I am to speak tonight from the 11th
verse of the first chapter of the gospel,
as given to us by the Holy Ghost
through his servant John.
The words are, he came unto his own
and his own received him not.
That is only a single sentence broken by
a comma.
He came unto his own and his own
received him not.
I want you to notice first of all
the words, he came.
You know, in the early part of the
chapter, we learn what he was doing before
the world was.
Before the creation came to be, before Bethlehem,
we read simply in little short words, he
was, in him was, he was with, he
was God, he was in.
Those are simple words, but they are at
the root of theology.
They are at the root of all truth.
Now, in this verse, for the first time,
we have a hint of the incarnation.
He came, that's the first hint.
Before that, it had been in the eternal
past, or it had been since the creation,
but before the incarnation.
In him was life, in the beginning he
was, in the beginning he was God, all
things were made by him, in him was
life, and he was the true light that
lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
Now it says, he came.
And I have been struck by the wonder
of these words, he came.
The story of pity and mercy and redeeming
love are all here in two words, he
came.
All the pity capable, that God is capable
of feeling, all the mercy he is capable
of showing, and all the redeeming grace that
he could pour out of his heart, all
are at least suggested here in two simple
words, he came.
And all the hopes and the longings and
aspirations and dreams of immortality that lie in
the human breast, all had their fulfillment in
two words, he came.
I wonder if that should not suggest to
us that simplicity is always best, and that
you can say more with short words than
you can with long ones.
And that brevity beats the interminable pulling out
of verbiage that we preachers are given to.
It says, he came.
And all the hopes of mankind, and man
has always been a hopeful creature.
John Milton says, hope springs eternal in the
human breast.
And that eternal hope that springs always in
the human breast is like the lark at
break of day arising.
That hope finds its fulfillment here, he came.
And all those longings and aspirations, I repeat,
because man has always been an aspiring creature,
even while groveling in the dirt, even while
lying in the pigsty, he remembers his father's
house and says, what am I doing here?
He may lie there and never get up,
but he aspires, he remembers.
And all the dreams of immortality, because all
the human race has dreamed of immortality.
Nobody wants to think that when we say
the remains, our brother tonight used the phrase
so common, the remains will be at Lane's
undertaking, establishment.
Now there's something in us that fights that.
We fight that to the bitter end.
Our mind will not accept it.
You know you're going to die, but you
do not believe you're going to die.
Your mentality will not visualize it.
You will not surrender as as Bob Bryant
said, your universal being.
You will not give it up to the
clay.
You have whole hopes of immortality and dreams
of a life to come.
And all of this is summed up here
in the two words he came.
I want you to know that these two
one-syllable words occupying only seven spaces on
the line, I suppose that's the editor in
me, but only seven spaces on the line,
these words he came.
And yet what he tells us here is
profounder than all philosophy.
Now I'm not simply using words, and I'm
not using superlatives carelessly.
I realize that there is a danger that
we should stress too much and underscore too
much.
Sometimes I get articles, as they're laughingly called,
from men who get their effects by everlastingly
underscoring or writing them in capitals, and some
even go so far as to write them
with the red part of the ribbon.
If they want to emphasize, they use the
red part of the ribbon, or underscore or
make capitals.
You never, you don't have to edit articles
like that, you just have to fold them
up and send them back.
Nobody wants to read anything where the writer
couldn't think of anything to do except underscore.
It is like the preacher that never can
make a point without roaring.
You've heard that, that type, haven't you?
If the thing sounds good, they beat the
desk and roar.
That's supposed to be spiritual, but it isn't
spiritual, it's ridiculous.
How'd I get over there?
But I was saying, I was saying that
I do not want to use superlatives, but
there are some times when superlatives are absolutely
necessary, you can escape them.
And when I say that these two words
in John, he came, contain for founded truth
and all philosophy, that's a superlative statement, but
it is nevertheless a balanced and accurate statement.
For not all the great thinkers of the
world ever thought out anything that could even
remotely approach the wonder and the profundity of
the words he came.
And these words are wiser than all learning.
Not all the men who have ever gathered
together the lore of the ages and written
them in books have ever thought of anything
as deep and wonderful and wild as the
words he came.
These words, if they're understood in their high
spiritual context, they are more beautiful than all
art, and more eloquent than all oratory, and
more musical than all music, and more lyric
than all song, because they tell us that
we, when in the darkness, were visited by
the light.
Oh, that that might strike us.
I wish we could get as thrilled up
about it as they were in those early
times.
I wish that when we sing the light
of the world is Jesus, that we could
get a look on our faces that would
make the world believe we mean it.
Now, Milton celebrated the coming of Jesus into
the world in one of the most beautiful
odes that ever has been written that begins,
This is the month, and this the happy
morn, wherein the Son of heaven's eternal King,
of wedded maid and virgin mother born, our
great redemption from above did bring.
For so the Holy Prophet wants it seen,
that he our deadly forfeit should release, and
with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
Then he says of Jesus that glorious form,
that light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze
of majesty, wherewith he was wont in heaven's
high council table to sit in midst of
final unity.
These he laid aside, and herewith us to
be, forsook the courts of everlasting day, and
sought with us a house of mortal clay.
That was Milton's description of the incarnation.
It says he came, and I, for one,
am plain childishly glad that he came.
For one, I'm childishly glad about it.
I heard Tim Cullard, brother, preach on the
radio today while I was getting some rest
this afternoon, and he had a voice that's
worse than mine with the cold that I
had tonight, but his was permanently bad.
He sounded like a tuba that had gotten
rusty, and it was really bad.
But the man was happy about something.
He was delighted about something.
That's about it.
This thing wasn't to him.
He wasn't bored with it.
And while he was preaching, some of his
brethren would sit within sound of the microphone
and say, That's the way brother preaches.
Preach it, brother.
But we sit and take it as though
we were bored with it, and I'm not
sure that we are not.
I am not sure that we are not,
that we're not bored with it.
I'm not sure that we haven't heard it
so much that it doesn't mean much anymore.
But he came, those wonderful, beautiful words.
He came, and then it says, Here he
came unto his own.
Now, that's going a little further with it.
He came unto his own, and his own
received him not.
Now, it's a strange thing that the two
words, his own, his own, are the same
in our English, and yet they are utterly
and completely different as used by John.
For the first, his own, is translated his
own things, his own world, his own home.
He came unto his own world.
He came unto his own possessions.
He came unto his own things.
And one translation says he came unto his
own home, but his own people received him
not.
So that his own, as used in the
second place, does not refer to the same
thing as used in the first place.
He came to his world, and his own
people didn't know who he was, and didn't
receive it.
Now, he came unto his own world.
Let's let it rest at that.
For this is Christ's world.
I wish you might know it.
This is Christ's world.
This world we buy and sell, and kick
around, and lord it over, and take by
force of arms.
This world is Christ's world.
This is his world.
He made it, and he owns it all.
This mother of God business, sometimes I hear
it on the radio.
I sample everything.
Somebody asks me, How do you know so
much about what's going on in the nightclubs
and shows and all the rest?
I listen to the radio.
I sample it.
If I had time, I'd visit them and
take my notebook along and come out and
blow them out of the water with a
torpedo.
But I can't go there, so I listen
sometimes.
And I hear the services, they would call
them that, in which we say, The Mary
Mother of God pray for us.
First place, Mary can't hear, she's dead.
The second place, she's not the mother of
God.
Mary's the mother of Jesus' flesh, but not
the mother of God.
And it's time we find that out and
know it and dare to stand up and
say, We don't want to oppose anything I
do.
I want to oppose the devil wherever he
sticks his sooty nose in my business.
If Mary is the mother of God, then
Elizabeth is God's cousin.
And you can go back through and find
that God had grandchildren and uncles and all
the rest, which is, of course, absurdity.
Mary's not the mother of God.
A body hast thou prepared me, said the
Holy Ghost, said Jesus in the Holy Ghost.
A body hast thou prepared me.
And Mary was the mother of that body.
God Almighty used the body of the Virgin
Mary as the matrix to form a body
for his Son, his eternal Son, who was
with the Father and was God.
And that was Mary's job, God bless her
little Jewish heart, was her business to be
the recipient of the eternal Son and give
that Son a body.
And so instead of saying, Mary the mother
of God, we should always say, Mary the
mother of Christ.
And then we have it right.
We have given Mary her proper honor, higher
than any other honor given to any other
woman since time began, or ever will give.
So that Jesus Christ made this world, and
he made the very atoms out of which
Mary was made.
And he made and created the very atoms
out of which his own Bobby was made.
And he made the very straw upon which
he lay in the manger.
Now, I'd like to have seen the baby
Jesus.
I dedicated a little red-headed girl here,
and if it got buttered, I could have
swallowed her in one go.
And I'd like to have seen the baby
Jesus.
I'll never see him now, because death has
no more dominion over him, and he's a
grown, free, blooming human, now glorified yonder, the
right hand of the majesty.
But he was there nevertheless, that baby Jesus,
lying on a manger.
And he, the baby, had made the manger,
and had made the straw, and had made
the beasts that were there, and had made
this little town and all that it was,
and had made the very star that looked
down this one.
He came unto his own.
Now, our Lord Jesus Christ is not a
guest here.
I wish we might figure that out.
They say that a lot of people make
a great deal out of God being their
guest, or God being their senior partner.
They run the business and their name's on
it, but God's their partner.
They make a great deal of that nonsense.
The quicker we find it out, the better,
and stand up on our two hind feet
and there to tell people that we don't
want to patronize Jesus Christ.
Time will stop it.
They write nice books, and around Christmas time,
even the newspapers come out with a fawning
over Jesus Christ our Lord.
He doesn't need your patronage, brother, and he
doesn't need your pity.
He's not a guest here.
He's the host, and we are the guests.
We are here by his sufferance.
We are here by his kindness.
We are here because he's made us and
brought us here.
And this world is his world, and he
can do what he wills with his world,
and no one can upbraid him.
He can do what he wills with life,
and he can do what he wills in
death, and he can do what he wills
in nature, and he can do what he
wills in that mighty cataclysmic overthrow that we
call judgment.
He has a lot of apologies in the
day in which we live.
A lot of people are apologizing for the
Lord Jesus Christ.
I think we ought to start apologizing for
the Lord Jesus and start apologizing for ourselves.
He doesn't need your apology, and he doesn't
need your defense.
When I run onto a book where somebody
is apologizing for the Lord Jesus Christ and
proving he isn't so bad after all, I
always toss it aside.
I won't waste my eyes on it.
Jesus Christ who made the world in which
we live, and whose fingers formed the crooked
serpent and studied the stars in the sky
under, and made the solid ground on which
we stand and upon which we build our
temporary buildings, he doesn't need me to run
around apologizing and rushing in, taking his part
and saying, Now just a minute, just a
minute.
Fairer he heart and fairer his heart, but
it doesn't mean that.
He sent judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but
it doesn't quite mean that.
It means something else.
It means exactly that, ladies and gentlemen.
And when God Almighty turned Lot's life into
a pillar of salt, it means exactly that.
And when the Bible tells us there is
a hell where the wicked will go, it
means exactly that.
It doesn't mean something else.
So my business is not to apologize for
the Lord Jesus, or patronize him, or talk
down to him, or go to an altar
in order to come out and be loyal
to him.
No, no.
My business is to come crawling to his
feet, a sinner filled with sores, and say,
Touch me and make me whole.
And I stand upon my feet, as I
said over the radio yesterday morning, no longer
to crawl like a spaniel crawling down the
sidewalk on your tummy, but to stand up
and look into the heavens, and say, I
was once a sinner, but I'm redeemed, and
the Lord has saved me, and now I'm
his child, and I can keep my chin
up now, and both, or three of them,
or as many as I've got.
Some of you, one won't be enough, but
you can keep them out, because you belong
to God, you belong to Christ.
But in the meantime, we're not going to
patronize him.
I absolutely will not apologize for him.
Here he is, he'll take care of himself.
He made this world, he made the very
bricks out of which this building is built,
and he made the world in which we
live, and so it's his world, it's my
Father's world, it belongs to the Trinity and
it's not mine, and I live here by
the good grace of God, and everything I
handle and touch belongs to my Father.
These lovely flowers belong to God, they don't
belong to me, and all the air and
the winds and the clouds and the corn
and the waving wheat and the tall noble
forests and the flowing rivers, they're all his.
He was, he was in, he made, and
all things were made by him.
And he came unto his own world, and
his own world received him not.
That is, his own people received him not,
but his own world, that nature received him.
His own things received him.
It was the winter wild when the heaven
-born child, all meanly wrapped in the root
manger, lies.
Nature in awe to him, a doctor, godly
trim with her, great maker, thus to sympathize.
We sang this morning about nature smiles and
owns her king.
So when our Lord Jesus came, all nature
went out to greet him, all nature met
him.
The star led the wise men from the
east, and the cattle in the stall didn't
bother him.
As they lay, little eight or nine or
ten pound baby Jesus wasn't harmed by the
beasts, that nibbled straw from around his tender
little legs and arms.
They know him.
G.
Campbell Morgan in that great book of his
called The Crisis of the Christ, points out
that when Jesus went into the wilderness to
be tempted of the devil, he was there
forty days and forty nights and was with
the wild beasts.
Remember that.
And Morgan said that there was wrong conception
about that, Jesus being with the wild beasts,
that we pitied him and wondered how he
could ever stand it to be with the
wild beasts and think those wild beasts might
have been wanting to attack him and he
had to have angelic protection.
And Campbell Morgan said properly, no, it was
not true.
The wild beasts recognized their king, and they
crept to his feet and licked them, no
doubt, and lay down beside.
They recognized their Lord and their maker.
And the very tawny lion shook his mane
and kneeled beside his seat.
And the very bear that might have devoured
another man knelt and whined at the feet
of the man who was fasting forty days
and forty nights.
So that instead of pitting Jesus for those
terrible hours or days he spent with the
wild beasts, we ought to remember that he
was perfectly safe there.
For not a sharp claw would tear the
skin of the man who was God, and
not a fang would rip the body of
the man who was God.
For he came to his own and his
own received him.
And the wind blew for his pleasure, and
he waxed and grew in body and in
wisdom.
And the very earth on which he trod
smiled, and the stars at night looked down
on his humble carpenter's cottage.
And the winds and the rain and the
snow were all his strength.
He was in harmony with nature.
And I believe it's entirely possible to be
more in harmony with nature than we are
if we were Christians as we ought to
be.
Saint Francis was in harmony with nature, and
the world has wondered at him.
Some have laughed, and others have scoffed, and
others have raised their eyebrows and wondered if
he was right in his mind.
But Saint Francis was so completely yielded to
God, and so completely and fully taken up
by the presence of the Holy Ghost, that
all nature was his friend.
And it says of Citra that the stars
in their courses fought against him.
And if the stars in their courses fought
against the enemy, then the same stars in
their courses fought in favor of the friend
of God.
And I believe it is possible to be
so tuned to God that the very stars
in their courses are on our side, and
nature smiles and moans her king.
God, when he made Adam, said, Now you
be, you be over the whole business.
And sin came in and wrecked it all,
and when sin is removed, then I can
see why Saint Francis could preach to the
birds and call the rain and the wind
his friends, and the moon his sister, and
live a delighted life because the world, God
-blessed world, received him.
It is only sin we have to be
ashamed of, my friend, only sin.
It is not this world that God made,
it is sin.
And if you were to take sin out
of the world, there wouldn't be a thing
to be ashamed of, nor a thing to
be afraid of.
He took sin out of the world.
If sin could suddenly be extracted from the
world, suddenly extracted from the world, all of
it taken out, there wouldn't be another sick
man in all the wide world.
There wouldn't be an insane man behind any
bars.
There wouldn't be a criminal in any jail.
There wouldn't be a polio victim crippling around
on crutches.
There wouldn't be an old man of days,
bent with his cane, waiting for the undertaker.
There wouldn't be a man with a cold
in his nose trying to preach.
And there wouldn't be sleepy people wishing he'd
quit.
And there wouldn't be an evidence anywhere of
evil.
If you could take sin out of the
world, you could leave your house unlocked.
Thank God, go to bed and leave her
unlocked.
And you could carry her money around your
pants pocket.
You wouldn't have to put it in a
bank behind bars of a cop to watch.
And you could walk anywhere in this city
and not be afraid of getting attacked.
You could take sin out of the world.
So instead of apologizing for God and Christ,
we ought to begin to apologize for humanity
and apologize for our sin.
But remember that he came unto his own
and his own received him.
And Jesus was never sick an hour.
And nothing was ever wrong with him, but
he carried a perfect body to Calvary.
Sure, he bore our sicknesses, but they were
poured on him.
They were poured on him.
God Almighty took all that swill barrel of
bubbling, crawling sickness and poured it on the
body of Jesus, just as he took that
swill barrel of vicious, venomous juice called sin
and poured it on him when he died.
And he died under our sins and he
died under our sicknesses, but he never had
any sin and he never had any sickness.
He came unto his own world and his
own world smiled and ran to meet their
king.
The wind and the waves obeyed him.
You say that was a miracle.
Well, maybe it was a miracle.
It looked like a miracle from our standpoint,
but it wasn't any miracle for Jesus.
He said to the wind, shh.
And the wind looked up and saw who
it was and shh.
And he said to the waves, be still,
and they saw who it was and they
got soft and still as a mirror.
It wasn't any miracle, it was just God
Almighty acting like God in a world that
received him.
But when it comes to people, you have
another story on your hands.
His own people received him not.
And that reminds us of the famous hymn
that says, Every prospect pleases a lonely man
is vile.
His own people received him not.
Now, there were the Jews, the nation of
Israel, and they were of all people the
best prepared to receive him, because they had
the call in Abraham, they had the covenant
with the fathers, they had the revelation, they
had the tradition, they had the prophets, they
had the temple worship.
They had their holidays and their anniversaries and
their psalms and their prophets, and they were
of all people the best place to receive
him when he came.
But they failed to recognize him, and that
was the greatest blunder in the history of
mankind, without any doubt.
The greatest moral blunder in the history of
the world was when he came to his
own world and the world received him, and
he came to his own people and his
own people rejected him.
The very caterpillar on the leaf received his
king, but the Jews turned him away.
Oh, the blindness of it all.
I read here in my Bible of that
blindness.
God said, Go and tell his people, hear
ye indeed, but understand not, and see ye
indeed, but perceive not.
And make the heart of his people fat,
and make their ears heavy, lest they see
with their eyes, and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts, and converge, and
be healed.
There was the blindness that lay upon them,
and they didn't recognize him.
It was a stroke of God Almighty upon
them for sin, and they didn't recognize him.
Now, why didn't they receive him?
The world received him because he was the
world's God, I mean, the natural, the God
of creation.
But why didn't humanity receive him?
I'll give you about five reasons why they
didn't receive him.
I'm going to cut this sermon short tonight.
First, to receive Jesus when he was here
in the world would have meant possible financial
loss.
The rich young ruler is an example of
that.
If the rich young ruler had followed Jesus,
he'd have had to lose every bit of
his property, for the Lord told him to
go get rid of it, and they wouldn't
receive him because they love their money more
than they love their God.
It would have meant a change in their
way of living, and they refused to allow
the pattern of their life to be disturbed.
It would have meant a thorough inward housecleaning,
for Jesus taught that the true in heart
should see God, and the mourner should be
comforted, and the meek should have the earth,
and the merciful should be blessed.
It would have meant a thorough housecleaning inside
of them, and it would have meant an
abnegation of self.
He said, let him take up his cross
and follow me.
It would have meant faith in the unseen.
They'd have had to throw themselves out on
God, and that's why they didn't receive him.
In closing, it's very satisfying for us to
belabor the Jews, but I remember a word
of Jesus, take the beam from thine own
eye, and then shalt thou see clearly, to
remove the moat from thy brother's eye.
It's very comforting for us, here two thousand
years removed, to preach about the Jews that
received him not.
It's a kind of a safety valve for
us, a red herring that we draw across
our trail to take God's eyes off our
own sins, and to solve our own conscience
by reminding ourselves that the Jews received him
not.
But I warn you against any kind of
such self-deception as that.
Who more than you who listened to me
should receive him?
You have two thousand years of tradition behind
you that the Jew didn't have.
You have revelation that the Jew didn't have.
You have the Old Testament, you have the
Old Testament and the New.
You have information the old Jew didn't have.
You have light the old Jew didn't have.
You have opportunities the old Jew didn't have,
and you have an urgency by the presence
of the Holy Ghost the old Jew didn't
have.
I do not think for one minute that
we ought to spend our time belaboring the
Jew, comforting our own carnal hearts by saying
he came to his own world and the
Jews did not receive him.
And we would only be building the sepulchres
of our fathers, as Jesus said, and we
would be as bad as they that slew
the prophets.
We had better look to our own hearts.
Why do not we receive him?
The answer is, it might mean financial loss
to some people if they receive Jesus.
There are people in business in Chicago that's
lucrative business, and if they ever receive Jesus,
they are going to have to get out
of that business.
You say, I don't think so.
I think they can just glorify God where
they are.
Well, I admit that there is a lot
of that going on now.
No matter what you're doing, you just say,
I'm a Christian now, and then you begin
to testify where you are.
I have suggested that if things keep on
going from bad to worse in evangelical circles,
the time will come pretty soon when we'll
put John 3 at the bottom of a
beer mug so that when a fellow drains
it and looks at the bottom, he'll see
salvation shining out at him.
Halfway houses will have texts that the girls
give out with their favors.
Pretty soon, if we don't stop somewhere, if
somebody doesn't get a hold of us, that's
what we're going to do.
Brother, there are some things you can't do
and be a Christian, and you might as
well settle that now.
The Jews knew it, and so they rejected
Jesus.
They wanted to do what they wanted to
do.
And they rejected Jesus because they knew they
couldn't do it if they received him.
And there are people with all this revelation
and all this light and information, and yet
they will not tonight receive him whom the
very angels and stars and rivers received, because
they know they've got to give up something.
It will mean financial loss.
It will mean a change in your way
of living.
And some of you people aren't going to
change your way of living.
You're going to go underground.
I'm sure that's all my preaching does to
some people.
It just drives them underground.
I shell the woods occasionally, you know, for
somebody that's bigger gun than mine yet, or
even hell or somebody, I shell the woods.
You all put your ears back and go
underground, but you don't change your ways any,
and God knows you don't change your ways.
They outlawed the Communist Party, and now they
say they've driven them underground.
But a Communist underground, that is provided that
you don't mean actually lying under there in
a coffin, is more dangerous than a Communist
up on top of the ground.
And it's just as bad to be underground
sinner as it is to be an overt
sinner.
You won't change your ways, I know it.
And there must be a thorough inward housecleaning
before you'll come.
I'll tell you one thing about that manger,
brother, that's clean.
Be sure of that.
Little Mary didn't go and have her baby
in a dirty manger.
Be sure that one little thing, now, was
simple, it was plain, it was crude, but
it was clean.
They put fresh straw down for that, do
you think?
Don't you think they did?
Joseph never would let her lie there, and
her little baby lie there in a dirty
crib.
That was a clean place.
Jesus never went any place where it wasn't
clean.
He won't inhabit any place that isn't clean,
be sure of that.
Some people would rather have the dirt than
they would to have the Son of God.
They'd rather have the darkness than come to
the light.
That's why they don't receive him.
They've got the Old Testament, they've got the
New Testament, they've got the hymn book, they've
got churches, they've got radio preachers, they've got
evangelists.
They have opportunities, they have light, they have
information, but they won't receive him.
Because of the dew, they're going to have
to clean up.
Some people won't clean up, just won't do
it.
They don't want their houses to be cleaned.
A woman came to Dr. A.
B.
Simpson one time, and she said, Dr. Simpson,
I'm possessed of a demon.
It's a male demon.
I'm possessed of a demon, and I want
you to pray for me.
And Dr. Simpson said, all right, sister, get
down here on your knees.
And when he prayed, they say sometimes when
he started to pray, he felt that heaven
was bending.
And he began to pray, and in a
commanding voice, he began to order the demon
to go out of her.
She grabbed his shoulder and said, don't, don't,
don't, Dr. Simpson, I love him.
I love him.
She was in love with a demon lover.
That's the only example I ever heard of
that.
Did you ever hear anything like that?
The most terrible thing I ever heard, I
suppose.
But there's a lot of that going on.
We're in love with sin, and it's inside
of us.
And if Jesus Christ comes in, he'll run
it out!
And we'd rather have sin than have Jesus.
We'd rather have buzzards perch in our hearts
than we would have the dove to come
in.
But remember one thing, as long as the
buzzards are there, the dove will never descend.
Remember that.
As long as the world dirt remains in
our hearts, Jesus Christ will never come in.
He came unto his own, and his own
people would not receive him, because they loved
dirt.
They loved inward dirt, moral dirt.
Respectability?
Sure.
You wear a hard chapter in Mark's clothes,
and floor-shine shoes, and drive a $2
,200 car, and have a modern kitchen, modern
bathroom, modern everything, and live by a push
button.
But inside your heart, there is a filthy
pool, and Jesus Christ won't come in until
you drain it off.
He won't do it.
He came unto his own people, and his
own people received him not.
And it's the same thing today.
We love our demon lover.
When the Lord says, All right, I'll help
you, we'll get rid of this mess, we
say, No, Jesus!
No, no, I love that mess.
I was brought up in it.
I want to be respectable, and I want
to be outwardly clean, and I want the
sepulcher of my life to be carefully polished
and painted.
But I don't want to get rid of
the dead men's bones.
I love those dead men's bones, and I
don't want to get rid of them.
Some of you clean, respectable, well-groomed people
who leave this church tonight, and you'll take
dead men's bones out with you in the
sanctuary of your soul.
You wouldn't let Jesus Christ come in and
cleanse the temple.
You'd rather have the swine there.
Ah, how satisfying to blame the Jew.
But think of ourselves tonight.
Let him take up his cross and follow
me, and we don't want to do that.
Nobody wants to be that serious.
Mr. McAfee was telling me about an Australian
in New Zealand, Australian, a medical doctor, who
preaches against communism, lectures against communism, and he
knows his subject.
He said he's debated with communists, and they
say to him, Mr. Schwartz, you can't understand
communism until you get over into it.
He said they have to have a kind
of a conversion into it.
And I've been saying for a long time,
long before I heard that, that communism is
a religion.
You don't reason yourself into it, you get
converted.
That's why they do such extravagant, strange things.
That's why they obey to the death.
They've given themselves over to a religion.
They've been converted to communism.
It's the devil's religion, and in a great
many ways it parallels Christianity, only it's on
the devil's side.
And they become as fanatical and zealous, they
give up their home, their family, and turn
on their country and their friends and their
very lives.
And here we have the light of the
world, the very sun of God, whose bright
shining will burn as a leaf the devilish
religion of communism.
And we can't get up enough steam or
enthusiasm even to keep from looking bored when
we talk about it.
I wonder if we've been converted at all.
You can't understand Christianity until you're in it.
You can't stand back and look on and
you must be converted over into it by
a miracle.
Then you understand Christianity, then you understand God
and Christ.
But until Jesus Christ is received, miracle-working,
transforming power into the light, there never can
be any salvation, nor any understanding of the
things of God.
All nature received him, the very brown cupworm
that crawls across the road, stormy winds fulfilling
his word.
Praise him, all ye stars of light, says
the Holy Ghost.
Praise him, ye trees and forests and hills
and mountains, says the Holy Ghost.
The beasts of the field shall glorify me,
says the Holy Ghost.
All nature sings to meet their Lord.
Little, hard, selfish, sinful man rejects.
Brethren, this is more terrible than atom bombs.
This is more terrible than wars to the
death.
More terrible than diseases.
This is death.
What shall we answer him?
When very nature receives him, and our hard
little hearts say, No, I want that money,
I want that girl, I want that fame,
I want that job, I want that pleasure,
I want, I want, always I want, and
the Son of God stands outside, his own
received him not.
It's the tragedy of mankind, my brethren.
If some Shakespeare, some Aeschylus, some Goethe could
write it, it's the vast, illimitable, boundless, fathomless
tragedy of mankind, that we loved our sin
more than we loved our God.
And the world around us sang when he
came, and will sing again when he comes
in glory.
And our hard little hearts say, No.
This is the tragedy, I say.
No Faust, no Julius Caesar ever was as
stark and as terrible as this.
We rejected him from our hearts because we
want our own way.
You will have your own way, and Jesus
Christ will park on the sidewalk outside.
The stars will sympathize, and the birds, and
you will let him stand.
Oh, Jesus, you've stood outside so many hearts
so long.
You've stood outside so many homes and businesses
so long.
How much longer?
Dear people, we ought to do something about
it tonight.
We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, and
we ought to open the doors of our
hearts and let him in.
I want you to forgive me.
I shouldn't have preached at all tonight, this
kind of poor preaching.
But I'll be all right next Sunday, I'm
sure.
But anyway, forgetting that now, what about you?
What about your soul?
He came unto his own world, and it
received him.
But he came unto his own people, and
they rejected him.
How terrible.
Let us pray.
Oh, we can say with him this, Shame
on us that we have left thee standing
there.
Shame on us we repent before thee.
We're sorry for ourselves, for our friends.
Sorry, Lord, for our neighbors, our fellow Americans.
Sorry, oh Lord.
We grieve and repent before thee.
Millions attend ballgames, and millions attend prize fights,
and millions attend shows, and they count their
wealth in millions and multiplied millions, and they
buy what they will, where they will, because
men spend their dollars, thy dollars, freely for
lusts and pleasures and entertainments and possessions.
Oh, Lord Jesus, the poor little unpainted churches,
the poor half-paid preachers, the poor groany
old organs and badly-tuned pianos and cheaply
-constructed buildings all tell the same thing that
not very many have received.
We're ashamed tonight, Lord.
We're ashamed, Lord Jesus.
The crowds are not in church tonight, they're
in theaters, skating rinks, dance halls, body houses,
gambling dens, but they're not in churches.
Thank thee for every one that is, but
there are not many.
Oh, we're ashamed, Lord.
We're ashamed for our friends, ashamed, Lord, that
they have rejected thee so successfully, so long.
They are guests in thy house, boarders sitting
at thy table, breathing thy air, drinking thy
water, sleeping on thy sweet earth, eating thy
fruits, but they have rejected thee.
Oh, Lord Jesus, we're ashamed, and we repent,
and we're sorry.
Forgive, O Lord, we pray thee.
Forgive us.
Forgive, O Lord, the half-saved Christians.
Forgive the lazy, half-backslidden Christians.
Hot, spiritual preaching only drives them underground.
They sneak underground and go do it anyway.
Keep it from the pastor and keep it
from the teachers, but do it anyway.
O God, how ashamed we are of all
this.
Holy Ghost, we have grieved thee until thou
dost tremble in the corner.
We have given thee no place.
We are sorry.
O thou dove, thou dost flutter over us,
can't find a place for the sole of
your foot.
We are ashamed.
O, make this church a clean place for
the sole of thy foot to light upon,
blessed dove of God.
Come, flutter down upon us with thy light
and strength and power and grace and healing
and joy and loveliness.
Come and flutter down on us.
Forgive, we pray thee, the pigsties of our
hearts.
May we cleanse them and dump them out
and fix up the temple and say, Come
in, Lord Jesus.
O Shekinah of God, we pray thee, come
to the temples of our hearts.
Help these friends tonight, for Jesus' sake.
Before we go on, close prayer, please, friends.
Who wants to be remembered if the Holy
Spirit has spoken to you?
You want to be remembered?
Would you, by the old-fashioned way of
raising the hand, say, pray for me?
Who would say, pray for me?
You want us to remember you.
If you'd come clear out and be what
you should be.
Before we close our prayer, we want to
remember any who want prayer.
The only way I know is to have
you indicated in some manner.
Raising the hand seems to be the most
convenient.
All it is is a request for prayer.
You'd like us to remember you.
All right.
God bless you.
We'll remember you.
Who else would say, pray for me?
Yes, sir.
I see your hand.
Who else say, pray for me?
At least two, and I think three have
requested prayer.
Who else?
Yes, I see you too.
There's four and five.
We're going to pray for you in a
moment.
Oh, Lord, we pray for these five persons
who have raised their hands and asked us
to remember them.
Oh, Lord Jesus, the world is so full
of temptations, and the magnetism of the world
is all but impossible to resist.
But these people want to do it.
They want to turn from everything that grieves
the Lord and follow him.
They want to be thine completely, fully.
We pray for them.
I said, pray one for another.
We lift our hearts in prayer now and
ask, oh Lord, that you will help these
five persons to put away their resistance, throw
down all opposition, and meekly surrender now their
hearts to thee.
For thee to come in, take over, set
up thy throne, and reign from within, king
of their lives by thy grace.
Grant this, we pray thee, Lord Jesus, even
right now, for thy name's sake.