Moreover, brethren, I would not have that, not
that ye should be ignorant, how that all
our fathers were under the cloud, and all
passed through the sea, and were all baptized
unto Moses in the cloud and in the
sea, did all eat the same spiritual meat,
and did all drink the same spiritual drink,
for they drank of that spiritual rock that
followed them, and that rock was Christ.
But with many of them God was not
well pleased, for they were overthrown in the
wilderness.
These things were our example to the intent.
We should not lust after evil things, as
they also lusted, neither the idolaters, as were
some of them, as it is written, and
the people sat down to eat and drink,
and rose up to play.
I'll get rid of that frog, and then
we'll go ahead.
Neither let us commit fornication, as some of
them committed, and fell in one day three
and twenty thousand.
Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of
them also tempted, and were destroyed of the
serpent.
Neither murmur ye, as some of them also
murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer.
All these things happened unto them for example,
and they were written for our admonition, upon
whom the ends of the world are come.
Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth, take
heed lest he fall.' Now, that gives us
New Testament authority for using the Old Testament
to point up New Testament truth.
And I have been preaching from this text
in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 1.6. The
Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb,
saying, Ye have dwelt long enough in this
mount, and remember, these things were written for
our admonition.
God said to Israel, Turn you and take
your journey, and go to the mount of
the Amorites, and to all the places, and
I thereunto, in the plain, and in the
hills, and in the vale, and south, and
by the seaside, to the land of the
Canaanites, and to Lebanon, and the great river
Euphrates.
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 to them, and to their
seed after them.
But they were going round and round about
that mount.
He said, You have been here long enough
in this place.
Get out of here and begin to accept
or possess that which I have made available
to you and which belongs to you.
That's the background.
I say that Israel is in a rut
here.
Israel as a nation did about everything that
we as individuals do, and that we as
churches.
That's why the Old Testament history was written.
And we'd better learn from them and stay
out or get out of the difficulties they
found themselves in.
Now, about this man in the religious rut.
Churches get in ruts only because individuals get
in ruts.
It's impossible that this church should do anything
that individuals don't do.
It's impossible that we should make any progress
except as it's made by individuals.
It's impossible there should be any regress unless
individual Christians go backward.
And so we'll think about that individual man
who finds himself in a religious rut.
He'll find a number of things about himself.
He'll find that he's getting older and not
getting any holier.
So time is his enemy and not his
friend.
And the time that he trusted and looked
to is betraying him.
For he said very often to himself, the
passing of time will help me.
I know some good old Saints, and therefore
as I get older I'll get holier and
better.
Time will help me and purify me and
revive me.
He said that year before last.
But it wasn't help any last year.
Time betrayed him.
It wasn't any better last year than he
had been the year before.
Time let him down.
But he said last year, next year surely
I'll make some progress, I'll get out of
this rut, I'll go forward with God.
That would have been this year.
But this year is over to September 2nd,
and he isn't any further along than he
was last year or the year before.
But this year he may be saying, time
is my friend, time will help me, and
I'm getting older, and next year I'll make
progress.
But I say to you that religion, the
man in the rut of religion, the religious
rut, is getting older, but he's not getting
any holier.
And time that he trusted to be his
friend is betraying him and proving to be
his enemy.
And time is doing another thing to him,
it's increasing his indifference to spiritual things.
The signal that God used to be able
to get through to him easily is now
getting fainter and fading away.
Once in a while on good days you
can still hear it.
You know how it is when you travel
away from a city like Toronto, you have
your radio on, you want to get the
news or find out something, or listen to
music, maybe if it's FM, decent music, and
you want to listen to it.
And as you move away, the station gets
fainter.
The signal is still reasonably clear, but it's
fainter.
And then you get into a pocket where
you don't hear it at all.
And you say to yourself, to someone with
you, well, that station is faded out, whatever
your station is.
And then suddenly it comes on again, and
you say, well, we're hearing it again, but
it's very faint.
But when you get far enough away from
the city, you don't hear it at all.
And that's exactly what the man in the
rut finds out about himself.
He finds out that the passing of time
tends to dull his religious feelings, and the
signal that used to be quite clear is
fading out.
Then he worries a little, and he says,
now this signal is gone, I'll have to
do something.
Then suddenly it comes on again, and he
hears it a little, and he says, oh,
it's not so bad after all.
But he's just in a favorable pocket.
Some new preachers come to town or something,
and he thinks he's hearing the voice again,
and he is a little bit.
But it isn't very long until he's out
of the wavelength where he can't hear it
anymore.
And so time has increased his indifference to
spiritual things and dulled his religious feelings, and
it's making it harder all the time for
him to change.
Now, change is one of the ingredients of
Christianity.
I don't mean that it's there theologically, but
if a man couldn't change, then the gospel
would be absolutely meaningless.
If the Lord would come and say, believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ, repent and believe,
and you couldn't repent and believe, the gospel
would be meaningless.
So I say the fact that a man
can change is the only hope the man
has.
For if he couldn't change, there would be
no reason to preach to him that he
must change.
And yet we are sent to preach that
men should change, which is repent.
They should turn from darkness to light.
They should turn from idols to God.
They should change.
This, I say, is absolutely necessary.
It's vitally needed in the spiritual life.
But this man who is in the rut,
who is in the circular grave, finds that
it's getting harder for him to change.
He used to have spells when he was
emotionally moved and his will got over on
the side of God, and he really meant
to make a good Christian out of himself
by the grace of God.
But those times are getting fewer.
Up from Cape Canaveral a week or so
ago, they sent a rocket toward Venus, Mariner
II.
Mariner went up all right and took off
and pulled away from the gravitational drag of
the earth and got out into free space,
worked weightless, nothing to hold it back, nothing
to draw it in any direction.
All it had to do was just go
ahead.
But the scientists figured that the way it's
going now, when in December it arrives in
the general area of Venus, it will be
a third of a million miles away from
Venus.
And they want to get it within 10
,000 miles, 10,000 miles in space just
next door.
So they want to get it within 10
,000 miles of Venus so that it will
tell them certain things they want to know
about Venus and all the rest.
Here's what they're going to do, either today
or tomorrow, and I wasn't certain whether it
was today or tomorrow, but it's in a
matter of hours now.
It either has been done or will be
in a matter of hours.
They're going to activate a little motor from
the earth by remote control, they're going to
activate a little motor that will push the
nose of that thing a little bit to
a right or left or up or down,
whichever it is, there's no up or down
up there, so that the change will bring
it within 10,000 miles of Venus in
December, not 300,000 miles.
Now, my friends, this, say the scientists, this
change must be made within hours now.
It couldn't be made too soon, but if
they wait, there's no use to make it.
It's too late.
They've reached the point of no return, and
the thing will simply go off into space
and be what they call, that terrible word
they call now, space garbage.
Have you heard that word?
I heard on the air the other day
that they had found some space garbage up
there somewhere.
The garbage man hadn't cleaned up the mess.
They thought the Russians did it.
Mostly it's Americans that are to blame, but
this time the Russians got it.
They said, there's space garbage, and this thing
would simply be space garbage if they don't
make that change at the point of no
departure, at the only time that they can
be saved from that point of no departure.
You can't wait and say, Oh, well, we'll
do it next Thanksgiving day, or we'll do
it when they come home from our vacation.
No, you'll either do it in the next
hour or you won't do it at all.
And that's the way it is with the
man in the rut.
There comes a time, and I don't claim
to know where it is, there comes a
time when he must make his change, and
if he doesn't make it, he'll not make
it at all.
And as time goes by, it gets harder
all the time for him to make it.
And time is stealing away the day of
his opportunity to make it.
He began with a given number of days,
and he's already used up so many days,
but he doesn't know how many.
And he doesn't know how many he has
left because he doesn't know how many that
he had to start with.
He doesn't know how many were granted to
him to start with, and so while he
could count the number of days he's been
on earth, he doesn't know how that stacks
up relative to the number that were accorded
to him, so he doesn't know where he
is.
He only knows that the days are doing
what the poet said about the leaves.
The leaves of life keep falling one by
one.
There stands a beautiful sugar maple in front
of our house up on Old Orchard Grove.
It's one of the greenest, deepest trees we've
ever seen, almost as beautiful as our old
maples back in Pennsylvania.
Lovely, lovely trees, standing there beautiful.
And it hangs to its leaves a long
time.
Then along about the latter part of October,
the first of November, we notice some leaves
missing.
And I say to myself, Oh, well, look,
it's a mass of leaves.
It's a bushing mass of green leaves.
I don't need to worry.
Then the next day I say, Well, there
aren't as many leaves.
And I notice some branches beginning to show.
And before the snow flies, there isn't a
leaf left.
The leaves of life keep falling one by
one.
And the man in the rut never knows
when the last leaf has fallen for him.
Now, why is the man in the rut?
I say as a man, I'm not going
to talk to the Church, because there's nothing
so comfortable as to have a preacher lamb
-basket Church, and then you say to yourself,
That doesn't mean me, he means the Church.
I mean you, you're the Church.
Why is the man in the rut?
Well, there are four possibilities.
He may never have been cruelly converted at
all, and I think that that's one of
our great problems now.
We have a dozen ways of getting people
into the kingdom of God now, and the
Lord said there was only one, and we
have a dozen.
They leak in and ooze in and come
in by osmosis and get in by marriage
and just get in about any different kind
of way.
But there's only one way, and when a
man finds that after being in the Church
for years he's not making much progress, but
he's about where he was, he ought to
examine himself and wonder whether maybe he's not
been cruelly converted at all.
Which means radical repentance, a changed life, conscious
forgiveness of sin, and a spiritual rebirth.
That's all included in what we call converted,
though theologically it isn't, but for popular use
as I'm using it now, it is.
The truly, solemnly converted man, as the old
Methodist said, he's had a radical repentance which
eventuated in a changed life, then there came
a consciousness of forgiveness of sin and a
spiritual rebirth.
The man in the rut may never have
had that at all.
Or he may have been abandoned to the
devil as a severe disciplinary measure to keep
him out of hell.
Let me read to you, 1 Corinthians 5,
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
said the Holy Apostle, when you are gathered
together with my spirit with the power of
our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such a
one, a certain one, unto Satan for the
destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may
be saved in the day of the Lord
Jesus.
Then in 1 Corinthians 12, or 11, the
man of God says, Let a man examine
himself, and so let him eat of that
bread, and drink of that cup.
For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth
and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the
Lord's body.
For this cause many are weak and sickly
among you, and I don't think we know
whether we mean physically or spiritually, but I
would say physically here.
And many sleep.
If we would judge ourselves, we should not
be judged.
But when we are judged, we wait for
God's judgment, we are chastened of the Lord,
that we should not be condemned with the
world.
So this man in the circular grave, who
is getting older without getting holier, may have
been abandoned to the devil because of one
of two things.
Some fleshly sin, or in 1 Corinthians 5,
it was a fleshly sin, the sin of
a man who married his mother-in-law,
at least it was incest, or because of
grave irreverence at the communion table.
I tell you, my friends, we Protestants are
altogether too much inclined to take things for
granted.
We laugh at those on the other side
of the ecclesiastical fence because they bow and
scrape and kowtow in the presence in the
Church, but we lack reverence, not because
we are free in the gospel, but because
God is absent and we have no sense
of his presence.
We sometimes come to the communion table in
a moral and spiritual state totally unfitting us
for receiving of the communion, and yet we
take it.
Paul said about such that they are being
judged of God, or will be judged of
God, that the spirit might be saved in
the day of the Lord Jesus, they might
not be condemned with the world.
This man in the rut, it's almost certain
that sin is the cause of his circular
grave, since only sin offends God, and sin
is extremely deceitful.
It can be present doing its deadly work,
and we don't know it.
The man not be aware of it at
all until it's called to his attention.
It's of several kinds, as you know.
There is the sin of omission, which is
an act left undone that should have been
done.
There is the sin of commission, which is
an act displeasing to God and to the
Holy Ghost.
There is the sin of the flesh, which
the world may approve, even the churches and
the pastors may permit it.
It's astonishing what preachers will joke about with
their congregations and laugh off and put up
with.
So maybe the pastors permit it, laugh it
off at least, and say, Oh, well, you
can't be too holy, you can't be angelic
in this world.
But the Holy Spirit is grieved by it,
nevertheless.
The Holy Ghost is grieved by it.
So the man moves around his circular grave,
and he's not hearing the voice much anymore.
He used to hear it, but
he's not hearing it anymore.
He's not hearing it.
He's not talk too much.
The man moves around his circular grave.
There may be sins of the mind.
Society.
Whenever I use the word society in a
sermon, I want you to know what I
mean.
As a rule, I don't mean the Social
400.
That we call high society.
I'm not referring to high society.
So unless I put the adjective of high
on it, when I use the word society,
I mean Adam's race.
Adam's fallen race, organized variously into what we
call cultures, groups, nations, tribes.
Society.
Society is organized to condition our minds to
think sinfully and to think in unbelief and
to think carnally and to think in a
manner displeasing to God.
We're taught it in school, it gets into
our newspapers, it's on television, it's on the
radio.
Our neighbors are dropped in for a cup
of tea, drops a little word.
Not bad, but it's all part of the
conditioning process of society.
Society, says a great man, is in a
conspiracy to make every man like every other
man.
But what he didn't say was that society
is in a conspiracy to make every man
ungodly in his thinking.
By ungodly, I don't mean that he likes
pornographic pictures.
By that, I do not mean that he
stands in the corner of the street on
a windy day and watches the ladies go
by.
By that, I do not mean that he
thinks and dreams at night of pornography.
Not that, because that's only one facet of
wrongdoing.
It's only one facet of sin.
It's such a thing as ambition and the
love of money.
And over-appreciation of earthly things, such as
our possessions, and jealousy and envy.
All of these things.
They all fit in and make a web,
and society is busy teaching us and conditioning
our minds, I say, to think sinfully.
And it begins in the cradle.
My brother, to think God's thoughts requires much
prayer.
If you don't pray much, you're not thinking
God's thoughts.
If you don't read your Bible much and
often and reverently, you're not thinking God's thoughts.
Those thoughts you are having, and your head
buzzes with them all day long and into
the night, those thoughts you are having are
earthly thoughts, they are Adamic thoughts, they are
the thoughts of the fallen race, they are
the thoughts of a lost society, let this
mind be in you which was also in
Christ Jesus.
There's got to be a lot of meditation,
reading a page out of the book all
fixed up for you by somebody else and
what's supposed to bless you, and then running
off, that won't do.
It's better than nothing, I suppose, but it's
a lot worse than something.
So we ought to get our Bible, and
we ought to learn to live in it,
get one with print big enough to read
so it won't punish your eyes, look around
until you find a good one, and then
learn to love it.
Begin with 1 John, or I mean the
gospel according to John, and read the psalm.
Isaiah is another great book to help and
lift you, and when you feel you want
to do it and can, go on into
Romans and Hebrews and the deeper theological books,
but get into the Bible, and don't just
read the little passages that you like, but
in the course of a year or two
years, see that you've read it clear through,
because your thoughts, my brother, will someday come
up before God's judgment.
We are responsible for our permitted thoughts.
They make of our mind a temple, or
they make of our mind a stable.
They make of our mind a temple where
God can dwell with pleasure.
Or they make of our mind a temple
where Christ in anger ties a rope and
drives the cattle out.
It's all up to us.
What should we then do?
I say, examine yourself.
If you find yourself in that awful circular
grave, and you haven't made any spiritual progress,
and you're not making any, and you find
that the passing of time upon which you
would lean so heavily has become a broken
reed, and time isn't helping you at all,
then I recommend you examine your life.
Even the philosopher Socrates said, a nonexamined life
isn't worth living.
If a common philosopher could think of that,
how much more we Christians ought to listen
to the Holy Ghost when he says, examine
yourself.
For an unexamined Christian life is like an
untended garden.
Let your garden go untended for a full
month.
You'll not have roses and dahlias and tomatoes.
You'll have weeds.
An unexamined Christian life is like an unkept
house.
Lock your house up as tight as you
will, and leave it for a long enough
time when you come back, you won't believe
the dirt that got in it from somewhere.
An unkept house is like an unexamined life.
An unexamined Christian is like an untaught child.
A child that isn't taught, that grows up
like crops he just growed, that child will
be a little savage.
It takes examination, teaching, instruction, discipline, caring and
tending and weeding and harrowing and cultivating to
keep the life right.
I don't want to leave you on a
low note once more, I tell you, that
what I am doing is trying to wake
you, but I am certainly not trying to
discourage you, because there isn't any reason in
the world for your being discouraged.
Suppose that there was an elixir of life
that could cure any disease any man could
have, and it was down here at the
corner of Bloor and Young, and you could
have it for a nickel a bottle.
It was the magic elixir of life that
would make anybody healthy.
Then suppose that I found an old fellow
sitting on a bench over here, and I
went and sat down beside him.
I noticed by looking at him, high blood
pressure could tell it by the veins that
stand out on his forehead.
Another thing is that I'm no doctor at
all, but having lived around a while I
can see what's wrong with people sometimes.
And I began to try to tell him,
you have lived long enough on this bench,
get up, there's a better place for you.
He begins to resist me.
Then I have to preach a whole series
of sermons to him to get him to
know how sick he is, when just down
the street here a little way is the
cure for what's wrong with him.
And that's precisely where we are in our
churches.
You have to work on people for weeks
to get them to see that they are
in a rut.
And it would be a cruel thing to
do if there wasn't a remedy.
But there's a remedy.
Here is the elixir.
If we say that we have fellowship with
God and walk in darkness, we lie and
do not speak truth.
But if we walk in the light, as
he is in the light, we have fellowship
one with another.
In the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son
cleanses us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin,
there we are arguing with the old fellow,
you're sick, Grandpa, I'm not sick.
Get out of here, young fellow.
If we say we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in
us.
But if we confess our sins, he is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
And I wonder if I'm the only preacher
or teacher in the world that ever noticed
this, for I have never heard it preached,
I have never heard it in a Bible
class, I have never seen it in print,
and I have never come across it anywhere,
that the justice of God is on the
side of the confessing sinner.
Because Jesus Christ died and because he was
God and because he was man, his atonement
was so absolutely and fully efficacious.
And because he died that just for the
unjust, he gave us a plenitude of atonement
so full and satisfying to God that even
justice comes over on the side of the
sinner.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful,
that's good, but he is even just, righteous,
to forgive us our sins and cleanse us
from all unrighteousness.
Do you hear that?
All of the attributes of God are on
the side of the man who confesses his
sin and turns and runs to the feet
of Jesus.
Now, little children, these things write under you
that you sin not, but if any man
sins, even advocate with the Father Jesus Christ,
the righteous, and he is the propitiation for
our sins, not for ours only, but also
for the sins of the whole world.
So there we have it.
There is the elixir, there is the cure.
That's only one little passage, of course.
There are all over the New Testament.
The blood is shed for us.
God pardons and forgives for Christ's sake.
The Holy Ghost is here to take the
things of Christ and make them real unto
us, just as the stars in their courses
fought for Deborah against Cicero.
So all of the stars in heaven and
above them, the winds that blow on the
earth, are in favor of the child of
God when he comes to the Savior and
wants to get right.
There is nothing, not the devil himself can
hinder him, nothing can hinder him.
For Christ Jesus is a sovereign Lord, and
all power is given unto him, that is,
all authority in heaven and in earth.
So there is a remedy, thank God there
is a remedy.
How much longer am I going to have
to sit and argue with that man on
the bench and say, Dad, you're in an
awful state?
And they say, That was good preaching, wasn't
it?
And then goes on his way.
That's not the point, brother.
The point is, how soon are we going
to take the remedy?
How soon are we coming to the precious
blood that defends us from all sin, and
to the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver
of life, which with the Father and Son
is worshiped and glorified?
How soon are we going to shake ourselves
out of this rut?
Don't wait for time.
Time will be your enemy.
The signal will get weaker, and your ability
to change will get less, and your interest
will become less keen.
Do something, while you can.
Remember, if they don't activate that little motor
at the right time, it will go where
they can't activate it at all, and so
will the man.
Dear Heavenly Father, we pray this night, O
Heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, thy Son, we
bring our petition.
Father, we apologize to thee this night for
the way we've been living.
We're sorry for carelessness and that insidious
ease in Zion that cares nothing for the
troubles of Jacob.
O God, we pray this evening that thou
wilt burn truth home.
We dare to ask, and we do ask,
don't let anybody escape the arrows of the
Almighty.
Don't let anybody escape the net of the
divine fish.
We beseech thee that thou wilt so move
upon us that one after the other, board
members and Sunday school teachers, people that have
a reputation for being holy, all of us
together will see how desperately we need a
visitation from thee, and how we're hindering it
by our rut, thinking in the rut, praying
in the rut, expecting in the rut, living
in the rut.
O Lord, we thank thee there is a
way out.
The precious blood of Jesus cleanses from all
sin, and for the blood cleanses the Holy
Ghost anoints.
So we pray this night, there might be
some, even one, that will say, I am
the man, I am the man, and will
do something about it.
And we believe that if we repent of
the rut, thou wilt repent of the rut
that thou art leaving us in, and will
bring us out to a wealthy place.
We ask this in Christ.