You remember we're going through this slowly, nibbling
as we go along, getting what we can
out of it.
Last Sunday I called attention to verse 14,
that we are to follow peace with all
men and holiness.
Now in verse 15 he says, without breaking
the sentence, there's only a colon there.
He says, Looking diligently, lest any man fail
of the grace of God, lest any root
of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby
many be defiled.
I want you to notice the word there,
looking diligently.
That is, beware, take heed, look out.
And this cry is heard throughout the entire
New Testament, in fact throughout the entire Bible.
The reason is the kind of world we
are living in.
If we were living in a sinless world,
did you ever think the word, beware, never
would have been invented?
The words, take heed to yourself, never would
have been invented.
Look out, never had any occasion.
Help, help, those are words nobody ever would
have uttered.
Police, nobody ever would have uttered those words.
A third of our vocabulary would be absent
if we lived in a sinless world.
For because we live in the kind of
world we do, God has to be flashing
red lights continually before us.
And one of them is, look out.
This is the warning, the alarm, to be
on the alert, to be watchful and to
wait.
Now, the Holy Ghost sees the Church a
little differently from the way men see the
Church now.
The Holy Spirit and the scriptures, the Lord
and his apostles, see the Church as an
army in the field.
And because it's an army in the field,
there is always danger.
There is the sniper and there is the
danger of ambush, there is the sudden attack,
there are the booby traps that look innocent
but kill you.
And all these require constant vigilance just to
stay alive.
Those of you who have had military training
know that one of the first things they
teach you is how to stay alive.
They don't throw you out as meat to
a hungry dog, but they say, You're our
boys, we want you to stay alive.
Then they teach you how to stay alive.
So God sees the Church as an army
in the field and says, I want you
to stay alive.
But he also sees the Church as a
flock in the wilderness and says, There are
dangers, the wolves ready to tear you, the
bear ready to leap and silent us upon
you, poison food which you may take and
die, and there is always a chance of
straying.
The result is necessarily that you must be
watchful.
You don't look after yourself as sheep, but
somebody else looks after you.
And if you think of yourself as a
sheep, your business will be to keep close
to the shepherd.
See to it that you do, beware that
you don't stray.
But the Holy Spirit also sees the Church
as a company of travelers in the forest.
And of course the dangers are robbers and
predatory animals and falls and getting lost and
dozens of other things that can happen when
a traveler is going through the woods alone.
And then the Holy Ghost sees the Church
as a garden under cultivation.
Those of you, and it would be a
few at least, who have lived on a
farm or have tried to cultivate a seed
garden know that there are numbers of things
that can happen in a garden.
Blight can come along, insects can destroy a
garden, birds can destroy it, drought can come,
and frost can come too early.
So because we are this kind of people
in this kind of world, the scriptures say
you are to look diligently.
Because you are part of an army getting
shot at, because you are part of a
flock, because you are part of a company
of travelers, because you are a garden in
the wilderness, therefore you must look diligently lest
any man fail of the grace of God.
There are various translations of this, lest any
man fail to respond to God's grace, or
lest any man fail to avail himself of
God's grace, or lest any of you miss
the grace of God.
I tell you here, we won't go into
this profoundly, this failing of the grace of
God.
I can see John Calvin and John Arminius
squaring off here, but I won't take sides
with either one.
I'll only point out here that the scripture
says that it's possible for us to fail
of the grace of God.
That is, fail to respond to God's grace
or prove false to God's grace.
And it would seem to me that the
persons, these would-be persons, who have the
look of Christians but aren't Christians, they have
the language of Christians but aren't Christians, they
have a reputation among the Saints as being
Christians but are not Christians, they have the
confidence of God's people but they are not
Christians, they have not obtained the grace of
God, they have failed or missed the grace
of God in some way or other.
Now, I submit that here is what the
ancient Anglo-Saxon called scathed.
That word we don't have any more used
in its positive sense, scathed.
But we use the word unscathed, and we
use the word scathing, and it means a
harm or an injury, a hurt or a
misfortune.
And I say to you that this is
everlasting scathing if we miss the grace of
God.
This is eternal hurt if we miss the
grace of God.
This is misfortune beyond the power of man
to describe, better a thousand times lose an
eye or both eyes and feel your way
through life until God take you home, than
to fail of the grace of God and
bring upon yourself this incurable scathe, this awful
hurt on the soul, better a thousand years
in prison, better death at the hands of
the public executioner, than to endure this scathe
of God upon your soul, the awful hurt
of sin there.
And what is it that's going to scathe
us here, that's going to hurt us?
Well, it says, lest any root of bitterness
spring up.
A root of bitterness, thinking of the garden
now.
Here comes a poisonous, deadly root, springing up
and causing many, many people to be defiled.
This is not a seed, but an old
root believed dead.
Occasionally you hear of Christians who got along
all right because they were not put under
the pressure sufficient to show how bad they
were and what poor Christians they were.
I think of one of our missions here.
Several years ago we ran in our magazine
a story of a Saint in one of
our fields.
He was a Saint, and truly a Saint,
they said, and we had no reason to
doubt it.
He had a reputation for being the praying
man, for being the Bible-loving man, for
being the counselor to which young Christians could
come.
And then came a period of political upheaval
on that field and a realignment of things,
and the Church got divided.
And now, last week in New York, I
heard a part of the letter read and
heard it discussed on the Board, that this
old man, he's a man now well along
in years, has turned against the Church, turned
against the true Church, has turned against Brother
Copp and Brother Joelic of Bumi and the
other men of God who are there, who
are indeed men of God.
And the old man now hates these Christians
with a hatred that Brother Copp describes as
alarming.
He said, I know now what it is
to be hated, to be hated for myself,
to be hated with an alarming hatred.
Now, I don't know what.
I can't describe this, and I shall not
pretend to.
I'll only say that here was a rose
of bitterness that lay dormant, not dead, but
dormant for a lifetime.
And then when a shift in the political
winds and a division in the Church came
up, not an actual division within the Church,
but a group who claimed they were the
Church and weren't, who had been kicked out
of the Church, when this division came, this
rose of bitterness springs up.
And for a man who has looked to
heaven for half a lifetime, or a lifetime,
and has earned the reputation for being a
modern saint in ebony, that he now will
turn and hate a man of God with
an alarming hatred.
This, my brother, is what it means.
Take heed for this scape, this harm, this
awful injury to the soul that comes when
the root of bitterness springs up.
Now, this hidden root of bitterness was unnoticed,
but it was lying there.
And when the circumstances shifted about and the
squeeze got on, or to keep my figure
somewhere decently logical, to say when the weather,
when the spiritual moral weather got to a
place where the root could sprout, then it
suddenly sprouted up and poisoned how many.
Now, what are these roots of bitterness?
I don't have time to talk about them
at length.
I'll only name some of them.
One would be the hidden root of bitterness
in the Church.
Any report against any member of the Church,
whispered about.
Any slumbering grudges, quarrels, lying quiet like a
bitter root waiting to spring.
Any differences over any non-critical matters.
What is the cure?
What am I to do?
Dig that slumbering root out and plant in
its place the sweet myrrh and rose of
Sharon and lily of the valley.
In the individual heart, what root of bitterness
might it be?
Love of money is one, desire for revenge
is another.
I was thinking about a pastor I knew
when I was in my teens.
I got converted, incidentally I was converted when
I was 17, and I joined that church.
I was fresh off of the farm and
dumber than the average, and knew as little
about religion as was possible to know, except
I knew the Lord Jesus was my Savior.
I remember how I was treated by this
pastor.
I remember his name.
That was so long ago that I don't
even want to remember how long ago it
was.
But do you know what I caught myself
doing this very week?
I caught myself thinking over again some of
the things that that pastor had said to
an ignorant country boy, bitter, abusive things, and
I had to ask God to help me
to forget it and never remember it again.
Why, I hadn't thought of that for so
long, I didn't know it was there at
all.
It must have been in my subconscious, because
it couldn't have been in my conscious mind.
I had trouble remembering the man's name.
But do you know the human mind is
such a tremendous thing?
Not mine or yours, but ours.
The human mind is such a tremendous thing.
It is such a vast storehouse of so
many things.
I hesitate to quote psychologists, they are mostly
off the deep end one way or the
other.
But if they are telling the truth, then
you never forget anything.
It just sinks below the level of consciousness,
of the conscious mind down into the subconscious,
if there is such a thing.
You can dig it up later on.
There is only one thing I know to
do with the subconscious cistern, and that is,
take the lid off of it by the
grace of God and turn the sun of
righteousness loose on it to kill all of
the bugs and everything else that is in
it.
So don't try, don't remember the old things.
I have nothing against the dear brother.
I suppose he is dead and in heaven
now.
I hope he is in heaven.
But the point is, you can't get to
old but what you can remember, and the
root will be there.
Drag it out, kill it, destroy it.
Then there are the old hurts, the resentments
and the hurt feelings.
I tell you, I never tolerate a hurt
feeling.
I don't have any hurt feelings.
I can't think of anybody that I'm mad
at.
Are you mad at anybody?
No, I'm not either.
I'm not mad at anybody.
I can't think of anybody that I'm mad
at.
I just love everybody that I can.
I don't love them all alike.
Some people I don't like, but as I've
said before, you can love them without liking
them.
I love Crucif, but I don't like him.
I love him in the sense that I
want to pray for him and ask if
the grace of God could be sufficient to
save even that old fellow.
I don't like him, but I certainly love
him enough to pray for him, because he's
a human being born of a woman and
who has within him the capabilities of the
new birth.
God could give him the new birth and
make another man out of him.
I don't suppose it will ever happen, but
it could.
So I'm not going to quit praying for
him until God gives him up or until
he dies.
I'm going to pray for the conversion of
rulers and kings and those in authority and
Secretaries and Prime Ministers and Presidents and Governors
and Premiers and the rest round over the
world.
I don't like all of them, but I
can love them all for Christ's sake.
So let's put away all hurt feelings, all
resentment, and with a spade of repentance destroy
the root of bitterness.
And there are jealousies, I won't mention that.
There is the evil temper.
How many can be defiled by an evil
temper blowing up?
I knew a man in the City of
Chicago, well, he wasn't at that time, I
think he was in Detroit.
He belonged to a certain group that wore
a uniform, a Christian group, and also taught
that you could be eradicated so that there
was no sin.
You were completely free from all, delivered perfectly
from all sins, theologians call eradication.
I don't know how he got in there,
but he got to be pastor of an
alliance church.
He was preaching this, that everybody ought to
get delivered so that they were completely good
and sinlessly perfect.
And one night he had a board meeting,
and he was crossed by one of his
board members, and he blew his blessed little
top and flew into a fiery rage in
the board meeting.
After that, I don't think he preached on
that.
He probably preached on his Mussolini the Antichrist,
in order to escape the embarrassment of having
a board member look at him and say,
I remember you, Buster, in the boardroom the
other night when you weren't so clean as
you sound up there in the pulpit.
You don't know me here at all.
You don't know me.
My wife knows me better, and she doesn't
know me, even though she's lived with me
43 years.
What I am in my deep heart of
hearts is what I am, not what I
seem to be.
And if you want to be sure that
you will be what you ought to be,
then you must put away the root of
jealousy and evil temper and pride of heart
and deceit and spite and all these things.
This may lie dormant for years.
I believe I mentioned once how on the
farm in the early spring when it was
still cold but warm enough for kids to
be out stirring, the snow beginning to, as
the poet said, fair ill on the top
of the bare hill, and spots of bare
ground were showing through.
One of my brothers and I went out
into the woods, and we found a beautiful
little thing that looked like the lid of
an Indian basket, woven beautifully, only it was
perfectly flat and stiff.
We picked it up and brought it into
the house.
And as soon as it got warm, it
uncurled and crawled off.
We lugged a snake in.
I can't touch a snake.
I can't do it.
I can pick up toads and worms, but
I hate snakes and have always had phobia
for snakes, and to this day I get
the shudders when I think that I actually
carried in a nice little flat affair that
looked like a doily, all curled up like
a braided rug.
And when he got warmed up, he was
a snake.
You know, sir, that in the human heart
it's possible if we don't watch it that
we will allow that cold thing to lie
there, innocent, looking enough that when it gets
into a place where the heat is on,
it will suddenly uncurl and strike, and then
come to stay in trouble and hurt and
harm, and many are defiled.
Your home can be defiled with that kind
of thing.
Your church can be defiled.
How many churches have blown up because one
or two deacons or elders who were thought
to be Saints turned out to have a
cold of bitterness?
Your children can lose confidence in you and
never turn to Christ.
It's a compliment to a man when his
son will go along with Roy Laterno.
It's a compliment to the Father.
I know them both.
They've been in their home and slept in
their home and eaten in their home.
And if the Laternos hadn't been living what
he preached, this boy wouldn't have been converted.
You can ruin a home by preaching one
thing and living another.
Well, we have but to uncover the hidden
root.
I said a while ago, take a spade
and destroy it, but I think I'll say
better, uncover it to the eyes of God,
and let God do what has to be
done.
Burn and destroy and he will take it
out.
Let no root of bitterness remain in your
heart.
Let it spring up and trouble you, and
thereby many be defiled.
The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from
all sin, and if we walk in the
Spirit, we shall not fulfill the lusts of
the flesh.
Remember those two passages.
And God will take care of your root
of bitterness.