Before I speak, lest I forget it afterward,
I want to make this announcement.
This I make without previously consulting the board,
but I know the board well enough, and
all of you well enough, to know that
you would concur in all this.
You know about our students who were injured,
four of them on their way here from
Nyack.
And up to now, young Cliff Westergren is
still in the hospital, and will be for
some time.
He crushed pelvis and other injuries.
Little Mary Thomas, I say little, she always
seemed to me like a child.
I used to buy her ice cream when
she was this high.
She's a young lady now.
Also was injured.
And the pastor in action, the Alliance pastor,
a young man with a small church, and
I suppose not too much money, took them
in and wouldn't hear anything but what they
were to stay there at his place, and
took care of them.
And he even took a little offering on
the Wednesday night service.
I appreciate this a lot, and I know
you do.
Now, here's what I know the board will
want to do, Mr. Lorell, who has our
fund for such things.
And that will be to find out who
might be of those four in a little
financial jam and help them out.
Particularly Cliff, who is the worst off of
all.
And then I think also that as a
little love offering and appreciation from this church
to the Ashland Alliance Church in Ashland, Ohio,
we want to send Reverend Mr. Winkler and
his family, his big family.
If there was nobody but Brother Winkler, it
would be a big family.
But I think we from this church ought
to send them a little gift of appreciation.
Don't you think so?
They've been so good to our youngsters when
they got caught in that nasty accident there
and had no place to go, they took
them in.
Now, that's just that much.
The details will be taken care of by
Mr. Lorell and the board, and we won't
bother you with it.
But I know that when the offering is
taken, the usual offering, which we call it
after a communion service, that you will give
with that in mind.
We don't ask for large amounts, of course,
but we just ask that you keep that
in mind and you'll be knowing, at least
in this instance, where your love gifts are
going.
Now, in the book of 1 Peter, it
so happens in the will of God, this
communion service has a text.
The text next in for consideration.
It is verses 18 and 19 of 1
Peter 1.
I'll break in here with the word forasmuch.
Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not
redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold
from your vain conversation received by tradition from
your fathers, but with the precious blood of
Christ as of a lamb without blemish and
without spot.
Last Sunday night I spoke on the text
Behold the Lamb of God.
After the service, very few people knew anything
about it, a fine young Irishman, I assume
he's Irish, he's got an Irish name, surely,
came down, two or three of us took
him in the side room, he gave his
heart to our Lord Jesus.
And a New Year's Eve meeting here told
me with joy in his face that it
was going to be a wonderfully different year
for him.
There were also present two young men who
are Iraqi, that is, they're from the country
of Iraq.
They were Muslims.
They liked it here.
They went to the young people's rally and
they at least were prayed with.
Mr. William Allen, who would pray with anybody
in Oakland, the Pope down.
He cares for nobody.
He serves God with enthusiasm.
So he got these boys down and he
has good reason to think that at least
one of them was saved.
Having been touched and affected according to what
these brethren tell me, simply by the thought
of the Lamb of God.
Behold the Lamb of God.
Now, we come to this text, for as
much as ye are not redeemed, we're not
redeemed with productive things, but with the precious
blood of Christ as of a lamb without
blemish and without spot.
Peter here carries through this beautiful symbolism that
of Jesus Christ as a lamb, a sacrificed
lamb.
Let us notice briefly what is here.
He says, ye were redeemed.
And of course, as you know, redeemed means
loosed.
It means loosed, not in the sense that
you would loose a man who was bound
to a post or loose a horse that
was hitched, but loosed in the legal sense
of being freed from legal bondage, in the
sense that a slave is loosed, legally declared
free.
And he said, ye are loosed from the
vain conversation.
Those who insist so religiously on the text
and letter and syllables of the King James
Version ought to listen sometime to some of
us preachers trying to untangle King James translation
for modern listeners.
Vain conversation.
Neither word there means what it means now.
Vain means foolish, and conversation means a manner
of life.
So what Peter said is, for as much
as you know that you were not redeemed
with corruptible things as silver and gold from
your foolish way of life.
Now, this foolish way of life is a
way of life that is morally foolish.
It is the sinner's way of life, bluntly.
The sinner's way of life.
But God calls it a foolish way, empty.
And it is foolish for about five reasons
that I want to give you.
The sinner's way is foolish because it neglects
to give God his proper place.
Now, any way of life, any attitude, any
political philosophy, any moral philosophy or speculative philosophy,
any kind of thinking that anybody does in
any sphere of human thought or life, any
standard of morals adopted or followed by any
people, however loosely, that does not give God
his proper place is declared by the Lord
God himself to be foolish and empty.
And that is what's wrong with us in
our time.
Foolish way of life.
People around us are foolish.
The men who went out and got themselves
hepped up during the holiday and then the
next day suffered with big heads, they weren't
so bad as they were just foolish.
It's foolish to treat your body like that.
It's foolish.
They were doing a morally foolish thing because
they did not take God into that consideration.
No man who had God before his mind
would ever swill poison, liquor down his throat.
So what people do, it's foolish.
Some of us in our efforts at evangelism
try to make sinners out of everybody in
the sense that we make everybody to be
vicious and low and wicked.
That's not true.
There are sinners who will certainly perish and
spend their eternity in hell who are nevertheless
courteous, kind, friendly gentlemen.
And you consider it a privilege to live
next door to them if you own the
little home someplace, good neighbors, thoughtful.
But they're living without a thought of God
in their minds.
Their way is a foolish way of life
because it is a godless way of life.
It's not always a morally low way of
life for there are all levels of wickedness.
But it is a way that doesn't take
God into consideration.
The Bible says it's foolish.
And it ignores reason, really.
It ignores reason for righteousness always has reason
on its side.
You can remember that.
That was one of the teachings of Plato.
That every man reasonably wanted to do the
right thing, only that men made mistakes in
deciding what the right thing was.
That was one of the basic tenets of
the great Greek thinker.
But we ignore reason.
The average man, he was thinking, of course,
because of the finer thinking people.
But the great masses of us, we don't
think too much.
But reason is always on the side of
righteousness.
When it comes to whether I should do
it this way or do it that way,
and the first way is wrong and the
second way is right, reason is always on
the side of right.
It's always illogical to do a wrong thing.
And Peter says that it's a foolish, illogical
way to live because it ignores God and
it ignores reason.
And it disregards the moral lessons of history.
It disregards the lessons that history teaches.
History has been pictured as an old fellow
with an old-fashioned quill pen writing lessons.
Well, even though history is not always accurate,
I think it was Napoleon, wasn't it, or
Voltaire that said that history was a lot
of lies agreed upon.
But that was a cynic's statement.
The truth is, there's a lot we can
learn from history.
And one thing we can learn from history
is that it's always better to be righteous,
and it's always worse to be evil, and
that to live without a thought of God
before our minds, ignoring moral reason, is a
fool's way of life.
History teaches that.
All kinds of history teaches that.
And then the sinner's way of life is
foolish because it assumes that there is no
final reckoning.
It's like the man who plunges into debt
and on into debt and on into debt,
blissfully unaware or refusing to consider that someday
he's going to have to pay up.
It's like the man or woman who dances
into the grey dawn and then steps themselves
up with liquor and all other stimulants and
work and then go and dance on into
the next dawn and beat themselves and abuse
themselves and keep that up and continue to
keep it up and fill themselves full of
narcotics and all sorts of drugs to keep
going.
They're having fun, but they're fools because they're
not considering that there's a day of reckoning.
There'll be a time when angry Mother Nature
will say, Pay up!
And the sinner's way is foolish because he
does not reckon that there's a final reckoning.
He does not believe there's a final reckoning
or if he believes it, he foolishly disregards
it and assumes that he is just going
to be able to peter out and shuffle
off this mortal coil without giving a reckoning
and accounting.
He's not.
And the way of the sinner is a
foolish way because it assumes that man is
a one-world being.
If there's anything to which I am committed,
it is that man lives on two planes,
this world and the world above, the physical
and the spiritual, the natural and the divine.
Man is not made for one world only,
he's made for two.
He's made for this world now and the
next world later.
And the sinner's way of life is, at
least takes for granted, assumes or seems to
assume, one would gather, that the way sinners
live, they don't expect to be another world
they're going to have to face.
This is all.
And they joke about this world being so
terrible because you don't get out of it
alive.
And that's all very funny but all very
tragic.
When you consider that there is another world,
but sinners act as if there wasn't.
Christian is wise because he's taken that second
world into consideration.
He's wise because he's taken into account the
fact that he must make a reckoning.
He's wise because he has taken into account
the lessons of history, the moral lessons of
history.
He's not ignored reason or ignored God, but
he's given God his right place.
He allows himself to be chastened with the
memories and knowledge of how others lived and
what they paid for wrong living.
Now it says here that this way of
life is received by tradition from our fathers.
And the power of this way of life
over us is twofold, or the power derives
from two sources.
One is that it comes to us with
the approval of the ages.
What our fathers did were inclined to think
as all right.
I remember when I was a very young
preacher, very young.
I was preaching in the state of West
Virginia up in the country.
And I hate tobacco now as much as
I did then, but I have sense enough
to know that it's only a pimple on
the body of morality and is not itself
basic, so I don't preach against tobacco, though
I hate it.
But those days I did.
That is, I attacked anything I thought didn't
look good, and tobacco was one.
And I used to really tell them that
they were dirty if they used it and
couldn't be Christians.
And do you know their response to that
kind of preaching?
It was this.
White-faced anger.
Do you mean to tell me that my
old father who smoked and chewed until he
died and my grandmother who was a Christian
and chewed, smoked a clay pipe until she
died?
Do you mean to tell me that they
perished?
They were sanctifying the ways of their parents.
And they were on the cool end of
a hot stick, that is, smoking, because I
suppose they liked the taste of it, and
because it was received by tradition from their
fathers.
It was sanctified by generation after generation of
incense burners.
And they didn't want me to say a
word about it.
Not for their sakes, but because it seemed
to be reflecting on the tradition of their
fathers.
Well, I've learned better.
That's only one more thing, and I preach
Christ now.
But anyway, I gave that as an illustration.
People will justify anything if Daddy did it.
And he says, you received this way of
life by tradition from your father.
And then the second source that this way
of life stems from, or where it gets
its power from, is that it accords with
the fallen tendencies of the human heart.
Whatever accords with the fallen tendencies of the
human heart, you always do without much trouble.
You remember the little old song they used
to sing a couple or three years ago?
Everybody was singing it.
You couldn't get into a restaurant or sit
down anywhere, but somebody would come on singing
about the grandfather who lived to be 83
doing what comes naturally.
Well, if you do what comes naturally, brother,
you'll be doing the way of the flesh,
you'll be doing that which, of course, outside
of the normal bodily functions, which is not
considered here neither by the Holy Ghost nor
certainly not by me.
For there's a certain basic physical naturalness that
even our Lord Jesus Christ had, and it's
perfectly natural to eat, it's perfectly natural to
sleep, and so on.
But I'm talking about a moral kind of
life that stems out of the fall of
nature and that it's easy to do.
It's easy for a child to lie.
I remember my first lie, and remember how
easy it was and how it got me
out of a jam.
It was Christmas, and my poor mother, God
bless her memory, she tried to always get
at least something, nothing but a popcorn ball,
something for us.
And this time, somebody dug up a Barlow
Man, maybe some of you others do.
But I got a Barlow knife, and I
thought that was wonderful.
Then when time came to go back to
school, they surrounded me and asked me what
I got for Christmas.
And I felt chagrined to tell them a
Barlow knife and nothing else.
So, I used that imagination that people tell
me I had, and I fixed myself up
with the nicest bunch of Christmas presents you've
ever heard of.
And I got out of an embarrassing position
by telling a lie.
Now, that came naturally, brother.
I didn't have to work on that.
All I had to do was just open
my mouth, and nature took its course.
And because we have these fallen tendencies, the
foolish way of life is easy for us.
It's always hard to teach a child to
be good.
Never let him alone, and he won't be
good.
You say, but my little darling is good
naturally.
Oh, you're going to be fooled one of
these days.
Your disillusionment is coming, Papa.
Your little darling is one of Adam's wild
breeds.
And if you don't teach him to be
good, he'll never be good.
You don't teach him to wash, he'd be
so dirty you'd have to fumigate him once
a week.
And if you don't teach him to tell
the truth, he'll lie to music.
We're all alike in things like that.
And the reason our children are good is
because you're good, and you're teaching them to
be good.
Don't get it wrong.
They didn't inherit any goodness.
You taught them that.
That's your credit, not theirs.
And they, in turn, by the grace of
God, may teach the next generation to be
good.
But you've got to teach people to be
good.
They'll be bad without teaching, because we receive
it from our fathers, by tradition.
And it accords with the fallen tendencies of
our heart.
The honest businessman who conducts his affairs in
an honest way is doing what he's learned
to do.
It'd be the natural thing for him to
reach out and rake in whatever he could
get his hands on.
But he's been trained and taught by religion
and morals to be a little different.
Now, it says here, from this way of
life, we are set free.
We are redeemed.
A Christian has been delivered from this way
of life, from the moral magnitude, from the
entanglements.
The best illustration I ever heard on this
was given years ago in my hearing.
It told about in midwinter in Niagara River.
Sheep had died.
I used to see sheep die in great
numbers when I was a boy on the
farm.
One thing or another, they'll get sick and
they'll die in great numbers.
Well, some of them had died upstream in
Niagara, and they'd either fallen in or been
thrown into Niagara River.
And it was very cold, very cold, but
the pestilence Niagara wasn't frozen.
And it was carrying these dead sheep over
the falls.
They said that the bald eagles would gather
and dive down and ride these carcasses and
tear at their flesh.
They said one great old eagle, one after
the other, she'd fly upstream and she'd get
down on one and tear with her talons
and pull with her great sharp beak and
get herself a mouthful of meat and gulp
it.
And then when it was about to go
over the falls, she'd leap up gracefully on
her broad wings and circle back and do
the same thing over again.
But it was getting colder.
Somebody tells the story of seeing this eagle.
Make one mistake.
She rode a little too long the last
time and her talons froze into the wool.
And when she, confident in her self-assurance,
spread her great broad wings and to take
into the air, her talons were frozen into
the wool of the sheep.
And she plunged over to her death along
with the carcass she'd been feeding on.
Somebody could have come and untangled her talons
from the wool.
It would have been a kind of redemption,
a release, that's what it means, a moral
release in our case.
And that God has provided a moral release
from the tradition of our fathers, the foolish
way of life that we see all around
about us.
And it's been done by an act of
God in redemption involving the payment of a
ransom for its moral.
It's not a physical captivity, though it has
physical implications for sinners, but it has its
legal and moral aspects.
So the ransom price had to be a
moral ransom price.
It had to be the blood of a
holy one, holy enough for God to accept.
So that moral price was paid.
And it says it was not silver nor
gold.
I were a slave in a market somewhere
in Arabia or in the Old South, and
I were worth $200 or $500, depending upon
my age and size and ability.
Someone might come with a pocket full of
gold and buy me and then set me
free.
But free with money, silver and gold.
But when your bondage is not physical but
moral, you can't buy off moral slaves with
money.
So Peter says, you were redeemed not with
silver nor gold, but with precious blood.
Brethren, we are free this morning, if we
are freed by blood most precious.
This blood of the Lamb is precious because
of what it means to God and because
of what it means and meant to our
Lord Jesus Christ, the deathless man who volunteered
to die, and of what it means and
what it did for men.
Peter calls it precious, and God doesn't use
words carelessly.
He called the blood of the Lamb precious,
and it's precious because of what it did
for men.
Two men were traveling, two men, one of
whom I knew, or at least I heard
him.
I was near to him as a young
fellow.
They were traveling through the mountain, and they
were overcome by what they call in our
West and Northwestern, one of those sudden, terrible
storms.
The temperature plunges to zero or below, and
the blizzard begins, and the wind is high.
A man, however well clothed, can simply die
in that.
He can just die.
He gets sleepy, wants to rest, and never
wakes up.
That's well known.
These two men were traveling together.
The temperature had suddenly plunged.
It was becoming so cold that it was
brutal now, and dangerous.
So they found themselves a little shelter by
a rock, or a little depression in the
rock, and they looked at each other and
said, A few hours of this, friend, and
we're finished.
Yes, the other one said, We're finished.
We can't stand this.
We'll be found dead here in the morning.
Well, one said, Do you suppose we could
start a fire?
The other one said, Let's try.
So they hurried around with their numb fingers
and got a hold of some sticks, and
then dug some leaves from the last fall
out from under the overhanging rock, cut themselves
a few little shavings, and they went to
their matches, very few and very precious.
One after the other blew out in the
breeze.
They gathered around, cupped their hands, did all
that woodmen do, and the swift wind blew
out one after the other.
The last match was gone and no fire.
One of them said, Do you suppose that
we could find a match somewhere in our
clothing?
So they searched.
Nothing in this pocket.
Breathless.
Nothing in this one.
Nothing here.
Each one searched.
Nothing.
Finally, in the, what do you call this,
hemp of one of the coats, a fellow
felt a little hard thing, not very long.
He said, I wonder.
Ripped it with a knife, cut it.
It was a match about a third as
long as a match would be, but it
had a head on it.
He said, I held this little match head
with a third of the match still on
it, broken match up, and I said, Bill,
do you know the most precious thing in
the world?
Yes, he said, that match.
He said, if it holds and catches, we
live.
If it fails to catch, we die.
So they redoubled their efforts.
Struck it carefully.
It leaped up.
The ragged edge of a dead leaf caught,
and then another, and then another, then the
shavings, then the sticks, and then the wood.
Pretty soon they had a beautiful fire.
The searchers that found them days later found
them well, because that precious little thing held.
Brethren, everything had been tried.
To save you and me from death, everything
had been tried.
Every kind of sacrifice.
Every kind of ascetic practice.
Self-immolation.
Everything had been tried.
Everything blew out in the morrowing.
When a man walked in Galilee, and he
had in his veins only a small amount
of blood.
I should have checked on how much blood
we had.
Somebody tell me.
Not much.
The average-sized human being.
Possibly a gallon.
Wasn't much in the great pool of human
blood.
But brethren, if that didn't work, we died.
It worked.
The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth
from all sin.
For as much as we know that we
are redeemed, not with silver nor gold, but
with that precious blood of Jesus Christ.
I wonder how many of us know how
precious their blood is that we celebrate today.
I don't wish to browbeat you or take
a superior attitude and lecture.
I walked onto this platform this morning almost
painfully conscious how unworthy I am to talk
about this precious blood or to have any
share in Holy Communion.
But it's only by the preciousness of the
blood that any of us are able or
worthy to be considered at all by the
kind eye of God.
And it's only that knowledge that gives me
courage to officiate at a communion service or
to talk about this Holy Blood.
So I do not say you should repent.
I say we should repent.
Pastor, the associate pastor, we should approach this
morning in broken humility, tenderness of humility, and
think about that precious blood.
If it had failed us, we'd have died.
But God raised him from the dead and
set him at his own right hand.
He took that precious blood and sprinkled it
on the judgment seat.
And that judgment seat is a mercy seat
now.
He didn't fail us.
It's precious.
Let's approach with brokenness of humility and we'll
find in the communion, as our fathers used
to say, the medicine of immortality.
God, we pray thy blessing upon us.
O Lamb of God, we love thee so.
We would with thee life's journey go.
We pray thou will help us this morning.
Hurt and humbled by our own unworthiness, the
knowledge and haunting memories of sins committed in
the past, but by thy grace at the
moment we have no wish to sin.
We wish only to love thee and live
as we should.
So please help us now.
For Jesus' sake.
Brethren, we'll now gather while we sing.