In the first chapter of John, the gospel
according to John, the 19th verse and following,
and this is the record, this is the
record of John, when the Jews sent priests
and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who
art thou?
And he confessed, and denied not, but confessed,
I am not the Christ.
And they asked him, What then?
Art thou Elias?
And he said, I am not.
Art thou that prophet?
And he answered, No.
Then said they unto him, Who art thou?
That we may give an answer to them
that sent us.
What sayest thou of thyself?
And he said, I am the voice of
one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the
way of the Lord.
As said the prophet, he saith, And they
which were sent were of the Pharisees.
And they asked him and said unto him,
Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not
that Christ?
Nor Elias, neither that prophet.
John answered them, saying, I baptize with water.
But there standeth one among you whom ye
know not.
He it is who coming after me is
preferred before me, whose shoes latcheth.
I am not worthy to unloose.
And these things were done in Bethabara, beyond
Jordan, where John was baptizing.
Now here is the man sent from God,
whose name was John.
And what he says is of vital and
lasting importance.
So I beg a hearing for the man
sent from God, whose name was John.
Now John gave a frank testimony about himself.
It's rather oddly worded here.
One wonders why it's worded like this.
Probably there's a lot in it.
But it says more than simply John said.
It says, He confessed and denied not, but
confessed.
I am not the Christ.
Obviously the temptation to put himself in the
stead of another and to take some lasting
glory was very strong.
But John gave a testimony about himself.
It was very frank and illuminating.
Now he was preaching in the wilderness, that
is, he was preaching beyond Jordan, and he
was attracting a wide following and getting very
much attention.
There had been no prophet in Israel for
four hundred years.
There had only been teachers.
And I have an adjective in front of
the word teachers.
I wonder if I'll be misunderstood if I
use it.
There had been no prophets for four hundred
years.
Malachi, the messenger, was the last one.
And then they went into decline.
And while the Maccabees and John Hyrcanus had
come and had been men of military might,
there had been no seer, no prophet for
four hundred years.
There had only been uninspired teachers.
There had been no strange voice, no inspiration,
only the faithful passing on of the doctrines
of the word by teachers, telling what others
had seen and heard.
But for four hundred years there hadn't appeared
a man who had seen anything himself.
He was forced to tell what others had
seen.
For four hundred years there hadn't been a
man who could tell what he had heard.
There had been a long procession of teachers
who were faithfully telling what others had heard.
But they themselves, these teachers, were seeing nothing
and hearing nothing, and for the most part
feeling nothing.
They were the custodians of theology.
And we thank God they were faithful.
They faithfully told what others had seen, faithfully
declared what others had heard.
But they themselves had neither seen nor heard.
And now they were disturbed, that generation of
them, these custodians of orthodoxy, were disturbed by
the appearance of a man who didn't fit
into their pattern.
And they sent to inquire whether he was
one of the expected ones.
You can discover here, without very much intelligence,
you can discover the eschatological background of these
teachers, that is, what their prophetic expectations were.
They sent to inquire whether John was one
of three expected figures.
For evidently, their prophetic expectations only included three
major figures who were to appear.
They said, are you the Christ?
And his answer was very quick and blunt.
He said, no.
They said, all right, now, if you are
not the Christ, are you Elijah?
Because in Malachi they remembered that it said,
the prophet Elijah shall appear before that great
and terrible day of the Lord shall come.
Are thou Elijah?
And he said, I am not.
And they said, all right, then, are you
that prophet?
And again he said, no.
And it's almost amusing, if anything could be
amusing as sad as this.
This exhausted the list of expected ones by
these custodians of prophetic truth.
They had gotten together and sort of agreed,
and they'd written books, you know, and gone
to school, and had gotten under the influence
of the custodians of orthodoxy.
And according to these janitors of the holy
place, they were to expect three persons, Christ
the Christ, Elijah, and someone whom they vaguely
called that prophet.
That prophet is not really a vague expression,
because it's pretty specific, but it said that
prophet.
So they had figured out that there was
to be a prophet, so outstanding a prophet,
that he could be called that prophet.
They figured that John the Baptist was to
come separate from, and he was to be
different from, I mean, Elijah was to come,
and was to be different from that prophet.
Then in addition to Elijah and that prophet,
there was the Christ who was to come.
And that exhausted their list of expected ones.
They could have put that all down on
a chart very nicely, and drawn crayon pictures
of these three expected ones, and then lowered
their voices and said in a solemn voice
that that was God's last word on this
subject.
But here comes a man who isn't Christ,
and he isn't Elijah, and he isn't that
prophet.
And they thumbed over the scriptures and said,
We're sorry, we have no reservation for you.
We have a reservation for the Christ.
When he comes, we have a place for
him, and we have also a reservation for
that prophet when he comes, but we have
none for you.
We have also for Elijah a reservation, but
you haven't sent in your reservation.
Where do you fit in?
Well, he plainly told them this.
He said, I am one foretold in your
very scriptures, but you mislaid my card.
You didn't locate me right, and so you're
missing me.
And I don't like to say it right
here, because I don't want to distract from
the main flow of what I have to
say.
But I wonder how we teach prophecy so
carefully.
I wonder how many cards we've mislaid, and
how far we've missed it, and how many
events may take place that you and I
haven't any reservation for, nor any place in
our thinking to include.
Now, he said, I am one plainly foretold
in your scriptures.
Isaiah foretold me, and you've overlooked it.
I don't fit into your plans, because you
want to be let alone.
You want the dramatic prophet to come, you
want the fiery Elijah to come, and you,
of course, want the Christ to come, the
King of Israel.
But you haven't any place in your expectation
for one who will come and disturb you
morally.
You want to be let alone.
You want God to conform to your religious
pattern.
You're perfectly willing to go along with God,
as long as God will be good and
conform to your pattern.
It's taken centuries to work the pattern out,
and you've got a long tradition behind you.
And it wouldn't be becoming of God to
upset your pattern, or destroy your tradition, or
do anything that wasn't on your agenda.
You want God to approve you, said John,
in effect.
You want God to justify you.
You don't want a prophet to come, or
a voice to come that will disturb you.
You want to be let alone.
But I am come to call you to
righteousness.
I am the voice of one crying in
the wilderness, preparing thee the way of the
Lord.
Now, let's look at this wilderness, for that's
what I want to talk about mainly, the
voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Now, obviously, as John used it here, it
doesn't have the same meaning as it has
when it said he was in the deserts
until his showing unto Israel.
There, the word desert or wilderness was an
identifiable, discoverable piece of terrain that one could
mark on a map and know where it
was to be found.
But here, as is very often true in
the Bible, after a literal use of a
word, there follows a figurative use of the
word as an illustration.
Give me to drink, said Jesus to the
woman at the well, and she said, how
is it that you ask me?
And then the conversation went from water to
water.
After the literal water had been talked about
for a while, he said, ask me and
I'll give you living water.
So he raised our expectation from the physical
water to spiritual water.
So here we have the wilderness in which
John grew up, and now we have him
saying, the voice of one crying in the
wilderness.
Obviously this is a strong figure of speech,
and it does not mean the wasteland where
he had lived.
It refers to the moral condition of Israel.
For John was not talking about botany and
agriculture.
He was talking about morality and religion.
And he went from that word wilderness straight
into moral and spiritual subjects, showing that when
he used the word wilderness, the voice of
one crying in the wilderness, he referred to
the moral condition of Israel.
Now, a wilderness has certain characteristics that might
take a whole sermon to declare them.
There is the characteristic of disorder.
You go into a park and you will
find order, but go into a wilderness and
you will find disorder.
Then there is waste, for these were deserts,
and there were whole sections that had no
grass, and there was the waste.
And then there was the confusion of it
all.
You go into a desert, a wilderness such
as this, not like our western deserts or
not even like the Sahara, but burnt over,
beaten out, fallow, filled with greenbriars and all
kinds of weeds and a bit of grass
here and there, scrubby tree there, just a
confused wilderness.
And then there was the purposelessness of it
all.
You could walk, you can go now through
parts of New Mexico and Arizona.
I rode through there last spring, and I
said to a gentleman after I'd got through,
said, Brother, I want to do something for
you.
I want to give you New Mexico.
And he said, I've already given New Mexico
to another fellow.
Nobody seemed to want New Mexico, at least
not the part that we went through.
It was just a wilderness, a sway-backed
old cow with her washboard ribs standing out
there.
Wouldn't you wonder how she lived on this
sparse grass and no water?
There she was, just her poor desiccated skin
holding her bones together.
That's the purposelessness of it.
I wonder what God ever made such a
place for.
He made it, and it's there.
They say about some parts of the West
that God made the world and had a
truckload of stuff he didn't need and said,
Dump it.
And they dumped it out there.
I've heard that about several sections.
And it seems that the desert is just
the purposelessness, the characteristics, the purposelessness of it.
God just dumped it there.
It doesn't seem to have much meaning.
And then there is the wild, undomesticated quality
of the wilderness.
Nobody obeys any law around there.
Nobody comes when you whistle, lies down and
turns over when you tell them.
They're all wild, so we have confusion and
disorder and waste and purposelessness all built into
the wilderness.
And John had all that in mind.
He knew it and knew it well.
He said, That's what I see in Israel.
That's what God sent me to tell you
is in Israel.
But the seeing John saw this.
Maybe some of you think that the old
brother is beginning to slip and that there
is a crack appearing in the well-known
dome.
But I think I know what I'm talking
about yet.
And I think I'm seeing something.
And I hope there will be enough people
to see it before long that we'll do
something about it.
But this seeing John saw what the religious
leaders of Israel never dreamed was true.
He saw what the faithful custodians of orthodoxy
never dreamed was true.
They saw themselves one way and God saw
them another way and John saw them the
way God saw them.
And John and God were right and they
were wrong.
So it's the voice of one crying in
the wilderness.
Now it would be a worthless time to
be spent here if we were simply to
attack Israel on dead and vex our righteous
souls with the conduct of Pharisees and Scrabs
and Levites and all the rest who have
been filling graves for a great many centuries.
But there is a present condition of the
wilderness, a condition that parallels that of Israel
when our Lord came.
And I want to talk about that.
You know they told us we have been
betrayed by our teachers, tragically, cruelly betrayed by
our teachers.
They told us a little while back that
the world was getting better.
I almost hesitate to use that worn-out
cliche, but they said certainly the world is
getting better.
And they said we know it's getting better
because man is able to cure rabies, for
instance, and diabetes and other diseases, and furthermore
man can do so many things that they
didn't used to be able to do.
And because man has become a toy-maker,
a brilliant toy-maker, they believed that man
also had become a good toy-maker.
That is, man is a toy-maker.
He can make all kinds of toys.
He can reach up and pull down a
jagged lightning and put it in a box
or run it along the wires and send
you the voice along the wires.
And then he can send that jagged lightning
out without any wires from place to place.
And man has invented toys.
They used to take a wheel and put
a spike through it and split a stick
and run the spike through the split stick
and have a toy.
They used to take an old sock that
wasn't useful anymore and stuff it with cotton
and paint a face on it and have
a rag doll for the baby.
They were compelled to use plain little toys.
But now we have manufactured wonderful, startling toys.
Radio is a toy we have invented.
We've invented teleweave, as my friend says, Tee
Wee, my Swedish brother.
He talks about Tee Wee.
And we have invented Tee Wee.
And we have invented deep freezers to give
to your political friends.
And we have invented nylon.
You can run around now in a suit
of glass underwear.
And don't think I'm being funny.
It's true.
Don't think I'm being funny.
They make it out of glass now.
I read of some fellow who said, I'm,
well with Henry Ford, even when he was
still alive, he said he went around walking
around over, is it Litchfield?
All right, Greenfield.
He went around, he said, you know that
I'm dressed in soybeans from the skin out.
He said, I haven't got a stitch on
me not made out of soybeans.
So we're able now to take a soybean
and turn it into a suit of clothes
from the skin out.
We're able to take glass, it used to
shatter when you hit it, now you can
bend over with it and wear it.
And we used to be able to do
only minor things.
Now we're the toy makers of the world.
We make gadgets now.
We make supersonic airplanes that fly faster than
sound and make a shattering noise and break
the non-elastic glass windows when they rip
through the sound barrier.
We're the toy makers of the world.
And they say, all right, man must be
better.
But we have overlooked one little thing, that
along with man's strange and wonderful new ability
to take the forces of nature and combine
them to make modern toys for him, to
make life easier, say light instead of the
candle, and transportation by supersonic plane instead of
by ox cart, and communication instead of by
runner or pony express, now by wireless.
We have these toys and they led us
to believe that along with our advance in
scientific subjects, we should also have an advance
in moral things.
Now I don't know what this proves, but
I throw it out for what it may
prove to a sharp mind ready to hear.
I wonder if it isn't very strange that
two things paralleled each other.
The toy maker's dream, the invention of all
the gadgets and toys that we now have,
that we call modern civilization, that came and
paralleling that, paralleling it the same time and
in the same places among the same people,
like two rails of the same railroad track
running side by side and going the same
places, there came the most frightening and frightful,
incredibly cruel and wicked state of affairs that
has ever been since the days of Noah.
I refer particularly to two ideologies that have
been born or hatched out of hell within
the last years and coming almost at the
same time as the industrial revolution that has
given us the toys.
I refer to Nazism and communism.
You know along with these two godless dreams,
political dreams, there came a carelessness about human
life.
Nobody is sacred except the members of the
party.
And so there can be gas chambers and
pogroms and massacres and purges and starvations and
concentration camps and brutalities and murders and death
marches, and these have taken place in the
same areas where we have been doing our
most wonderful inventing.
So that instead of our new ability to
make toys making us better, it has left
us no better, and for some strange reason
that may not have done it, and I
don't want to be quoted as saying that
science has made us bad.
I only want to be quoted as and
understood that meaning that science has not made
us any better and something else has made
us worse.
There hasn't been anything as bad, not Attila
the Hun, not Genghis Khan, not any of
the cruel tyrants of the past.
They were all brokers compared with the scientific
fleet plan cold mass murders of the last
20 years.
And then, lest we take out our sputtering
indignation on Stalin and Hitler, now both comfortably
deceased, let me point out to you that
the wilderness has also invaded other realms beside
those behind the so-called iron curtains.
I'm not going to mention the place of
women and the degradation of women in this
day in which we live.
There's just no use, and I might as
well shut up.
There's just no use, because nobody believes it,
and to say it is only to have
the satisfaction of knowing that you have told
the truth, whistled into the wind, and gone
to bed, forgotten about it, because nobody listens.
But the degradation of womankind in the last
50 years, all over the civilized world, has
been overlooked, excused, and laughed off.
But let me tell you something, before the
judgment bar of God, it's not a laughing
matter.
And it's no more a laughing matter than
gangrene in a man's leg is a laughing
matter.
If a man had gangrene in his leg,
and he could get enough people to glorify
it, and pay him to exhibit it, and
write books and poems about it, and sing
giant songs about it, pretty soon we could
glorify gangrene.
But gangrene will kill its victim just as
sure as God lives in his high heaven.
And unless he cuts that out and gets
rid of it, all of it will kill
him.
You can never make terms with gangrene.
And when we violate the laws of God,
and bring pollution to the poorest springs of
the race, and continue to do it, and
then excuse it, justify it, and don't repent
of it, but build it into our reasoning,
and write books around it, write plays around
it, and honor it, we're glorifying something that
will kill us as sure as we live.
Now, I don't know that there'll ever be
any change before our Lord comes back again
or judgment hits us.
I don't know that.
I hope so, but I don't know.
And I don't want to abuse young people
either.
Believe it or not, I was once young
myself.
But it seems to me that the rappiest
little guy in the whole neighborhood 40 years
ago would have just been coming around with
the mill stuff now.
And the nastiest little scoundrel that was known
in all the region around about was just
a Sunday school boy compared with the average
that we see up and down now.
A fellow, an old fellow, appeared in the
Alliance Church in New York City, 690, just
above 690, 28th Avenue, just off Times Square
one block, appeared the other night all bloody
and beaten up.
And he said, What's the matter with you?
He said, Oh, some fellow's mugging me.
Now, you know what mugging is?
I hope you never suffer it, and God
knows I don't want to, in my state.
But I hope he's weak as I am
if he tries it.
But any and all, they grab a fellow
from behind and just maul the devil out
of him.
And if he has any money, they take
it, and if he doesn't, they have to
give him an extra beating up for not
having it.
And they did it, surrounded by 8 million
people at church time Sunday evening on 8th
Avenue, with 65 theaters within a few blocks.
The New Yorker only down a little way,
Piccadilly over another little way.
Great hotels and centers, not too far from
Radio City.
Now, I heard the other day of a
doctor over here, on his way about his
business, I suppose, to help some poor unfortunate,
and they grabbed him and did the same
thing to him.
That's when you say those are just rare
examples.
I wish they were rare examples.
Hoover, the head of the FBI, and every
cop that has any sense at all, any
place throughout the country, PTA groups and all
groups, and that may be our hope that
there may be something left yet, are worried,
desperately worried, because of the condition of youth.
Think of the crimes that everywhere are being
committed.
I'm not much for statistics.
I should have loaded my gun with statistics
tonight.
But when you think of how many crimes
are being committed every minute of the day,
how many murders every day, how many murders
that are never caught, murders that are never
solved, and marriages gone to rot, there used
to be only a few jokes.
You know, the old generation, the young fellow
that hasn't shaved yet will cackle over the
joke, and when he's old and rattly and
some gravelly voice, he'll still cackle over the
same joke, so it comes along dressed differently.
And one of those jokes, of course, is
the mother-in-law joke.
Another one is the bride's biscuits, which she
can't cook right.
I saw one on the streetcar transfer this
week.
It says, the bride, honey, I'm glad you
like your meal.
My mother always told me that chicken salad
and strawberry shortcake were two things men liked,
and he said, yes, which one is this?
Now, that has been told from the day
that Cain got married and took his wife
and knew her.
Something like that, down to this present moment.
And I didn't tell it because I like
to tell jokes in a poor bit, I
just wanted to demonstrate the fact that that
old chestnut is still alive.
So there are only a few jokes.
Now they've added another joke to the list.
A fellow went to steal a sisterhood.
One time, one of the great Greek plays,
and he came back and said, the only
thing that bothers me is they haven't been
able to discover a new joke in 2300
years.
Well, they've got a new one now.
It's the joke about getting married and getting
divorced, getting married and getting divorced.
A little girl in Hollywood who says, mama,
who is that man who comes in here
once a month?
Meaning her father, who never shows up.
Or other jokes having to do with how
many husbands they have and how many wives
they have.
Now, there never was a time when people
were good, but there was a time when
the masters of mankind were ashamed of being
evil.
But we have degenerated and gotten demoralized to
a place where now we make belly laughing
jokes out of our evil.
Let someone do evil and hide in the
night, and God will say he's gone where
he belongs into the darkness and will withhold
his judgment.
But when the moral philosophy of a whole
generation becomes such that he can do his
evil and get on the front page, then
God will withhold his hand no longer.
He will rot from within.
So that when we say it's the wilderness,
we have our facts before us.
The wilderness is all around about us.
Now, that was all.
And I would say, thank God for a
pure church in the midst of all this
night.
Thank God for the pure woman with the
light in the midst of this darkness.
But I can't say that until the truth.
For the Christian church, instead of floating high
above it all free and clean, separated from
it, her poor old boat has leaked water
from every seam.
And the church and the world have become
so mixed up that you can scarcely tell
one from the other.
And the world has so affected our moral
standards.
The Christians say they believe in Christ and
don't change their moral standards scarcely at all.
And these leaders, like the priests and the
Levites, they were defending themselves.
They wanted to be left alone and approved.
They didn't want to be disturbed.
They wanted to go to church because it
was so peaceful there.
They said, oh, it's so peaceful sitting here
in church.
Makes me feel so good.
So they wanted to go to church so
they could feel so good.
But all around about them, the wilderness conditions
prevailed.
The vast, formless, morally purposeless and vain manners
of the day.
And the cowardly leaders made converts.
And in our day, we preach the gospel,
we say and make converts, but we make
to the wilderness.
We make converts to the vacuity, to the
emptiness.
Now, if God should raise up a John,
I don't know that he will.
But if God should raise up a John
before Jesus comes, one of the first things
we may get set for is to be
disturbed, deeply disturbed, perhaps even angered.
Let's look at it for a moment here.
At this church alone, a common honesty compels
me to say, I believe this, and if
I'm wrong, God will have to show me.
The common honesty requires me to say, that
compared with the average church, this church is
a good church.
I suppose a large percentage of our people
are good living people.
A large percentage of them could lead in
prayer if you want them to lead in
prayer.
A large percentage of them could lead a
soul to Christ if you ask them to
come help this boy to find the Lord.
A large percentage of them give of their
money to missions and other good works.
They must, or we wouldn't have such an
amount of it here coming through our church
year after year.
So that I must say in defense of
the church, that compared with the average fundamentalist
church, it must be a pretty good church.
But even in this church alone, and those
listening to me now, how much of disorder
there is.
Compared with what you ought to be, brother,
how much of disorder there is in your
life.
Just disorder in the life and in the
heart.
How much waste there is in your life.
Waste of the vital gifts of God.
Waste of abilities and life and time.
How much you waste.
For the wilderness is characterized by waste spaces.
Spaces that have gone to waste that are
no good to God or man.
And even the Christians I'm preaching to now,
how many would have to say it's true,
Mr. Tozer, my heart is more like a
wilderness than like a garden.
It's more like the wild stretches beyond Jordan
than it is like the garden of God
and the barrenness.
I ask you bluntly, if you were to
go to meet him or he were to
come for you, within the next twelve hours,
what would you have to show him for
a life spent in his service?
Barrenness, that part of the wilderness.
Nothing matures in the wilderness.
Nothing grows much.
If there's any fruit there, it's scrubby fruit.
Any grain there, it's inferior grain.
Barrenness.
I ask what have you to show it?
Better never have been born than to be
born once and only once.
But how tragic to be born twice and
yet have no fruit to show for our
Christian faith.
To go our way never having really done
anything.
Nobody in the earth that'll thank God you
live, you're skinned through by the grace of
God.
But nobody will be sorry when you go,
except your immediate circle of loved ones, and
that's only an emotional attachment.
Nobody anywhere that'll say, I thank God that
man ever lived.
In parts of Indonesia tonight, there are whole
tribes that when all the facts are known,
will thank God with shining faith that Jaffrey
ever lived.
Thank God for such men, but there are
not many, and most lives are barren.
And then think of the wild plants that
grow in the desert.
And think of the wild plants that grow
in many lives of those listening to me
now.
Plants of the flesh and of the world,
but they're growing there.
We're supposed to be a garden of God,
but we're a formless wilderness in some instances.
And those wild plants will only be cut
down and thrown into the fire and the
drowsiness of it.
That's the trouble, the drowsiness that is upon
us.
We don't understand.
We not wait to see this.
We're like a man who's been asleep only
a short time and is desperately tired, and
the cry of fire, fire, and he partly
gets awake, but not enough to know what
is going on.
And many a man has perished because he
couldn't shake the drowsiness from his eyes in
the moment of peril.
And a lot of these never repented.
Some did, good many did.
So when our Lord Jesus was finally revealed,
they followed him, and John the Baptist did
not live in vain.
But the masses did not.
They thwarted the purpose of God and did
not repent.
I wonder how it'll be today, whether we
can shake off this drowsiness.
Do you want to pray strategically with me
over the next days?
Then join me in praying for God to
open people's eyes to condition.
Open eyes to condition.
We're so busy with our jobs, and so
busy raising our children, and so busy going
to school, and so busy keeping up with
the program, and so busy reading as much
as we think we ought to read, and
so busy going so many places, with our
little social engagements.
So busy that we forget that there is
a wilderness, the spirit of the wilderness has
settled upon the churches of Christ, as well
as upon the great world around us.
And there's a voice calling, not I don't
fear refer to myself now.
I refer to God's voice, speaking wherever he
can speak, through whomever he can speak.
God is trying to say to us, a
voice, a voice, crying a voice in the
wilderness, a voice.
And now what are we going to do?
Defend ourselves?
Or surrender, obey, and say, God, I'm sorry?
Will you pray with me that God will
disturb us?
The old Lutherans used to say, faith is
a perturbing thing.
The faith they had was not like the
faith we have today.
The faith we have today is a very,
it's a sedative, it's a pill we take.
You believe in Jesus Christ?
Yes.
All right, get up here to Mark, New
Testament, go your way.
And he goes away groggy-eyed, he's taken
the sedative of faith.
But faith was no sedative in the days
of Luther, and was not in the days
of Paul.
It was what they called a perturbing thing.
And it disturbed me, and jarred me, and
shook me, and made me afraid, made me
honest.
And I pray that it may come back
on us.
Will you join me in praying that God
will awake us and rouse us from the
drowsiness of it all?
For there's a drowsiness that lies on the
desert, and there's a drowsiness that lies on
human hearts, and there's a drowsiness that lies
over the Church.
Do you think it's a condemnation of churches?
No.
I believe in every little bit of good
I see everywhere in the world, and I
love it.
And I'm the first one to come to
its defense.
But I still think if God doesn't raise
some men who can be voices to disturb,
within the next few years that which is
now called fundamentalism will be liberalism, and that
which is now called modernism will be atheism.
For we're on the way down.
If you don't raise Lazarus from the dead,
he'll rot.
Decomposition asks no questions when one should get
started.
Cell breaks down, other cell breaks down, gases
are released, smell rises up.
Decomposition asks no questions and plays no favorites
and has no partiality toward anyone.
So when the churches, my church, this church,
any church, my home, your home, my heart,
your heart, when putrefaction sets in, it goes
right on, it finishes the job.
Unless the great physician who now is near,
thus sympathizing Jesus, is permitted to take his
sharp knife and cut it out.
So will you pray for God to open
eyes?
Open eyes.
God is opening eyes, a few eyes here
and there.
I had lunch this week with an important
religious figure in this city.
He sat and told me of what God
had done for his soul, filled him with
the Holy Ghost and marvelously blessed him.
This same week I had a letter from
the borders of Burma, four days' walk from
the nearest road, poured out in two or
three pages of letters.
The letter poured out to me his yearning
after God that was eating him up, his
desire to know God.
Someone else writes from another church, an alliance
church far from here.
A young man and his wife had gone
from this church there, and they had received
something here, and they went out there blazed
with the love of God, full of the
Holy Ghost and zeal.
They went to an alliance church, if you
please, and they began to testify and needle
the young folks to seek God.
The pastor called them in and said, now
don't you bother the young people.
I sympathize with you and your desire for
the deeper life, but let the young folks
alone.
You'll drive some of them away and we'll
deplete our numbers.
But, said they, I come from Chicago.
I go to Mr. Tozer's church.
Ah, he said, we're not all like that.
And as dead as we are, he still
thinks we're fanatics and don't want us to
be let alone.
Well, I won't let them alone.
Don't tend to.
The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
and I pray to God Almighty there may
be an opening of eyes on our board,
in our Sunday school, in our choir, the
two pastors.
There may be an opening of eyes.
Will you pray like that in the next
day?
Oh, God, open our eyes.
We're religious custodians of the temple.
We dot the i's and cross the t's
and count the digits.
But, oh, God, we haven't heard anything or
seen anything.
We're faithfully telling what others have heard and
seen, but we've not seen anything or heard
anything.
We've not felt anything.
We're only telling what Ezekiel felt and David.
My God hears me say this, I'd rather
never preach again than merely to be an
echo of an echo, a reflection of a
light that's long gone.
May God save us and help us.
And over the next days, won't you pray?
Won't you pray for opening of eyes?
Oh, God, open the eyes.
Oh, Brother Tom says, don't waste your prayers.
Don't waste your prayers, he says, with his
Irish accent.
He says, find out what's wrong, then go
right after that.
I know what's wrong, let's go after drowsiness
upon the nations, drowsiness upon the churches, drowsiness
upon the wilderness.
When we do get a convert, we make
a convert to the wilderness.
Let's pray that God will begin a reformation
within his Church that will purify and draw
out a people, a separated people, a holy
people, a spirit-filled people, a biblical people.
Whether they're Baptists or Lutherans or Presbyterians, I
give not the snap of my finger what
they may call themselves, but a separated people,
a people called out, people that God can
use.
Won't you pray like that?
They're found, they're found here and there, my
friend of whom I spoke, that they write
to me, Brother Tozer, too, they tell me,
all over they write, seekers after God, and
there are seekers after God in this country
of ours, but mostly not, mostly not.
We believe in Jesus Christ, get our heels
clean, and get our ticket tucked away in
our inside coat pocket, which according to our
theology we can never lose, and then gaze
out the window while the world goes to
hell, while we go on our happy way.
We're drowsiness of the wilderness is upon us.
Let's pray that God will wake us up,
and wake this Church up.
Will you do it?
And God will wake McAfee and me.
We've been praying like that.
What's the matter with us, anyhow?
Let's pray that God will rouse us, so
the prayer meetings will bulge, so that the
tears of the people will flow, and so
there will be a care, instead of the
sleepy drowsiness of the wilderness, while wild plants
grow.