As you are aware, I am bringing sermons
from 1 Peter every Sunday morning.
We are now in the second chapter, for
I spoke last week on laying aside all
malice and guile and hypocrisies and envies and
evil speakings, as newborn babes desire the sincere
milk of the word that she may grow
thereby.
Then he continues without pause, If so be
ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious
to whom coming as unto a living storm,
disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God
and precious.
Ye also, as lively stones, are built up
a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, to
offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by
Jesus Christ.
I think those three verses will be enough
for the morning.
Beginning with, If so be ye have tasted
that the Lord is gracious.
Now, what he has to say following rests
upon the, If ye have tasted that the
Lord is gracious.
One great error that we make in coming
to the Bible is to assume that because
a thing is true, it is true of
us.
If it is in the Bible, it is
true.
But the error is to assume that it
is true of us.
It is not necessarily always so.
Even that which follows the truth of God,
Peter conditions upon the little word, If, and
says, If ye have tasted, then what I
say from here is applicable to you.
But if you have not tasted, then you
should go back and taste before you go
any further.
This is required of us to be called
New Testament Christians at all, that we have
tasted the good word of God and the
powers of the world to come, that we
have tasted that the Lord is gracious.
I want that word tasted to mean what
it means in the Bible, and not what
it means when we mean we experiment.
We mean that we test the thing by
putting it to the tongue, as a woman
tests her cooking.
They used to, I don't know whether they
still do, but they used to test their
soup with a little spoon taste of it
to see if it was salty enough and
was all right.
I suppose that's ordinary.
But that's never what the Bible means, to
test the thing to see if it's all
right.
With no intention, maybe, of eating it, maybe
never going on to eat it at all,
but at least knowing what it's like.
Now that is not what the Bible means.
We have only to look it up in
its original and find that the word taste
here means experienced, lived through.
In order that a thing may be real
to us and everlastingly ours, it must be
experienced, it must be lived through.
Now that same word tasted that Peter uses
here, the precise word is used about our
Savior in the book of Hebrews.
It says that Jesus was made a little
lower than the angels, that he by the
grace of God should taste death for every
man.
Now those who teach the tasting doctrine ought
to give this some attention here.
If the word taste in the New Testament
means tested with the tongue to see if
we like it or not, then that's all
Jesus did with death.
For the same word is used, that he
tasted death for every man.
So you see, my brethren, the word taste
here does not mean experiment, try it by
a touch.
But it means experienced, gone through, encountered, passed
into and through.
And that's exactly what happened to our Lord
when he died on the cross.
He did not experiment with death and see
whether he liked it, taste it to see
whether he dared go on, but he threw
himself recklessly out and gave himself to die
and experience death in the fullest sense of
that word.
These believers had experienced, and they had experienced
not the grace of God only, but that
the Lord was gracious.
I do not want to split hairs, I
never was much of a hair splitter.
But where there is a difference, we ought
to note that difference and distinguish things that
differ in the language of Paul.
Here I do note a difference.
He does not say, if so be that
you have tasted of the grace of God,
but he says, if so be that you
have tasted that the Lord is gracious.
There is a difference between testing or tasting
or even experiencing the word of God or
the grace of God and experiencing the gracious
God.
There is a difference there, my brethren.
We never should separate a gift from the
source of the gift.
We never should say, I have forgiveness.
We should say, God has forgiven.
We never should say, I have eternal life.
We should say, God has given me eternal
life and Christ is my life.
The point there is that God does not
divorce himself from his gifts.
He gives himself in whatever he gives.
If a man has been forgiven, what has
happened to him is that God, the forgiving
God, has touched him and thus forgiven him.
But it is God that matters more than
the forgiveness.
If a man has eternal life, it is
that he might know Jesus Christ, God the
Father and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.
That word know is experienced there again.
So that we must be careful that we
do not divorce God's gifts from God himself.
I think that is what is wrong with
us in our day.
We have the gifts of God, but we
forget that we are the God of the
gifts.
There is a difference between noble, strong, vigorous
and satisfying spiritual experience and the other kind
of spiritual experience which takes the gifts of
God but forgets the giver.
A most ignoble example is found in the
Gospels, where ten lepers came to Jesus and
were healed of their leprosy.
They did receive healing and they were delivered.
The old spots went away, the old sores
disappeared, the old symptoms were gone.
There were ten healthy men, and with this
new gift of health they all started away.
Nine of them kept right on going, satisfied
with the gift of health.
But the tenth one happened to remember that
he had received a gift from the giver,
and his eyes went from the gift to
the giver, and he came back humbly and
thanked the Lord Jesus.
And Christ said, sadly, where are the nine?
The others were satisfied with the gift, but
one came back to get better acquainted with
the giver.
It was Campbell Morgan who said, We ought
never in our gospel preaching to offer men
peace.
We ought never in our gospel preaching to
offer men repose from their conscience.
We ought never to offer them anything short
of life.
And I repeat that we should never divorce
any gift we offer to men.
We never should divorce it from the giver.
We should hold it for the giver, as
we sing.
So that he did not say, Ye have
tasted the grace of God, though they had.
But he said, You have tasted that the
Lord is gracious, and that is quite something
else again.
Our selfish praying when we come to God
with a long grocery list and petition God
to do this and do this and do
this and do this, and if God answers
our prayers, then we cross it off and
go on down to the next list, and
so on we go.
It seems to me that it is very
saddening to the heart of God to be
thus used as a convenience.
It seems to me that the Lord Jesus
must be very heavy hearted at times when
he finds his redeemed people more taken up
with the redemption than they are with the
redeemer.
His forgiven people more taken up with forgiveness
than they are with the forgiver.
His living people, of whom he has given
life, more taken up with the life than
they are with the life giver.
We ought in our preaching and teaching and
personal experience to make a strong return to
God himself, to the person of God.
In fact, I am not sure, but we
could condense everything that we want into sentences
beginning with God or having God in it
somewhere.
God is, God is present, God loves, God's
word, God's Holy Spirit, God's Messiah, everything begins
and ends and continues with God.
Now, he said, if ye have tasted and
experienced that the Lord is gracious, your experience
has been with the gracious Lord unto whom
coming.
Now, this was true of them as it's
true of all real Christians everywhere.
I give you four prepositions.
I am not unmindful of the fact that
I sometimes poke good-natured fun at the
prepositional preaching.
But I give you four prepositions, inconsistent or
not, as you like.
You know what Emerson said about consistency?
He said it was a hobgoblin of little
minds adored by statesmen, something else, and divines.
So we'll throw it aside and point out
four prepositions here.
First, they came out, and then they came
away, and then they came together, and then
they came unto.
They're not in that order, probably, and they
didn't do it together.
They might have come one at a time
or two at a time.
But taken all together, these four things can
be said about these Christians.
First of all, they came out of the
world.
We are now trying to take the world
into the Church, sanctify it, baptize it, anoint
it, and try to hide its skulls and
crossbones.
I preached last night to a Baptist men's
fellowship on the north side.
Four hundred and eight men were there, and
I talked to them about coming out and
separating ourselves from the world.
Not this sermon, certainly.
But I did introduce the idea there, and
I repeat it to you now, that there
must be a coming out.
Israel had to come out of Egypt before
she could come into Palestine.
Always Abraham had to come out before he
could come in, and so with everybody else.
There must be a coming out.
And any kind of Christianity, however orthodox it
may sound, that does not major on the
doctrine of coming out, that is, coming out
of the world, is inadequate and imperfect.
And then after the word out, we have
the word away.
They came away from the old life.
Whatever that old life might have been to
one person, it is one thing.
To another, it is another.
But whatever it is, the old life, we
come away from when we come to Jesus
Christ, to taste the good grace of God
and that the Lord is gracious.
There must be a coming away from the
old life.
And then, naturally, there is a coming unto
Christ.
That, after all, is what the gospel is.
It is a coming unto Christ.
And then there is the word together, a
coming together, that is, they are coming unto
each other.
As we gather unto Christ, naturally, we gather
unto each other.
And the nearer we get to Christ, naturally,
the nearer we get to each other.
So that the way to get Christians together
is not to form some kind of a
political united front.
The way to get them together is to
bring them close to Jesus Christ.
Just as if we had something down here
at the front of the church, some curio
or missionary exhibit, and I wanted to get
you all together, closer together even than you
are now, and I invited you to come
down and see it.
Well, as you came unto it, you would
come unto each other.
And the closer you got to it, the
closer you would be to each other until
finally shoulder would touch shoulder.
And you would be pushing close together to
see this exhibit.
So when we come unto Christ, it is
automatic that we come unto each other.
That is why I have never been able
to understand this monkish hermetic, if I might,
I don't know such a word.
There ought to be, and there is now.
But this word that covers the idea of
going off by yourself to be a Christian.
There are people like that.
They are antisocial, or rather unsocial, in this
position.
So they do not like the fellowship of
the Saints.
I remind you, my friend, that if you
heard Jesus is, you are surrounded by Jesus'
people.
And therefore we ought to make the fellowship
of the Church the biggest thing in our
lives.
And I'd like to say right here, at
the risk of hurting somebody, for that isn't
too important after all, it may hurt a
little, but it may do some good, that
the important thing in the world today is
the presence of an invisible spiritual entity called
the Church.
And the Holy Ghost never works outside that
entity, or through that entity in some manner
or other.
That is why I'm a Church man.
I'm going to preach this week at a
Bible school, or Bible college it is now,
and I believe in them, of course.
But I remember a Bible school president that
once smiled good-naturedly and sort of kiddingly
to me, and he said, You're Church-minded,
you're not school-minded.
How could a minister of the Church of
Christ become school-minded?
A school is simply an instrument with a
temporary value which may for a time serve
a purpose.
But it is not the school, he said,
I did not say on this school I
will build my Church, or take the very
many laymen's organization.
I do not say but what they have
some value in the world, I believe they
do.
But remember, they get their value from the
Church.
And if God works in them at all,
he works through his Church.
It is the Church, the group that comes
together under him.
Whether they're red or yellow, black or white,
whether they lived in the first century or
the twentieth, the coming together under Christ makes
the Church.
It's a called-out assembly.
So those four words, they came out of
the world, they came away from the old
life, they came unto Christ, and they came
together relative to each other.
Now he says, You have come unto Christ
as unto a living stone.
Now this is a frequent Bible passage or
a Bible figure, this stone or rock as
it's sometimes called.
And it almost invariably, if not invariably, refers
to a building.
I think there may be a few places
where Paul or David uses it as a
great craggy rock where he hides.
But for the most part, the figure has
to do with a building.
And because the Jews were a God-conscious
people, their thought ran to a temple building.
I think somebody ought to write about this
or talk about it for the Church and
make the people of God see that the
Jewish nation above all nations of the world
were a God-conscious nation.
America is not a God-conscious nation, we're
a secular people.
We have what the Bible calls a profane
mind.
And even those who may toss God a
sock when making a political speech to get
the votes of the religious-minded people, if
you probe in far enough, for the most
part you'll find that our leadership is composed
of secular-minded people.
I don't use the word in a wrong
sense, but in the sense that Esau was
secular-minded.
This world was the point of interest for
the man, and that's all right, provided that
we have another and higher interest.
But Esau didn't have it, and the nation
of America doesn't have it much.
But Israel had it.
Israel, in fact, had nothing else.
Have you forgotten that Israel had no civil
laws at all?
The day was in England when she had
two sets of laws, the ecclesiastical laws and
the civil laws.
Whether that's still true, I don't know, but
they did for many centuries.
And a man could be tried before the
civil law, and then turned loose and tried
before the ecclesiastical law.
The Church could try a man for certain
offenses, and the civil law for certain other
offenses.
And there were two kinds of officers, civil
officers and ecclesiastical officers.
And there were two worlds within worlds mingling
there, wheels within wheels.
But not so in Israel.
Israel had no civil officers.
Israel had no civil law.
Israel had no code, no code of jurisprudence.
Israel had no statutes on her books except
those that were of God.
The Bible was her code of law, and
her priests and were her officials, and her
high priest her leader, and her king anointed
of God was her ruler, so that Israel
was a sacred nation, a people who were
God-conscious more than any people that have
ever lived in the world.
There never has been a nation as God
-conscious as Israel, so that Israel's science was
all God-founded.
We turn the telescope into the heavens now,
and we look at the stars.
And we separate the stars from the God
who made them, and we have astronomy.
We dig in the rocks and we have
geology.
And we monkey with the little flying microscopic
or submicroscopic matter, and we have physics.
So we separate nature from God, but Israel
never knew how to do that.
God was everything.
If an Israelite looked at a hill, it
was God's hill.
If he looked at a tree, the tree
clapped its hands.
If he looked at it raining, it was
God who sent the rain, so a Jew
never complained.
He said, It's miserable weather, isn't it?
God sent that rain, and God was in
everything, so that when a figure of speech
occurred, it was a divine figure of speech.
And when they talked about a rock and
a stone, they were talking about a building
that was a temple building.
Now, they had a temple building there, of
course.
But it was composed of dead stones laid
one upon another.
They were hewn out and then laid one
upon another and joined to each other by
cutting and mortaring, and that was a dead
temple.
And God knew it was a dead temple,
and the only living thing in it was
the shekinah that dwelt between the wings of
the golden cherubim.
The temple itself was a dead thing, and
our Lord knew it, pointed to its stones
and said, There will be a time when
everything, all that you see, will fall to
the ground and be no more.
Passed over, and they even plowed the place
where the temple had been.
That's because it was a dead temple.
But this new temple under which we are
come, this new temple is composed of living
stones, and it is a living temple, and
its cornerstone is Christ, and its stones are
redeemed men and women who are alive by
the gift of eternal life.
He says he also, our living stones, just
a side here, not a part of the
sermon, but just for your ecclesiastical education, I
might point out that this King James Version,
which is supposed to be always inerrant, makes
a cute little mistake here.
It says that ye are come unto Christ,
the living stones, and ye are lively stones.
I wonder why the translators did that, because
in the Greek it's exactly the same word.
Both words mean living.
But when the translators were translating 340-some
years ago, the word living and lively almost
meant the same thing, but they don't now.
Lively means know what your boy is, hopping
around, never in one place twice.
Like the Irishman was sent out to count
the chickens.
He came back and said there were 37
and one that he couldn't count.
It traveled around too fast.
That's what the word lively means.
It means moving about so rapidly you can't
get it in one place long enough to
count it.
But that word lively has lost its meaning.
It doesn't mean what it meant back there.
It says the same thing about the Church
member as it says about the head of
the Church, Jesus Christ.
He is the living stone, and the members
that make up the great temple are also
living stones.
There is a plural and a singular, but
there is no difference in the adjective itself.
Now, Israel had a dead temple, and because
Israel had a dead temple made of dead
stones, she couldn't use a living stone when
she found one, and for that reason he
was disallowed in deed of men.
Israel could not use Jesus Christ when he
came.
He was the headstone, the living headstone of
a new kind of temple.
Not one more stone to go in the
old temple, but the headstone of a new
kind of temple.
They looked at that stone and the builder
shook their heads and said, He doesn't fit
anywhere.
We've got our temple, there it stands, stone
upon stone, tear upon tear, stone upon stone,
stone joined to stone, and it's got a
top on it and it's there and it
is set with beautiful jewels.
And they said, Where does this man fit
in?
Jesus Christ could not fit into Israel, and
so Israel rejected him and crucified him, because
he wasn't shaped right.
He was the stone that was to be
the guiding stone for the new temple to
come, and he didn't fit into the old
temple at all.
But nevertheless, God says that he was chosen
and precious.
Look at this stone.
I think that it begins way back there
when Jacob had that sleep in the wilderness.
I will never know, until I die, and
am able to question Jacob himself why he
wanted a stone for a pillow.
He took up of the stones of that
place and set them for his pillows.
I don't know why he would use a
stone for a pillow, but he did.
And when he saw that vision, he waked
out of his sleep and turned that stone
over, stood it on end, and anointed it,
and it was called Bethel, the house of
God.
Then when Israel had come out of Egypt
and had gone into the wilderness and were
traveling about those forty years, that same stone,
says the Holy Ghost, followed them.
If it was not exactly the same chunk
of rock, it was at least the same
symbol, the same figure, following through.
So one day they were thirsty, and Moses
smoked the rock, and they all drank out
of that same rock, at least symbolically, upon
which Jacob had laid his head, and which
he anointed and called Bethel.
Then when our Lord came, he said that
if you fall upon this rock, you shall
be saved, and it worked to that effect.
But if it falls upon you, you will
be crushed to death.
And that was the same stone.
He said, On this rock I will build
my church, and let men say that, Peter,
if they want to.
But every figure, every type, every symbolism, every
suggestion, every simile in the whole Bible indicates
that that rock was none other than Jesus
Christ himself.
And then in Daniel we read of the
rock of the stone that was cut out
of the mountain without hands at the second
coming of Jesus, when he comes back to
put down Communists and Fascists and all the
rest, and to rule in the earth.
So there is our Savior, the rock.
Now, what is the function of the house
which is built around this new rock?
In contrast, I have said, with the Old
Testament temple.
In that, the Old Testament temple was made
of stones that were dead, and the New
Testament made of spiritual stones that are alive.
And the priests of the old temple walked
into the temple and performed the functions of
their office.
But the priests of the New Testament are
the temple.
There is the difference.
We have a movable, portable temple, a temple
made of living human beings, and every one
of those beings a priest in his own
right.
That is why we do not need father
or somebody.
We have a priest, and that is why
we do not go off to some telephone
booth and sit and tell some old, unmarried
fellow about our troubles, because we are priests
in our own right, and we have a
great high priest at the right hand of
God.
And this temple of which we are a
part is a temple of priests, so that
we do not need to have anybody run
interference for us when we go into the
presence of God.
We can come straight to Jesus Christ ourselves.
They tell us, poor misguided friends, that Jesus
is too great and wonderful that we cannot
go to him, but we can go to
his mother and she can go to him.
We do not have any pull with Jesus,
but she has, and if we get to
her and get her here, she will go
and have a talk with Jesus, and then
it will be all right.
We do not need her, my brethren.
She has performed her function, this lovely little
Jewish lady.
She brought into the world the man Christ
Jesus and gave him a body which was
later offered as a sacrifice on Calvary, and
she did her function when she brought him
up and fed him at her breast and
looked after him and loved him until he
was a man.
Then she passed out of the picture, filled
the horizon of believing men.
But in our day this is the Marian
year, and they are doing everything possible to
make Jesus little and Mary big.
I am dedicated forever and ever to the
magnification of Jesus Christ and making everybody else,
including Mary, small by comparison.
So we are priests, and we need no
other priest to help us.
This temple is a shrine where God dwells,
and in that temple we offer not goats,
not lambs, not doves, but spiritual sacrifices, says
Peter, loving service and praise and song and
worship.
You know, the critics call us psalm singers.
They call the old Scotsmen.
People have said, a bunch of Sam-singing
Scotsmen.
Oh, my brethren, those Sam-singing Scotsmen have
made their mark in the world, I am
telling you.
And our forebears who walked the rugged shores
of New England and who stamped America with
their noble character once, they were Sam-singers
too.
They met in little groups, log buildings dedicated
to worship, and there they sung psalms and
offered the fruits of their lips praises unto
God.
But they didn't stop there.
They shouldered their axe and went out and
felled a forest and established cities and built
a civilization the like of which the world
had never known.
Those psalm-singing Puritans, God hears psalms when
they are sung in his name and for
his glory.
They are offering up psalms to our Lord,
and psalms and spiritual melodies in the Holy
Ghost.
And the critical, cynical world sees us come,
close our eyes and talk to someone we
can't see and say, What's it all about?
We answer, This is the temple of God,
dedicated to the God of the temple.
And we, the priests of the temple, sing
these psalms to God the unseen, make our
prayers to God the unseen, though unseen he
is real and though unseen he is nigh.
And we are not such fools as the
world would make us out to be.
Now, I'm almost finished.
He says that these praises and songs and
spiritual sacrifices are acceptable to God.
He accepted the cornerstone, he accepted the living
stones which are gathered to the cornerstone to
make a temple for the Holy Ghost, and
he accepts the service that is brought in
that temple and performed in that shrine.
You haven't wasted the morning, brethren.
You haven't simply followed a custom like mistletoe
and wreaths at Christmas.
You've done an act, you've performed an act
that God accepts through Jesus Christ.
If you've really prayed this morning, if you've
really sung a true psalm this morning, if
you have made your gifts out of the
love of God this morning, you go away
and you have nothing to show for it,
certainly.
And the world laughs and says you have
nothing to show for it.
But remember, not every precious thing shows the
same time it's received.
Remember, there is a time when the invisible
things will be the only real things, and
the visible world shall dissolve in smoke and
pass away, and God will roll them up
as a garment and as a vesture, they
shall be chained.
But the invisible things of God from the
creation which we have in Christ Jesus will
continue as real as heaven itself forever and
forever.
Now, if this is true for you, he
says, if so be that ye have tasted,
if so be that ye have experienced, that
the Lord is gracious.
I repeat, a thing may be true, but
not true of me.
So the most vital thing to settle, you
religious-minded people, the most vital thing to
settle is not the truths of the scriptures,
for these have been established beyond perventure, world
without end.
The scriptures are already established by two immutable
things, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead and the downcoming of the Holy
Ghost.
Everything hinges on Jesus Christ.
The truth of the whole word of God
rests on the shoulders of Mary's Holy Son.
And if he failed us, the whole thing
collapses around our ears.
If he is who he said he was,
and rises from the dead, then he supports
all the rest of the Bible itself.
That's why I'm not afraid of modernists and
critics and hierocritics and fault-finders and cynics.
That's why I'm not worried about Jonah and
the whale.
I've never spent five minutes in my life
trying to decide whether a whale could swallow
Jonah or not.
If God Almighty could make a whale that
would swallow not only Jonah, but the whole
ship and men that were thrown in.
The point isn't whether Jonah was swallowed by
a whale.
The point is, what did Jesus Christ say
about it?
He said, as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the belly of the whale,
so shall the Son of Man be three
days in the bowels of the earth.
He tied himself up with the truth of
the story.
Therefore, the Jonah story is true because the
truth said it was.
So, your business is not to determine whether
the Bible is true or not.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ and his ascension
to the right hand of God and the
down-coming Holy Ghost forever takes apologetics out
of the hands of men and puts it
in the hands of the Spirit.
And we know the Bible is true not
by long, painful reasonings.
We know it is true by a flash
of inspiration from the throne and from the
Holy Ghost who brings the flash.
So your big problem isn't whether the Bible
is true, brother.
Your big problem is whether it's true in
you.
It isn't whether the Bible is true, but
it's whether these things are true in me.
The old German poet said, Though Christ a
thousand times in Bethlehem be born, he is
not born again in me, for thee thy
heart is still forlorn.
If I were a poet, I'd add some
more stanzas, and I think he did.
Schaeffler added some more.
I think Schaeffler added some more, which I
can't quote verbatim, but they run something like
this, that if Christ died a thousand times
on a cross, we do not accept and
receive he died in vain as far as
we're concerned.
Though the Bible be the very rock of
God's Gibraltar, if it isn't true in us,
it's vain as far as we're concerned.
So what we need to do today, brethren,
is not to go home and overeat and
sit around the logie and look at television.
What we need to do today would be
to go home and eat modestly, and then
some of us at least ought to go
to our rooms, open our Bible, get down
on our knees and say, Oh God, are
these things true in me?
You know, you can be an awfully nice
person and still not be a true Christian.
I told my Swedish friends last night, my
good Baptist friends, there were only four of
us foreigners there that we knew of.
Myself, Scotsman, an Irishman, and another man unidentified,
I think English.
Outside of that they were all native.
But I told them that I like Swedes,
they're all nice people, but you can be
an awfully nice person and not be born
again.
You can be an awfully nice religious person
and never have tasted that the Lord is
gracious.
Oh, my friends, let's not waste this, what
is it, 27th day?
Whatever it is, let's not waste this holy
day.
Let's search our own hearts.
Let's see for ourselves if these things be
so in us.
We don't need to see if they be
so.
I repeat, a resurrected Savior and a down
-coming Holy Ghost confirming forever the fact the
Bible's true.
But is it true in us?
That's the big question.
And I want you to take it home
with you.
Search yourself and ask in the light of
God's revealed truth, oh, God, I believe this,
but is it true in me?
If it isn't, it can be.
Faith and repentance can make it real in
your heart.