Now, in the 5th, or in the Book
of Deuteronomy, the 5th Book of Moses it's
called here, Deuteronomy, the 1st chapter, verse 5,
verses 5 to 8.
On this side, Jordan, in the land of
Moab began Moses to declare this law, saying,
The Lord our God spake unto us in
Horeb, saying, Ye have dwelt long enough in
this mount.
Turn you, and take your journey, and go
to the mount of the Amorites, and unto
all the places nigh thereunto, in the plain,
in the hill, in the vale, in the
south, by the seaside, to the land of
the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, and unto the
great river Euphrates.
Behold, I have set the land before you.
Go in and possess the land which the
Lord sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, to give unto them, and to their
seed after them.
Now, Israel had just come out of Egypt
some years before, a relatively short time before,
thought of in the long sweep of history,
and they had been wandering about.
Now the Holy Spirit says to them through
Moses, Ye have dwelt long enough in this
mount, get you up.
That leads me to ask a question, and
that is, what is Israel's greatest enemy?
You know that in that great desert, that
waste howling wilderness with the wild beasts howling
at night and the sun beating down pitilessly
by day, there were enemies.
Then there were the Edomites, and there were
the giants tall that towered up to heaven.
There was the desert sand, hot and barren
and hostile to the feet of those who
walked upon it.
There was lack of water and many other
enemies.
But who or what was Israel's greatest enemy?
I believe that Moses touched it here that
the greatest enemy of Israel was the dictatorship
of the customary.
That is, Israel had gotten used to walking
around in circles, and she was quite content
to walk around in circles or to stay
by a mountain for a while, as she
did here.
That is, it's the psychology of the usual.
And God said to Israel, Now here, ye
have been here long enough, ye have been
at this mountain long enough.
Now, by this mountain to you and me,
we see this as a spiritual experience or
a spiritual state of affairs.
You have been here long enough, turn you
and take your journey.
Where, God?
Where shall we go, God?
Why, God says, Go to the Mount and
unto all the places nigh thereunto.
And go into the plain, and into the
hills, and into the vale, and into the
south, and by the seaside, and to the
land of the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon and
the great river Euphrates.
Behold, I have set the land before you.
Go in and possess the land which the
Lord swore unto your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, to give unto them unto their seed.
The problem with Israel was that they had
given up getting the land.
They were satisfied to go about in circles
or to stay camped in a nice, comfortable
place under the brow of a mountain where
there was a little shade by day.
And they had gotten the psychology of the
Rupin.
And this was positively their greatest enemy, because
it kept them where they were, it prevented
them from getting the riches that God had
for them, it froze them and fixed them
in their present state, and this was their
worst enemy.
If the Edomites had come after them, they
could have fought the Edomites down to the
death, and somebody would have won, and they
would have gotten somewhere, and they wouldn't have
been there sitting, twiddling their thumbs, waiting around
for the customary to keep on being customary.
But there wasn't anything like that happening.
They were just sitting about sort of waiting,
and God said, You've dwelt here long enough,
get ye up and get ye going.
Now, I want to ask a question of
you about this Church and about the Church
generally.
Who is our worst enemy?
Right here is where a lot of unreality
and unconscious hypocrisy enters.
The Churches are ready to say, Well, the
liberals are our enemies.
Now, I needn't tell you that I am
not speaking in favor of liberal theology or
liberal Churches, but I do not like to
make a hypocrite out of myself by saying
that liberals are our problem.
Brother, you have no problem with liberals here
in this Church.
What problem have you got with liberals?
Nobody gets up in this pulpit or anywhere
in the Sunday school or in the prayer
meetings or in the women's groups, nobody gets
up and says, The first five books of
Moses are a myth, the story of the
creation is simply religious mythology.
Nobody gets up and says that Joshua didn't
make the sun stand still, and nobody gets
up and says Christ didn't walk on the
water, that he didn't rise from the dead,
that he wasn't the Son of God, and
that he isn't coming back again, and that
the scriptures cannot be trusted because they are
a myth.
Nobody gets up and says that here.
You have no trouble with liberalism at all,
so let's not hide behind liberalism and say
the trouble with the Church of Christianity is
liberals.
No, let the liberals go their way.
As I have said many times, I don't
waste any powder and shot on a dead
lion.
Let them go their way.
And we'll go ours because we believe that
we are evangelical Christians trying, trying the least
to hold on to the truth which was
given to us and is the faith of
our fathers.
So the liberals are not our problem.
We have no problem with the government.
Anybody can do anything he wants to do.
We could hold prayer meetings all night here
if we want to, and the Canadian government
would never bother us.
They're not against this.
They might raise an eyebrow and wonder what
had happened to us, but they'd go their
way looking for votes.
They wouldn't care.
They don't mind what we do and don't
care what we do.
There's no secret police going to come in
here and breathe down our necks.
Nobody.
Nobody is going to say, well, now you've
got to close this up, we have to
have this to teach you Nazism or Communism.
Nobody is doing that.
You're living in a free land here in
Canada, and you ought to thank God every
minute of your life that you're living in
a free land.
So let's be honest and admit what our
trouble is.
I believe that our greatest enemy and the
greatest enemy of this Church is the dictatorship
of the routine.
It is when the routine becomes a lord
in the life.
Things get organized and conditions are accepted as
normal, and anyone can predict next Sunday's service,
next Sunday's doings.
Anybody can predict it.
This, to me, is one of the deadliest
things in the Church that we can predict,
what's going to happen.
What's going to happen three weeks from today?
Everybody can say, well, Brother McNally will lead
the singing and so-and-so will take
up the offering and such-and-such will
probably be back at the organ and piano,
and Brother Tozer will preach probably on Hebrews.
I've been at that now about a year.
And they'll say, well, that's what will happen
here.
Whenever we're to a place where we can
be predicted and we don't expect anything from
God that's unusual at all, but we can
foretell what will be, then we know that
we have reached the place where we're in
a rut, where the routine dictates.
And we can tell not only what will
be next Sunday, but what will be next
month, and if things don't get better, what
will be next year.
We can reach a place where what has
been determines what is, and what is determines
what will be.
Now, that would be perfectly all right for
a cemetery, perfectly all right and proper for
a cemetery.
Nobody expects anybody in a cemetery to do
anything except to be entirely, to conform.
The greatest bunch of conformists in the world
sleep this evening out in Mount Pleasant.
They've never bothered anybody from the day they
laid them away with tears and covered them
up.
They lie there asleep.
It's perfectly all right.
You can predict what is there, except for
not being able to predict that margin of
who will be laid in there next.
You can predict what everybody will do in
the cemetery, even the live people you can
predict.
They'll cut the grass and trim the flowers
and sweep up the walks and look after
it and keep it trimmed up.
But everybody has accepted the routine.
I don't expect anything other of our friends
who sleep waiting the resurrection of the just,
or of the unjust for that matter.
But I do expect something else of the
Church, because what has been should not be
the Lord to tell us what is, and
what is should not be the ruler to
tell us what will be.
God's people are supposed to grow.
You take a baby, take a baby.
Can you predict your baby?
Do you know what he'll do next?
I could have you on the floor rolling
with laughter if I would tell you a
few things.
I was over at the Ranky's here some
time ago, and their little boy went out
in the yard while we were having dinner.
Some of the things we saw him do
out there, nobody would have believed.
There isn't a comic strip world would have
thought of that.
He thought of that himself.
He wasn't dead, you see.
He hadn't accepted that the dictatorship was a
routine.
He was experimenting.
He was having himself a time out there.
Now, I believe as long as there is
growth, there is an inability to predict.
Certainly we cannot predict exactly, but you can
in most churches.
We know exactly, and that's our woe and
that's our greatest enemy.
Not Prusciat, not the liberals, not the government,
not the enemy, the devil even, because what
could the devil do if God's people all
decided they were going to lay hold of
the provisions made for them in a resurrected
Lord?
What could the devil do except to snarl
in helpless frustration while the people of God
grew in grace?
He could do nothing.
We blame the devil.
We blame the last days.
We blame anybody that we can find to
blame.
But I tell you that our greatest enemy
is not outside of us at all.
Our greatest enemy is the dictatorship of the
routine.
It is accepting things as they are, as
things as they should be.
It's in believing that what was must necessarily
determine what will be, and so we do
not grow in expectation.
You say, Do you mean that we ought
to go out and run around the block
and call people in?
No.
That's an odd thing.
As soon as you begin to talk the
way that I'm talking now, then immediately the
Lord's people try to respond by getting busy.
They dash about.
And Protestants can dash about the most hopelessly
and fruitlessly and uselessly of any people under
the sun.
The most active dashers or abouters are lots
of the evangelical Protestants.
But they have read something that somebody did
back there, and so they try to do
what that person did, and round and round
they go.
But you can predict them.
You know exactly what they will do.
Now, this that I'm talking about is an
internal thing.
This is a thing of the soul, a
thing of the mind.
And because it's of the soul and of
the mind, it finally, ultimately determines the conduct.
Now, I'm not an alliterative preacher, you know
that.
I don't say, I'll preach this morning on
three C's or three D's or four G's
or something.
I haven't done that ever in my life
that I can remember.
I'm not an alliterative preacher.
But I do happen to have three words
here that are alliterative, in that they all
start with the letter R, and I will
show you the progressive stages.
And by progressive stages, don't misunderstand me.
I mean the word progressive the same as
a doctor means the word progressive when he
says you have progressive anemia or progressive myopia
or progressive cancer.
He doesn't mean that it's progressing in the
right direction, he means it's progressing in the
wrong direction.
Here is the way we go in our
progression, or at least our slow movement.
First is rote, R-O-T-E.
That is repetition without feeling.
If someday in this church at Avenue Row,
somebody would read the scripture and everybody would
believe it, and then we'd sing some songs
and everybody would believe what they sang, it
would have a blessed spiritual revolution underway in
a short time.
But the rote means that we repeat without
feeling, without meaning, without wonder, and without any
happy surprise or expectation.
That is the rote.
Repetition without meaning, repetition without wonder, and repetition
without happy surprises.
Now once more, we tell our people, Oh,
you ought to be glad you are a
Protestant because you can pray without a prayer
book.
But if you would take down on tape
the average preacher's prayers, including mine, and then
play them back, you would find over a
period of six weeks that he repeated himself
just as surely as the prayer book.
And if you would take the average Protestant's
service, you would find that we are just
as ritualistic as the Roman Catholics, except our
ritual isn't good and pretty and well-ordered,
and theirs is.
That's the difference.
God can't get in because we've got it
all fixed up for him.
And we say, Lord, we are going to
have it this way now, and will you
kindly bless our plans?
He does the best he can, for he
is a kind, loving God.
But we repeat without feeling, and we repeat
without meaning, and we sing without wonder, and
we listen without surprise.
That's the rote.
And then we go one step further and
we come to the rut, and that is
bondage to the rote.
When the inability comes, or the inability to
see and sense that we are in a
rut, then we are in a rut.
A man who is sick may be sick
and not know he is sick.
For instance, a man who has a very,
very bad heart.
And the doctors have told his wife, Now
listen, I don't like to frighten your husband,
but he could drop any minute, any minute,
just expect it.
When the phone rings, just expect it.
I can't imagine the doctor telling a woman
that, but I'm illustrating.
You can do anything with an illustration.
So I would say, the doctor says to
the woman, Now, Mrs. Jones, your husband will,
any minute he'll go, because he can't last
the way he is.
But he doesn't know it.
And so he goes out and plays tennis,
or golf, or goes on a long hunting
trip, or goes out and paddles a canoe.
He is inviting that.
He is sick and doesn't know how sick
he is.
If a man is sick and knows he
is sick, you can do something for him.
But if he is sick and doesn't know
it, nobody can do anything for him.
He may hasten his end by the fact
that he doesn't know it.
So the rut is bondage to the rote.
Inability to know that we are in a
rut, inability to sense it or to feel
it at all, our bondage to it.
There is a third word, and I don't
like to use it, but the history of
the Church is strewn with it as the
coasts of New England are strewn after a
great storm with pieces of spire and pieces
of the ships that have gone down.
And that is the word rot.
It's dry rot.
And so psychology of non-expectation takes over
and spiritual rigidity sets in.
And a general debility, an inability to visualize
anything better, and a lack of desire for
improvement.
And this is the rut.
How many churches are there that are in
the rut?
You say, Mr. Tozer, I know lots of
evangelical churches that would like to grow and
they have contests to get their Sunday school
larger and they try to get crowds to
come to them.
Yes.
What they are trying to do is to
get people to come and share in the
rut.
They want people to come and help them
to celebrate the rote and finally join in
the rut.
Because the Holy Ghost isn't given the chance,
nobody is repenting, nobody is seeking God, nobody
is spending a day in quiet waiting on
God with his open Bible, seeking to mend
his ways and straighten himself out.
Nobody is going to do it.
We just want more people.
We want more people.
So we say, let's go out and get
more people.
More people for what?
More people to come and repeat our dead
services without feeling, without meaning, without wonder, without
surprise.
More people to join us in the bondage
to the rote.
And finally, the spiritual rigidity that can't bend
and the general debility that is too weak
to know how weak we are.
Well now, let me go on a little
and say to you that a church is
an assembly of individuals.
This church, we'll talk about this church.
It wouldn't be nice for us to talk
about the one across the street or one
two blocks up.
We'll talk about this one, us.
We're not talking about the building now.
But what is a church?
When I say a church gets into the
rote, gets into the rut, and then goes
on to rot, what do I mean by
a church?
I don't mean the building.
A church is an assembly of individuals.
There's a lot of meaningless dialogue going on
these days about the church, and it's meaningless
because those who are engaging in the dialogue
forget that a church has no separate existence.
It's not an entity in itself.
The church is composed of individual persons.
It's the same error that we make when
we talk about the state.
You hear politicians sometimes talk about the state,
or social workers talk about society.
Society is people, brother.
And the church is people.
We're people.
The church hasn't separate entity in itself, but
it is composed of persons who have existence.
And then when they're together, then we have
a church.
So a church isn't some superior group of
people that we can't identify and don't know
about.
The church is composed of that old gentleman
that's been coming to church for twenty-five
years, and that dear old lady who is
sick, but when she can get to church
and prayer meeting, she does, and that young
fellow who was just converted three weeks ago,
and that girl who just decided it was
better to serve the Lord than to serve
the flesh, and that businessman who works all
day in his office and then tries to
get to prayer meeting on Wednesday night in
church on Sunday.
It's composed of people, you see.
You can identify them.
The people that compose the church are people.
They're not faceless zombies.
They're people.
They're human beings.
And in this church, they're quite cosmopolitan.
We're composed of everything.
We have Chinese, we have Japanese, we have
some Jamaicans, we have Swedes, and we have
Scots, and we have English, and we have
Irish, and we have whatever I am.
And we have, we're just from every where,
happily serving God together.
So you say, what kind of church is
the Avenue Road Church?
I identify them by name.
And I say, that's the Avenue Road Church.
And you say, well, tell me more.
And I say, that's the Avenue Road Church.
The Avenue Road Church is people.
And whatever the persons are who compose the
church, the church is.
No worse, no better, no wiser, no holier,
no more ardent, no more worshipful.
When a lot of Christian people come into
a building to carry on a service, if
the people are worshipful, the church is worshipful.
If the people are not, the church is
not.
And always remember that you are the church.
And the church can be improved only by
improving individual persons.
And that is by improving you.
Almost everybody has a list of people he
knows in the church that he wishes could
be improved.
Almost everybody.
When I preach a sermon like this, I
don't touch very many people, really, at the
quick of their souls, because they've gotten a
habit.
When they hear a sermon that cuts close,
they say, yes, that meant for so-and
-so.
Almost everybody has a list of people that
you feel should be improved.
But that's the sure road to failure.
And that is evidence enough that we are
in the rut, and evidence enough that the
next stage will be dry rot.
And it's a proof enough of three sins,
the sin of self-righteousness, the sin of
judgment, and the sin of complacency.
When the Lord said, one of you will
betray me, thank God those disciples had spirituality
enough that nobody said, Lord, it is he!
Every one of them said, Lord, it is
I.
If they had not said, Lord, it is
I, there could have been no Pentecost.
For the Holy Ghost, a few days later,
fell on those people at Pentecost.
It was because they were humble enough to
say, Lord, is it I?
But if we insist that I know Mrs.
Jones, bless her, I know she's a good
woman, all right, we say smugly, but how
she needs to be enlightened, how she needs
spiritual help, how she needs help.
Sister, maybe she does.
But Peter said, Lord, is it I?
Not Lord, it is she.
So self-righteousness is one.
If we feel that we are what we
ought to be, then we shall remain what
we are.
The next is judgment of others, and I've
mentioned that, and the third is complacency.
Complacency is the great sin, and I guess
maybe complacency is the word that will cover
all I've said about the rote and the
rut.
Complacency.
Lord, I am satisfied with my spiritual condition,
and I hope one of these days the
Lord will come and I will be taken
up to meet him in the air and
I will rule over five cities.
He can't rule over his household, but he
expects to rule over five cities.
He prays only spottily and sparsely and rarely
attends prayer meetings, but he is reading his
Bible and marking it.
He expects to go zooming off to the
blue yonder and join his Lord in the
triumph of the victorious saints.
Brethren, I wonder if we are not fooling
ourselves.
I wonder if a lot of that is
not simply self-deception.
I hear the voice of Jesus saying to
us, saying, You have dwelt long enough where
you are.
You have dwelt long enough in that present
place.
Turn you, turn you.
Take your journey and go to the Mount
of the Amorites, that is, whatever that may
mean to God and to the present moment,
some new spiritual mount, some new hill that
you can take.
And all the places nigh there unto in
the plain and in the hills and in
the vale and in the south and to
the seaside, it's all yours.
Everything Jesus Christ did for us that we
can have in this age, now I grant
there were some things he did for us
we can't have now.
We can't have resurrection bodies now.
We can't be delivered now from this world,
I mean, out of it.
We have to live in it, as the
Sister said in her testimony.
But there are so many things that he
has for us.
Victorious living, joyous living, holy living, fruitful living,
wondrous ravishing knowledge of the triune God.
We can have all this.
Power we never knew was for us before.
Answers to prayer we never dreamed we could
have.
All these are for us.
Behold, I have set the land before you,
says the voice of Jesus.
Go in and possess it.
The Lord swear it to you in his
covenant he gave it to you.
Go take it, it's yours.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and they seeked after
him.
And Jesus, when he prayed, said, Neither pray
I for these alone, but for all them
that shall believe on me through their word.
That's Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all of
his seed and all of the people who
belong to the Church of Jesus Christ.
We have called him Lord.
How can we afford to sit any longer
in the rut?
Midsummer is hot.
A quarter, I guess, of our people are
away.
The scripture says, Work in season and out
of season.
And I've always been an out-of-season
man.
In fact, I like to work out of
season better than in season.
Because when you work out of season, you
work when the devil is the busiest, and
you can get closer to him for a
closer shot.
And the Lord has called us to move
on, called this Church to move on.
I think with last Sunday we begin a
new era in this Church.
I do.
I believe we begin a new era.
The day when everybody came in and looked
to see what a wonder was in the
pulpit there and what kind of a strange
creature that American preacher was, that's over now.
Everybody is back where he belongs, in his
own Church and looking after his own stock
where he belongs.
And now from here on, it's our job
and business to take what we have and
go ahead with it.
Our young brother here, along with myself, we
dedicate ourselves by the grace of God and
in the power of the Holy Ghost to
do everything that can be done.
But when people are in a rut, if
they will not come out of it, not
even the angel Gabriel can help them.
This is not an accusation, but it's a
suggestion, that's all.
If you're not in a rut, don't get
mad, somebody else is.
But if you are in a rut, don't
get mad, because you ought to get out
of it.
So shall we not together respond?
The difference between a wooden leg and a
good leg is that if you would prick
a wooden leg, the fellow would never notice
it.
The difference between a Church that's got dry
rot and a Church that's alive is that
if you prick the live Church, it will
respond.
If you prick the other kind, it's already
dead.
The tree that stands out there alive with
its green lush leaves, take a knife and
scar the bark deep in it and it
will bleed, it's alive.
The old dead tree that stands there, a
watchtower for old sentinel crows, take your knife
and dig as far in as you want
to and nothing will happen there because it's
dead.
And if you will get neither mad nor
glad nor sad under my preaching, and I
know nothing that can be done, but there
are some who live and I believe it's
the majority.
And I believe you will hear me and
hear my call and hear the call of
God the Holy Ghost.
Come on, we've been long enough in this
mountain.
There's no reason why we can't have Sunday
night services here that will mean the salvation
of sinners, the filling with the Holy Ghost
of believers and the restoration of people from
a life of carelessness, members joining the Church
and more people joining the prayer meetings.
There's no reason why we can't have it.
We're situated well, we're right downtown here, we're
surrounded by people.
There's no scandal in the Church, there's no
division in the Church, there's no trouble in
the Church and there's very little debt hanging
on that we can pay off in no
time.
So there isn't any reason why we can't
get out of the rut.
Now tonight I've more or less given you
a beginning of my talks, but later on
from Sunday to Sunday I'm going to talk
about how we can do, what we can
positively do.
I've had people go out of the service
after I've preached and say, Well, what does
the pastor want us to do?
Well, I don't blame them, because I know
people don't like generalities, they want particulars, and
I'm going to give some particulars.
So I'd like to have you come even
though, regardless of how hot it gets, I'd
like to have you come and I'd like
to have you bring your friends along.
Next Sunday night I'm going to begin to
say how.
Tonight I've told about what the rut is
and tried to say that the call of
God is to get out of it and
to get moving spiritually.
And now next Sunday I'm going to give
you two points and the next Sunday two
more points.
What we can do so that we will
become a better church and better individuals.
I believe God is going to help us.
I'm looking forward to great enthusiasm myself, more
enthusiasm and expectation on my heart now than
ever since I've been in this city.
Now, Brother McNally, please lead us in that