The woman of Samaria.
Our Lord met her there at the well,
Jacob's well, and asked her for a drink.
She wondered why.
They got into conversation.
Then they went on to talk about worship.
She asked a technical question, where they should
worship, since the Jews and the Samaritans did
not agree.
And he said to her, woman, leave me
the hour cometh when ye shall neither in
this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the
Father.
Then he said to the woman bluntly, you
worship thee know not what.
Samaritan religion was a compound of paganism and
Old Testament.
And he frankly said, you don't know what
you worship.
But we Jews know what we worship, for
salvation is of the Jews.
But apart from that, the hour cometh.
And now is when the true worshippers shall
worship the Father in spirit and in truth.
For the Father seeketh such to worship him.
God is spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.
Then she said she knew that when the
Messiah came, he'd tell everything.
And Jesus said, I that speak unto thee
am he.
Then verses 28 to 30, the woman then
left her waterpot.
She'd come out from the city of Samaria,
started to say, wearing that, holding it upon
her head anyhow, the kind of huge hat.
She hadn't any water.
She'd gotten into a conversation with the strangest
man she'd ever met.
And she ran off and left that waterpot
and went back into the city.
And she said to the man, come see
a man which told me all things that
I ever did.
Is not this the Christ?
I can see the literal-minded person accusing
this woman of falsehood here, because certainly our
Lord didn't tell her everything she ever did.
Then verse 30 says, then they, obviously those
men to whom she'd spoken, went out of
the city and came unto him.
Then skipping over to the 39th verse, many
of the Samaritans of that city believed on
him for the saying of the woman, which
testified, he told me all that I ever
did.
So when the Samaritans were coming to him,
they besought him that he would tarry with
them, and he abode there two days.
And many more believed because of his word.
And they said to the woman, Now we
believe, not because of thy saying, but we
have heard him ourselves, and know that this
is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the
world.
Now our Lord's great, his holy secret, he
had here told.
He had told more about himself than yet
any time in his whole ministry, and almost
more than he ever told to anybody.
And he had told it to a woman
who was not a very good woman.
I touched that last week, but I want
to speak a little more about it tonight.
There were plenty of priests around Jerusalem, men
who had been appointed and had come into
the priesthood after the very order of Aaron.
They could have shown their credentials, could have
proved their right to be rabbis, or priests,
or both.
And there were scribes there, men appointed to
teach and transcribe, to make copies of the
scriptures.
There were lawyers skilled in the Mosaic law.
There were religionists there, and there were there
are plenty, because, as you know, Israel was
a very religious nation.
And if we had been doing it, we'd
have never chosen this woman, with a shadow
lying across her life, as the receptacle for
a holy secret, a divine revelation above anything
ever yet made, and equal to anything ever
made until after the resurrection.
Now, I don't know why this was.
I only know that it's an everlasting rebuke
to human self-righteousness.
I only know that.
I only know that every smug sister that
walks down the street of Chicago ought to
be ashamed of herself.
I only know that every self-righteous man
who straightens himself up in the morning before
the mirror and shaves what he believes to
be an honest paste ought to be ashamed
of himself.
I only know that the priests in their
order, the rabbis in their proper place, and
the scribes at their tables, and the lawyers
at their work, were passed over, and this
woman was given the holy secret.
I say I don't know altogether why it
was, but I would assume that there were
a number of things that were in her
favor.
One was her conscious need.
There are some things that do not always
follow.
That is, they are not always the same.
There's lack of uniformity, as I said this
morning.
But there's always uniformity here.
Everybody that ever gets anything from God has
to have a conscious need.
There must be a conscious sense of a
lack that is vital, and this woman had
it.
She never fought back.
She was in great need, and she knew
it, and she was completely frank.
She was a pretty good sidestepper, and no
doubt she'd heard much religious argument, and she
did what she could to take the heat
off as the Lord's kindly eyes bored into
her conscience.
And when she saw there was no use,
she threw up her hands and was completely
frank.
And her frankness, her humility, then her enthusiasm,
pleased the Lord Jesus Christ.
For always remember that Jesus Christ never thinks
about what you have been.
He always thinks about what you're going to
be.
You and I are slaves to time and
space and chronology and records and reputations and
publicity and the past and what we call
the case history.
Jesus Christ cares absolutely nothing about your moral
case history.
He forgives it and starts from there as
though you had been born one minute before.
So that the Lord cared nothing about this
woman's past whatsoever, it didn't enter into the
consideration.
But he was drawn to her warm enthusiasm
and her frankness and her self-conscious need.
So he revealed himself and gave himself to
her, and I repeat again, gave her the
secret that he had not given to anybody
yet, and that he gave to very few
even following that.
So that the woman received the great disclosure.
The Lord himself disclosed a secret to her,
a mysterious secret to her.
It was the secret of his Messiahship and
the secret of the nature of God and
the secret of the true nature of worship.
And the woman let it out.
She wasn't a stodgy, dull person, apathetic and
hard to move.
But as soon as our Lord had said,
I that speak unto thee, to you am
he, she let right out and ran to
tell others.
A revelation had come to the woman.
The light of God had slipped down into
her shadowy interior, and there had begun to
shine a light.
And it lifted this woman, and she lived
out on light feet.
And the scripture says that she went to
tell the men.
Now why does it say she went to
tell the men?
Why did she not tell the women?
I assume that this woman's kind of life
had made her more familiar with men than
with women.
I don't add anything here.
It says that she went to tell the
men and told them.
And it's strange how Jesus, our Lord, accepted
this situation.
I can't see a church board anywhere that
would have accepted it quite.
And I can't see a women's hindrance society
any place in any church either.
Ladies, that would have given it any notice
here.
They would have raised their eyebrows and made
funny little plucking sounds with their tongue.
And they would not have accepted this testimony.
But our Lord accepted the situation here because,
you see, he always begins as though there
hadn't been any past at all.
Behold, he maketh all things new.
And so if it's going to be new
anyhow, what's the difference about the old?
And the Lord started right there with the
new.
And he accepted this situation.
Now I say her kind of life had
made her familiar with the men of Samaria
a great deal more familiar than with the
women of Samaria.
And yet our Lord didn't shame her and
he didn't denounce her.
Christians have always been great denouncers.
But it's an odd thing that they often
denounce the ones the Lord opens his arms
to receive and receives the ones that the
Lord denounces.
Some carnal old rascal may get into a
church.
Did I tell this story here or since
I heard about Benny Nicholson and the brewers?
I think I ought to tell you that.
Brother Ravenhill told me this.
I had been, had had something in the
magazine about Nicholson, the great Irish evangelist, and
he told about Nicholson going into a certain
church.
I'm not going to name the denomination because
I wouldn't be kind in doing it.
It was a nice church, very well-known
denomination.
And this fiery Irishman that was somewhere in
England or Ireland or Scotland, this fiery Irishman
was called in and they said to him,
Now, Mr. Nicholson, we appreciate your ability as
an evangelist and you've done great good and
we want you to come and help our
church.
We want the benefit of your ministry and
we want to turn you loose now to
help yourself.
Only, Mr. Nicholson, there's just one thing we
want to get straight.
We have in our church a great Christian
brewer and he is a very good man
and he is the financial pillar of our
church.
And in addition, it was a small town,
in addition to being the leading brewer of
the city, he's also the local undertaker.
And he is the financial pillar of our
church.
And Mr. Nicholson said, Well, and why would
you be telling me this?
And he said, Because we want you to
lay off on brewers.
Now, he said that the only stipulation, don't
bother the brewers.
And Billy smiled a wry Irish smile and
then got up that night to preach and
he preached the gentlest, tenderest sermon anybody had
ever heard.
And they were walking around there, these deacons
and elders and the pastor and the rest
of them that were in on the conspiracy.
They were walking around shaking their own hands
if nobody was near enough to shake.
They said, This is going to be wonderful.
We're going to get the benefit of a
blessing, a revival and an added number to
our church and we won't have our brewer
disturbed.
But the second night, Billy was sitting there
quietly waiting and watching the song leader operate.
And he wasn't operating right and they weren't
singing right.
And Billy jumped up and said, Sure, and
why don't you sing?
He said, This sounds as if there were
a dozen tomcats here in the audience singing.
He said, Why don't you sing?
And then he led them.
And pretty soon he got them to singing
as we sang here tonight with real radiance.
And when he was through, he stepped to
the edge of the platform and said, Now
I'll be telling you.
He said, Do you know what you've got
here in your church?
He said, You've got a Christian brewer.
And he said, He's not only a brewer,
he's an undertaker.
He said, Sure, and he sells you liquid
damnation to send you to hell.
And if that wasn't enough, he sends a
carriage around to take you there.
That was the end of Billy.
He never got back in that church again.
But God Almighty used him throughout England and
particularly Ireland, they say, to save Ireland from
a revolution.
And you have to go to Charles G.
Finney to find anything as horrific as the
impact of the preaching of the Irishman.
Now I say, we're busy denouncing that which
God opens his arms to receive, and slyly
permitting that which God hates.
But not Nicholson.
He knew that a Christian brewer was a
contradiction in terms, and he let him have
both guns.
Now, this woman, I say, was allowed to
go and to teach or preach or testify
to the only people she knew.
And when she went, it wasn't very much
of a story yet.
The Lord knew that.
She didn't, but he knew it.
But he had about it the brightness of
a revelation.
And the woman was completely sincere.
Now, there's this about her actions.
They weren't imitative, and they weren't formal, and
they weren't planned, and they weren't programmed.
You know that ugly, vicious French word.
I hate it as I hate the devil.
That word program, and then the word programmed.
They say, now the service is so programmed
as to have a minimum of preaching and
a maximum of enjoyment.
The devil could program it like that, and
he would.
But I don't like the word programmed.
I use it sometimes, because you get in
a fix and you can't get out without
using the very word you don't like.
But if this woman had been programmed, there
never would have been any revival in Samaria,
brother.
She wasn't programmed.
They didn't program this little woman.
They couldn't.
She had too much bounce in her soul.
They couldn't get her on a car.
And so she just ran as fast as
her slick, fast heels would take her.
And there was nothing formal about this, and
nobody planned it.
We say we're going to meet and plan
a revival.
You might as well try to meet and
plan a lightning stroke as to meet and
plan a revival.
Nobody ever did yet, and nobody ever can,
and nobody ever will plan a revival.
God Almighty makes a world, nobody plans it.
And when he raises the dead, nobody plans
it.
And he never raises the dead fifth item
on the program.
You can be perfectly sure of that.
We programmed ourselves into deadness and death, and
that this little woman had only, somebody had
only caught her by her fleeing garments and
stopped her and said, Sister, we're glad to
see the new light in your face.
We'd like to have you third on the
program.
She died along with the rest of those
scribes and Samaritans and the rest of them.
But she went bouncing along, eager with a
new revelation in her heart to tell the
men, for she didn't know many women, they
would talk to her, to tell the men
she knew that she had found the man
who had told her everything she ever knew.
And it was an exaggeration, and every spiritual
man that ever lived gets blamed for it.
But you know, brethren, when you get so
full of something that you begin to talk
very often, your mouth is smaller than your
heart, and exaggeration is a result.
This woman, hyperbole now, I think they call
it.
Hyperbole is a learned word for an exaggeration.
But she did have one thing.
She had a sweet contagion about her.
She was contagious.
She didn't make converts.
She, they caught it from her by contagion.
So God uses artless testimony and the candid
witness.
He still uses them, even though they may
be perfect and limited.
This woman, I say, had a long way
to go.
But she had had one thing.
She had had a valid encounter with the
one called the Messiah.
Two hearts had come into collision with each
other, and the result had been an emotional
upheaval in the woman's life.
I don't know what to do with those
Christians, those teachers, who are so afraid of
the word emotion.
We say the man is very emotional when
we merely mean that he is a neurotic,
that he's lost self-control, that he cries
over nothing, laughs over nothing, and gets blue
over nothing, and gets elated over nothing.
That man is simply a mental case.
And we've taken the word emotion and applied
it to that.
No, no, my brother, that's not emotion.
That's a condition the man is in.
He needs prayer and rest.
But when I use the word emotion here,
I'm never afraid to use it, because emotion
is your inner feeling, what Jonathan Edwards called
the religious affections.
I like that expression very well.
I wonder why somebody, I'm so busy I
can't do everything I think of, but I
wonder why somebody doesn't resurrect the word religious
affections and show some of these cold, stiff,
deep-freezed Christians of the present day who
go only on texts and theology and are
afraid of emotion, why don't they show them
that religious affections of Jonathan Edwards and the
spiritual emotions of the modern day are meant
the same thing?
They mean the same thing.
This woman had had a collision.
Her heart had come into violent contact with
the heart of Christ, and the result had
been an experience that the woman will never
forget, and I think the Lord never forgets.
A stroke from God had fallen upon her,
and so she lit out without her water
pot.
Every woman should have come back with that
pot full of water.
She came back without even the water pot,
because she had forgotten all about the house
and the kitchen and the meals.
Now, the men of Samaria heard her testimony
and then started out to find the one
about whom she had spoken.
I wonder why they went.
I suppose they went out of curiosity and
out of a spirit of religious adventure, for
you cannot deny that we have in us
a certain spirit of high adventure, even religious
adventure.
I am sure that a great many religious
things are done out of this spirit of
curiosity and adventure.
But certainly that was not all.
This woman had jarred them.
She had stirred them.
She'd roused them.
And she could only do it because she
herself had been stirred and roused.
And there was contagion there.
And this woman, who had been jarred by
her contact with the Savior and deeply stirred
and moved, when she raced into the presence
of these men, she moved them the same
way.
It was contagious, and they caught it at
once.
And I suppose there was an element of
religious adventure there, but I think it was
only an element.
I think the main motivation back of their
getting up and hurrying to meet him was
that she had stirred them to the depths
of their being.
Now, why is it that there's so much
ineffective and ineffectual Christian testimony today?
If I were not a Christian, ladies and
gentlemen, if I had never been, and I
was still not a believer in Jesus Christ,
I suppose that I now never would be,
if I knew as much about Christians as
I do know now about them.
Because I find, and I regret to say
this, and if there be any non-Christians
present as there probably are, I hate to
admit this in company, but we might as
well be honest, and I believe God loves
an honest man.
They say, tell the truth and shame the
devil.
And I believe that the Christians are, for
the most part, a very sad people.
They are not the happy sort that they
ought to be, and for that reason their
testimony is ineffective.
The gleam is gone out of most Christian
eyes, and the shine out of the countenance,
and the glory of a birth and a
revelation that this woman had that made her
testimony contagious isn't found very much these days,
because we plan everything.
Everybody reads a little leather little book on
how to do Christian service, and we go
do it the way we're taught to do
it, but we do it perfunctorily and without
the contagious element the woman had here.
So there's a great deal of ineffectual Christian
testimony—honest, sincere, I suppose, and well-intentioned.
We do the best we can at what
we have to work with, and we go
like a salesman selling thousand pens.
We make a case for our product, but
down in the heart of the ones we
deal with there is a deep knowledge that
we're not too much convinced ourselves.
We're unconvincing because we've not been convinced, and
we're ineffectual because we have not met ourselves
the Lord from glory.
A cross light making cross lights—it seems to
me that if angels can weep, they must
weep salty tears.
To see a cross light who has never
met the Lord making another cross light who
will also never meet the Lord.
Now, I want to give you a quotation
from a Frenchman.
I don't mean that I believe what he
believed exactly, but a great French philosopher by
the name of Paul Richard, who wrote a
book, the name of which I've forgotten, but
the sentences you'll never forget.
He evidently must have been a Baptist because
he said that infant baptism was vaccination against
the new birth.
That is, you get sprinkled when you're a
wee tot, and brother, you're immune.
You're immune to the new birth.
Now, some listening to me are sprinklers.
Why, brother, just go right on and sprinkle.
I wouldn't divide with my brother.
But I wouldn't for the life of me.
We had occasion this week in New York
City to deal with the question of a
fellow who sprinkled a few, and we went
to the records to find out what our
old black book said about it.
And the black book says, We in the
alliance recognize immersion as a mode of baptism,
but receive into fellowship Christians of every persuasion.
Now, if you can get any more contradictory
than that or inconsistent, I beg of you
to show me how it can be done.
You just can't get any worse than that.
So I'm not talking against the fellow who
sprinkles his baby, but I am saying that
it's possible to have some kind of external
religious experience that immunizes you to the new
birth and puts you where you will never
be born again because you think you are
already born again.
That's what Paul Richard meant, and that's what
I mean tonight.
So the cross light makes a cross light,
and because the cross light never was in,
he doesn't require the other cross light to
get in.
And so we have whole churches established that
are only cross lights, echoes of echoes and
reflections of reflections, but never the true light
shining.
Now, these Samaritans, moved by this lady, this
woman, went out and found Jesus and brought
him to the city.
And they heard him, and they saw him,
and they were convinced, and they believed, and
they testified, and they said, Now we know,
not because of what you said, we know
ourselves, for we ourselves have met this one,
and we believe that he is the Christ,
the Savior of the world.
What had begun so low now had risen
so high.
And what had begun in the shadows had
now gone into the clear sunlight.
And the testimony of this woman, whose real
life had only just now begun, brought these
men to God, and to the Lord Jesus
Christ, and to God.
They couldn't rest on another person's testimony, didn't
know that.
You might as well try to get fat
or what somebody else eats, as to get
to heaven on somebody else's religious experience, or
meet the Lord in somebody else's testimony.
You say, Now you're contradicting yourself because you
just were talking all nicely about her testimony.
Sure I was, and I still will, but
I keep her testimony in context.
I know God used it to bring people
to him, but when they got to him,
they said, Now we don't need your testimony,
we know ourselves.
But if they hadn't come to Christ, they
could have started the first church of the
Samaritans down in Samaria on that woman's testimony,
and never have met the Lord for themselves.
And that's what I mean where a testimony
breaks down.
A testimony doesn't convert you.
A testimony may only excite you to get
going in the direction of the one about
whom the testimony has been given.
And that is the glory of the Christian
witness.
A Christian witness never saved anybody, and can't.
A Christian witness is not a spiritual experience
for a third person.
A Christian witness is the honest confession of
what the Lord has done for me.
And that may spur others to go and
do likewise, and hunt the same Lord, and
go to him, so there's not too much
to be said for the Christian witness, provided
it is not a planned witness, provided it
is not a program.
Brother McAfee is a musician, and a chorister,
and all that stuff.
And maybe he and I will have to
have lunch together over this tomorrow, but at
his expense.
But do you know, do you know what
I, I, should I say this or not,
I have a reputation for being a little
radical.
I might just as well stay in character.
Do you know what?
I've never been blessed by a planned testimony
since the world began.
I have had to sit and listen through
various and sundry musical organizations that get up
and do a Negro spiritual, and then a
classic, and then a semi-classic, and then
something else, and then the fellow says, now
give the testimony.
And they've all been told ahead of time
who's to talk and what they're to say.
And they all get up and testify, and
I sit there just as cold as a
dew pickle.
There isn't a response in my life.
I can't find a thing that responds to
that, not a thing that responds to it.
And one night, here not long ago, it's
been several years ago now, but it was
eleven-thirty at night, and I don't know
whether I'd gone to bed or was about
to.
It was Sunday night, and the phone rang.
And a friendly, vibrant, excited voice on the
other end of the line—I recognized it immediately—said,
Mr. Tozer, I've got something to tell you.
I couldn't wait till morning.
I said, what is it?
He said, I've been born again tonight.
He said, you know, I've been around your
church there, and I've been around your church,
and my wife's a nice little Christian, and
she's prayed for me, and I thought I
was a converted man, but I have never
been converted till tonight.
As a result of tonight's service, he said,
I have come into a spiritual experience.
I know I'm born again.
And this quiet fellow that you never could
get excited or get to talk or raise
his voice was pouring it on like an
evangelist.
You know who it was, Burroughs Barker.
He's gone from us now and is living
further out west.
But he lived that life until he moved
away from here and is still living it
in the church in where?
Galesburg.
But there was a man—now that testimony, that's
okay—that man was bouncing that he had had
an encounter with God and was perfectly willing
to admit that all his previous religious experience
had only been preliminary.
Now he knew.
He could say to his wife, Little Mary,
now I know the one about which you've
been talking.
I no longer believe through your witness.
I know from myself.
Now, that kind of testimony always is contagious.
But whenever you're third on the program, brother,
look out.
That testimony will start out dead and end
up worse than dead.
And there you plan a man's spiritual expression
and program his happiness and incorporate his vision.
We've got them nowadays, vision incorporated, healing incorporated.
We incorporate the glory of God and take
out corporation papers on the divine grace.
How low can we get?
How far from God can we wander and
still say we're Christians?
Now, I have a few little conclusions here,
a recapitulation of what I said, put briefly
so that I can take it home with
you.
I draw these conclusions that Christ received great
sinners, no matter how great they are, no
matter whether they have no reputation at all,
no matter whether they're pariahs cast out by
society, he receives them.
This man received a sinner, they said about
him in their region, and he lived and
died and rose to prove it, that they
were right.
He received great sinners.
Meister Eckhart, the great German devotional philosopher, says
this.
He says that God loves to forgive big
sins more than he does little sins, because
the bigger the sin, the more glory accrues
to the God who forgives it.
It makes quite a case in one of
his great sermons for God having actually being
partial to great sins.
It says that God forgives great sins.
Then he goes on to say this.
Not only does God forgive great sins and
enjoy doing it, but as soon as he's
forgiven them, he forgets them and trusts you
just as if you'd never sinned.
When I first read that, I almost went
out through the ceiling, because I believed it
in my heart, that God not only forgives
great sins as quickly as little ones, but
that once forgiving them, he starts over right
there and never brings it up.
Now, you take a man who works in
a bank, and one day there's a little
shortage.
It isn't much, and it isn't worth going
to trouble about, but there's a little shortage
of a few dollars, and there is a
question about that man.
Maybe he got away with it, but they
still let him stay on.
But the board of directors or whoever decides
such things discuss him every time they meet.
There's a shadow across his reputation, and they
never quite forget it.
But if you carry our illustration further, he
came and frankly admitted it and wept over
it and paid it back and said it
was a weak moment and I'll never do
it again.
And they said, all right, stay on.
Still the shadow would be there, because man
can forgive, but he never can quite forget
it.
And what we have been colors a reputation
for all time to come in the minds
of some.
But when God forgives, he starts from right
there.
And if the devil runs up and says,
what about his past?
God says, what past?
There's no past.
We started when he came to me, and
there's no past for you to kick about.
And God forgives us and entrusts us as
if we hadn't done a thing.
And if the topside of our soul is
open to God.
This, I admit, is a little doctrine of
my own, but I think it's pretty biblical,
and it's certainly in line with all Christian
experience, that there's a topside of the soul
that's open to God in some people's lives
and not in others.
Jacob was a crooked fellow, the very name
Jacob meant to supplant her, and he wasn't
a pleasant man, and he was the kind
of fellow that you always button your pocket
tight when he was around.
Jacob just wasn't a trustworthy man.
But for some reason, Jacob had the topside
of his soul open there.
There was a little window that was open
to God.
He saw his brother was, everybody will admit,
a finer character than Jacob, less wily, franker,
tender, for he wept on his brother when
he should have killed him.
In every way, he was a finer man
by nature.
But there was no topside of his soul,
no window there.
But Jacob, the crooked supplanter, met God because
the topside of his soul was open to
God.
Oh, my friend, I don't know, I don't
know.
Is that election?
Is that predestination?
What is it?
I don't know what it is, and I
don't care what it is.
I only know that I can, I'm told,
to go and tell everybody everywhere that Jesus
Christ died for all men, and anybody that
will come can come, and I don't have
to worry about predestination.
Somewhere, someway, some have the topside of their
soul open, just a window open toward the
light.
And this woman had, though she certainly hadn't
lived a very good life, there was someplace
in her soul there, a window that was
open, and the light of God finally shone
down through.
And I note also that he'll use any
witness to start a story that no one
can substitute for Jesus himself.
The new life has to be born in
us, and the new life will not be
born until there has been a collision with
Christ, a collision.
And the sinner has been met and defeated,
and his will for the moment shattered, and
his life brought down to the dust.
And he'll always remember and look upon that
encounter.
Though happily he'll go forward, leagues up the
mountainside, always he'll remember that encounter.
And his soul and the heart of God
met in violent conflict for the moment, till
God won, and then the heart of the
man surrenders tenderly and says, not my will,
but thine, and salvation comes to the sinner.
That kind of encounter, that kind of meeting
of the soul with God, comes with the
freshness of a birth, with the brightness of
a dawning.
It comes with the clearness of a revelation.
And I believe we're where we are in
religious circles in America, because we've taken our
religion at second hand.
We're programmed it.
We've been taught it.
We accept what people tell us, but we
don't push on to know him, so that
we can say, now I know for my
person that has to be picked out of
the shell, that has to be by red
lines and blue lines under verses, urged and
pushed and psychologized into the kingdom of God
never gets in.
It must be a revelation to the heart.
It must be an encounter with Christ.
It must be a sudden indulging of the
soul with Jesus Christ the Lord.
And if we had our standards higher, people
would expect that, but they don't now.
If we preached repentance more and raised Christian
levels higher, that would be an ordinary thing.
You get argued into belief in Christ, you
can get argued out.
And any man who can win you by
presenting reasons, somebody else presents stronger reasons, can
upset your faith.
God never meant that our hope for heaven
should rest upon the words of a man,
but power must come to our lives.
And the presence and the revelation and the
knowledge that we indeed have met Jesus Christ,
the Son of God.
Now, does this sound like radical religion?
It isn't at all.
It isn't.
And I'm sure that if I were to
ask for a show of hands or ask
you to stand, that there would be scores
of you here tonight who would stand and
say, Mr. Towles, you've described my situation.
This is what happened to me only I
just didn't word it like that, but my
heart tells me this is what happened to
me.
I met him, I know him, he's mine,
I'm his.
We've had that collision and he won and
I lost, and yet I won because I
was saved.
My old will went down and my old
boldness and aggressiveness went down.
Jesus Christ came in, took over, and now
I live no more, but he lives in
me.
A lot of you could arise and say
that tonight.
Witnesses to what I'm talking about.
It's not radical.
The other thing is abnormal.
Well, let's expect it.
Let's expect the Lord Jesus Christ to do
this thing for us.
Let's come to him with simplicity, frankness, hunger,
conscious need, and say, Lord Jesus, here I
am without one plea, but that that blood
was shed for me, and that thou biddest
me come to thee, O Lamb of God,
I come, I come.
You don't have to be a Ph.D.
nor a doctor of theology.
Come as you are without one plea.
The Lord will receive you in.
He'll take you in.
You can go away tonight saying, oh, I've
heard this for years, but now I know
for myself that thou art the Christ, the
Son of the Living God, the Savior of
the world.