Paul also tells us some of the things
we've been brought unto.
Not that we will be brought unto in
the day of Christ, but that we now
enjoy.
He says, Ephesians 1, 3 and on, Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all
spiritual blessings in the heavenly places.
Once more, don't think of heaven as far
out beyond Venus and Mars and Saturn, and
don't think about our being blessed with something
way over there.
These heavenly places, or heavenlies, are now present
to us and available to us, according as
he has chosen us in him before the
foundation of the world, that we should be
holy and without blame before him in love,
having predestinated us unto the adoption of children
by Jesus Christ unto himself, and that present,
according to the good pleasure of his will,
through the praise of the glory of his
grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in
the Beloved, that present, in whom we have
redemption through his blood, that present, the forgiveness
of our sins according to the riches of
his grace, that present, wherein we have abounded,
he hath abounded to us in all wisdom
and understanding, having made known unto us the
mystery of his will, that present, according to
his good pleasure which he hath purposed in
himself, that in the dispensation of the fulness
of times.
And then he races on out into the
future and shows that all this that we
have is but, as Eisenhower once said, a
prelude.
It's the beginning of what we are to
have.
He was talking about politics and we are
talking about theology, but all this that we
have is but the prelude to all that
we will have.
And yet we do have these things.
They are here for us.
I want to call your very, very careful
attention to this, that the institutional church misses
all this.
And I must explain what I mean by
institutional church, because as soon as you have
three people organized, you've got an institution.
So I'm not objecting to an institution.
As soon as you have a President and
a Vice President, a Secretary and Treasurer, that'd
be four, but we'll make three.
As soon as you have an organization, you
have an institution.
So it's impossible for a church to be
together and have a pastor and an elder
and a deacon and an usher and not
be an institution.
But institutionalism, institutionalized churches, tend to move away
from the shining glory that we are called
unto, the thing that makes us churches, and
differentiates us from all other social bodies.
The institutional church, which is merely institutional, which
is an organization and not an organism, which
is what it is because of its constitution
to which everybody subscribes, or instead of being
the spiritual body, the company of renewed Christians,
a minority group in a hostile world, I
say that as soon as we get away
from this concept and the institution takes over,
then we don't have a church at all.
We have something else.
The institutionalized church offers some good things, but
not the glory.
It offers social contacts, for instance, and these
are very pleasant, unless we are hermits by
disposition and unsocial to a degree where we
don't want to meet people.
Everybody likes to meet and talk with everybody
else.
I'm going down to Detroit tomorrow, and I'll
be there with Ken Oberman.
That to me is just like coming out
into the sunlight.
I'd just love to be around that big,
good-looking guy.
That will be pleasant now.
He'll be giving missionary talks, and I'll be
preaching there at Central Church.
That will be delightful.
There will be others there, too.
Tommy Thompson, the pastor, my good, warm, long
-time friend.
Those are good things, and I appreciate them,
and I appreciate social contacts.
But this is not the Christian manifesto.
This is not what we're for.
This is not what we stand for.
It includes that, but it isn't that.
These institutionalized things give us lots of things
that are pleasant.
For instance, they give us parties, and there's
nothing wrong with a party, I wouldn't suppose.
If you act decent at the party, parties
where they drink and tell dirty stories, that's
another matter.
But parties that are decent, I suppose nothing
wrong with them.
Games, nothing wrong with games.
Nothing wrong with the heights, good for your
muscles.
Nothing wrong with fish fries.
Fish, of course, is a brain fool.
Mark Twain in one instance, a young fellow
asked him if he thought he ought to
eat fish, and he said, Try a whale
to begin.
So it's good for your head.
Then there are toasts and taffy pools.
They're all good, and I don't mind them
at all.
At my age I'm not particularly interested in
taffy pools, and I never heard any time
when anybody ever got blessed at a taffy
pool and suddenly broke down and said, Glory
to God, isn't this wonderful?
I haven't heard about it.
Could be.
But I say these are the social things,
they're group activities, all harmless enough.
But you can get them at the Boy
Scouts, the Elks, the Eagles, and community organizations,
and all the rest.
In other words, there's something you can do,
and they're innocent, and they may even be
pleasant and nice, but it isn't the Church.
The Church could do this.
There's no reason why a Church couldn't have
a taffy pool, and there would be no
reason why a bunch of Christians couldn't go
on a hike, no reason why they couldn't
fry fish.
Somebody else caught the fish, there's no reason
why they couldn't, but what I'm trying to
say is, the institutionalized Church lives on this
because they've got nothing more.
But the Church of the Living God is
something else altogether.
It is a group of called-out people
of many nations and tribes and kindreds and
tongues and levels of intellectual achievement and varying
levels of educational accomplishment and varying social levels,
all called together out from the world around
the person of Jesus Christ.
The presence of the Lord is there, and
the Holy Ghost is there, and they are
a spiritual body, and they don't belong on
earth.
They actually belong in heaven, for the scripture
says our citizenship is in heaven from which
we wait for the Savior.
We belong in another world altogether.
I've always been a bit amused in a
kind of a sad way at how people
will migrate from one country to another.
Say, coming to Canada or going to the
States from some other country, say in Europe,
and they are going to these other countries
evidently because they like it there, and yet
they won't learn the language, they stay together,
and they live in a certain little section
in the city of Chicago.
We have a Polish section, a Lithuanian section,
and a strong Jewish section, and there's Chinatown,
as they call it, where the Chinese live.
They come to another country, but they bring
their own country with them and stay a
minority group.
I'm not criticizing that.
I don't know why it is.
I would suppose that it could easily be
figured out psychologically.
But it does illustrate why Christians stick together.
Christians know they are a minority group.
They are migrants.
They are from another world.
They have another nature.
God has imparted to them a nature which
is from him, and they have a sense
of belonging to each other.
And while they are here, exiles or immigrants,
so to speak, in this world, they love
to cling together because they speak the same
language, they love the same song, they are
loyal to the same king and constitution, the
Bible, the same king being the Lord.
And thus the Christians come together.
That's what makes the Church, ladies and gentlemen.
That's what I'm talking about.
That's what the Bible talks about.
Now, the institutional Church starts with its trustees
and the rest and goes right on, up
or down, whichever way you go to be
the pastor, up and down the scale.
And we have it all organized.
But you know, and I know, and we
might as well be admitted and admitted kindly,
that there are thousands of such organizations throughout
this North American continent that have not one
modicum of spirituality, therefore.
God isn't there, Christ isn't there, the Holy
Ghost isn't there, no worship there except that
which is superimposed by cut-glass windows and
solemn organ tones.
But that wondrous delight that the disciples felt
when they saw the Lord is not there.
Some go a little further, and they have
literary activities.
I enjoy that, I enjoy hearing people talk
about literature and political things and civic improvements.
These are all good, and there's no reason
why Christians couldn't take part in them, I
suppose.
But they are not the supreme gift of
God, they are what anybody can have, whereas
you and I are called unto and into
that which is bought by blood and made
possible through the Spirit.
The text tells us here, I've gone over
this two or three times already, what we
can experience now.
It says that we can have them now
in this life.
And we tend to overlook the plain fact,
and that is that the inner man is
a real being just as certainly as the
external man.
The soul has ears and can hear, and
the heart has eyes and can see, and
the Spirit has a tongue and can take,
so that we can experience with our inner
eyes and ears the soul, the heart, the
Spirit.
We can experience these things now in this
life.
And this is the purpose of the fellowship
of the Church.
It is to bring the Church together and
give them something better than they could have.
You can have literary clubs, you can have
political groups, no harm in them, and they
may even be useful to society.
You can have civic groups, and there can
be civic improvements, and we're for them and
they're good.
But this is not what the Church is
for.
The Church is a spiritual group brought together
to hear with the soul and see with
the heart and taste with the Spirit, and
enjoy those things that are eternal which were
brought to us through Jesus Christ our Lord
and presented to us.
Hence, these spiritual treasures are likened to material
treasures.
Christ, for instance, is said to be bread
and meat.
So that shows that just as the external
man, the outer man, has to have bread
and meat in order to live, the inner
man has to have Christ in order to
live.
Christ is to my inner spirit what a
good meal is to my body.
The Holy Ghost is water and showers as
springs of living water, and they shall flow
out of him as rivers of water.
That's the Holy Ghost.
And so we have, just as we need
water, oh, how desperately we need water to
keep alive, for our bodies are 70 or
more percent water, and if the water balance
is disturbed, if we get too much or
too little, we're sick.
We have to keep the balance, and always
in perspiring and breathing, we give off liquid,
and then we have to take water into
our system in order to keep the balance
right that we may live and be healthy.
So the Spirit of the living God is
as necessary to our spirit as water is
to our body.
As the outer man must drink of the
spring that flows out from the hill, so
the inner man must drink from the spring
that flows out from the throne of God.
And then there is Christ.
Christ has said he is the light, and
so just as the sun must shine, the
beautiful sun that shines down on Toronto today
gives light to the world.
Jesus said, I am the light of the
world, so our inner spirits must have the
light shine upon it.
Perpetual darkness is a terrible thing.
They tell me that there are fish that
live in underground rivers where there is no
light, and those fish have lost their eyes.
They can't see any more at all, because
they have never had any use for their
eyes.
They were hatched down there and grew, matured
down there and lived and died down there,
if you can call that living in the
darkness.
There are bugs that you sometimes find in
caves, in dark caves, weird, funny, hairy, slippery
looking things that make you sick just to
touch them, and they live in the dark.
So the human soul is said to be
in the dark.
I am the light of the world, and
he that follows me shall not walk in
darkness.
Jesus Christ becomes, not to these external eyes
but to my inner life, the sun to
my spirit.
And he is a God of beauty?
No, philosophers can't agree about whether there is
such a thing as beauty at all.
The old Greeks said there was.
But these modern philosophers are trying to tell
us that beauty is only what the eye
has been evolved to approve.
And therefore it isn't beautiful, it's only beautiful
because the eye has been evolved to like
it.
Well, people like that have gone to school
too long.
As I've said, there are two ways to
be ignorant.
One is to go to school not at
all, the other is to go to school
too long.
And these brethren have gone too long, and
so instead of believing in beauty, they believe
that beauty is nothing.
Nothing is any more beautiful than anything else,
but there is a certain thing the eye
has learned to approve.
Well, I would rather look at a flower
bed than to look at one of these
lots where they put old, discarded cars, wouldn't
you?
My eye has learned to approve the flower.
I suppose if I want to be philosophically
modern, but I don't.
Ah, let the beauty of the Lord our
God be upon us.
And there must have been some reason why
the Spirit inspired men to say that he
is the lily of the valley and the
rose of Sharon, and he is the bright
morning star, and he is the sun of
righteousness with healing in his wings.
There must be something about God that set
David's harp a tune and that caused Isaiah
to play his great organ notes and that
gave us the hymn of the day of
the ages.
There is beauty in God, and the Church
has found that beauty.
How beautiful, how beautiful is the sunset, how
beautiful the starry night and the sea and
the forest and the mountain, but how much
more beautiful is the triune God, the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost.
We have this, and this is brought to
our hearts, and the sweet fragrance of Christ.
Have you ever noticed what a marvelous sense
of smell it?
Have you ever smelled something that took you
back 20 years to some place you had
been?
The smell of tea berries, or what do
they call it, evergreen, in chewing gum.
I've forgotten.
Wintergreen, that's it.
But to us back on the farm, that
was tea berries.
And when I get near somebody chewing wintergreen
gum and he breathes in my face, I
can just shut my eyes and soar back
to my Pennsylvania hills, where we kids used
to get down on our hands and knees
and pick little cups full of them and
eat them.
They are very sharp, and you can't eat
too many, but oh, what a fragrance!
A sweet fragrance is a beautiful thing.
Anybody can tell me that wants to.
But there is no such thing as a
sweet fragrance, that my nose only evolved to
approve certain things.
I don't know, I'm just too intelligent to
take that in.
I can't possibly do it.
I got some Limburger one time and brought
it home.
Now, I threw it out, and we've never
had any Limburger around since.
My nose evidently hasn't evolved sufficiently.
Or maybe it has evolved too far.
I don't know.
But I do know this, that I love
the smell of the lily and the rose,
myrrh and aloes and cashew out of the
ivory palaces.
But I don't like the other.
So we have this.
This is accessible to us now.
The Church of the Living God is to
cultivate this.
To cultivate his inner sense of smell, to
cultivate our inner sense of sight, to cultivate
our inner sense of hearing, and cultivate our
taste.
And then God sits before us the rich
table and says, This is all yours.
Share it with the innumerable company of angels.
Share it with the General Assembly and Church
of the Firstborn.
Share it with those who are blessed with
all blessings in heavenly places.
Share it, it's all yours, and Christ in
the midst, the Big Brother at the table,
presiding over the Father's table, gives you these
things.
We may experience these now, and this is
what we Christians have to say.
Now, there isn't any way possible that we
can equate this with downright secular philosophy.
It's impossible, you can't do it.
The world rejects this and says, You're a
bunch of weird mystics and you haven't got
anything to stand on.
We know better than this.
We know that we have eyes and see,
we have ears and hear, we have hearts
and feel, we have tongues and taste, oh,
taste and see, that the Lord is good.
Blessed are they that put their trust in
him.
We don't feel called upon to make our
faith intellectually respectable before the world.
They said, Paul, the greatest mind probably that
ever lived, even the scholars admit that, Paul
was a picker up of scratch, and that
much learning had made him mad.
They said very much the same thing about
every other man that has stood out solidly
and said, We are called unto, here is
what we stand for.
And they've shrugged and walked away and said,
What a bunch of weird.
Ah, my brother, we hear and we see,
and they don't hear and they don't see.
The blind man never will believe in the
beauty of a rose, and the deaf man
never will acknowledge the beauty of a symphony,
and the sick man will never admit the
good taste of food.
And so the man who is dead in
his sins, though he be a learned man,
a genius, an artist, a poet, he will
only smile and shrug when we talk to
him about the beauty of Jesus, and the
glory of God, and the sweet wonder of
the Holy Ghost, and the present accessibility of
this Zion, the City of God, and the
Church of the Firstborn, whose names are written
in heaven.
They smile, but we let them smile, and
we smile again.
And he who smiles best who smiles last,
because we know what we've found.
The spirit of just men made perfect.
When we lose a Christian, we don't really
lose him, we think we do.
My good friend, Dr. Whitmer, I told you
about him, he's gone.
He's gone.
And I just heard last week down in
Pittsburgh, out in Pittsburgh, of how two of
our young missionaries, probably in their middle twenties,
I would say, had just been on the
field in Peru, just hadn't been there long
enough to get settled down.
They were still getting their house arranged.
And early in the morning, driving in a
little Volkswagen along the highway, they ran into
a park truck, killed her instantly, and he's
in a coma.
That would be Mr. Gertner of Peru.
Now, she's gone, and we say how tragic.
And it does feel that way to us
in our human way, a little baby in
the back seat wasn't injured.
Maybe he'll die if he does, but two
will be gone.
Maybe he'll live crippled.
But she's gone, Dr. Whitmer is gone.
I heard of my good friend E.C.
Anderson, District Superintendent of Western Pennsylvania, for whom
I preached many, many, many a time when
he was District Superintendent.
I found him dead in bed the other
day.
The people of the Lord are going one
by one.
What shall we conclude?
Are these dead soldiers?
Are these casualties?
Is this a loss?
Never, never!
As the dear old woman said to the
young Methodist preacher, when he tried to console
her for because she was dying, she said,
God bless you, young man, don't pity me.
She said, I'm just going over the river
here in a few minutes, and my father
owns a land on both sides.
That's all, my dear friend.
They've just gone over the river.
And Bunyan said, when he saw Christian and
hopeful enter the city of God and start
up the Golden Street, he said, and when
I had seen them, I wished myself so
that we don't lose them, really.
The Church of the Firstborn and the spirits
of just men made perfect, they are God
gathering them in.
When the farmer gathers in the wheat off
of one field and puts it in the
granary, the rest of the fields around it
don't weep and say, we'll never see them
again.
Just give them a few days and the
farmer will be back to the next field
beside it, and he'll gather them in, and
they'll all be gathered into the garner together.
So we have this, the general assembly in
the Church of the Firstborn.
I've never cared too much for memorial windows
and graveyards out back of churches.
But I wonder if there wasn't a sort
of a wisdom in all that.
I wonder, after all.
Sometimes the only spiritual people you will find
in churches are the ones that lie out
back.
And I wonder if, after all, the Church
isn't trying to say, wait a minute, we
haven't lost them, they're still with us, they
haven't gone, they're with the Lord in their
spirit.
But since the spirit doesn't know time and
space, since the spirit of a man, it's
the very quality of spirit that it is
not subject to the laws of time and
space.
Therefore, physically they're away from us, but because
our spirits and their spirits, united in Christ,
rise above and laugh at the limitations of
space, they're with us after all.
I don't mean there are a bunch of
ghosts floating around, but I mean that they're
one with us in Christ, and that soon
we will all be joined and united there
in one universal, organic unity, and Christ's prayer
is answered, that they all may be one.
Bodies are material and so subject to material
laws, but the spirits are not subject to
any laws except the laws of spirit.
So we are with the Lord, and they
are with the Lord.
Why do we enjoy so little?
I suppose it's because of absorption in worldly
affairs, it's because of preoccupation with the cares
of this world, I suppose it's because the
flesh takes over, I suppose it's because of
our unbelief.
Dear friends, this young brother here, whom I
am, is David M.
Johnson.
At least I am, I don't know how
he feels, but I think he likes me
too.
But I certainly love him.
If we can only, by God's grace, inspire
you to see around you these invisible spiritual
gifts, these things that are yours in Christ,
because you are part of the body of
Christ.
If you owe us a debt, you never
can pay.
And if you pray for us, we'll owe
you a debt we never can pay.
And we'll go off together and bless the
debtors to each other.
Elisha, one time, was playing a little spy
on the Syrians and telling Israel, the King
of Israel, what the Syrians were doing.
Syria was losing the wars, the battles.
So the King of Syria called them in,
and he said, Who is a spy in
our rank?
And they said, Nobody here, Mr. King.
He said, Nobody is a spy here.
He said, The spy is in the camp
of Israel.
He said, Well, how could that be?
Well, he said, A fellow named Elisha is
there, and he foresees things, and he is
a prophet.
Here is your man.
If you get him, you can win your
war.
So they started out after him, and they
sent a whole army, multitudes of them.
And they camped around the city of Jerusalem,
where Elisha was.
And Elisha's young assistant came rushing in, pale
-faced and shaking.
He said, Oh, Master, Master, look, look, we're
done for.
What'll we do, what'll we do?
Look at the soldiers and chariots.
The old man bowed his shaggy head and
said, Heavenly Father, open his eyes.
And God opened the young man's eyes, and
what do you suppose he saw?
He saw chariots and forces of fire all
around about Israel, around about Elisha.
And Elisha said, God, make them blind.
And they made the whole army blind.
Elisha said, I can see.
I'll lead you where you want to go.
And he led them into captivity.
Beautiful.
He had all the armies of God around
about him.
But I think that story ends about as
nice as any Bible story in the Old
Testament.
Somebody said, All right, let's kill them.
Elisha said, Kill them?
No.
He said, They're hungry and they're thirsty.
Let's feed them and give them some water
and turn them loose.
And that's just what they did.
And then it ends this way, it says,
So Syria came no more into the land
of Israel.
There weren't any corpses around there.
There was just a man who could see
chariots of fire and horses of fire all
around about him.
I believe, my Christian friends, that if we'd
stop being so carnal and so worldly and
realize that we Christians are called unto something
eternal and real, as real as the rock
of the mountain and as eternal as the
throne of God, and continue to cultivate that
and preach about that and sing about that
and live for that, then the overflow of
this kind of spirituality out into social contacts
and activities would make us what they were
in the New Testament, the people who justified
their right to live in the world by
the good deeds they did in the world.
God grant it may be so with us.
Amen.