hiding it back in the earth from which
they spend a lifetime to dig it.
It seems to me that for men made
in the image of God and made to
seek the high heaven above as their home,
that this is one of the supreme tragedies
of the world, that we dig it out
of the ground at great loss and sacrifice
and then bury it back in the ground
again, down at Fort Knox.
Everything they've buried in the ground there somebody
dug out of the ground before.
What good is it lying down there?
You can't eat it, you can't wear it,
you can't inject it into a dying man
to bring him back health, you can't pull
it over his cold baby at night, you
can't live in it.
There it is, sacks of gold to be
wasted or hidden, I say, and riches that
could never bring peace and never bring rest
or safety or life or happiness.
You no doubt have been reading, as I
have, about the governor of New York, one
of the richest men in the world.
Not all his money can give him peace
now.
Not all his money can take the pain
out of his father's heart.
Michael, his son, 23-year-old adventurer, over
there seeking treasures, strange treasures, shrunken heads and
such treasures for museums.
But not all the money in the world
could give Nelson Rockefeller that which a man
wants the most, peace in his heart and
the happiness of having his people safe and
his friends around him.
Yet men have forsaken all and searched with
great diligence for these things.
But the Holy Ghost says, we desire that
every one of you do show the same
diligence, to the full assurance of hope to
the end, that you be not slothful but
followers of them who through faith and patience
inherit the promises.
What do we look for?
Why, I read here in the book of
Ephesians, blessed be the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us
with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in
Christ.
And in Paul's prayer, he prays that the
God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father
of Glory, may give unto you the spirit
of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of
God.
The eyes of your understanding being enlightened, ye
may know what is the hope of his
calling, and what the riches of the glory
of his inheritance in the saints, and what
is the exceeding greatness of his power to
us who believe according to the working of
his mighty power.
These are the things that matter.
And though you are as poor as a
church mouse, and though you died in a
concentration camp or a prison, and though your
poor body was dragged out and thrown over
a cliff for the buzzards to pick on,
you are still richer than any riches could
make you that is found by explorers or
adventurers or prospectors or financial geniuses.
What treasure do we look for?
Inward freedom and endless life and a glorious
home and immortality at last.
And we even know where it is.
We don't have to prospect for it.
I never liked the word adventure used in
religion.
Men sometimes get poetic and they talk about
the adventure of religion, the adventure of knowing
God.
No.
An adventure means that I go out not
being sure what I'm after, or what I'll
find, or whether I'll find it, nor where
I'll find it, and that there will be
possibilities of great danger to me.
Maybe I'll not find anything, and maybe I'll
die in the attempt, and maybe the buzzards
will pick my bones on the desert, and
all that will be left are the buttons
of my clothes and a bit of leather
the buzzards couldn't eat that were my shoes.
Or maybe I'll get some treasure, but on
my way in I'll be overtaken by bandits,
and they will kill me and take my
treasure and leave my bones there.
That's what adventure means.
It means going out looking for trouble, joyful,
thrilling trouble, with maybe a bit of reward
attached.
No, let's not think of religion as an
adventure.
There is no element of uncertainty in following
Christ.
He is victory.
He has won, and the battle is his,
and there is no possibility of loss or
failure.
I know where to go.
I don't go out looking with a diving
rod as the farmer does for water.
I don't go out with a geiger counter
as the man does looking for the metal
to make these bombs.
No, I know where to go.
I don't look for it.
I know where it is.
I know that Jesus Christ has made unto
me wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
I know that God has put in his
Son, Jesus Christ, all that I need for
now and forever and for all time and
for eternities and millennia to come.
I know that, and so I know where
he is.
Come unto me, all ye that labor and
are heavy laden.
If you would wash your hands, ye sinners,
and turn unto me, I know where he
is, and so I don't have to search.
I know who has my possession, I know
who has my treasure.
And I go to him, and I mine
for it, yes, but not uncertainly.
I go and I dive for it, yes,
but not uncertainly.
I go and I seek for it, yes,
but not uncertainly.
I know where it is.
So the great, all-important question is not,
Where is it?
We know where it is.
We know that there is nothing in all
this vast world that we need that Jesus
Christ can't provide.
We know it.
We know that he is the eternal God
made flesh to dwell among us.
We know that time and space and love
and life and hope and peace and riches
and bliss and all that the human soul
could need or crave are found in the
person of Jesus Christ.
Our mistake is that we think because it's
there, we have it, when the fact is,
we may not have it at all.
It may be in Christ, but not in
us.
But the man of God, the Holy Ghost,
through the man of God, urges us that
we be not slothful, but be diligent and
press on to the full assurance of hope
unto the end, through faith and patience we
might inherit the fulfillment of the promises.
Now the Holy Ghost says, Put away sloth.
I don't know whether the half-dead animal
that spends its lifetime in a state of
coma, hanging upside down by its heels, I
don't know whether that is named after the
word slothful, or whether somebody looked at it
and named it sloth because of the word
slothful.
I don't know which is the horse and
which is the cart.
But if you want to know what slothfulness
means, look at that poor creature that hardly
knows what it is, and the scientists hardly
know, hanging upside down practically all the time.
Sloth.
Look in your dictionary or in some encyclopedia
or look somewhere where you can see a
picture of this thing, and then hear the
Holy Ghost say, Don't be a sloth.
Don't hang there in a state of semi
-activity, but be diligent, earnest, eager, careful.
Think of what scientists have to go through
to escape, to get rid of yellow fever
in South America, or not in South America,
in Panama.
To get rid of yellow fever when they
are putting the Panama Canal through, scientists went
down there, and they said, We think maybe,
we're not sure, but we think maybe that
yellow fever is being carried by mosquitoes.
So they said, All right, now we'll put
a man in a cage and screen him
in, and then we'll release some mosquitoes into
the cage who were taken out of a
room where a man died of yellow fever,
and then we'll see what happens.
And one young man, a couple of them,
I think, volunteered, young doctors.
He said, I'll go in.
They went in, and they were sanitary, not
exposed previously.
But these mosquitoes were allowed to come from
the sick room and go into the screened
-in enclosure where the two doctors were, and
in a few days both of them came
down with yellow fever, and one of them
died.
But the scientists learned what caused yellow fever,
so they went throughout all that area, and
they put oil and other things over the
water, and they killed the mosquito larva.
And when there were no more mosquitoes, there
was no more yellow fever.
But somebody died to find that out, and
other men got desperately sick, and others exposed
their lives.
If we would give half as much attention
to our Christian lives as scientists do to
test tubes, we'd blaze with the love of
God.
There are students, I have known students, I
know a family named Bell, the Bell family
in the city of Chicago, Illinois.
Bob and Clarence and Fred, and I think
one or two others, they come from a
home pitifully, tragically poor.
But something in here burned like a light.
And the Christian boys, too.
But those boys wanted education.
They would have it, they would have it.
And they had no money.
Parents had no money.
Old, weary, deaf father had to do odd
jobs for a living.
But those boys started in.
And I know that Clarence Bell used to
leave one class and without anything to eat,
run for ten minutes to get to the
next class, and go through days with nothing
but perhaps a hot dog, if he could
afford that, from early breakfast to late supper,
and dress in the most ordinary clothes, those
boys pressed through.
Late at night they studied.
Early in the morning they studied.
They withdrew themselves from ordinary social contacts.
They were going to have an education.
The result is that Bob, the principal of
a high school, Clarence, Dr. Clarence, who worked
with highly classified scientific information for the government
during the war, and is now teaching in
the University of Ohio, they got their education.
But they didn't loaf.
They were diligent.
And they pursued it.
And if we, if you young people listening
to me, would give even half as much
persistent and continued activity to knowing God as
the Bell brothers did in getting education, you
would be among the leaders of your generation
for God.
There are writers.
Writers go through God knows what to get
down in print what they want to say.
The long vigils, the exhausting corrections, the times
when you get up from a typewriter and
walk around in circles wondering where the sequence
of your sentence ever disappeared to.
Writers, if you're going to write anything that
anybody will read, you're going to have to
give birth to it.
And so it is with any profession.
If you're going to make good, we're going
to have to pour everything into it.
Yet we stand and plead before Christians.
Christians say, We despise the world.
We have eternal life.
We are forgiven.
Heaven is our home.
We're going to wear a crown some bright
morning.
But no diligence.
The scientists put them to shame, the students
put them to shame, the writer puts them
to shame, the very ball player puts them
to shame.
I came down in a cab and I
talked to the young man who drove me
down.
He was, of course, all steamed up over
yesterday's great cup and also over hockey.
And I asked him about those boys that
guard the nets.
I'm not too sure what they call them.
Oh, he said, it's terrible before they get
hit.
They get their faces literally dashed in, teeth
knocked out and everything from those pucks.
If I ask a Christian young man, Listen
son, I want you to serve God now.
All right, I'd like to be a Christian.
All right, what am I to do now,
get baptized and join the church?
Yes.
And then I want you to put as
much into serving God as a goalie puts
into guiding a goal.
And if they knock your teeth out, smile,
spit the teeth out and guide your goal.
And if they bust your nose, all right.
Look at these boys that are coming here
tomorrow to fight it at, uh, where?
Look at these two boys, the black boy,
uh, Patterson and the Irishman are coming up
from the States to fight here in Toronto.
Look what it costs these boys.
Young fellow wants to become a Christian.
And we said, well, now put away smoking
and drinking and all that kind of stuff
and live a disciplined life.
And he whimpers like a baby and says,
Oh, you want it so hard.
You'll drive everybody away.
If you preach like that, those boys don't
smoke, nor drink, nor run around nights, nor
lie around nightclubs.
They work like dogs.
What for?
For the glory of getting in there and
having a 50-50 chance of knocking the
other man unconscious or getting knocked unconscious.
While a few groundlings clap their cigarette stained
hands and shout.
But if we ask a Christian to put
anything into his Christianity, they begin to run
like hens thrown off the nest and cluck
in every direction, make the feathers fly and
say, Oh, you'll drive the young people away.
I don't believe it.
Young people, if they are worth their salt
and are worth saving, are ready to put
something into their Christianity.
So be diligent, he said, and pour yourself
into it.
God help us, my dear people.
Amen.
Father, we pray that thou wilt help us.
Oh, thou seest times are waxing late, and
the world is getting old, and the judgment
is drawing near, and the shadow of man
-made destruction hangs like a cloud over the
world.
Great God, thou hast called us thy people
to be a different kind of people in
this world, to live disciplined, careful lives, temperate
and brave and serious.
But also we thank thee, joyous, joyous with
expectation of a victory that is bound to
be ours, for we can't lose who are
on thy side.
And sin can't win what is against thee.
Oh, Lord, we pray thee, help us this
morning.
We can't ask that we might be worthy
to receive of the communion, but we do
ask that we might, in a worthy manner,
receive it.
Prepare our hearts, O God, to think seriously
and reverently and with joy over thy blood
and body and righteousness, which are to be
to us glorious dress and a heavenly garb
in that day.
Bring on our minds from considering the world,
and we will think only about thee.
Christ's name.
Amen.