In the gospel according to John, the first
chapter, verses 11 to 13, He came unto
his own, and his own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them
gave he power to become the sons of
God, even to them that believe on his
name, which were born not of blood, nor
of the will of the flesh, nor of
the will of man, but of God.
Verse 11, we had as the subject of
our sermon the last time I spoke here,
before Dr. Kligerman's coming, he came unto his
own things, the world, but his own people
received him not.
Now, verses 12 and 13, but as many
as did receive him, to them gave he
the right to become the sons of God,
even to them that believe on his name,
which were born not of blood, nor of
the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God.
Now, God has stepped out of his way
to talk about certain persons being born.
And God never does anything that is ordinary,
and he never does anything that is routine,
simply.
But everything he does is alive, meaningful, and
brilliantly significant.
And here we have God talking about certain
people being born.
What is there significant about that, that the
great God Almighty, who rounded the earth in
the hall of his hand, and set the
sun shining in the heavens, and flung the
stars to the most far corners of the
night, that this God should take seven lines
in our English version to talk about people
being born?
I had always thought that was a most
ordinary thing, that there wasn't anything about that
that had any particular significance.
That's the only way there is to get
into the world, is to be born.
And they're being born all the time.
There are dying 100,000 souls or more
a day, and there must be more than
that being born every day, for the population
is increasing.
So whatever 100,000 people and over do
every day can't be new, surely, except for
the parents.
And everybody knows that we're all born, everybody
here was born at least once.
And there isn't any use to come around
giving us any of that blarney about sliding
down a sunbeam, or a stork winging his
way over the meadows.
We were born, and we were all born,
everybody was.
Now, why should he talk about anybody being
born?
Well, we're born into the world, and each
birth has certain characteristics, certain significance.
And our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the
most downright and realistic teachers that ever lived,
speaks about it here.
He said, Now, the biological urge, the will
of the flesh, is back of every birth.
And the will of man, that's the social
arrangement whereby people marry and get social approval.
And from this, men are born.
And then, of blood, that's the level of
life on which we're born.
We're born of blood, and our birth has
to do with blood, and bones, and all
the rest.
I saw on a streetcar transfer, this allegedly
funny little squid, that a young mother took
a baby to the butcher.
She had no scale.
She took a baby to the butcher and
said, Mr. Schmidt, I'd like to have you
weigh Junior for me.
And he weighed Junior back.
And weighed Junior and handed him back and
said, 13 pounds with the bones.
And that's supposed to be funny, and I
thought I'd throw it in.
But the idea is that we're born, and
there are bones to be considered there, and
blood, and flesh, and tissue, and hair, and
hide, and gristle.
And when we're born into the world, that's
what's born.
And where everybody was born, probably 120,000
to 30,000 people were born today.
I may be off there a bit in
my statistics, but somewhere in that neighborhood, what's
a few thousand, more or less, in the
millions that are living in the world.
So there's no news particularly in somebody being
born, and yet here is God, turns aside,
and inspires an apostle to talk about it,
and has it recorded by divine inspiration in
a book, preserves it at the cost of
blood, and tears, and toil, and prayers, and
hard work for 2,000 years nearly, and
gives it to us in our familiar English,
that there are certain people born.
And the reason it is significant and not
ordinary is that these are born of a
mystic birth, and it hasn't anything to do
whatsoever with this common birth that you and
I know.
He says plainly that it's up on another
level, it isn't on the blood level.
They were born out of blood.
There is a birth that hasn't anything to
do with blood.
There is a birth that hasn't anything to
do with bones, or tissue, or gristle.
There is a birth that has not back
of it the urge of the flesh.
There is a birth that has not back
of it the social arrangement, the will of
man, the desire of parents for children, the
determined will of people to propagate.
Jesus said, I'm talking about a birth that
doesn't touch any of this.
Nothing of this is associated with it at
all.
It's another kind of birth.
It is a mystic birth, and it is
an act of God, this birth.
They were born, said Jesus, and their birth
was an invisible birth.
All the births you and I know are
visible births.
The baby is there and goes to manhood
or womanhood, and it's visible and audible and
tangible.
It can be seen and heard, and we
are all willing to admit.
So there is the sight.
The senses can touch the average birth.
When you and I are born into the
world, the senses could get to us.
They could see us and touch us and
hold us and weigh us and wash us
and clothe us and feed us.
Jesus said that there were certain people born,
and they were born up on another level
altogether.
It hadn't anything to do with human life
as we know it.
It hadn't anything to do with bones and
flesh.
It hadn't anything to do whatsoever with earth.
It was of heaven.
It hadn't anything to do with the flesh.
This birth is of the Spirit.
It hasn't anything to do with the will
of man.
This birth is by the will of God.
It is a mysterious, invisible birth, a mystic
birth, a birth of another kind.
Some people are very greatly perturbed when you
use the word mystic.
They want to chase you out immediately and
replace you with a man who is as
afraid of the word mystic as you are.
I'm not afraid of it at all, because
the whole Bible is a mystical book, a
book of mystery, a book of wonder.
You can't trace any simple thing, not any
simple phenomenon, that you can trace back any
distance but what you come blank up against
mystery and darkness.
There isn't one lonely idea your mind can
entertain of natural phenomenon anywhere that you can
trace back that doesn't run up against darkness
and mystery.
And it is much more so upon the
spiritual level where these ones were born.
It was a mystic birth, a birth of
the Spirit.
Contrary altogether from every kind of birth that
any man knew.
If Jesus our Lord had merely talked about
people being born, he would never have been
heard and his teachings never would have gotten
into print, and they never would have been
preserved because it's too common everybody's born.
But these people were born of a birth
that was not of the body but of
the heart.
They were born not into time but into
eternity.
They were born not of earth but of
heaven.
It was an inward birth, a spiritual birth,
a mysterious birth, a mystic birth.
And then again in this text, I'm only
giving you what's here, understand, restating it in
other words.
That's all I ever do, really, is to
restate truth in other language, sort of give
a free-running translation on the old texts.
That's about all preaching amounts to.
You can tell your own stories, and outside
of that, preaching is just a free translation
in modern language of the old solid truths.
So all I've said up to now is
plain here in the book.
And then this birth is by a particular
grant of God.
I know there is a sense in which
the sovereign God is over all.
And I like to think that there isn't
a child born anywhere into the world that
God doesn't own, that is, he owns it
as his creature.
It's here, it's a creature, somebody said, even
about the many thousands that are born out
of wedlock.
One great philosopher said, there are no illegitimate
children, only illegitimate parents.
And so even those that are born without
benefit of clergy, without the formalities of the
wedding, are nevertheless owned by God Almighty as
creatures born into the world.
They're here, and there's in that sovereign sense
in which everything that is born is born
by the will of God.
But that's down on the level of nature,
and it isn't what our Lord was talking
about here.
He said that this other birth, this mystic,
mysterious, spiritual birth, was by a particular grant
which was altogether other than and different from
and superior to the first kind of birth.
He said that it was this birth that
gave men the right.
They had the right to be born, and
they were born into the father's household, and
they became children of God.
Now, I believe in the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man.
Some of you now will proceed to faint,
and an usher will kindly be around with
an aluminum bottle, and bring them to because
you have had, you've seen fire in men's
eyes when they talk about the fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man.
But I believe in both.
That is, I believe that God is the
father of them that believe, and thus there
is a fatherhood in God, the father for
whom the whole family in heaven and earth
is named.
God is not the father of the sinner,
but he's the father of them that believe,
and therefore there is a fatherhood in God.
And I believe in the fatherhood of God,
only I do not foolishly stretch it to
cover all mankind.
God is not the father of the two
that kidnapped a six-year-old baby and
shot his brains out.
God is not the father of the murderer
and the whoremonger.
God is the father of them that believe,
so there is a fatherhood of God.
And I'm not going to let the liberal
and the modernist chase me out and run
me down the alley and back me a
white face against the wall and make me
deny their fatherhood of God.
I believe in the fatherhood of God.
Furthermore, I believe in the brotherhood of man.
God has made of one blood all people
to dwell upon the face of the earth,
so that everybody that is born into the
world is born of the same blood.
And our skins may be a bit different
and our eyes slope a different direction.
Some hair may be red and some black,
some curly and some straight, and some tall
and some short, and we may differ from
each other very greatly.
But where there is nevertheless a vast human
brotherhood, and we all descended from that man,
that man, Adam, whose mortal sin brought death
into the world with all its fruits.
And so there is a brotherhood of man,
everybody's, everybody else's brother throughout the whole wide
world.
But then there is another brotherhood within that
brotherhood, and that is the brotherhood of the
saints.
Now, the fact that man has a broad
brotherhood doesn't mean men are saved, they're not.
And when they're saved, they leave the old
brotherhood of Adam and enter the brotherhood of
the redeemed.
And that's another brotherhood altogether.
Where the liberal and the modernist make their
mistakes is that they are trying to level
everybody, Christian and non-Christian, religious and irreligious,
the saved and the lost, the believer and
the doubter, all to one level brotherhood.
And say that mankind is a brotherhood and
therefore we're all the children of one father
and therefore we're all saved.
All that's nonsense and it's unscriptural and isn't
true.
So when the liberal says he believes in
the fatherhood of God, he doesn't believe in
the fatherhood of God in the sense that
the Bible teaches it.
He believes in it in another sense which
is not scriptural and so I do not
believe with the liberal, but I believe in
God as being the father of all of
his redeemed children.
And I believe that there is a brotherhood
of man which comes by the first birth
and another brotherhood which comes of the second
birth.
And oh, by the grace of God, I
want to dwell in that sacred mystic brotherhood
of the ransomed and redeemed, that fellowship of
the saints gathered round the broken body and
shed blood of the Savior, redeemed how I
love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood
of the Lamb.
And that's another brotherhood, brethren, altogether because it's
a brotherhood of the second birth.
It's a brotherhood of that mystic, mysterious birth
that puts us over into eternity instead of
into time.
A child born into the world is born
into time, but a man born into the
kingdom of God is born into eternity and
born upon to eternity and hath everlasting life.
So that this, these, these that are born
that our Lord took time to tell us
about are born of another kind of birth.
It's a mysterious birth and it gives us
a particular privilege.
As many as received him, to them gave
he power, which is, the word power doesn't
mean dynamics.
It doesn't take any dynamical power on the
part of a man to become a child
of God.
But he gave us the privilege, it means,
the right, he gave us the legal right
to become children of God.
And we are born into the kingdom.
You know, some people don't understand the doctrine
of adoption.
And I've heard people get up with happy
faces and say, I thank God I'm adopted
into the family of God, poor little orphan.
Aren't you glad God found you on the
doorstep and took you in?
You were no relation to him, but he
decided to take you in, make you his,
that's precious.
Now, if that's the best you can do,
I'd say you ought to be happy about
that.
But I know something better than that altogether.
Not God found me in a clothes hamper
whimpering on his doorstep and said, the poor
little scrawny fellow, I'll take him in and
call him mine.
And thus I'm God by adoption.
Oh no, I got in easier than that.
Some years ago, I arrived in a house
out in Lagos, Pennsylvania.
There is such a town as that.
Out from town, of course, not in the
town.
I was no city slicker.
I was born a mile from the nearest
post office.
And my little mother, Prudence, told her.
They didn't have any birth certificates in those
days.
That's so long ago that they didn't, I
wasn't even recorded, you know.
They didn't even put me down.
I don't know.
I know I got born, though, because I'm
still around.
But I was born of my parents, and
I got into that family by birth.
I had a playmate that grew up with
him, fought with him, wrestled with him, and
argued with him and loved him.
His name was Wood, Doris Wood.
And so Doris Wood and I, Doris used
to talk about the fact that, well, he
was quite a grown boy before he knew
that he was adopted.
I knew it all the time, but we
tried to keep it away from Doris.
And believe it or not, even as a
growing kid, child, I never told my pal
that he was adopted.
He used to fight with him, and I
don't know why I didn't get mad and
tell him, but I didn't.
I kept the secret.
Doris never knew until he was quite a
big boy that he had been adopted.
Not perfectly all right.
I think it's wonderful to be adopted.
I knew two dear little girls out in
Hawthorne, New Paterson, New Jersey.
I was riding along once with them in
the car, these two sweet little girls, and
they began to talk to me.
And they said, you know what, Mr. Tozer?
Our daddy and mama, they like us.
They love us.
Because you see, Mr. Tozer, and they started
to give me the fact of life.
You see, Mr. Tozer, the ordinary baby, when
it's born into a family, they just, the
parents just have to take what they get.
And if it isn't what it should be,
they just have to take it.
They were telling me, snuggling up warm in
the back seat of the car, telling me
about it.
They said, you see, when the child is
born into a family, the parents just take
whatever they get.
But you said, you know what, my daddy
and mama came and picked me out.
And they wanted me.
And they made something out of that adoption
business.
And said, they didn't just take us because
they couldn't help it.
They came and got us.
And they were as happy, and I thought
that was the most perfectly beautiful thing that
I had ever seen.
Of its kind in the world, that parents
were wise enough to take away all the
shock from their little lives and say, no,
you're not born of us actually, but you're
better than that.
We wanted you.
We went and got you.
So if that's the best your theology will
allow you to be, why, you may rejoice
and say, thank God.
He wanted me and went and got me.
But the Bible says that God gave us
the privilege of being born.
Now, there's no poetry here.
This is not poetry.
Sometimes we use a poetic phrase and you
have to edit it down, you know, squeeze
the water out of it and the air
and get it down to a germ of
truth to find out what it means.
But this is not poetry.
This is theology.
And it says he gave them power, authority,
the right to be children of God, which
were born.
So you see now, why have they got
the news item?
Why have they got the byline?
Why God Almighty put it in his news
that certain people were born that weren't born
ordinarily, weren't born just after the flesh, the
average rut and routine of things.
These were privileged few.
And they had a right given to them
that wasn't given to any others.
The right was that they should be born
children of God.
They should actually be children of God.
Now, these are the only ones that possess
that right.
Let us not yield to the pressure, especially
around Thanksgiving and Christmas.
From now on to the 26th of December,
we will be subjected to a quiet but
powerful pressure to believe in the religion of
King.
Jesus' picture will be in the newspapers, and
there will be parts of Scripture increasing until
finally they will put Luke, 2nd chapter, on
the front page.
We will get more and more and more
religious until Santa Claus gets out of the
woods, out of the country.
Watch that now, and don't let anybody pressurize
you into accepting any sloppy, badly thought out
and unscriptural doctrine of the universal fatherhood of
God over all mankind, for it isn't so.
The child that is born of flesh and
bones and blood and sinew is not a
child of God.
He's a creature of God, but not a
child of God.
He's a child of God only when he's
born by a spatial privilege and right and
grant of God Almighty.
And God has given a grant, a privilege,
to certain ones.
And he's denied it to all others to
become the children of God in a sense
that even angels do not have.
There will be a time when we will
no longer cringe before angels.
There will be a time when we will
no longer feel like saluting or salamming before
any broad-winged angel of heaven.
Because the scripture says that God has made
Jesus for a little time lower than angels,
that by the grace of God he might
face death for every man.
But Jesus was not originally lower than angels,
but they were lower than him because it
is written that all the angels of God
worship him.
And what he is, we will be.
Not in a sense of deity, certainly, but
in all the rights and privileges and standings,
we will be equal to him and like
him, for we shall see him as he
is.
And the day will be when the angels,
if there's any salamming to be done, they'll
do it.
And if there's any saluting to be done,
they'll do it.
For the children of the Most High God
have the high grant and privilege given to
them.
We don't believe that.
We don't have to believe that.
If we have to believe that, we begin
to act like it.
You read, Americans are so democratic they love
kings and adore queens.
And you've read in your newspapers and elsewhere
how already they're taking little Prince Charlie.
I think he's cute, don't you, little Prince
Charlie?
They're taking little Prince Charlie and they're starting
to educate him.
Make him a king.
You're a royal stuff, they're telling you.
They had an awful time with Elizabeth.
I followed her from the time she was
this high.
In the newspapers and newsmagazines, cute little thing,
full of sass and talk and used to
push her old granddaddy around and make him
gut the door, Grandpa.
And so the old King V, George V,
had to go shut the door for his
little granddaughter.
She learned how to be a queen, though,
and she's doing a good job of it.
She always deports herself well.
I could think of First Ladies, but we
won't go into that.
But this First Lady of the British Commonwealth
of Nations, they have a right to be
proud of her.
She's acting like the queen she is because
she was trained to it from the time
they could get her settled down long enough
to listen.
Little Prince Charlie's taken up the torch and
now he's being trained.
I can't see why, if we believe that
we have the spatial higher right to be
children of God, we don't begin to act
like children of God, instead of children of
the world and of the faith.
Why do we have men of such fiery
swords as Ravenhill and others of his kind?
They're sick inside when they see the children
of heaven acting like the sons of earth,
and they may go too far and be
extreme and cruel in their slashings, but they're
right in doing it.
We ought to be cut to pieces and
flailed for this thing of living like sons
of the earth when we're children of heaven,
living like Adam when we belong to God,
for we have the right and privilege now
to be children of God.
How do these persons get that privilege?
These born ones that were born of the
mystic birth, how do they get that privilege?
It says they believe and they receive.
Now, we hear that so much that I'll
skip the believe part about it because we've
believed ourselves into a blind alley in our
time.
Every time you pick up a track or
hear an evangelist or sing a song, it's
something about believing.
Everybody goes around believing and never get much.
So that I'll only say that they believed
in that they were not cynics nor doubters
nor pessimists.
They took an optimistic, humble, trusting attitude towards
Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
They were believers.
And then they received him.
Now, here's what I want to lay my
emphasis upon tonight.
They received him.
As many as received him, to them gave
he power.
Now, this word received here is not passive.
We everybody knows the difference between active and
passive.
Passive is when I receive the action.
Active is when I do the act.
And we have come to a religion of
passivity in our day.
Toward God, everybody's passive.
And we receive Christ.
That's passive.
But the Bible knows absolutely nothing about passive
reception.
For the word here is not passive, it
is active.
This word receive here is an accept.
We have accept in our time.
Everybody goes around saying, will you accept him?
Will you accept him?
And we make a fuller brush man out
of Jesus Christ.
He meekly stands waiting to know whether we'll
patronize him or not.
We need what he has.
But we're sovereignly deciding whether we'll receive him
or not.
My brethren, passive accepting is unknown in the
Bible.
Now, let's get there.
Passive accepting is unknown in the Bible.
Nobody knows anything about it within the confines
of sacred writ.
And I, for one, am tired of being
told what to believe by people who copy
everybody else just like parrots.
Put the ministers on perches and they all
say, Polly wants a cracker.
Good morning.
In exactly the same tone of voice and
write books about it and edit magazines and
sing songs.
And if anybody challenges it, they look over
their religious nose at you and say he's
either radical or he's touched with modernism.
When the simple fact is that we have
been taught that passive acceptance is equivalent to
faith when it is not.
The word here in the Greek is not
passive, it is active.
You go to any lexicon, you go to
any modern translation, and you will find out
that somewhere they get across the idea of
take, took, take.
As many as took him, says one fine
translation, to them gave he power to become
the sons of God.
So it is taking instead of accepting.
They took him instead of received in the
passive sense.
As many as took him, to them gave
he power to become the sons of God.
So now I want you to put this
down.
No matter whether you're a layman or a
minister-to-be or a missionary or a
student, I want you to take this thought
down.
That receiving Christ savingly is an act of
the total personality.
That is, it is an act of the
mind and of the will and of the
affections.
And it is not only an act of
the total personality, it is an aggressive act
of the total personality.
I want you to put that down, or
at least hold it down in your memory,
that when Jesus said, or when the Holy
Ghost said hereabout in the works of Jesus,
that as many as received him, it meant
and means as many as aggressively took him
with their total personality.
It didn't mean sit and quietly accept.
It means they took him with their total
personality.
Everything they had became a hand reaching forth
for Jesus Christ.
All of their will and all of their
affections and all of their feelings and all
of their intellect took Jesus Christ as the
Savior and Lord.
That's what it says here.
Now, it actually says it in the Greek,
many as took him actively, they became the
children of God.
So we have here that word.
It's an aggressive taking, an aggressive act of
the total personality.
If somebody should come along who would make
himself heard to thousands instead of to a
few hundred, if somebody should come along with
as much oil as intellect and as much
power as penetration, I believe that we could
yet save fundamentalism from the dogs.
I believe we could yet save evangelical Christianity
from the dead-end street in which she
finds herself.
Never forget it.
Evangelical Christianity is gasping for breath.
Don't you let for a second, don't you
let crowds fool you, and don't you let
anybody teach you that because there's a lot
of religious activity and a lot of religious
thinking that therefore there's a lot of religion,
a lot of spirituality, isn't so.
We happen to have come upon a period
now when everybody is singing about tears and
prayers and weeping in the temples down Mexico
Way.
And you can get a religious phrase kicked
around almost anywhere.
And right in the middle of a worldly
program dedicated to the world of flesh and
the devil with old mammon with his two
silver dollars for eyes sitting at the top
of it, lying about the quality of their
products, shamelessly praising men who ought to be
put to work laying bricks.
Right in the middle of it somebody will
say with an unctuous voice that they learned
in a studio how to make sound religious.
Now we'll have our hymn for the week.
And then they'll call it a hymn and
then they'll break in with a banjo, twinkle,
twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, and they'll sing dogger all
the devil must blush to hear.
And they call that a religion.
It's a religion.
Yeah, I'll admit that all right, but it
isn't salvation.
And it isn't Christianity, and it isn't the
Holy Ghost, and it isn't the New Testament,
and it isn't redemption.
It's simply making capital out of religion for
a price.
Because there's enough of sentimental people listening that
want to blow their nose at least once
a week.
Good.
And they can do it best if some
fellow with tears in his voice sings about
the poor girl that kneels in the chapel
and weeps on the border down Mexico Way.
If I know my geography right, that would
be somewhere in pathway over the Rio Grande,
but we won't go into that.
Now, the meaning of the word took here,
as many as took him actively and aggressively
took him.
They took him, it means a determined exercise
of the will that will not deny any
condition, that will meet any condition the Lord
lays down.
You hear me now?
That's something quite other from what we're hearing.
As many as took him, he gave power
to become the sons of God.
And took means that it was an act
of the will that would meet any condition
the Lord laid down.
It did not come to the Lord and
try to make terms, but that came to
the Lord and actively took him on his
own terms.
We try to make terms with the Lord
and it won't work.
And it will meet any condition the Lord
lays down that will forsake any friend or
relative.
You say, now you're getting radical.
I knew he couldn't preach one sermon that
didn't have radical statements in it.
Well, maybe so.
But did you ever read that passage that
said, If any man comes to me and
hates not father and mother and husband and
wife and yea his children and his very
life, also he cannot be my disciple.
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut
it off.
If thy foot offend thee, cut it off.
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.
For it's better to enter into a life
of the blind than to enter into hell
with all your eyes, both your eyes and
both your feet and hands.
We've edited Jesus Christ down.
We fight over translations and fight over translations
and get bitter over translations.
Any modern translation will tell you that Jesus
Christ said, If you don't come to me
and love me beyond all your family, you
can't be my disciple.
And if you're not willing to turn your
back on your wife for my sake, I
won't have you.
And if you're not willing to forsake your
father for my sake, I won't have you.
That's the sum of the teaching of Jesus
on this subject.
You say it's terribly cruel.
Yes, I suppose so.
But hell is so hot that God did
anything and is doing anything he can do
to rouse people.
And God demands loyalty.
Lot would have been justified if he had
forsaken that ungodly family of his and left
Sodom all alone.
And Abraham almost did that.
You tell us Jesus Christ gives us salvation.
Something to be added on, a boot in
there, a corsage that we add on to
the clothing we already have.
The Lord says, No, strip to the skin.
Throw off your old rags from the skin
out.
And let me dress you in the rags
of righteousness, all mine.
And if it means the loss of friends,
lose it.
If it means the loss of money, lose
it.
If it means the loss of a job,
give it up.
If it means persecution, take it.
If it means the stiff, fierce winds of
opposition will blow, bow your head into the
wind and take it for Jesus' sake.
As many as took him, to them he
gave the authority to become the sons of
God, even to them that believed on his
name.
So to receive Christ is not the passive,
soft affair, not the predigested Wheaties religion.
It's strong meat, brethren.
Yes, sir, it's strong meat.
And God is calling us in this hour
to give up everything and sinful pleasures as
well.
But in our deadly, terrible hour, our degenerate,
sodomitic hour, we are making it as easy
as we can for Christians.
And saying, just believe on Jesus and accept
him, and then you can have and go
and do and be just all you did
before, as long as you don't drink and
run after women.
Outside of that, everything's all right.
Amen.
Now let's get a banjo and go to
work.
And the result is, brethren, that we have
a religion that is not too much better
than Buddhism.
If I wanted to take my choice between
a lot that I see parading as Christianity
and good old Zoroastrianism, or the sound teachings
of Buddha, I'd take Buddha, because he was
sincere about it anyhow.
I'd rather follow Zoroaster and kneel twice a
day to the sitting and rising sun than
to be a half-baked Christian that insists
upon believing on Jesus Christ for salvation and
then doing as I please and violating the
lordship of the Savior.
No, you can't do it, brethren.
You can't do it.
Now, some people don't like this, and that's
why we always have a relatively modest crowd.
I've got sense enough to know what I
could do if I wanted to do it.
Pull in my horns a little bit.
Don't draw so much blood, and don't skew
so close to the line.
Follow along and they'll follow you.
Give them something to make them happy and
tell them they can get to heaven, they
can get eternal life and never lose it,
and all they have to do is simply
accept the Lord and then after that to
do as they please.
They'll follow you.
You can have big conferences built upon that
and great Bible schools and colleges and great
groups of busy Christians and great magazines all
built around that erroneous idea.
Now, as many as took him, they took
him aggressively with their whole personality.
Shakespeare said, or Hamlet said to Denmark, that
all of Denmark is contracted in one great
brow of woe.
And I'd like to change that and say
that all of the human personality is contracted
in one grasping, aggressive hand that reaches out
and takes Jesus and says, Here, Lord, you're
mine if it costs me blood and death.
You're mine if it costs me the loss
of friendship.
You're mine if I lose my job.
There appeared in the Alliance Weekly only about
three weeks ago the obituary, well, it really
wasn't an obituary, of Louis Henry Zimmer of
the city of Toledo.
Had for years one of the largest churches
in the city of Toledo, one of the
largest Sunday school, largest churches, his offerings going
up to $71,000 a year for missions.
This great, broad-shouldered, high-for-it German
Lutheran he was.
He could be saved and be a Lutheran.
Please don't misunderstand me there.
There are lots of saved Lutherans.
I hear them on the air and they
preach the gospel, and I think there's a
lot of fine Christians.
This particular church happened to be the other
kind.
Somebody gave me an Alliance Weekly, and he
said, Why, they told me I could be
saved and know it.
So he gave his heart to the Lord
and was converted.
And when he got converted and began to
preach that you could be saved and know
it, he began to have revivals in his
Lutheran church.
So they called him to account.
And they said, What's this big idea?
How come?
What do you mean?
So he got up and read out of
Luther to them and showed that Luther taught
the same thing.
And they cleared him and then asked him
to resign.
He said that was a promotion.
So he took a little old Alliance church,
the only kind there ever were in those
days, and there aren't too many other kinds
now, a little old Alliance church, usually the
back of a livery stable and over a
barber shop.
That was the early Alliance church as a
rule.
Couldn't get anywhere else.
He took one of those and brought it
up into the great Toledo tabernacle that has
sent missionaries around the world, three of his
own sons and daughters on the mission field.
Well, this man knew what it was.
He gave up everything.
They threw him out.
He had to live from hand to mouth,
jobs, parsonages and all that, all went out
for Christ's sake.
You say that is cruel.
Listen to me.
Do you know that Communists do that now?
Communists dedicate themselves to the cause of Communism
and are willing to give their lives to
support their faith.
And then they tell me that with God
offering me eternal life through Jesus and heaven
and all the glories that lie beyond, that
God's cruel because he tells me I've got
to turn my back on everything to take
Jesus.
Nothing cruel about it.
We're so soft in these days.
We want everything pre-cooked, pre-digested, sliced
and salted.
And then we want God to come and
help us eat and hold a cup to
our baby lips while we pound with a
spoon and splash.
And we think that's Christianity.
Brethren, it's not.
It is a degenerate, bastard breed that has
no right to be called Christianity.
The man who wants the Lord to atone
to him and let him go on as
he's going and still say, in the end,
come thou good and faithful servant, is a
moral fool.
And somebody ought to tell him so now.
And I'd like to be the fellow.
I want to close.
It says here, as many, as many, as
many.
Now, that phrase is inclusive and exclusive.
It includes all who will and it excludes
all who will not.
What is the most important thing going on
in the world today?
Is it the alignment of nations for the
coming of the Antichrist?
I believe not.
Is it the development of the new Israel,
the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies?
As important as that is, I think it
is not the most important.
Is it the growth of Communism and the
preparation for the taking over of half the
world by the Communists?
That's tragically important, but I think that's not
the most important.
Is it the development of the atomic secret,
which will someday send airplanes through the sky
and ships across the seas by the invisible
atom?
That will someday cook your food and warm
your house, drive your automobile by the invisible
atom?
Is that the most important thing?
I think not.
Is it our mastery of nature?
I heard somewhere, I have not seen this,
but I heard somewhere of a watch or
clock.
Do you know how it's powered?
It's powered, that is, it wound up and
kept going by the changes of the air.
Have you heard about that atmospheric change?
It gets warmer and cooler and hotter and
cooler and colder and hotter, and as it
does, it keeps winding this thing.
That's what you call mastering nature.
They sure put a saddle on old Mother
Nature that time, didn't they?
Is that the most important thing?
No.
Not our ability to light our cities with
the light from the stars?
Philadelphia, soon, next week, is going to light
the city with a star.
They're going to have Santa Claus down there,
beard and all, and ho-ho, and they're
going to turn the star loose to light
a certain section of the city or a
certain parade of some sort to light up
old Santa Claus' whiskers.
And they're asking the stars in the heavens
above to conspire with them.
Mastery of nature, is that the most important
thing?
No, I don't think so.
What is the most important thing?
Oh, my brethren, this is it.
The mysterious operation of the Holy Ghost whereby
he selects and rejects.
That mysterious, invisible, and totally silent operation of
the Holy Ghost by which as many are
selected.
As many, he says, as many.
That's a selection out from within.
That's an exclusive selection and an inclusive selection.
And it excludes all that are not in
and includes all that are in.
And it's done silently.
It's done in messages and meetings like this.
It's done wherever the Holy Ghost takes the
word and begins to select.
As many as receive him.
As many.
Nobody knows who they are quite nor where
they are always.
But this mysterious Holy Ghost, invisible, unheard, but
yet wonderfully, terribly present.
Selected, selected, selected.
One here, one over there, two over here,
three across yonder.
This church, nobody.
That church down there, one.
This church over here, two.
Maybe for weeks, nobody.
The mysterious Holy Ghost is finding his selection.
As many, as many.
That's the most important thing that's going on
in the world today.
But that has to do with eternity.
All these other things have to do with
time.
They have to do with the souls of
men.
And all these other things have to do
with the bodies and social lives of men.
So the most important thing in the universe
is going on right in this building tonight.
God is selecting men and women.
As many as took him.
Would you be one of them?
And the bride says, come.
And the church says, come.
And the Holy Ghost says, come.
And the son says, come.
And the father says, come.
And we all say, come and take him.
Come, come.
The Lord Jesus Christ is your Savior.
Come and take him.
Take him if you must walk over your
own family to take him.
Take him if you must leave your job
to take him.
Take him.
Make him yours tonight.
That's the most important thing in the world.
There's nothing can compare with it.
Would you bow your heads in a moment
of prayer with me, please?
O Lord Jesus, thy going forth has been
from of old, even forever.
Thou art moving from eternity that was to
eternity to be, passing by.
And the magnetism of thy presence is finding
a few.
A few that are one with thee in
yearning and longing.
A few.
O Christ, even as thou didst walk down
the streets of Jerusalem, and they came out
of houses and leaned out windows, others glowered
and walked away, so it is today.
My Lord, we beseech thee, help those that
are rejecting.
We pray thee, let them reject.
Those that will receive, we beseech thee, let
them receive.
We say, Selah.
Amen.
So be it, God.
Thou invisible, mysterious person, present in our midst.
The physician is near, the sanctifying, healing Jesus.
The Lord and the Savior is near.
We pray thee for those who, up to
this hour, have been careless, shallow, modern, irresponsible
believers.
We want tonight to change all that, and
to settle it with thee, that they will
take thee as their Savior now, that they
will make thee thine, theirs, that they will
make themselves thine, that they will lay hold
of thee by all the aggressive act of
their personality, believe on thy name, receive thy
person, cease to be sinners, move over into
the new and heavenly birth that makes them
children of God.
Grant it for thy name's sake.