Deuteronomy 1st chapter, Deuteronomy 1st chapter, verses 6
to 8.
The Lord our God spake unto us in
Horeb, saying, Ye have dwelt long enough in
this mount.
Turn ye, and take your journey, and go
to the mount of the Amorites, and unto
all the places nigh thereunto, in the plain,
in the hills, in the vale, in the
south, by the seaside, to the land of
the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, unto the great
river, the river Euphrates.
Behold, I have set the land before you.
Go in, and possess the land, which the
Lord sware unto your father, Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, to give unto them, and their seed
after them.
This is the second in a series of
Sunday night talks on how to get out
of the religious rut.
Now, when God, as he in his great
love and kindness often does, when God sends
someone to tell us, a Moses, maybe, a
Joshua, an Isaiah, or in later times, a
Luther, or a Wesley, when God sends someone
to say to us, the work of the
Lord is not progressing.
Times are bad in the kingdom, and getting
worse.
You have settled into a rut, and you've
got to get out of it, and it's
time for you to arise and go on
from here, because my will for you is
as broad as the high mountain yonder, and
the hill, and the plain, and the vale,
and the south, and the seaside, and Lebanon,
and all the land is before you.
I say, when God sends somebody, maybe not
somebody as well-known as Luther or a
Wesley, maybe some simple preacher in a little
church in some small town in Ontario or
Michigan, but when God sends some preacher to
say this to a congregation, and the congregation
is even half ready to listen to him,
and they say to themselves, I think the
pastor is right about this, we are in
a rut, aren't we?
We used to fight it.
We are.
We've been more or less in a rut.
I think we ought to do something about
this.
Then you know what, 99-100 percent of
the time, you know what the answer will
be or the remedy that will be prescribed?
It will be, let's come together and eat
something.
Say, I know we're in a rut.
You don't see each other often enough, and
we ought to get to know each other
better and get warmer and fresher.
Let's come together and eat something.
Now, I don't mind that.
I guess I've eaten my way through several
pounds of food around here since I've been
here in the last two and a half
years, so you know I don't object to
coming together and eating something.
But what I'm pointing out is that this
isn't the answer to what's wrong with it.
Or, if they don't say, let's come together
and eat something, they say, let's make plans
and go somewhere.
That's another way we Protestants have of curing
all the sores and job and all the
leprosy and everything that's wrong with it.
We either get together to eat our way
out, or else we travel and get out
of it.
Or we say, let's come together and do
something religious.
I know, I'm sure the Church is in
a pretty bad state, and the morale is
low, and things aren't where they ought to
be, and we're running pretty much in a
circle.
Let's get together here and get active and
do something.
That's activism.
Or they say, let's form a committee to
consider it.
You know what the Baptist preacher Vance Hadner
said about a committee?
He said, a committee is a company of
the incompetent, chosen by the unwilling to do
the unnecessary.
I think maybe that he had that thing
a little radically stated, but there are some
things committees can do, and then there are
things committees can't do.
And I'm quite sure that when the man
of God here thundered, you've dwelt long enough
in this mouth, you were going around in
circles, get you out and take what's given
to you by the hand of your God.
I'm quite certain that nobody got up and
said, Mr. Chairman, let's eat something.
I'm quite sure that I wouldn't have helped
any if they had.
And I'm quite certain they didn't get up
and say, let's take a trip.
Or that they didn't say, let's form a
committee to handle it.
Or that they didn't say, let's start another
club.
That's another way we have when we find
ourselves in a rut, that we find we're
no taller than we were five years ago,
we're no further along than we were five
years ago, we don't know any more than
we did five years ago, we're not any
holier than we were five years ago, and
we simply meet ourselves coming around, and if
you could wear out songs, we'd have worn
out the same old songs, revive us again
in each heart with thy love.
Sometimes when I hear that I want to
go cry on my own shoulder.
We've sung that song and nobody means it,
nobody would pay the price, but here we've
gone round and round, and all we see
is the other fellow's heels just ahead of
us, and all the fellow behind us sees
our heels.
And here we go round and round and
round the circle.
And so somebody says, let's start a club
now.
Now clubs are all right I suppose, all
kinds of clubs are all right under the
right circumstances, but what I'm trying to point
out here is, brethren, that this kind of
an answer to that kind of a problem
presupposes that those who give the answer have
misunderstood the problem.
You see, they've misunderstood three things.
They've misunderstood the nature of the Christian faith.
The Christian faith is inward and not outward.
It's of the spirit and not of the
flesh.
The kingdom of God is within you, and
Christ dwelleth in your heart except you to
reprobate, and Christ in you the hope of
glory is the burning core of the Christian
faith.
So the Christianity, the true Christian faith is
the inwardness of it all, that we're to
be inwardly Christians, and it's in our inwards
there somewhere, in the spirit, the soul, the
heart, the inner man that we get into
the rut.
And so because it is, you see how
ridiculous it is to say, all right, the
inner man, the spirit of me, the inner
shrine of me is in a rut.
It isn't where it ought to be.
Therefore, let's eat something.
Well, brother, you can just eat caviar and
hummingbird tongues until the sun goes down, and
it won't help you because that isn't what's
wrong with you.
Somebody else says, let's take a trip.
Take your trip, it's all right.
Try not to get killed on the way,
but remember that isn't what's wrong with you.
Somebody else says, let's start a committee to
handle it.
That isn't what's wrong with you.
You're missing the nature of the true Christian
faith, which is inward, and what's wrong can't
be reached by these external things.
And then somebody else would say, let's come
together to eat, let's go together to play,
let's do something else.
We don't misunderstand the nature of the church
because, you see, the church is a body
of individuals united in Christ, but having separate
individual responsibilities.
And the body can be improved only as
we improve the individual that composed the body.
You see, the Holy Ghost fell at Pentecost
on 120 people approximately, the scripture says, but
it fell on them individually.
And each individual, if one man had hardened
himself there, he would have been passed over.
Each individual.
We're born individually, even if we're triplets.
We're born one at a time, and we
die one at a time, and we face
judgment one at a time.
And if we're sick Christians, we'll be cured
one at a time.
The body is composed of individuals.
And for us to say, all right, let's
form a committee to look into it.
You're trying to do by a dozen men
what God can do for one man.
Doesn't work, never will work.
Because we misunderstand the trouble, we misunderstand what's
wrong with us.
We misunderstand the nature of the Church.
And then thirdly, we misunderstand what is wrong
with us.
First, what the nature of the Church is.
Second, what the nature of Christianity is.
And third, what is wrong with us.
You can't cure a weak member by prescribing
medicine that is no good.
Or suppose now that there were a dozen
men, or suppose there was a Church that
by some means or other, every member had
leukemia.
That would be a terrible thing to contemplate,
but you're allowed anything in the illustration.
So suppose that there were a hundred members
in the Church, and they all had leukemia
in various stages of progression.
And all of them, every one of them
had leukemia, which you know is sort of
a cancer of the blood.
They were all Christians, but they all had
leukemia.
And here they were all gathered around, and
somebody said, You know what's wrong with you
boys?
You've lost.
You remember Lou Gehrig, the great baseball player
who played 1,200 and some games without
missing one, and was called the Iron Man
of baseball?
One day he came to the manager and
said, Skipper, I think you ought to bench
me.
Well, he said, Why?
Bench you?
You're running for a record.
You've played longer and more games consecutively than
any other man, yes.
But he said, I don't feel right.
I feel weak.
And he was a great horse of a
fellow, handsome in the face and strong shoulders,
and a great, fine fellow.
But he said, I don't feel right.
He said, My feet are dragging.
I'm not fast on my feet anymore, and
my eye's not good.
He said, I think for the good of
the team you'd better bench me.
So they benched him.
And he began to go downhill, and was
soon dead.
He had leukemia.
And suppose now that we all have it,
a hundred of us have it, and we're
a church, and we say, somebody says, I
don't know, I don't have the zips I
ought to have as a Christian.
I don't have the zeal I ought to
have.
I don't have, something's wrong here.
Everybody's got the same thing.
All right.
Now, how are we going to cure it?
Somebody says, Let's eat.
All right, but that doesn't cure it, you
see, brother.
You can't eat your way out of leukemia.
And somebody else says, Let's form a committee
to consider it here.
It'll all die while you're sitting around moving
and seconded and debating and passing.
And somebody else says, All right, let's go
somewhere.
All right, go somewhere else and die, or
else die here because you've all got leukemia.
And we're all feet are dragging.
And the Lord's benched some of us.
I'm sure of that.
All right.
Individuals have got to be cured, and you
can't do it the way the churches try
to do it.
So as we go on the philosophy of
externalism, and externalism is not the heart of
Christianity, but internalism.
I repeat, it's of the spirit.
God is spirit, and those that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.
Again, I repeat that the church is composed
of individuals, and it's the individual that must
get cured.
If the individual is weak and anemic and
dragging, he's got to get cured.
The lonely, serious individual.
And it's a painful thing, and it isn't
anything you can do by jocularity and jokes
and slaps on the back and cute choruses.
It isn't anything that can be handled that
way.
It's a deep thing.
It's a lonely thing.
It's something that the man has to meet
God for in the loneliness of his spirit.
Now, suppose we're ready to admit that we're
in a rut.
And we ask, and the individual asks, you
see, the church can't ask anything.
That's a mistake.
They say, well, but what's your church doing?
I don't know.
I don't know because it's the individual that
matters.
See, the church is composed of this fellow
that lives out here a little way, and
those two people that live out here in
Scarborough, and the five that live out in
Reckdale, and the seven that live up here
in Willowdale, and the 14 that live out
here in the east.
Well, that's the church.
And so what the church does is what
the individual does.
How well or how sick the church is
depends upon how well or how sick that
individual is.
In other words, it depends upon how you
are.
Now, we come to the Lord and say,
O Lord, what lack I yet?
What is it?
I have some things, but Lord, what I
lack, or what is it that I ought
to get rid of?
What is it, Lord?
What am I compared with what I should
be?
What am I compared with what I should
be?
How am I going to know what I
should be?
All right, let's turn over here to a
passage of scripture.
Now, I know some of the brethren rule
this out, but I'll just let them rule
it out.
I don't care.
They say the sermon on the mount isn't
for us.
Somebody thought that one up, and I think
I know who it was, but I'm not
going to name him in a nice meeting
like this.
But I'm sure that traditionally he has horns
and a tail.
I don't mean that everybody that teaches that
have horns and tails, for God's poor dumb
sheep pick up anything along the way and
teach it.
Listen.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst
after righteousness.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are the pure in heart.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Blessed are they that are persecuted.
Then he says, Let your light so shine
before men.
He says, You have heard it said thou
shalt not kill, but I say to you
that if a man's angry with his brother
without cause, he is in danger of the
judgment.
You have heard it said you shall not
commit adultery, but I say unto you that
if you steal a glance at a woman
with a lustful desire, you have already committed
adultery as far as you are concerned.
And you say, it's been said by those
of old time, for swear not thyself, but
I say to you, swear not at all.
You have heard it said an eye for
an eye, but I say to you if
any man smite you on the right cheek,
turn to him the other also.
Take heed that you do not your arms
before men to be seen of them.
Now that's what we ought to be, you
see.
I can't read it all, but this tells
us what a Christian would be like, or
ought to be like, if he's a true
Christian.
And judge not that you be not judged,
for with what judgment you judge you shall
be judged.
Then go on into the epistles and see
what the man of God has to say
there.
He says, Be angry and sin not, let
not the sun go down upon your wrath.
Ye that give place to the devil, let
him that stole steal no more.
Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your
mouth.
Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby
you're sealed unto the day of redemption.
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and
clamor and evil speaking be put away from
you.
Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one
another, even as God for Christ's sake hath
forgiven you.
Be therefore followers of God as dear children,
who walk in love as Christ also hath
loved us.
Now this is what we ought to be.
This is the way we ought to be
living.
And so that's what when we say, Lord,
what lack I yet?
And the Holy Ghost said, This is what
you lack.
And then compared with what I could be,
not only compared with what I should be,
but with what I could be.
Always remember this, that God being who he
is, and Jesus Christ being his risen and
all powerful Son, anything you ought to be,
you can be.
Remember that.
Anything that God has declared you should be,
you can be.
For listen, look again in the scripture here
where it tells us in the book of
Romans, that wonderful book of Romans, the greatest
and profoundest book probably in the Bible or
in the world.
Here's the 7th chapter that tells us of
a man who's struggling and wanting to be
something that he feels he can't be, and
giving up and saying, Oh, wretched man, what
am I to do?
And then immediately he says, I thank God
I know what to do through Jesus Christ
our Lord.
For the law of the spirit of life
in Christ Jesus has made me free from
the law of sin and death.
For what the law could not do when
it was weak to the flesh, God sending
its son in the likeness of sinful flesh
and for sin condemns him in the flesh.
That the righteousness of the law might be
fulfilled in us who walk not after the
flesh but after the spirit.
And over in the book of Galatians in
the 5th chapter, we read there that the
5th chapter we read there that the fruit
of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, and against
such there is no law.
And that if we walk in the spirit
we shall not fulfill the lust of the
flesh.
Now that's what we ought to be and
what we can be.
Now compare that with what we are.
And if we compare what we ought to
be with what we are and what we
could be with what we are, and we
don't see that we're in a rut and
we're not concerned, then one of three things
may be wrong.
First, maybe we've not been converted at all,
because I'm convinced that a lot of evangelicals
and I get abused for the word evangelicals,
I even got a letter which I dictated
the answer to from an evangelical Lutheran pastor
out in, I don't remember the town, in
British Columbia.
And he was nice about it and he
said the magazine was a wonderful magazine, he
got help from it, but he wanted to
know why I was always acting as if
the alliance were the evangelicals.
I don't believe the alliance people are the
only evangelicals.
I think we are a small segment of
a large body.
But I believe we are evangelicals, but I
think that among the evangelicals it's entirely possible
to come into membership to ooze in by
osmosis, to leak through the cells of the
church, into the church and never know what
it is to be born of the spirit
washed in the blood.
I believe that's entirely possible.
I want to say something else to you.
I get invited around among the Baptists and
even Lutherans preaching on the deeper life, among
the Holy Spirit, and I go and I
preach for them, but I'll tell you something.
I am afraid that a great deal that
passes for the deeper life is nothing more
nor less than simple Christianity.
And there's nothing deeper about it, and it's
where we should have been all the time.
We should have been happy, joyous, victorious Christians
walking in the Holy Ghost and not fulfilling
the lusts of the flesh, but we haven't
been.
We've been running around, chasing each other around
the perpetual mount.
And then they say, let's have Tord over
and preach on the deeper life.
Well, what we need is, I think, to
go off and just claim getting converted.
What the old Methodists called, what did they
call it?
A sound conversion.
Yes, a sound conversion.
The difference between conversions, you know, and a
sound conversion.
Well, either he's never been converted and so
has not the spiritual enlightenment, and when you
read the Sermon on the Mount or the
Tordatory passages of the Epistles that tell a
man how to live, and the doctrinal passages
that tell him how he can live, when
you read them, he's not affected by them
because the spirit that wrote them isn't witnessing
in his heart because he himself hasn't been
born in spirit.
That often happens.
People clean up, throw their pipe away, and
start to pay their bills and live right.
And then say, I want to join the
church.
Do you believe that Christ is the Son
of God?
Yes.
So does the devil.
Yes.
So does the devil.
Do you believe he rose from the dead?
Yes.
So does the devil.
Do you believe he's come again?
Sure, so does the devil.
And he trembles.
And so we get people into our church
that aren't converted at all.
And we're so tender-hearted and sentimental and
eager to have them in that we get
them in on any grounds at all if
they just say the right words for us.
But maybe this fellow's never been converted.
Maybe.
He has been regenerated, but he's sinned against
light too often, so the light within him
has become darkness.
And that often happens.
I don't say the man's lost, but I
do say that he's in a terrible state,
and only the power and grace of God
working within him can help him.
But I think there are lots of people
like that.
They've been regenerated, but they've gotten busy with
their real estate office, or they've gotten busy
with their store.
Many a man's told me, well, I'd like
to come to your church, Reverend, but I
have to keep my store open seven days
a week.
And so they can't serve God because they
don't have time to serve God.
They'll have time to die, but they don't
have time to serve God.
Or, maybe, thirdly, he's so self-righteous that
he's impervious to any work of the Holy
Ghost, to any penetrating so he can't be
cured of his blindness because he thinks he
sees.
I want to say something to you tonight
that I never said before that I remember
in my long ministry.
And if you'll only remember this, it'll be
worth you coming to church to hear.
It is this.
The Pharisees never got under conviction.
Remember that?
The Pharisees never got under conviction.
They crucified Christ, they hated the Lord, the
Son of God, but they never got under
conviction.
They had so ordered their religious life as
to be impervious to the arrows of the
Holy Ghost.
The adulterous woman could fall at the feet
of Jesus.
The publican who knew he'd been crooked could
run to the feet of Jesus and ask
for help.
The poor, they could come from everywhere and
say, What must I do?
They could come, but Pharisees never did.
They never got under conviction.
This terrible, terrible, terrible thing.
And I suppose in hell they're still fighting
and saying they're right.
But they're in hell.
So it's possible if a man judges what
he could be and what he ought to
be with what he is and still can
go home and have a good night's rest
and shrug this off and laugh it all
off, maybe he's never been converted.
Maybe he's sinned against life until he's temporarily
under a terrible cloud of God's judgment.
Maybe he's so self-righteous that he can't
get under conviction.
Remember the Pharisee, he never did.
But if he's concerned, wounded by the Spirit's
sword and is deeply satisfied with the religious
wrath, there's hope.
Remember, complacency is a deadly foe.
Complacency is just as great a foe as
any other carnal malady, any other fleshly manifestation.
To be complacent, to have no desire to
get anywhere.
During the Great War, I used to travel
an awful lot, and of course it was
hard to get on the trains and hard
to get off of them.
I've gone a whole day on the trains
without eating, couldn't eat until 8 o'clock
at night because of the soldiers and sailors
and marines and the rest that were on.
I'm speaking of the States mainly because while
I traveled some in Canada, I'm thinking of
where I traveled most in the United States.
And you know what I saw?
I saw those bored, homesick, tired boys traveling
all over the continent, and you know what
they were reading?
You know, comic books.
They had them worn out, passing them from
G.I. to G.I. Worn out.
And they said it feels, not in a
sermon, but I've said to you, if communism
finally prevails and a country like mine goes
down, it'll go down because her people were
too mentally lazy to think or to study
or to read much more than comic books.
The fellas now who are the businessmen and
the politicians and are running the life of
the country, when a few years back they
read comic books.
They traveled so much, if they'd carried the
right books, they could have had a college
education just reading.
They wouldn't do it.
I say there's no excuse for this whatsoever.
And I suppose the same is true in
a great many other lands.
There was an Englishman, a celebrated Englishman, who
sat with a friend once, watching and listening
to a philharmonic orchestra.
And as they listened, this celebrated Englishman watched
a man play the violin.
He was playing second violin.
He was playing it well, but he was
playing second violin.
And this great Englishman shrugged his shoulders and
smiled and said to his friend, you see
that man there playing second violin?
He said, yes.
He said, if I were playing second violin
in that orchestra, do you know what I'd
do?
I would never rest day or night until
I was playing first violin.
And then he said to this great man,
if I got to playing second violin, do
you know what I'd do?
He said, no.
He said, I would never give myself rest
day or night until I was directing the
orchestra.
And he said, when I got to be
director, I'd never rest until I had become
a composer.
And when I got to composing music for
the orchestra, I'd never give myself rest until
I was the best composer in England.
The sons of this world are wiser in
their generation than the children of life.
We have been offered not the directorship of
a great orchestra.
We have been offered not a place in
Ottawa or Washington to be a great engineer.
We have been offered glory, glory and truth
unsearchable.
We have been offered the face of God
in the glory of Christ.
We have been offered holiness and righteousness and
to be indwelt by the spirit, to have
our prayers answered, to have hell fear us
because we have a hold on God and
God invites us to his omnipotence.
We're offered all this.
And we sit and play the second violin
without ambition, without thirst, without yearning, without desire,
without longing.
Israel one time, and I'm finished, was in
that condition.
And a hairy old prophet with shining eyes
came to him and said, Woe to them
that are ye in Zion and that trust
in the mountain of Samaria, ye that put
away from you the evil day and caused
the seat of violence to come near, that
lie upon beds of ivory and that stretch
themselves upon their couches and eat the lambs
out of the flock and the calves out
of the stall, chant to the sound of
the vial and invent instruments of music to
themselves, that drink wine in bowls and anoint
themselves with tea-pointing, but they're not afflicted,
did not grieve for the affliction of Joseph.
Therefore, said the shaggy old prophet, now shall
they go captive with the first that go
captive.
They were in a rush and they didn't
want anybody disturbing their calm.
They liked music and food and beds of
ivory and they anointed themselves with tea-pointing.
They had everything that we call now sumptuous
living.
They had it, but they weren't aggrieved for
the affliction of the church.
They didn't care.
Brethren, if I thought an appreciable number of
you people were like that and that I
could not reach you, I would hand my
resignation into the board this week.
I don't think so.
I have a new hope, ladies and gentlemen.
I've got my teeth in now somehow, rather,
and a new grip in my spirit.
I believe God is going to do something
for our new old church.
I believe we're not only going to see
it numerically come up, I believe we're going
to see it spiritually come up.
And I serve notice on you that drag
your feet and insist upon going around the
mountain and have no desire to go anywhere.
We're going to snow you under.
We're going to get hold of the truth,
and we're going to go someplace here.
And we're going to go right, and we're
going to go without circuses.
We're going to go the way New Testament
churches should go.
And there'll be people so blessed, new converts,
and people so blessed that haven't been in
the kingdom long, and you'll wonder why you've
been in 50 years, and you're where you
are.
So may God help us.
Let's not rest upon beds of ivory.
Let's thank God that we have a bed
of ivory and sleep on it at night,
and then let's get up in the morning.
And by the grace of God, let's begin
to grieve a bit for the affliction of
Joseph.
And be anxious and bothered in the Holy
Ghost for the state the churches are, not
only this church, but all God's people everywhere.
We're so desperately in need of revival.
I believe he will send it.
I expect it.
Brother McNally, let's pray.