The opening 18 verses of John 1 are
such that anyone sensitive to the truth contained
there is in danger, in attempting
to preach on these verses, he's in danger
of dying of a kind of spiritual suffocation.
I find it so in these opening verses.
I want to read a few verses and
then talk from the phrase in the beginning.
In the beginning was the Word and the
Word was with God and the Word was
God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him and without
him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life and the life was
the light of man.
And the light shineth in darkness and the
darkness comprehended it not.
Now all the excuse I have for the
message I want to attempt tonight is contained
in a famous line by a Pope, that
fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
No man ought to try to preach on
the phrase in the beginning, and yet it
is here.
And so to begin with I want to
ask you to do something that is virtually
impossible.
I'm going to ask you to do that
which is equivalent to standing in a market
basket, reaching down, taking hold of the handles,
and lifting yourself up on the table.
Now I'm going to ask you to do
that tonight.
That would be impossible and what I'm intending
to ask would be impossible, except that when
God made the human mind, he made a
wonderfully flexible and resilient instrument, capable regularly of
doing things that can't be done.
So that while it would be impossible physically
for you to stand in the basket and
lift yourself onto the table, it is not
impossible for you to do what I intend
to ask.
And I'm going to pay the compliment to
your intellect to believe that you can do
it, and then I'm going to have and
do have confidence in your spiritual hunger to
believe that you want to do it.
To believe that you are not satisfied with
religious toys, that you actually come to church
to gear in to deity and meet God
and hear from the world above.
Now what I'm going to ask you to
do is this.
I'm going to ask you to think everything
out of existence.
I'm going to ask you to go along
with me and dismantle the universe, to take
it down stone upon stone and hurl it
into nothing, and unmake everything that is made.
And in doing this, I'll not be acting
the part of a fool or playing with
the truth, but I'll be only trying to
get back to where my text begins.
So I want you to think away everything
with which you're familiar.
A time, for instance, this rolling stream of
time.
I want you deliberately to get a hold
of the handles of the basket and lift
yourself up and say to yourself, there was
a time when time wasn't.
And because our language is so limited, we
have to use a word that we're trying
to get rid of to tell you to
get rid of the word.
So we'll have to say that we want
you to think of a time when time
was not.
And then we want you to think away
space.
That used to be that a half a
mile was quite a distance and two miles
was quite a journey for an old horse.
And now we have telescope space.
Until we can get around pretty rapidly, they're
going to come over from London, they tell
me, and their new British jet planes in
how long?
Four or five hours.
They've already done it.
And that makes space look pretty small.
But I want you to think away and
dismantle that idea and break it down and
get it out of your head and say
there's no space.
There isn't any such a thing as space,
that there isn't any.
And there isn't any such a thing as
time.
And there isn't any such a thing as
matter, that familiar matter that one of its
attributes is impenetrability.
I strike it with my knuckles and it
stops me.
That's matter.
It has many forms.
But I want you to think of the
timeless time before space was when there wasn't
any matter.
There wasn't anything in the universe.
There wasn't any of those little things that
they're breaking down now to make the atom
bomb.
There weren't any.
They just didn't exist.
They weren't there.
And I want you to think away of
all beings and all created things and then
think yourself away and then go back to
the void and then think the void away.
Now, to raise this, I want you to
get in a rocket ship with me and
race backwards, not in space but in time.
Race backwards in time and as we race
backwards in time from 1953, we'll get rid
of a lot of things.
And the latest things, of course, will disappear
first.
Just as when you get in a plane
and soar upward, the closest things necessarily are
the ones that disappear first.
And then as you go up and up
and up, you get the general skeletal outline
of things.
But in time now, as we move backward
in time away from this present moment, we
first get rid of a lot of things
that I'm not so sure it wouldn't be
a pretty good idea to get rid of
anyway.
I don't know about that.
That would take another lecture or a lecturer
to take care of it.
But if there was a debate, I think
I'd know whose side I was on.
I want you to think away every city,
dismantle them all.
Let's get rid of London and Berlin and
Tokyo and New York and Chicago and every
city that there is.
And then let's think out of existence also
every bridge and every highway and every famous
hotel and every ship and every train and
every automobile.
And I say those are the things I'm
not so sure it might not be a
pretty good idea to get rid of anyway.
An old man would be considered a heretic
for even daring to say that.
But Adam and Eve didn't do so bad
when there wasn't any automobile to get around
the Garden Inn and when there weren't any
ships to ride the sea and run away
from their Edenic home.
They didn't do so bad when there was
only a bower with the moon shining through
to bless them as they slept.
They didn't do so bad when there wasn't
any highway to get killed on or any
city to get lost in.
They just lived and loved and knew God
wasn't so bad back there.
So there's a case to be made for
it, but that isn't our purpose tonight.
And I want you to think clear back
down the years would be something of an
adventure for the mind to think back of
the time when Columbus discovered America when there
wasn't anybody over here but Indians.
They had this whole hunk of land we
call the North American continent from Hudson Bay
country to the Rio Grande.
They had it all and nobody was bothering
them.
Then think back to that, the cave builders
and the back of that to the day
when Abraham walked in Ur of the Chaldees
and on back of that yet to the
time when there was just Adam and Eve.
Think it all away.
There isn't anything now but Adam and Eve
and then we go back to Adam and
Eve and think them out of existence.
They don't exist either.
We're talking about in the beginning tonight.
And then when we've gone back of Adam
and Eve and have depopulated the earth and
taken away every bone and every marker and
every track and trace and every leaf and
blade of grass and everything that is the
earth.
And then we begin on the stars that
jut and jot down out of the heavens.
They're like pinpoints and we get rid of
every one of them for there was a
day when they were not and we're wanting
to go back there tonight.
As we race onward backward through time we
have many stars now.
The moon is not and the sun is
not and the stars are not.
And then we go to heaven itself and
there is then no sea of glass and
no archangels and no seraphim and no angels
and no cherubim and no four square city
and no anything just the void.
And that is what it means when it
says in the beginning.
And do you know what you would have
found there then when you came to that
place?
You would have found God.
For it's that I am and there is
no other.
And Moses when you go to Pharaoh go
and say I am that I am sent
you.
So that there before the beginning, not in
the beginning, but before the beginning there was
God.
Now God had no beginning.
I gave a series some years ago in
which I mentioned that.
That God had no beginning because beginning is
a creature word.
And it means that somebody was working on
something.
He started to work on it.
He worked a while and he finished it.
And it had a beginning and then it
had a finish.
And that's a creature word but God is
not a creature.
God's the creator.
So that you never can say that God
had a beginning for he never had any.
God could not receive anything from anybody because
God had all there was.
You see that?
Now I want you just to stop and
kick that idea around a little while.
Brother it may give you a charley horse
in your head but it'll do you a
lot of good.
It'll be worth more to you than the
latest chorus that rolled off the press Friday.
And it'll do you a lot more good
than that cheap brown track that somebody wants
to sell you on.
Although I give like tracks myself.
But as a ruler cheap and brown.
And I want you to get back of
it all and way back to where God
was.
And find there that God is the uncaused
one.
Everything around here has a cause.
This building is here because.
The woman's reason, because.
And it's here because there were some people
who prayed.
It is here because it's caused by something.
And or someone.
It's here because there were a group of
adventurous and faithful brethren who believed it could
be put here.
It was here because there were some Swedish
gentlemen who lay brick on brick.
And brick on brick.
And rubbed snooze and laid brick on brick.
And finally the building was here.
That's the cause of it.
And everything else has a cause.
You have a cause and I have a
cause.
Everything is the effect of some cause.
Until we have gone into our machine and
gone back where there was nothing and no
one only God.
Where there was not a creature stirring, not
an angel, nothing.
And there you have causeless existence.
Self-sufficient, uncreated, unborn, unmade.
You simply have God.
Now I say that if God received anything
from anybody then he'd be in debt to
the people that he received it from.
But because God is all, God never received
anything from anybody.
Some of us lay a ten dollar bill
in the plate with a triumphant bounce.
As much as saying, now God will feel
better.
God doesn't need your ten dollars, brother.
He just doesn't need it.
Now that hurts some of you.
Some of you think you've been bailing God
out every Sunday morning by giving to the
offering.
Say, well poor God's in bad shape and
no doubt there's a depression in heaven.
But if I give faithfully, I'll save God's
face and I'll bail God out.
God doesn't need your money, brother.
He doesn't need a dime of your money.
And if you want to keep it and
let it rust and ruin you, keep it.
But don't think if you give it that
you're doing God the favor.
God doesn't need anything you have.
God says, if I had need of anything
would I tell you?
No, if God had need of anything he'd
be ashamed to tell us because he wouldn't
be God.
And God to be God has to have
no need of anything.
God doesn't need an angel.
And don't ever imagine that the archangels and
seraphim and angels over in heaven are God
Almighty's little helpers, that he created them in
order that he might get along.
As a farmer might hire ten hired men
to help him in harvest time so he
wouldn't get stuck and the rains wouldn't catch
his grain in the head.
God doesn't need anybody.
I know that God had himself a wonderful,
glorious time in creating the universe to admire
and to admire him.
But God doesn't need anything because, you see,
when you give God anything, you only give
what God gave you in the first place.
And every gift that anybody ever gave God,
God never got any richer by receiving it.
And when God gives anything, he's never any
poorer for giving it.
If you give ten dollars out of a
hundred, you have ninety left and you're ten
dollars poorer.
But when God gives anything, God does not
lose it.
He gives it without separating himself from it.
He gives it without loss and he receives
back without gain, because God is all and
takes in everything anyhow.
So that God never received anything from anybody,
that is God.
Not in the beginning, but before the beginning,
because it says that in the beginning God
created.
But we're concerned with that which the Bible
calls before the foundation of the world tonight,
for the moment.
So I would point out further that God
doesn't need his creation.
That if he needed anything, he wouldn't be
omnipotent.
If God needed strength, he wouldn't be omnipotent.
And if he wasn't omnipotent, he couldn't be
God.
And if he needed counsel, he couldn't be
sovereign, because he therefore wouldn't be, he wouldn't
have his sovereignty.
And if he needed wisdom, he couldn't be
omniscient.
And if he needed support, he couldn't be
self-existent.
God has to be utterly self-existent, self
-created, and yet not created.
Uncreated is a better word.
And self-existent, that's to be accurate, rather
than the other phrase that slipped out.
And that is God.
Now you've got God to deal with, ladies
and gentlemen.
All this little business you got around about
you, little churches and little preachers and little
editors and little authors and little writers and
little singers and little musicians and little elders
and little deacons and little tape recorders and
little radios and little cities and little statesmen
and little Sir Winston and little General Eisenhower
and little, and we're so smothered under the
little dusts of grain that make up the
world and time and space and organize as
I'd matter, that we're likely to forget that
God once lived and dwelt and loved and
existed without support and without help and without
creation, self-existent God.
Now Faber celebrates God's self-existence and all
in some lines which, because I've got too
many things to think about to memorize, I
want to read to you a few lines
to you.
He says, When heaven and earth were yet
unmade, when time was yet unknown, thou in
thy bliss and majesty didst live and love
alone.
Thou wert not born, there is no fount
from which thy being flowed, there is no
end which thou canst serve, but thou art
simply God.
Thy life is one unwarying day, before it's
now, thou hast no varied future yet unlived,
no lapse of changeless past.
Far upward in the timeless past, there form
and space had come, we see thee by
thine own red light, thyself thine only home.
Now that was before the beginning.
And then it says, In the beginning God
created.
Now of course it doesn't mean in the
beginning of God, for the reason, as I've
said, God has no beginning.
But it means at the beginning of the
creation, and it so has it in so
many, in some translations.
In the beginning of the creation, and God
made the heaven and the earth.
So that phrase, in the beginning, doesn't mean
the birth date of God Almighty.
It means the time when God ceased to
be alone and began to make time and
space and creatures and beings.
So God began to create.
And God created matter, that I've spoken about
already, that which is totally and altogether unlike
God.
You know, they talk about materialism.
Sometimes some people feed the audiences on great
resounding terms, and I'm afraid the audience is
busy with something else and doesn't know what
the term means, turns off his receptive powers
until the Learned Brothers, through talking, sings a
hymn and goes out for fresh air.
I'm afraid that often happens.
And we have the term materialism.
You'll hear a man get up and say,
we've got to fight this materialism.
And everybody looks around for the enemy and
can't find the enemy.
Doesn't know what materialism is, and therefore he
doesn't know what he set out to fight.
As long as you don't know who to
shoot at, you're not likely to kill an
enemy.
And many don't know what materialism is, not
because they're dumb or not even because they're
uneducated, but because materialism is a jargon.
It's a jargon phrase which men have picked
up, and all it means is this, that
we have accepted matter as the ultimate.
That we have accepted matter, anything you can
touch and anything you can smell and taste
and handle and see and hear that yields
to the senses, that's matter.
And there are those who say that's all
there is, there isn't anything else.
So all this talk about God and spiritual
life and spiritual beings is so much superstition.
We're simply here in the world and our
bodies and minds and our chemical outfit within
our body and our nerves and that's all
there is to it.
Now that's materialism in its crassest form.
That's what people mean when they say we've
got to fight materialism.
Doesn't mean you're going to get up and
get a sword and run after a fellow
named material and cut him down, but it
means that you've got to start believing in
the beginning God and that matter is only
a creature of God.
That God rubbed his hands together and rolled
them and tossed it out and we had
matter and all the matter there is.
So God began by creating matter and then
God had some place to put matter so
he created space.
He had to have a room to store
matter in, so to speak, so he created
space.
And we have this strange, terrible, wonderful, incomprehensible
thing we call space.
And then God had to make room for
motion and so he created time.
Now do you ever think about it, what
is time anyway?
We imagine time as a material thing.
We think that there's a great big spool
in heaven and that time rolls off that
spool.
They keep rolling it off, it rolls off
faster for men than it does for women.
But we roll this off and that's time.
Now time isn't anything like that.
Time is the, what shall we say, is
the medium in which things change.
It isn't time that makes you old, brother.
It isn't time that took those hairs off
the top of your blessed head.
It isn't time that took your 32 honest
teeth out and got you those hypocrites.
It isn't time.
It isn't time that does that.
It's change that does that.
Nobody ever has to be afraid of time.
Time never hurt anybody yet.
Time is just a word for things.
Time is a medium in which change takes
place.
It isn't time that makes a baby grow
up.
It's change that does it.
Things change and in order to change there
has to be a sequence of change.
There can't be one before there's two, or
two before there's one rather.
And there can't be three before there's two
and there can't be five before there's four.
They have to have a sequence.
And that sequence is time and we call
that time.
So God made matter and then he made
space to put it in and then he
made time in order to give it a
chance to jump around.
And then he made law to govern it.
And so law governs time and space and
matter and that's about all there is to
it.
That's simplifying and perhaps it's oversimplifying but at
least you don't have to read 19 books
to get it.
That law is simply God said to matter
now you behave in a certain way.
And he said to time now stretch out
and let things move around.
Let there be sequence so babies can grow
up and things can change.
They won't always have to be sitting around
in a rut.
And then he said now you take care
of space.
And then God created life.
He created life in order that life might
be conscious of all of this.
Time and space and motion and matter so
that life is self-conscious or conscious of
all that.
And then he created spirit in order that
there might be creatures who were conscious of
himself.
And then he organized the whole business and
they called it the cosmos.
And thus we have the world.
Now it took longer than it's taken me
to tell it and I suppose it's a
good deal more complex than I have said.
But in the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.
Now that was the beginning and that was
the beginning of human thought.
And I want you to think of the
beginning that all things began.
It was back there in the beginning of
John the first verse, first chapter, first line,
in the beginning.
That was where time began and that was
where matter began.
That's where space began.
That's where created life began.
That's where law and order began and that's
where history begins.
They talk about prehistoric times and they mean
by that what happened before man got so
he could write about it.
But history didn't begin when a man first
put down the thing down on paper.
The murders committed in Cicero, two gangsters shoot
each other up and history, that's history.
But it isn't written up till the next
day.
They didn't get on the job and the
reporters are slow so that that was prehistoric
in the sense that it happened before the
historians got there to record it for the
front page of the newspaper.
When we talk about anything being prehistoric, we
only mean that it's back there before they
started writing.
Now let's look at the scripture a little
bit here and I want to give you
a little baptism of prepositions again.
We talked about the prepositions this morning and
I know that my brethren make a great
deal of prepositions.
In fact, you would think that to hear
some people preach that the Bible had said
in the beginning was a preposition.
But it didn't.
It said in the beginning was the word.
That's quite another matter.
But here is, here are some scriptures and
I want to show you four prepositions having
to do with the beginning.
Hebrews 1.10 says, Thou Lord in the
beginning.
That's in the beginning.
Matthew 19.4 says in the beginning.
No, he made them at the beginning, male
and female.
So we have at the beginning, Matthew 24
something says, For then shall be great tribulation.
Such has not been since the beginning.
And then in John 1.1, 1 John
1.1, that which was from the beginning.
So we have here, in the beginning, at
the beginning, since the beginning, and from the
beginning, and they all mean the same thing.
So I want to remind you now, when
some fellow comes along and tries to hang
you high and dry on a preposition, you
tell him, you heard a little guy say
one time, that no matter what God uses
in the beginning, from the beginning, at the
beginning, it's all talking about the same thing.
It talks about the time when the God
who dwelt alone and lived and loved alone,
uncreated, the Father in love with the Son,
and the Son with the Holy Ghost, and
the Holy Ghost with the Father and the
Son, dwelling in the tranquility that had no
beginning and can have no end, that when
God began to create, that was the beginning.
And that's what it means.
And the beginning and the foundation are identical,
because it says in Hebrews 1.10, Thou,
Lord, in the beginning, hast laid the foundation
of the earth.
So when we learn about the foundation in
the Bible, we know that it means the
beginning, the time God started things.
Now that makes foolish all inquiries about God.
When I was a youngster, what seems like
several hundred years ago, one of the stoppers,
one of the stoppers, when some fellow wanted
to stop you, bring you up with a
jar, make your teeth rattle, he'd say, where
did God come from?
And when he said that, he asked a
question only a fool would ask, because he
knew not the scriptures nor the power of
God, for the simple reason that the preposition
from can't apply to God, for from means
that it was somewhere else and came here,
whereas God is everywhere.
Heaven and earth is filled with his glory,
and God can't come from anywhere, but all
things came from God.
Now, I want you to notice, in the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
And in that pre-creation void, that word
void is a good word, it's a most
useful word, it's a utilitarian word.
When you don't know what else to say,
we say it's a void.
And the pre-creation void, there was no
void there.
Pre-creation times, God was there, and God
is not a void.
God is all there is.
God is the triune God.
And back in that pre-creation time, God
was already busy, busy with eternal mercies, busy
thinking, and his mind was stirring with merciful
thoughts and redemptive plans for mankind.
So that we read in Ephesians 1 and
4, sometimes when I preach I worry the
Calvinists, and sometimes when I preach I worry
the Arminians.
This is the Arminian's night to sweat.
But here in Ephesians 1 and 4, we
were chosen in him before the foundation of
the world.
Now somebody will run me around a lie
like bush and say, how do you do
it?
How do you make it?
How can it be that you were chosen
in him before the foundation of the world?
How can you ever think of a time
when you didn't exist?
How can you think of a time when
your grandfather didn't exist?
How can you explain a time when there
was no matter, no law, no motion, no
relation, and no space and no time and
no beings, only God?
And if you can explain that to me,
then I can explain to you how God
chose me in him before the foundation of
the world.
I suppose it is by the foreknowledge of
God, for it says in Peter that you
are elected according to the foreknowledge of God
the Father through sanctification of the Spirit and
belief of the truth.
Then there is 1 Peter 1.20 that
says Christ's death and the blood he shed,
that Christ was foreordained before the foundation of
the world.
Now it says, in the beginning God created,
but that was not God's first activity.
God had been busy before that.
And God had been busy in choosing and
foreordaining from the beginning.
I wrote a little squid several years ago
called, We Travel an Appointed Way.
And I said that we're not orphans in
the world and we're not accidents if we're
God's children, but that our Heavenly Father is
going before us and the shepherd goes before
and leads the way.
And I got a very wonderful and very
serious letter from some dear man.
I wrote and said, Dear Editor, I read
your, this was reprinted then recently, and I
said, I read your article, We Travel an
Appointed Way.
Now he said, I was brought up a
Methodist.
And he said, Do you mean this to
be foreordination?
Or just exactly, what do you mean?
He said, That's what the Presbyterians preach.
And I was brought up a Methodist.
And I wrote back and I said, Dear
Brother, when I said, We Travel an Appointed
Way, I wasn't thinking about foreordination, predestination, or
eternal security.
They're in the eternal decrees.
I was just thinking about how nice it
is that if the steps of a good
man are ordered by the Lord, and if
a consecrated Christian will put himself in the
hands of God, there'll never be any accident,
but God will turn every accident into blessing.
And He will make the devil himself work
for the glorification of these saints.
If we are in the will of God,
that sour old hen-pecking wife will buck
you down and polish you up and smooth
you over, and you will be better off
for having married the gal.
And if you're in the will of God,
that which looks like tragedy and loss will
turn out to be gain in the end.
That's all.
I wasn't going so deep as all that.
I was just saying that our Heavenly Father
leads our way.
The steps of a good man are ordered
by the Lord.
So when you go down the pathway and
look back, you'll see where God has been
all the time.
You see, Brother, when you're looking down, you
can't see God's footprints.
But when you look back, you'll see two
sets, yours and God's.
God never makes a footprint ahead of time,
but He always leaves one when He's gone
by.
And so you look down the path and
it looks like just sand.
But if you've gone a century or so
and look back, you'll see two footprints, yours
and God's.
So the steps of a good man are
ordered by the Lord, and my poor, worried
Methodist brother can go to bed tonight knowing
that he doesn't have to turn Presbyterian to
get the blessing than to know that God
is looking after him.
I don't know how that part got in.
That wasn't in my notes, but I thought
I'd like to tell you that anyhow.
And then it says in Revelation 13, 8
that the Lamb was slain from the foundation
of the world.
And that says from the foundation of the
world, and that was before ever Adam came
into the world.
You know, Brother, I'd hate to be the
servant of a God that got nervous.
I would hate to be a worshiper.
In fact, I don't quite think I ever
could worship a God who ever was caught
unawares.
And yet sometimes it's made out as though
God was always in a dither, and that
somebody was always jeopardizing God's plans.
I couldn't get on my knees to a
God I had to apologize for, could you?
I couldn't get down and say, Now, Father,
I know that things are going tough for
you these days.
Things are tough everywhere.
And I know that Communism is a serious
threat to thy kingdom.
And I know that modernism is making it
tough for the saints.
And I know that you really need my
help, God.
So I offer myself to you.
I couldn't offer myself to a God that
needed me, Brother.
Now that's all the reason to it.
Brother Hare, if God needed me, I couldn't
respect him.
And if I couldn't respect him, I couldn't
worship him.
So don't come to me and base your
consecration on the grounds that God needs me
so desperately bad.
Some of our missionary conventions are simply whining
sessions.
I told them in New York, I didn't
believe that we ever ought to go to
people and say, Let's engage in missionary work
because God needs us so bad.
The fact is that God is riding above
this world and the clouds are the dust
of his feet.
And if you do not follow him, you'll
lose, but God will lose nothing.
He'll still be glorified in his saints and
admired in all them that fear him.
And in that great day, that consummation, all
that we've called matter and law and time
and space and angels and spirits and mind,
all organized into a redeemed cosmos, they'll gather
us around a maple and dance and sing
and glorify God who made us and say,
Worthy is the Lamb, for by him were
all things created.
And he by his blood has redeemed us
out of all kindreds and tribes and nations.
So come and give yourself to God because
you want to do it and because God
is infinitely worthy to have you do it.
But never come to God as a gesture
of pity because poor God needs you.
Oh no, no, my brother.
God has a hell for people that don't
want to serve him.
Anywhere from the covering cherub that walked up
and down in the stones of fire to
the bishop or the pope or the pastor
that would rather serve his flesh in the
devil than serve God, God has a hell
for that kind of thing and doesn't need
anything.
God unsupported, unserved, needing nothing, dwelling in holy
perfection, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
By the good kind impulse of his own
unstimulated heart, no propaganda, no pressure, not even
any prayer was made.
But out of the impulse of his own
heart, he said, I'll make me a world.
And so he made the world.
And then he said, now I've made it
all.
And now I'll make a being, that wondrous
being capable of appreciating me as the angels
cannot even do.
And I'll call him man.
And I'll give him a mate and I'll
call her woman.
And so God made man in his own
image, male and female made he them.
And said, increase and multiply.
And the dirty-minded fellow that says that
increase and multiply is itself sin is too
dirty even to be washed with ordinary detergents.
He needs something else.
For God commanded increase and multiply so that
the world will be filled with others like
you that can gaze at the stars and
say what is man that thou madest him,
that can kneel on his knees and say,
our Father who art in heaven and who
can admire and worship and adore.
And that was out of the kindness of
God, not out of any necessity laid upon
him.
No greater being could lay necessity upon him.
He did it because he wanted to do
it.
Did you ever think a little bit?
I recommend don't open the old tribune tomorrow
morning.
Don't open it.
Just let the things lie there.
Don't turn the radio on to see who
assassinated whom.
No, don't bother.
Just think a little bit.
And say to yourself before God, I'm glad
I'm alive.
You know what?
I am delighted that I was ever created.
I'm delighted that I was ever born.
I'm delighted that God ever thought of me
before the beginning.
I'm utterly and completely delighted that God ever
made me.
But you say, didn't you, haven't you suffered
a lot, old brother?
You knew how much.
A sickly boy, frightened of everything that moved,
scared of company, people, lightning, wind, mice, strange
dogs, the future, the past, and the present.
And then aches and pains and three sieges
of rheumatic fever that nearly killed me.
And toothache that I think I was never
free from until recent times.
And all that, yes, sir, and disappointment and
heartache and grief and pity.
Yes, I tell you, I've suffered.
I've suffered until my heart is scarred in
my body.
But that's only a temporary thing.
Why should I care about that?
I have long, long, long to live and
love and laugh and rejoice and worship and
serve and travel.
There was an old English preacher of Puritan
days named John Flavell, or Flavell, whichever they
pronounced it.
And as a kid way back on the
farm, somebody put into my hands a copy
of Flavell's sermon.
And one of his sermons sounded so wonderful
to me that as an unsaved boy I
thought it was absolutely wonderful.
He said, you know that heaven isn't an
end in itself.
Said when a Christian goes to heaven, God
doesn't put a period after him and say,
all right, now you're all set.
This is the end.
He said, we are of a nature.
We are so created in God and so
renewed in God that through all the endless
ages of eternity we'll develop and grow and
learn and increase.
And I think he's right because it says
in the book of Revelation, he that is
holy, let him be getting holier still, one
of the ages go on.
So going to heaven isn't simply like the
modern novel that if the lady gets her
man, that's it.
The old novel used to carry them down
the years and give them three or four
children and give the reader a chance to
think about how nice it was they'd ever
met.
But nowadays they just, they mate and suspend
them in space and they leave the rest
for your imagination and usually it turns out
to be divorce.
But we think heaven's like that, that heaven's
a place where you finally get to.
I remember one fella, God help his ignoble
soul, one fella said one time to me
in my presence, he said, if I can
just get inside the gate, just get in,
I'm willing to sit with my back against
the wall and never go any further.
He probably will get his wish all right.
And God never intended anything like that to
be, that you and I should go to
heaven and sit with our back against the
wall and thank God we ever got in.
Some of you have read Robert Burns' famous
funny and hilarious poem, uh, uh, Tam O'Shanter.
Tam O'Shanter, you'll remember, was the Irishman, or
Scotsman that was, that got on, yeah, Scotsman,
pardon me brother here, who got on a
horse named Old Meg and he was coming
home from a pretty wild party and he
was rather more or less, uh, stimulated, had
a few glasses of apple and, uh, was
feeling a bit high and he passed an
old church and the witches were dancing there
in the old church and he was so
taken with it that he got off of
Old Meg and went and looked in and
they saw him and started after him.
And he jumped back on Meg and started
at a dead gallop, crossed the water, and
they said that if you're cross-running water,
the witches couldn't follow you.
And, uh, one witch, a little livelier than
the rest, was making time on Meg and
just when her hoofbeats were drumming over the
wooden bridge, she grabbed Meg's tail and with
one mighty superhuman bound, Meg got loose and
after that she had no tail but she
at least carried Tam to safety.
And, uh, that isn't funny but, uh, I'm
thinking of some people I've, I talk with,
their idea of getting saved is just exactly
that.
You accept Jesus and as the last jump
just before the devil gets you and, uh,
you leave maybe something in the devil's hands
but thank God, breathless and panting, oh, and
covered with perspiration, you get in at last.
How unutterably silly the whole business is, brother.
When God Almighty before the beginning of the
world thought about you and planned your redemption
and in the pre-creation times, God was
thinking loving thoughts about you and when you
and Adam and you in fact grieved him
by your sins, he still didn't turn you
over to hell.
But a lamb slain from the foundation of
the world came to save you and redeem
you.
Now, when you get converted, you've only just
started.
When you get converted to Christ, you're a
new creature.
You've come up out of the old Adamic
crash, you've crawled out of the wreckage by
the grace of God and been made new.
God introduces you into his royal family, gives
you of his Holy Spirit and in increasing
measure, if you'll let him do it, and
throw your heart away.
And then begins that glorious growth upward and
onward and that happy and holy pursuit of
God and holiness and wisdom that'll never end.
Begins in conversion, is greatly stimulated and accelerated
when you're filled with the Holy Ghost.
We'll be still further perfected in that glorious
day when Jesus comes, but it'll never end
as long as God remains infinite and man
remains finite.
Growth through the ages, expansion of heart and
mind and knowledge and imagination and appreciation, brilliance
of vision and penetration and worship and adoration
while the ages roll along.
Now, I don't know what it all means
to you, but it makes Chicago pretty dirty
to me.
It makes money look like a pretty sordid
thing to me.
It makes the praise of man to be
a pretty cheap thing to me.
And it makes me pretty careless of whether
anybody likes me or not, or whether they're
willing to follow me or won't come to
hear me.
I'm pretty careless about the whole business.
In the light of eternity and the long,
long thoughts of God and the plans of
everlastingness and perfection and the consummation and the
coming of Jesus, I wonder what it all
matters, whether they like me or not.
And yet there are Christians who are in
mortal fear of offending some carnal old fellow.
They wouldn't draw blood lest somebody would say
they're fanatic.
There never lived a good man in all
the world yet.
But some son and child of the devil
didn't say he was a fanatic, and there
never was a holy testimony given by the
breath of the Holy Ghost yet from the
beginning.
Somebody didn't say the man was a fanatic,
and some people would rather die than be
called a fanatic.
There are hungry-hearted people around over the
South Side that if they could take the
stigmata of coming to a church like ours,
they'd do it, but they can't take it.
Well, we've got more strikes on us than
Mickey Mantle.
First, we're fundamentalists.
Then they say, and they're not only fundamentalists,
but they're pre-millenarians.
They actually believe that Jesus Christ is coming
back.
I'm silly.
That was all right for way back there,
and now sometime in a few million years
in the end of the world it'll be
all right, but imagine it.
No culture, no education there.
That's strike number two.
And then they say, why, those people actually
believe in the fullness of the Holy Ghost.
They believe that a Christian ought to be
filled with the Spirit and walk in power.
Then, brother, that's mighty close to being fanaticism,
and I'm not going around there, but in
the light of eternity and the long, long
reaches.
I wonder if it matters very much.
Just down on a common political level, it
didn't make much difference really what they thought
about Lincoln, did it?
The ages have justified Lincoln.
Doesn't make too much difference what they thought
of Martin Luther.
Not too much.
Now who cares now?
He's with his Savior.
So the Lord Jesus Christ is calling you.
He's calling you out.
If you were a heathen, I'd have to
explain, but I can only quote John 20,
31.
These things were written, you might believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and believing you might have life through his
name.
So Christ has every claim on you, and
I tell you, this is the hour, the
very hour.
You're dying everywhere, falling out of the sky,
blown up on battleships, dropping over with heart
disease.
Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring forth or
even tonight or the next hour, but there
walks one among us who walked among the
ancient trees.
There walks one among us who walked before
the world was.
In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was
God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
And he came unto his own, and his
own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them
he gave power to become the Son of
God, even as many as believe on his
name, who were born not of the will
of the flesh, nor of the will of
blood, nor of the will of man, nor
of blood, nor of the will of man,
but of God.
So the claim is mighty strong, stronger than
anything else in your life, the claim of
Jesus Christ to your life.
This would be a good time.
I understand that last Sunday night a couple
of people were saved here in the city
of New York, quite a number, I didn't
count them, some from the galleries came down
and went into the prayer room to be
saved.
God is still saving people.
What about you this evening?
Our God, our hope in ages past, help
in ages past, our hope for years to
come, we lift our hearts to thee.
We thank thee thou didst ever create us.
We grieve that we ever marred that creation
by sin, but having done that, we rejoice
that thou didst find a way through love
to save us the sacrifice of thyself.
He who was from the beginning yielded himself
on a tree that he might die, we
thank thee, Father, we can never thank thee
enough.
We pray thee for those who are lost
and in our midst this evening.
O Holy Spirit, do thou draw and win
and pull.
May the unsaved hear the voice of Jesus
say, come unto me and rest.
May the thirsty hear him say, come unto
me and drink.
May the blind hear him say, come unto
me and see.
May the dead hear him say, come unto
me and live.
O Lord, have mercy.