Now, here we find four, let us, exhortation.
Let us draw near to God, verse 22.
Let us hold fast to our profession, verse
23.
Let us consider one another, verse 24, and
then also, because it follows the let us
grammatical construction, let us not forsake the assembling
of ourselves together.
Now, these words, let us, they mean, come
on, we must do this.
They're words of exhortation and urgency, showing us
our privilege and our duties.
Now, such words teach us that we can't
hope to deadhead into spiritual advancement.
We can't ride on a pass.
It requires active exercise of our spiritual faculties.
We don't, we simply dare not allow ourselves
to hope that time will aid us.
Time never helped anybody yet, and never will.
Time is the medium in which we may
help ourselves, or seek God's help, but time
never helped anybody.
Now, it says here, let us draw near,
and it means that we have something to
do.
That the whole work of God with men
floats in a sea of grace, and rests
upon the foundations of grace, if I might
change the figure.
But it doesn't paralyze the human will, and
it doesn't exempt us from spiritual activities.
Let us draw near, he says.
And it is to God that we are
to draw near.
The great good news is that we can
approach God.
This is really the great good news of
the gospel, that man can approach God again.
That the man who went out at the
stern command of God from the garden can
now come back with all of his race
who will come into the presence of God
again.
And yet, that approach is not one of
physical distance.
It's very important that we know this, that
our approach is not one of physical distance.
It is as if God were far off,
and we made a pilgrimage to find him,
as though God were in Mecca, and we
traveled to Mecca, getting nearer to him as
we went, and when we came back, getting
further away from him as we left.
As though God were in Jerusalem, and we
made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and as we
cut the miles down and got nearer to
Jerusalem, we were getting nearer to God.
No, don't think of it like that.
To do so is to think falsely.
God is not far from every one of
us.
Though God is here, let us adore and
own how dreadful is this place.
God is here, and the nearness we talk
about here is not one of distance.
It has to do with the rich relation
of person to person and of soul to
soul.
It has to do with trust and love
and intimacy of heart.
People draw near to each other, not in
distance.
They may do that, too, but that is
not what is talked about here.
Let us draw nearer, he says, to God.
That is for you to be doing.
If you allow one week of your life
to pass by and you have not done
something toward drawing nearer to God, then we,
if we do this, are not obeying the
instruction here.
We are trying to deadhead into the kingdom,
and being in the kingdom, to deadhead into
spiritual advancement, and it won't work.
He said, Let us arise.
The second one is, let us hold fast
our profession of faith.
Let us hold fast.
We would like to get a spiritual experience
that would float us on high above all.
We'd like to go into orbit and be
sure there was nothing to do but simply
to ride around.
You don't go to heaven that way.
I saw an ad that my wife had
picked up somewhere, maybe a hand in at
the door.
It said, Step on air.
It was an ad for a pair of
shoes.
You put them on and just walk around
on air.
But people imagine that the Christian life is
the same way, that you get converted and
get blessed and then walk around on air
for the rest of your life.
You do nothing of the sort.
Not only that, you don't fly to heaven,
and there is no such thing known in
the kingdom of God as wheels.
I mean Christians.
I know there is a wheel in the
middle of the wheel up there somewhere, but
Christians don't happen to be in that place
yet.
So we don't go to heaven on wheels,
as the colored song says.
You can't go to heaven on roller skates.
And we can't go to heaven in any
other way but the simple pedestrian way of
walking.
The Lord does not talk about a flight
of faith, nor does he talk about a
tour of faith.
He talks about a walk of faith.
We are to walk.
The temptation to quit the journey comes to
everybody.
Have you been tempted sometime over the last
while to just give up the whole Christian
life and be done with it?
I suppose you feel very guilty, and you
are, but I will comfort you by telling
you that you are not guilty all by
yourself.
People of God have that temptation come to
them when things get tough and say, What's
the use of trying anyhow?
I can't do what I want to do.
I can't serve God as I long to
do.
And the temptation is to quit, but people
are ashamed to admit it and they cover
it up.
But if the testimonies were as frank as
they should be, many a man, instead of
getting up and saying, Pray for me that
I may hold out faithful, and so on,
he would say, I was tempted last week
to give up this whole deal, but the
Lord helped me and I didn't.
That would be frank.
It would be a little difficult to do
that, because usually we're taught to win friends
and influence people and never tell the truth
at all, say the thing we're supposed to
say, rather than the honest thing.
But the honest thing is, sometimes the pressure
is just so great that we almost look
up to God as Elijah did and say,
God, I've had it.
There isn't any use.
My father is a take-me-to-the
-Lord, there's nobody around that's any good.
We're tempted like that sometimes.
But I'll tell you some things.
I've got a little key for you.
I don't hand out keys usually, but I've
got a little key for you this time.
I suppose you'd love to have a verse
of scripture with wings on it, vibrant, fluttering
wings with musical accompaniment.
A fellow walked up to me down at
Temple Baptist Church Friday night after the meeting
when they were gathered around talking, and he
walked up to me and said, Give me
a verse.
He wanted me to be a prophet and
an apostle and a hymnist right there, and
give him a verse.
And I couldn't think of one.
So I turned over to the Bible and
gave him a verse, but I'm quite sure
I disappointed him, because he wanted something beautiful
and brilliant with a bow tied around it.
I have a little secret how you hold
fast the profession of your faith, and it's
so down-to-earth and pedestrian and common
that it'll disappoint you, but it's pretty good.
I'll tell you what to do.
Just outlive your troubles.
Just outlive them.
I have outlived so many things, so many
people that didn't like me, and I just
outlive them.
And somebody writes against me, I just outlive
him.
And problems that bother me, just outlive them.
You just go right on outliving your difficulties.
That neighbor that moved in and slams the
door all hours of the night and morning
and turns the TV on until it comes
roaring through the partition, and you, oh God,
just outlive him.
He'll move, you'll move, you just keep right
on where you are.
That neighbor whose dog howls incessantly tied to
a tree out there, just keep right on
living.
He'll move, God'll get rid of him.
And so with everything else, your problems, all
your problems, brother, as a district superintendent, you've
got, oh, I don't know how many churches
under him now.
He referred to it as a little different
ministry, I'd say so.
He's got all these churches, and if you
think that preachers aren't prima donnas, you don't
know preachers.
They're prima donnas with temperament galore, and they're
godly fellows, you know, and prophets are the
most high, but they're carnal sometimes.
And the superintendent has to try to untangle
that and babysit for them all the while.
Well, let me say to my good and
loving brother here, if he's got problems in
his district, as some of us preachers, we'll
move, don't worry, we'll get out, you just
keep on outliving us.
And that's the way to do with your
problems.
That boss you work for, that boss of
yours, you just don't know how you can
go to work.
You don't mind the work, but you just
wish you were somewhere else.
And you're shopping around for another job and
you can't find one, well, you just keep
right on walking with God, and one of
these times something will happen.
That fellow will be moved to some other
town, or he'll get blessed or he'll get
to liken you, or the thing will untangle.
You just keep on.
It won't kill you if you walk on
with God.
Let us hold fast, says the Word of
God.
But it says, to the profession of our
faith, but the profession of our faith has
its ramifications right down in our living.
So you just wait around, it'll come out
all right.
A dear old colored brother, I told you
about him once before.
He didn't have too much education, but he
was a dear Saint, and he said the
passage of scripture he loved among the very
most favorite passages was, It Came to Pass.
He said, When I get in trouble, I
just look up to God and say, Father,
I remember this came to pass.
And it passes after a while, and all
of your problems came to pass.
They'll pass if you just outlive them and
you keep right on.
Now, there's nothing poetic about that, and I
suppose nothing very spiritual, but there's a whole
lot of salty common sense in it.
Then the other is, Let us consider one
another to provoke unto love and good works.
We have serious responsibility for other people.
God has laid the welfare of others upon
us, and he will hold us responsible.
I suppose one of the most insolent and
cynical statements or questions in the entire Bible
was Cain's question after he'd murdered his brother,
Am I my brother's keeper?
Why are you asking me about my brother?
Do I have to take responsibility of him
on my life?
Yes, you do.
You take the responsibilities of others on your
life.
We should be responsible before all men for
our lives, for our example, for our word,
and we should be responsible to arouse people
and incite people and urge people.
Once in a while, somebody will say something
that makes it worth your while to preach,
or to write, or to teach, or to
labor, or to be a member of a
board, or a prayer band, or whatever you
are.
Once in a while, somebody will say something
that makes you feel that it's worth your
while.
At the Temple Baptist Church in Philadelphia, where
I told you I was going to ask
you a prayer, and thank you now for
praying, we had a meeting there, and this
Dr. Vroom, I didn't know him, I'd never
met him, he'd never met me, but apparently
he'd read everything that I'd ever written, because
he said this to me, and I felt
good about it without pride, but with the
satisfaction that a man would have if the
Lord sent him out to gather fruit, and
he got a basket of fruit and came
in and said, Here, Lord.
Well, this man said this to me.
I remember just walking over to answer a
telephone, and as he walked over to answer
this ringing phone, he said over his shoulder
to me, he said, When I read your
books, I want to be a better preacher
and a better man of God.
Then he answered the phone.
And that was all he said about that
particular thing.
But I said to myself, This is it,
brother.
Let us consider one another.
Let us so live, let us so pray,
let us so do whatever we do with
the thought of other people in mind, so
they will want to be better Christians because
we've been around.
Some Christians have a bad effect on other
Christians.
Let one Christian get with a group of
other Christians, and they have to fight to
keep up their spiritual lives.
This one Christian drags them.
There are other Christians, when you're with them,
their very presence is an incitement to you
to want to be a better Christian.
That's what it says here.
Let us consider one another to provoke them.
Provoke, of course, means to stir them up
to love and good works.
And then let us not forsake the assembling
of ourselves together.
Let us not forsake.
There is a significant mark of lack of
relish for the apostolic assembly.
When you see it, when going to church
becomes a problem, something is wrong, when the
circle of believers becomes too dull for us,
there are many excuses given, but there is
only one reason, and that reason is that
we've cooled off in our spirits.
The thing Christians have always done, they've come
together to worship and to pray and to
reminisce and to anticipate and to search the
scriptures and to sing holy hymns and to
testify, they've done this from the day of
Pentecost to the present hour.
And when I become a Christian and I
am not led by a magnetic attraction to
the circle of believers, something is wrong with
me.
People ought to assemble together.
He says, Don't forsake the assembling of yourselves
together.
The assembly is the church.
I believe in this.
I believe the church is the assembly, and
the Christian assembly is the church, the church
of God, and there are reasons for our
assembling.
We're not simply doing this out of habit
or because it's a custom that we can't
get over.
We do it because there are reasons for
it.
I remember the first time I heard the
word gregarious, when I was a young fellow
in a country school up among the pine
trees in the state of Pennsylvania, Clearfield County.
Our county supervisor came and made a talk,
and he was quite some fellow, really.
And for a farm boy, he used big
words, and one word he said was this.
He said, Boys are gregarious by nature.
Can you imagine saying gregarious to a farm
boy?
But I guess I loved words then, too,
because I found out as soon as I
could get around to it what the word
gregarious meant.
And I found that it meant, as you
know that it means, herding together like sheep,
loving to be together, a sense of sociability
and wanting to be with others of your
kind.
Now, we're gregarious by nature.
Being let go, they went to their own
company, is a sentence that's characteristic of the
people of God as well as sinners.
People always go to their own company, and
so it's perfectly normal for us to want
to go to our own company.
All the beasts of the jungle meet at
the waterhole, and there's a strange truce there
at the waterhole.
They may fight to the death in the
jungle, but when they go to the waterhole,
there's a truce.
They all meet together where there's the water.
And God's people meet at the waterhole.
They meet where the fountain flows, and they
meet together.
They are gregarious.
Those who raise sheep say that the sick
sheep is the only one who doesn't like
the flock.
He wanders off by himself behind a bush
and dies.
But the sheep that are healthy all like
to be where the sheep are.
And the second reason is that we need
each other.
And if we don't feel that we need
each other, then we need each other more
than if we felt that we did.
The individual Christian needs the company of Christians,
and God can say to a company of
Christians what he can't say to an individual
Christian, just as he can say to the
individual lonely, praying soul what he can't say
to the company.
If all your Christianity depends upon my preaching,
then you're a long way from being where
you should be.
If you do not have a private, secret
conduit, a pipe leading into the fountain where
you can go anytime, all by yourself, whether
there's a pastor here or not, whether you've
heard a sermon in a year, you have
nevertheless an anchor, you have a route, you
have a conduit.
You can get the water from God.
That's for the individual.
That's necessary.
And God can say to you there what
he can't say to you in church.
But over against that and supplementing it and
correcting it is this, that God can say
to you in church what he can't say
to you all alone.
Always been so.
God would take a man on a mountain
and talk to him and send him down
where the people were and talk to him
down there.
And he could say to him down there
what he couldn't say up there.
So we must close the door and have
private prayer, but we need to have our
private prayers corrected and brought into symmetry by
the public prayers.
We need to read the scriptures all by
ourselves.
Then we need to hear the scriptures expounded
in the public assembly.
So we need each other, you see.
And then I noticed that Christ went to
the synagogue
as was his want.
He had the habit of going to church
on the holy days.
And I say he went even though he
didn't agree with much he found there.
He went because he wanted to be in
the company of people who at least ostensibly
were worshiping God.
And you go ahead, the Lord will arrange
it somehow, you'll hear truth.
Christ went to the company regularly and we
should.
Christ promised special blessing to the company where
two or three of you are gathered in
my name.
And the assembly, the gathering together of God's
people is in historic tradition.
Now why Christians go to the assembly only
occasionally?
I've heard it said that some people go
to church only three times in their lives.
The first time they sprinkle water on them,
the second time they sprinkle rice on them,
and the third time they sprinkle dirt on
them.
And that, of course, is so old and
dried up that you don't even smile at
it anymore, but there's so much truth in
that that it's tragic.
That we use the church as a place
to get christened in, married in and buried
out of.
Tragic, my brethren, because if we have that
attitude we don't know what the church is.
Suppose that you were in Russia, and suppose
that you were all out of joint with
Russia.
You didn't like the way they were doing,
you didn't like Khrushchev as who could, except
his wife.
And you didn't like their communistic system, you
didn't like their secret police, you didn't like
anything about Russia at all.
And then you were walking one day in
the country and you noticed a little building,
an old building that had been forsaken, and
you walked by and you heard a noise.
And you said, I believe that's English, they're
singing.
And you went close to the door, and
when you got to the door you noticed
what they were singing.
They were singing Canada.
And you peeked in and you recognized Canadian
faces all around you everywhere, would be the
hostile, deadly, dangerous Soviet.
But here by themselves, shot away, met from
here and there, gathered together for a little
while, a fellowship, hidden here in a little
building by themselves.
There were a couple of dozen Canadians, and
you burst in on them with a big
smile, and they saw you, some of them
recognized you.
Pretty soon they sang a hymn together, and
you began to talk.
Oh yes, I used to live in Barrie,
sure.
Have you ever been down at Guelph?
I never could pronounce that word.
And pretty soon, pretty soon you've got a
fellowship, a fellowship way across the ocean, way
over in that big continent there where it
snows, Canada.
Oh, how good you'd feel.
Then you'd shake hands and say, well I've
got to go back to the grind, got
to go back to the grind, back to
the secret police, and back, back to, I
don't like it.
And you all shook hands and parted, but
said, now next Saturday let's meet again.
Next Saturday you all, don't you see how
perfectly normal that would be?
Don't you see, you'd live for it.
You'd say, during the week I have to
be out here with people whose language I
don't know nor like, and people who are
suspicious of me.
Out here, I don't like this, I'm here,
but I don't like it.
But oh, I live for the time when
I can get back into that little building
and sit and chat and reminisce and talk
old time, and sing good songs with my
friends.
Now that's a natural thing, isn't it?
Nothing wrong with that.
That's delightful.
And isn't it true that here we Christians
are a minority group in a great big
sinful God-forsaken world, or almost God-forsaken,
for they've driven him out and refused to
have this man reign over us?
We live in the week, we go to
school, we work, we sell, we buy, we
tend store, we drive trucks, we do something
all week long under the pressure of it.
But if we know where there's a company
that think as we think, whose hearts are
like our hearts, who love what we love,
who are our people, whose faces are recognizable,
we know who they are, and we like
to shake their hands and smile at them.
Don't you think that's reason enough for everybody
to go to church all the time that
they can, allowing only sickness to keep them
away?
I love the people of God, I really
do.
Sometimes I have to get after them a
little bit.
But I love them, I love the kingdom,
I love the church.
But you know, when people don't practice it,
when they go nearer or intermittently, and when
they take that old bromide about, I can
serve God under the trees, yes, I suppose
so.
If you were in Russia, you wouldn't say,
Well, I can think about Canada here under
this beech tree.
You'd get for your company just as fast
as you could get.
Talk about Owen Sound and Ottawa and this
and that river.
You'd want to talk to people who know
your language, who are of your blood and
kin, and who have the same spirit you
have.
So I can worship God under a tree
deal.
It's a bromide, it's a cover-up, it's
an excuse, it's only hiding coldness of heart.
And usually a fellow loses his love for
the company of Saints, he rationalizes, he blames
the minister, or he blames the music, or
he blames the unfriendliness of the people, or
he blames the hypocrites in the churches, or
he blames the church building.
Now his wife says, Come on, Jim, let's
go to church.
No, no, the church is too cold, I'll
take cold down there.
Come, Jim, let's go to church.
No, it's too hot in there, I'll just
smother in that place.
Let's go to church.
No, it's too drafty there.
Let's go to church, Jim.
No, no, in the back of the church
is noisy children crying, and it's terrible.
And then as soon as she's gone, he
ensconces himself in front of the TV.
Well, he's going to his own company, see.
The people who draw him, the people whose
spirit he has, he's with them.
And his wife hops in her little Simca
and drives off to the church, and she
goes among her people.
The reason I said Simca was that when
the pastor, Dr. Room, met me at the
hotel to take him to church, he took
me in a Simca, and he apologized.
He said, Sorry, take me in a little
car, and I said, I see lots of
them in town.
So she gets into her little Simca, and
off she goes to church.
And people say, There comes Mrs. Jones, she's
a faithful soul.
Why is she faithful?
Because she recognizes her own people.
She loves them.
I love the church of Christ.
I'm commissioned to love it, to scold it,
to warn it, and to feed it, and
to pray for it.
Thy church, O God, the house of thine
abode.
I love the church.
So now there are our four texts.
Let us draw near to God.
Let us hold fast to our Christian profession.
Let us consider one another and be responsible
to help each other.
And let us not forsake the assembling of
ourselves together.
For the sweetest place in all the world
is the assembly of the Saints.
Thank God for freedom in a land like
this, where there are no policemen listening to
what I have to say, ready to catch
me at midnight and condemn me because I
have dared to talk about God to a
people who wanted to hear about him.
Thank God for freedom such as ours.
Let us not sell it out or neglect
it.
Let us take advantage of it.
Freedom to worship God among the people of
God.
Amen.