In the third chapter of the book of
John, beginning with verse 23, verse 22,
says, After these things came Jesus and his
disciples into the land of Judea, and there
he tarried with them and baptized.
And John also was baptizing in Enum near
to Salem, because there was much water there.
And they came and were baptized.
For John was not yet cast into prison.
Then there arose a question between some of
John's disciples and the Jews about purifying him.
And they came unto John, and they said
unto him, Rabbi, ye that was with thee
beyond Jordan, to whom thou bearest witness, behold,
the same baptizeth, and all men come to
him.
John answered and said, A man can receive
nothing, except it be given him from heaven.
Ye yourselves bear me witness that I said
I am not the Christ, but that I
am sent before him.
He that hath the bride is the bridegroom.
But the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth
and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the
bridegroom's voice.
This, my joy, therefore, is fulfilled.
He must increase, but I must decrease.
There with the end of verse 30, John's
testimony also ends.
And from verse 31 on, it is John
the Beloved, the writer of the gospel, commenting
on the whole chapter.
So we'll stop where John the Baptist stopped.
He must increase, but I must decrease.
There is a good deal of history here,
and I'll make it as brief and as
interesting as possible, although there is a amount
of plain facts which we are going to
have to consider.
Both Jesus and John were baptized at this
time, though it is explained below, though Jesus
himself baptized not but his disciples, and there
is no disparity there between the words of
those who came to John and said, Rabbi,
he that is with thee beyond Jordan is
baptized.
Because it explains, in a parathetical passage here,
that Jesus, while he was conducting it, he
did not himself baptize anybody.
His disciples baptized, and he sort of overlooked
the ritual.
Now, these two were baptizing Jesus and John,
and in their journeys they had come here
nearer to each other.
John was bringing his colorful career to an
end, and Jesus was just getting his brilliant
career started.
Each was fulfilling his divine commission.
And as Robertson has said about this, that
between these two men there was no rivalry
except in the minds of the people.
But there was, nevertheless, jealousy which arose among
the followers of each man, not between Christ
and John, but between the disciples of Christ
and the disciples of John.
They were obviously jealous, because they came and
said, Listen, we don't understand this, John.
The one that you talked about as a
bear witness to, over on the other side
of the Jordan, he is eclipsing you.
His crowds are bigger than yours, he is
baptizing more people, he is raising more excitement
than you did, and he is just pushing
you off the front page.
You are being shoved back by this new
prophet that has come.
There was jealousy there, all right, but it
was not jealousy for themselves, it was jealousy
for their master.
Now, I want to point out here the
wickedness of jealousy in sacred things.
It's bad enough to be any time about
anything, but when it enters the sanctuary it
becomes wicked to a point of utter heinousness.
The wickedness of jealousy is like fighting over
a crown that belongs to the Lord himself.
I have two unanswerable questions about religious jealousy,
two questions that I think nobody can ever
properly answer.
One of them is this, if the Lord
is doing it, why should anybody else be
jealous?
If another man is having success and you're
not, and the Lord is doing the work
for the other man, then why should you
be jealous?
Because the other man is not doing it,
it is the Lord that is doing it,
you couldn't be jealous of what God does.
That's one question.
The other one is, if God is not
doing it, why should you be jealous of
it?
Because if God is not helping a man,
and a man is only seeming to have
success, he's going to wake up at the
end of the journey, and he's going to
find he has nothing but ashes for his
trouble.
Why should you be jealous of a pile
of ashes?
So that if God is doing it, why
should you be jealous of a man who
isn't doing it?
And if God isn't doing it, why should
you be jealous of a man who thinks
he's doing it and isn't, and will wake
up in the last day to find he
has no reward and nothing but the disapproval
of God?
Now, like all logic, that won't help anybody,
I might just as well have recited Mary
Wants a Cracker, or Has a Little Lamb
backwards, because nobody pays any attention to logic.
They want to weep or laugh, but they
don't want to think.
Maybe you do, if you're a blessed exception,
all right.
But for the logic of jealousy, the illogic
of it, it bowled me over.
I can't see why, if McAfee sings a
solo, why I should run out and take
a bow.
I didn't do it, when my vocal cords
had vibrated, it is his.
And if the solo is good, why should
I take the credit for it?
And if it's not good, why should I
worry about it?
I didn't do it.
So it is with the things of God,
if a man is having any spiritual success
anywhere, that if God is doing it, then
God's doing it, and I shouldn't be jealous
of God, but if God isn't doing it,
then I ought to pity the poor man
who thinks he's doing it, and God isn't
helping him at all.
Well, that dispute, like often disputes do, it
took another direction, and they went on to
talk about baptism, and that is purification, the
rite of purification by water baptism.
And they had a dispute over it, and
it appeared to be a sincere question, but
it was inspired by other motives and hidden
motives.
The wise man is the one who can
always get through to the motive for anything.
A fellow comes up all smiles and starts
to talk to you.
If you're foolish enough to take the smile
at his face value, you may easily be
led astray.
But if you can penetrate the man's motive,
it's easy to grin for ten dollars, you
can smile for a good sale, and many
a man, as Shakespeare says, smiles and smiles
and is a villain still.
The man smiles at me, I want to
know why.
Is my hair on straight, or what is
it?
Is he smiling at me, or with me,
or about me, or for me, or is
he trying to sell me something?
Motives is all that matter anyhow, motives.
They matter, nothing else does.
So that if we could always know the
motives back of religious disputes, we'd shrug our
shoulders and walk away and close up tight
and never answer at all, because the reason
back of all this was rivalry and bad
feeling.
I don't know whether Jesus baptized more deeply
down into the water, or whether John baptized
more deeply than Jesus did.
I don't know whether John baptized in a
still stream, and Jesus in running water.
I don't know, but they got into a
dispute about it, and it was the result
of rivalry and bad feeling.
I'd like to say this to you, that
out of many years of experience, of what
I hope is prayerful observation, I'm prepared to
say that it's rarely that two God-hungry
men ever disagree.
If there is a disagreement and a doctrinal
dispute, one of the men has ceased to
be hungry for God, or both of them
have ceased, or else neither of them ever
was.
It's rare that two God-hungry men ever
dispute over modes of baptism or of purification.
It is when we're no longer hungry for
God, that we get concerned about the niceties
of doctrinal interpretation.
And what passes for zeal for the Lord
is very often zeal for my own opinion.
It is amazing how much zeal a man
can work up, what a head of steam
he can get on in favor of his
own opinion.
And sometimes that will clear down to very
tiny, little things that don't matter at all.
I sometimes say to people that disagree with
me, well, you can be a good Christian
and not agree with everything that I say,
and you can go to heaven and not
agree with everything that I say, provided we
get together on the fundamentals.
And if we get together on the fundamentals,
then the incidentals never ought to divide us.
And I do not believe that two God
-hungry men ever yet quarrel over incidentals, because
if they're God-hungry, they'll get down on
their knees, and when they're on their knees,
they go immediately from the incidentals to the
fundamentals.
And when we agree on the fundamentals, we
are one, and there isn't anything to dispute
about.
But nevertheless, they were disputing.
And these religious disputes over rites and baptisms
very rarely have an honest origin.
Almost always they're born in the dark of
the moon and the sub-rosa, and they
come up out of a source that is
not good, and so it was here.
And John, this was one of the nicest
things John ever said.
This man, John, was a son of thunder
in the real sense of the word, this
John the Baptist.
And he could really peel a man's epidermis
down close to his bones.
You know how he did it.
If you were to look at the writings
or the New Testament descriptions of John and
of John's preaching, you will find that John
was a terrible prophet with a sword of
God in his hand.
But he was getting toward the end of
the journey now, and maybe he softened up
a little bit.
And so when these anxious people came to
him, jealous for him, he kindly changed the
subject.
And he did what his master often did.
Our Lord often did this.
They came and asked him question number one,
and he never paid any attention to question
number one.
He answered question number two, which they'd never
asked.
Jesus often did that, and John did it
here.
They came to him and said, Master, how
is it that that man, the two-pointed,
two over beyond the Jordan, is now crowding
you out, you, the great baptizer?
You are being crowded out, and your popularity
is waning, and his is rising.
How can these things be?
And John said to them, Kindly, your problem
is not ritual problem, nor practice problem, nor
mode of baptism problem.
That isn't your problem at all.
But your problem is your far-off distance
from God.
That is your problem.
Don't you realize that a man can receive
nothing except it be given him from God?
Why should you be excited in the flesh
and worry about man's opinion and what man
thinks of you?
Why should you change your color or complexion
or the feelings within your heart disturb you?
Because I am being eclipsed by the man
beyond Jordan.
He could receive nothing if God hadn't given
it to him, and I can receive nothing
if God doesn't give it to me.
And if God gives it to him and
gives it to me and gives more to
him than he does to me, why, don't
you see, that's nothing to worry about.
It's nothing to get excited over.
We're all in the hands of God.
That would be wonderful if we could all
see it like that.
It would be wonderful for church choirs if
they could see it like that.
It would be wonderful for boards if they
could see it, that a man can receive
nothing except it be given him from God.
And if he's got something that God didn't
give him, he simply has wood, hay, and
stubble that will perish in the last day.
So why not throw ourselves over on God
and say, well, I'm not going to worry
about appearances.
I'm not going to worry in the slightest
what men think of me.
If anything I have is of God, and
God's given it to me, then I have
it.
And if God has given something to somebody
else, then that man has that, and he's
responsible for it, and we're not going to
worry about that.
A man can receive nothing, said John, except
it be given him from God.
So that if God has given Jesus, this
man Jesus, a ministry, why should you be
jealous of me?
Because I told you long ago that I
am not the Christ.
I did my work, and now I'm about
to fade out of the picture.
And I have introduced him who is to
do a vaster work than I have ever
done, the man Christ Jesus the Lord.
Then he used a lovely little illustration here.
He said the bridegroom is really the main
one, the best man.
He's only up there as an ornament, and
he sort of arranges things.
In those old times, and I don't know
how they do it now, all I ever
do is stand up here and say, wilt
thou?
But in those olden times, the best man,
the friend of the bridegroom, he calls it
here, used to sort of take over and
arrange the whole business.
And he had no part in it except
that he arranged it for the bridegroom.
And when he heard the bridegroom's voice, he
was satisfied.
The bridegroom said, well done, that was beautifully
done, thank you, I appreciate this a lot.
That was all he wanted.
He was happy because he had served as
the best man to his friend.
And John said, now let us apply that.
He said, I came from God, sent of
God to introduce the bridegroom and to prepare
the country for him, prepare Israel for his
coming.
Now he has come, you have heard his
voice, now there's nothing left for me to
do, I might as well turn out the
lights and go home, because from now on
the interest is on the bridegroom and the
bride, not on me.
I was only the best man.
I simply got them together and arranged the
walking up and down the aisle and the
things they did.
I have no part, now I'm finished.
Blessed old John, nothing that he ever said
during his preaching was quite as nice as
a thing he said when he was through
preaching, when he brought it to an end,
which is always a happy circumstance, brother.
If we preachers only knew when to quit,
I mean not when to quit in a
given sermon, but just when to stop preaching.
Men have had a wonderful ministry, and then
slowly they began to peter out and sound
like a parrot and repeat and run around
in circles.
Their friends began to desert them a little
at a time, and they began to get
sour about it, and their preaching got filled
with rancor and gravel.
Oh, if they had only quit when they
were on top!
If they had only stopped and retired and
said, You believe in retiring?
I believe in retiring rather than getting sour.
If you can keep right on going and
stay sweet to the end like John did,
all right.
John was sweet right on to the end.
He said the nicest thing is just as
he would bring his ministry to a close.
And then the last line that John ever
uttered.
I realize that a little while later, maybe
a few months later, John got worried and
sent a note to Jesus.
But that wasn't in any sense a public
utterance.
That was simply a note which he sent
with certain disciples to the Lord Jesus asking
if he was indeed the one John was
discouraged and imprisoned and maybe even sick or
at least badly discouraged.
So we don't count that.
This is the last public utterance of the
man.
And according to Knox's translation here, here is
what John said.
He, Jesus, must become more and more, and
I must become less and less.
Now, this was John's last utterance, I say,
and it gives us the secret of his
ministry.
This is what made John tick.
This was the beating heart of John's ministry,
that Jesus Christ was to become more and
more, and John himself was to become less
and less.
He must increase, but I must decrease.
So John condensed into this one sentence the
secret of his spiritual greatness, and he unwittingly,
I suppose unwittingly, put into one sentence the
secret of the success of every prophet and
every saint and every devotional man and every
holy woman that ever lived in all this
wide world.
God must increase and I must decrease.
Jesus Christ must be getting more and I
must be getting less and less.
And here is the strange and wonderful thing
that as these saints said, God must become
more and more and I less and less,
God became more and more, but he also
made them more and more.
But the man who said, I willing that
God should become more and more, but I
also want to become more and more, immediately
started to become less and less.
Now, here is a strange voice sounding out
here, this text.
Jesus Christ must be increased and I must
be decreased.
He must become more and more and I
less and less.
This is a strange voice, I say, and
it's sounding over this modern religious vanity pair.
I received in the mail yesterday a nicely
done brochure called The New Mood.
Yes, I've heard of The New Look.
This is The New Mood.
And the story was that we have a
new mood now, a new religious mood has
come to America and that we're all very
much better off than we were.
One pastor brushed off his metaphors and came
out with the amazing statement that Dwight D.
Eisenhower had resurfaced religion in America.
The service had worn off and Dwight Eisenhower
had resurfaced the poor old worn-out church.
And one after the other, absurdized about this
new business in religion, more churches being built
and more educational units being built.
Well, why wouldn't there be?
We have unparalleled prosperity.
We have more money than we know what
to do with it.
You see an old sack of something down
the street here, it's money.
Somebody has thrown it away or hasn't carried
it around.
We've got money in these days, brethren, lots
of it.
And so naturally we have more money in
our coffers and naturally every ambitious deacon wants
to run up a finger to the sky
to mark him when he's gone.
And so we're building.
But they can't take me in about Dwight
Eisenhower retreading religion in this land of ours.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe that a man that'll swear
and get red in the face and drink
whiskey ever be used of God Almighty to
resurface anything.
Although politically I think he's a wonderful man
and I'm on his side.
But I'm not so foolish as to think
that the Holy Ghost is using a cussing
man who drinks whiskey to resurface spiritual Christianity
in America.
Now you say I'm over on the Democratic
side, you'd be surprised, brother, you'd be surprised
if you'd watch me pull that lever down
for height back there in November that year.
All right, but nevertheless I'm not going to
be taken in by a lot of dreamy
sentimental reverence.
When religion begins to take on meaning to
men and when they begin to pay their
bills and get out of debt and stay
out of debt, when they begin to drive
their automobiles like sane men instead of murderers,
when they begin to serve God and attend
prayer meetings and wait on God and live
right, and the moral standards of the cities
begin to rise and politics begins to get
pure, not because somebody purchased it, it's because
the public won't elect dirty men, I'll believe
Christianity is having a recrudescence in America.
But I'm not going to believe it just
because we're building more buildings, and I'm not
going to believe it just because they pray
and have breakfast in Washington.
A man can swear, use vile language, cheat
and lie, and then go and bow his
head at a prayer breakfast, and the poor
preachers will all raise their lily-white hands
to heaven and say it, then he'll come
to judgment.
Oh, no, brother, oh, no, just a nice
old boy that I thank God's in there,
but he's a long way from being spiritual.
We have bumped things a little bit in
the direction of religion so that people can
now, Jews, Catholics, and Mohammedans, and all the
rest of us can get together better than
we could before.
Then what I started to say before I
got over on that is, that this vanity
fair in which we're living now, this is
vanity fair, brethren.
This world in which we live, particularly our
United States of America, this is a vanity
fair here.
We're given over to the lusts of the
flesh, and to the pleasures of life, and
to the sight of the eyes.
We're given over to it completely.
To hear a voice sounding, listen real closely,
and maybe you'll hear it in the midst
of the babble of voices, he must increase
and I must decrease.
And we say, oh, wait a minute now,
that's for our day?
That voice sounds in our day?
Yes, that's for us in our day.
But it's hardly heard in this day when
men shamelessly promote themselves and allow themselves to
be promoted by language so extravagant and so
preposterous that it amounts to downright lying where
publicity is worshipped as a god, and where
success is coveted and courted and wooed like
a soiled curtain.
Men would rather succeed than to be fooled,
and where the models for rising young Christians
are not found in Jerusalem, but are found
in the world where saintliness matters very little.
We make Christians, get them in, label them,
tag them, count them, register them, and in
many instances they're seven times worse children of
hell than they were before, because there's been
no repentance, because there's been no appreciation or
understanding of what Christianity means, because they do
not come into the Church of Christ as
new creatures, but they think of the Church
of Christ as a kind of religious secret
society or religious social club.
Oh, this voice is sounding, and it sounds
strange in this day, incredibly strange, that anybody
should say, from now on Jesus Christ gets
bigger and I get small.
Oh, we say, you're going to have to
hire someone, surely you're going to have to
hire someone to do publicity for you, you
need a man, a publicity agent to put
you over.
John said, he must increase and I'll do
the decreasing, and as the Lord Jesus gets
larger and larger, I'll get smaller and smaller,
and it won't matter because that's the way
God ordained it.
No man can receive anything except it be
given him from God, and I have had
my time, and now it's my time to
quit and turn the light on the one
who is rising with healing in his wings.
He gets bigger and I get smaller.
Oh, that sounds like a voice out of
the past, or it sounds like a voice
out of the future, or out of eternity
that has no past and no future, but
it doesn't sound like the voices I'm hearing
in the day in which we're living, uh
-uh, because these are the days when everybody's
promoting himself.
Everybody's beating the drum for himself in religious
circles, almost everybody, and we're going to have
to stop and tune our ear trumpet up
a little and see whether we can't tune
in that strange voice.
I hear it.
He must grow larger and I must grow
smaller.
You really mean that, sir?
I mean that.
I'm satisfied to let Jesus Christ get larger
and larger, grow in my ministry, grow in
my heart, in my life, at my expense.
He gets bigger and bigger and I get
smaller and smaller, and in doing it we
both do the will of God.
That was John's last word.
I say nothing he ever said while he
preached among men was as wonderfully illuminating and
revealing as what he said as he was
leaving his ministry, soon to be thrown into
prison.
Now, let us note here that it's only
a rare soul that can hear this message,
only a rare soul.
But remember that your spiritual life, the depth
of it, the purity of it, the intensity
of it, and the quality of everlastingness that
it contains or doesn't contain, will depend altogether
upon how sincerely you are able to say,
I want my life to be so that
I become increasingly less important, and Jesus Christ
becomes increasingly more important.
Remember that you don't have to do it,
but your spiritual life will take on quality
from whether you do it or not.
The fruit of your Christian life also depends
upon whether you say, he must increase and
I decrease, or whether you say, I insist
upon increasing, I insist upon it.
And the result of your labors.
We're going to all be called home one
of these times, we great men according to
whether they're young men, middle-aged men, or
old men, or doddering old doters.
But God doesn't look at it like that,
because the wink of an eye and thousand
years have passed away.
Ten thousand times ten thousand millennia are nothing
to God, and God knows that we're all
old, that we're all in the long sweep
of the years, won't be around very much
longer.
And you're going to have to answer to
God for your labor and the fruit of
your labor.
Some say, well, but I am not responsible
for the fruit, I'm only responsible for being
active or being faithful.
It's a nice way to dodge out of
it, my brother.
You'll be responsible to God for the fruit
of your life.
For the fruit of your life is a
simple layman that couldn't stand on your feet
and talk five minutes, but you're responsible for
what God has given you.
No man can receive anything except it be
given him from God.
And if God has given you something as
he undoubtedly has, you're responsible for that thing.
And the fruit of your labor will depend
upon where Christ is in your ministry and
where you are in relation to Christ.
And your conscious union with Christ.
Now, this is what I talk a good
deal about, and I don't know how far
I'm getting with it, but I talk about
the union of the soul with the Savior,
the conscious union of the heart with Jesus.
Not the theological union only, but a conscious
union, a union that is felt and experienced.
And remember that Jesus Christ will brook no
rivals.
He will not allow this holy union to
be perfected where there is a rival, where
there is someone else who is demanding the
crown that he alone must wear, where there
is someone else that is pushing himself or
herself up into the seat where he alone
can sit.
That union of the soul with God comes
when we follow John in the wonderful blessedness
of bowing ourselves out completely and letting Jesus
Christ be all in all in all.
You see, friends, God made us for eternity,
as I have often, often repeated.
And this little brief minute of time that
we inhabit now isn't too important when it's
seen against the vast reaches of time that
we will indwell finally and inhabit.
And if you can afford to push yourself
up, can you afford it?
I don't think you can.
I think that you could for time, if
time was just all we had, then I
say that everybody ought to go out and
get all he could get and in religious
circles push himself up.
But when we use the holy sanctuary as
a place, a theater, where we show off
our talents, when we use the religion, the
holiest activity of the human mind as material
out of which we make a crown for
our own empty heads, the whole thing is
tragic beyond all description.
Tragic, I say, to the point of absolute
calamity.
When we come to the altar of God,
every man is the same size as every
other man.
When we enter in behind the veil where
the dim fire burns between the wings of
the cherubim, every man is the same size
as every other man.
And there are no great men, no small
men, no large men, but there are only
men.
And when we can kneel there before him
and take the holy vow that we are
going to so live that Jesus Christ shall
increase and grow always, we shall taper out
and down and cease to mean anything and
get smaller, then we are on our way
toward not only immortality to come, we are
on our way toward the immortality of our
deeds.
It is one thing to say that God
will at the coming of Christ give every
Christian immortality, but it is another thing to
know that immortality will also invest our deeds
and our toil.
You're working a little, you're giving of your
money, you're trying to win a few souls,
you're helping out here and there, that's toil,
that's labor.
You're standing against the enemy that's fighting like
a soldier, and all that is good.
But beware lest it perish with the using,
and watch that it get invested with the
quality of immortality, so that when our Lord
comes and gives immortality to our souls and
incorruptibility to our bodies, that our deeds also
and our labors that follow us shall also
be invested with immortality.
The immortality of deeds and labor and fruit
never comes to the man who says I
am getting bigger and bigger.
It always comes to the soul that says
he must increase and I must decrease.
He grows more and more and I less
and less.
They often talk about Dr. A.
B.
Simpson.
He has been a great blessing to thousands
of people.
It's quite an amazing thing that a revival
of his books in the last few years
has come, and so they're selling them like
hot cakes.
They're being sold and reprinted and reprinted, and
yet you wouldn't allow his picture to be
taken until he was an old man.
He said, No, no.
I don't want to be pushed up.
I don't want to be elevated above my
brethren.
He took the lowest, the humblest place and
always kept it.
Someone came to a meeting, you'd heard about
the great Dr. Simpson and his woman.
I don't know what she expected, Bo Brummel,
John Wilkes Booth, or Jimmy Walker.
I don't know what she was looking for,
but she said afterward, Oh, what a disappointment.
He said a man came in the back
way and went to the back of the
choir and sat down behind everybody else.
Pretty soon they announced that Dr. Simpson would
preach, and that was Dr. Simpson.
Imagine that, taking the farthest place back.
He couldn't understand that, because being used to
vanity fare and being used to men horning
their way forward and rooting their way into
the middle of the trough, she didn't recognize
a man when she saw one who was
dedicated to the proposition that he ought to
get smaller and smaller while Christ got larger
and larger.
He gave to the Church probably the biggest
vision of Christ given by any man in
a hundred years of ministry.
It is a hundred years of the various
ministries of various men.
Now, if I were at this juncture to
ask you or ask any average group of
Christians, do you want to become, would you
like God to come and do something for
you that would make you great?
Would you like to come to the altar
and we'll pray for you that God will
come and fill you in order that you
may go out and do great exploits?
There wouldn't be an altar room anywhere big
enough to contain the people that would rush
to the altar of prayer asking God to
do great things for them.
Oh, God, I want to be, I want
to be as our Christ.
But if you give an invitation and say,
how many would like to come and dedicate
yourself to the everlasting vow, O Jesus, from
here on thou will increase and I will
decrease.
And I am willing that thy increase should
be at the expense of my decrease.
And I am willing that in proportion as
thou dost get larger, I should get smaller.
And I am willing that as men love
thee more, they'll love me less.
I am willing that as they admire thee
more, they'll admire me less.
I wonder how many people would come under
those terms.
Not very many.
They wouldn't stampede down the aisles and race
into the places of prayer and kneel down
and say, Lord, let me be nothing and
be everything.
But don't forget, my brethren, immortality lies there.
I mean, immortality of deed, immortality of labor
and fruit and reward lies there.
Not only that, but saintliness lies there.
These grinning, glassy Saints, and I want to
run as far as I can run.
These born-again egotists, these twice-born extroverts
who rush in and horn you out, O
Lord, give me the wings of a dove
that I may fly away and be at
rest and never have to face that sort
of thing.
Now, the man of God who says, I'm
satisfied to be nothing if only God would
be big.
I've had a prayer written down for a
long time where I've been praying it to
the Lord, and I don't want to sound
funny, and I especially don't sound funny when
it comes to prayer.
But I have asked God whether he would
allow a scriptural application of a New Testament
text to me.
Brother McAfee grins at me about it.
But I've been asking God whether, I don't
know what they say down in the Bible,
exegetes, but I'm asking God whether he would
allow this application to be made of Jesus
riding into Jerusalem.
You remember that story, Jesus rode in, and
the little fellow of the long years got
less and less, and Jesus got more and
more.
As they rode in, they threw palm leaves
down on the ground, and the little hoops
of the donkey beat on the palm leaves,
and they threw garments down, and his little
feet beat on the soft garments, and he
was having his moment in the sun.
But nobody saw him.
There wouldn't have been three people in all
the thousands that lined the highways could have
told whether he was a brown-spotted donkey
or a white donkey with brown spots.
They wouldn't have known.
They weren't paying any attention to him, but
Jesus rode on top of him, and they
were crying, Hosanna to him that cometh in
the name of the Lord.
Now, I don't think donkeys go to heaven
as John Wesley thought chickens did.
I don't think that donkeys go to heaven.
So I suppose the poor little old donkey
got his reward by a good feed after
the day was over.
But if they do go to heaven, I'll
recognize him there, because I am asking God
whether he won't sort of let that be
the way it is with me and with
many of my brethren, simply that we be
nothing, that we furnish the four legs and
Jesus Christ rides in triumph into Jerusalem.
And when people look at us, they see
two, but they don't see us only out
of the corner of their eye, they see
Jesus in the middle of their eye.
And they say, Hosanna to the Lord Jesus
Christ.
There is saintliness and there is union with
Jesus and there is spiritual elevation and there
is great delight and there is that borderline
ecstasy of soul that the Saints used to
know, but it only can come as you
give yourself up to diminish while he increases.
But if you insist upon being big, all
that I've talked about will vanish away.
You can't grow and you can't be fruitful
and you can't be successful and immortality will
not invest your deeds and it will be
wood, hay and stubble in the day of
his coming.
So what are we going to do tonight?
Where are we going to put Jesus in
our ministry, the lame and simple ministry or
the grandiose ministry of the Bishop?
It matters little, it's still the same ministry.
There are no bigger little men with God.
And whatever your ministry is, if it's only
to tithe your modest income and intercede and
be faithful, that's a ministry.
And the outcome of that ministry altogether depends
upon where you put Jesus Christ in it.
Jesus Christ is big and getting bigger all
the time.
Well and good for you and blessed art
thou, but if you're insisting upon pushing your
way in, then God help you and have
mercy on you, because I see nothing but
loss and tragedy, loss of reward and the
shrinking of the soul and the diminishing of
the light as time goes on.
John left us a wonderful text, that last
verse he quoted in his final sermon was
a wonderful verse.
What do you think about it?
Would you bow your heads with me now
in a moment of prayer?
O Lord, your flesh is strong and vigorous
and the world is magnetic and dynamic and
the devil is active and unless we have
thy help, we're not going to get very
far.
But O Lord, thou hast said, I will
be with you, I will hold thy right
hand, I will lead thee, I will turn
away the arrow that flies toward thee, I
will quiet the tongue that rises against thee,
fire that is kindled shall not burn thee
and the water shall not overflow thee, these
things I will do unto thee and will
not forsake thee.
O Lord, we fear not, for we are
in thy hands.
O Lord, we pray thee about the place
of thy Son in our lives and the
place of thy Son in our labors.
We are concerned that he should be the
Son, and if we shine at all, we
should shine only as the moon, reflecting the
light of the greater orb.
O Lord, help us tonight.
Help us tonight.
There are some young people who may later
on in their lives become missionaries or ministers.
And Lord, we pray that thou wilt teach
them and then lead them through, at the
cost of bloody feet and torn sinews and
heartache, lead them through until they know that
they have taken the vow that has been
said of them, they have taken the veil,
and the holy vow that can never be
unsaid has been said.
From here on, it is I, nothing, Jesus,
all.
From here on, it is I, diminishing, Jesus,
increasing.
His light shining, mine dimming, more and more.
Grant, we pray thee, for Jesus' sake.
Now, before we finish our prayers, friends, I
feel it is so vitally important that I
would like to have you seal this home
to your own heart.
I would like to have you take this
as a voice of God to you, and
tonight, quietly and determinedly, make some vows that
will change the direction of your life and
keep it on course for the rest of
your life.
Jesus, Jesus, increase more and more, and cause
me to decrease to be less and less.
If you can pray that prayer, and if
you want me to pray that God will
burn this in on you until you take
your vow seriously, so that he will be
glorified at your expense, shine at the expenses
of your glory, then I want you to
stand and repose this prayer, praying for you
specifically.
But there are those who would say, remember
me, Joseph, as near as I know, I
understand you, and I want tonight that God
should receive me as one who is determined
that I am going to be small and
he large.
I am deliberately taking the place of humility
and self-effacement and loss that he might
have the place of shining glory before men
who else would stand.
God bless you well.
We will pray as we close our prayer.
Think it over, and whatever you do, do
it most deliberately.
Now, Lord, we pray for these probably 40
people who stand here tonight.
Oh, God, the world is busy counting numbers,
and the Church is even counting numbers, worshiping
success, promoting flesh, pushing Adam to the front.
These are saying, I desire to put Adam
under my feet and to promote Jesus Christ,
and to glorify the Father who art in
heaven, and to make Christ appear large and
myself small.
These are strange people, Lord, strange.
For they have heard a strange voice from
another world calling them to humility and meekness
and lowliness, to take thy yoke upon them
and follow thee, and to bear the cross
that will slay them out to the place
of death, that they might rise in newness
of life and promote the high glory of
the Most High God.
So we pray for these.
We pray that all their hearts yearned for
may be theirs, and that this may mark
in each of their lives a specific stone
of memory, a time when they will say,
From that night on things changed in my
life, and things have been different.
The old desire for honor and praise and
credit is all gone, and the only desire
is to make Jesus all in all.
By the Holy Ghost come and possess these
friends, until they shall be all, nothing in
Christ, all in all, granted to be keeped
for Jesus' sake.