At the pool of Bethesda there lay a
great multitude of impotent folk, flying, halt, withered,
waiting for the moving of the water.
And a certain man was there which had
an infirmity thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lie and knew that
he had been now a long time in
that case, he said to him, Will thou
be made whole?
The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have
no man when the water is troubled to
put me into the pool, but while I
am coming another steppeth down before me.
Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy
bed, and walk.
And immediately the man was made whole, and
took up his bed, and walked.
And on the same day was the Sabbath.
Let us pray.
God, our hearts, we confess to thee, have
been greatly stirred and deeply moved by the
songs we have heard tonight, all of them,
particularly this wondrous golden voice and song of
Jesus, the lover of men's souls.
We pray this hour, we pray that we
may be raised up out of the dust
and mire of earth, and given a view
of the cross, the wounded lamb, from whose
bosom there flowed that boundless salvation, so rich
and so free.
Let it roll over us tonight in billows,
we pray.
Let it roll over us as the billows
went over his soul, let the saving billows
go round.
Help us as we look into the scriptures,
Lord, tonight.
We ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Now, those of you who were here last
Sunday night remember that I preached on the
impotent man at the gate of Bethesda, at
the sheep gate by the pool of Bethesda.
But this act of divine mercy by the
one who is the eternal Word has yet
many, many merciful words to speak to us.
So we want tonight, reverently, to come and
to draw near and hear what God the
Lord may yet have to say to us
from this story.
The passage says that Jesus said unto him,
Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.
And immediately the man was made whole, took
up his bed, and walked.
Now, when our Lord Jesus said to the
man at the pool, Rise, take up thy
bed, and walk, it is to be understood
as a command.
But it is unto be understood as a
command that was impossible.
For the Lord commanded here the impossible.
He not only commanded the impossible, he commanded
the unimaginable.
For this man could not get up, much
less take up.
For the command was, Get up, take up
thy bed.
This man could not get up, certainly could
not take up, even as much as the
simple pallet upon which he lay.
And yet our Lord commanded him to do
both, to get up and to take up.
And this impotent man was in a state
of chronic invalidism.
He had been in that state for thirty
-eight years.
His muscles had atrophied to a large extent.
His body had stiffened and taken shape till
a kind of a living rigor mortis had
set in.
And for a man to get up suddenly
after thirty-eight years of lying flat, and
to pick up or roll up that bed
of his and walk away with it, was
unimaginable.
Nobody around there would ever have dreamed he
could do it.
He never had the remotest notion that he
would ever do it.
And anybody looking on, even a physician, would
have smiled and said, This is unimaginable.
This is impossible.
Now, I say this man was in a
state of chronic invalidism, and he could not
talk his way out of it.
I don't know what was wrong with him,
but it couldn't have been any like thing
to keep a man flat on his back
thirty-eight years, impotent means without any power,
helpless, powerless, palsied, probably.
But lying there for thirty-eight years, and
he couldn't talk his way out of this.
And we're living in the hour of big
talk and much talk.
They said that Thomas Carlyle preached the virtue
of silence in thirty-nine volumes.
He said, Be still, and then took thirty
-nine books to tell it.
And you may accuse me of somewhat the
same thing, but it's still true that we
are living in the time of much talk,
words, words, words.
He filleth his belly with the east wind,
said the old man Joel.
And the east wind is flowing over many
a set of vocal cords these days, and
we are told that we can talk ourselves
up.
But this impotent man, after thirteen years of
this, couldn't talk himself out of his condition.
But there are many today that recommend it.
They say that we ought to try it.
If you'll simply talk up, talk up, you
can do it.
But he couldn't do it, and not only
could he not talk his way out of
it, he couldn't be talked out of it.
Nobody else could talk him out of it.
Now, there's a new religion that has come
to pass, lo, in the last days in
which we live.
It is a johnny-come-lately among the
religions, because it doesn't go back very far.
And it's based upon the theory of the
subconscious.
And woven in with this doctrine of the
subconscious, there are a great many strange theories
by Sigmund Freud.
And this teaching is simply that human ills
result from morbid memories and fears, mostly contracted
in childhood, and that these can be cured
by being talked out.
The idea is that if you simply start
talking, the well will begin to flow, and
pretty soon the poisonous juices somewhere within you
that are causing your trouble will reach the
surface and overflow, and you'll be all right.
Now, that has given us many a school
of thought and many a practice.
It has gotten into the churches in the
day in which we live, so that we
are now teaching pastors that if they can
get people to talk, just get them to
talk, get them to talking.
The idea being that a man can talk
himself out of impotence, he can talk himself
out of sinfulness, he can just talk his
way out.
Now, I wouldn't say that it's not true
that confession and information and a certain unburdening
of myself or yourself to another might not
help.
I think it does help, for the scripture
says, confess your false one to another.
So I believe it is entirely true that
certain surface difficulties can be helped by being
talked out.
If a fellow is blue and someone comes
up and cheers him a bit and jerks
him up and shows him that the cloud
has the silver lining, he hadn't seen the
silver lining, and if it's pointed out to
him, it may help him a little and
help him over the hump.
I don't say that there doesn't come some
help from talking.
I believe that you can make yourself better
by just talking.
Just walk out on the sidewalk and stick
your chest out and say, I can do
it.
Well, you can't, but it doesn't hurt to
say that, and it helps you a little
bit.
It's a psychological lift, I believe.
It's a good thing, but I believe that
when it becomes a religion, as it has
in the day in which we live, that
it is nothing else than a delusion that
is leading man to death and to hell,
because you can't talk the impotent man strong,
and you can't talk the sinful man clean,
and you can't talk the polluted man poor,
and you can't make the dead soul live
by talking.
This man couldn't get out of it, and
all of the modern understand-yourself-and-talk
-out-your-troubles school of religious dentists never
would have been able to help this man.
He'd have lain right there and died.
So that's the reason that I haven't very
much time to say about these religious fellows
who call themselves preachers, but they're no more
prophets of God than were the four hundred
prophets of Baal who served under Jezebel.
They use the name of Christ, but they
drag in the theories of the subconscious and
the theory of Sigmund Freud and the complexes
and all the rest, and the result is
that it's a dreadful delusion that is leading
men on the way down to death and
finally to hell.
Now, Jesus Christ could say this impossible and
imaginable thing.
He could say to a man thirty-eight
years a helpless invalid, get up and take
up.
And the reason he could say it was
that there was power in his words.
There was no power in the infinite man's
words.
There was no power in the words of
those that lay around with him there in
their helplessness or the people that passed by
and tossed a grudging coin.
There was no power any place there.
The power lay in the word of Jesus.
He said a little later, it is the
spirit that quickeneth, the flesh prophet of nothing.
The words that I speak unto you, they
are spirit and they are life.
God Almighty's words are living words.
They're creative words.
Think back yonder in the beginning when darkness
was upon the face of the deep and
waters covered everything.
And God said, let there be light and
there was light.
And God said, let the waters be gathered
together and the dry land appear and it
was solved.
And God divided the light from the darkness
and the darkness he called night and the
day he called light in the morning and
the evening were the first day.
And God said to the earth, bring forth
and it brought forth.
And God said to the air, let birds
fly and they flew into the sea, let
fish swim and they swam.
Whenever God spoke, there was always power accompanying
his speaking.
When man speaks, it's only as powerful as
the man who speaks.
And the infinite man, as the word implies,
was a man without power.
And so his words were without power.
But when our Lord Jesus Christ said, get
up, take up, there was something in the
voice that said, get up, take up, that
enabled the man to do it.
As when he said, let there be and
there was, he sent his word and healed
them.
And by his word, he formed the crooked
serpent and made the stars to shine.
The word of the living God is a
powerful thing.
And when God Almighty speaks, it has the
power of 10 million times, 10 million of
these bomb-play things that we're hearing so
much about today all over the earth, the
hydrogen bomb, the atom bomb.
There's dynamic in his word.
There's creative power there in his word.
There's life-giving power there in his word.
When Ezekiel went into the valley of dry
bones and there were the bones all about
him, lying dry, and behold, they were very
dry, baked by the wind and parched by
the sun.
And Ezekiel said, God said, Ezekiel, can these
bones live?
And Ezekiel said, my Lord, God doth knowest.
And he said, preach to them now, preach
to them.
What did he say, preach to them?
Did he say, go quote, quote up the
great Egyptian thinker?
No.
Did he say, here I have a little
book from the Orient, a book that dates
way back to the early days of the
Japanese empire, and it's a beautiful religion.
Go read a chapter.
No.
He said, speak the word of the Lord
unto them.
So the man of God went and preached
the word of the Lord to them, and
as the word of the Lord went forth,
power went forth, and a great rattling began,
and bone went to his bone.
And God encouraged this prophet, preach on, and
he preached on, and as the word of
the Lord went forth, power flowed from the
central heart of God into those bones, and
flesh came up over the bones, and they
took form, and skin crept up over the
flesh.
And then he said, talk on, talk on,
because this is the word of the Lord.
And as he spoke the word of the
Lord, life came into them, and they stood
up on their feet.
Not a hand was put out to help
them.
It was all the word of the Lord.
When our Lord said, get up and take
up, there was so much power there that
it was not difficult.
The unimaginable happened before his eyes.
The impossible became possible.
That which could not be was, and that
which no one ever dreamed could come to
pass, came to pass simply in the sight
of all who were present.
Now, notice here, there had to be a
response, and this is really what I want
to get at tonight.
There had to be a response on the
part of the man who had been sick.
Immediately he was made whole, and he took
up his bed, and he walked.
The ability to obey came with the decision
to obey.
I know how dull that sounds, but if
you get a hold of it, it might
help you, that the ability to do the
impossible came with the decision to obey God
to try to do the impossible.
He said, get up and take up, and
that was impossible.
But there was power in those words to
make the impossible possible, and to bring to
pass that which could never happen in nature,
and there had to be a decision in
the heart of the man who lay there.
After thirty-eight years of non-expectation, thirty
-eight years of chronic discouragement, he had to
make up his mind to obey, to get
up.
Now, my brethren, from here on, I want
you to listen very closely.
Even if it bores you, I want you
to listen.
In the soul's encounter with God, such as
this, there is what we might call a
zone of darkness, where the action is obscure
and out of our hands, where the sovereign
God steps in with his all-creative work,
with his life-bringing work, where he steps
in and performs that secret and mysterious act
which the soul cannot understand.
I wish that the whole Church of Christ
might see this, and that we might get
off of the businessman's attitude toward religion, and
realize that just as there was a zone
of darkness psychologically for a moment, as the
helpless man heard a voice telling him to
do what he couldn't do, and his mind
couldn't analyze it nor understand it, and he
could not know what was happening, yet his
will responded to the command of God, and
as his decision was made to obey, even
though reason told him he couldn't obey, and
history thirty-eight bitter years of it told
him he couldn't obey, and all his non
-expectation within him told him he couldn't obey,
in that awful, shadowy, obscure moment between impotence
and bounding health, between lostness and saveness, there
was that something, that mysterious working of the
sovereign God, doing for the man that which
he could not understand, and never to this
hour has been able to understand.
My brethren, there is a moment between the
saved and the lost moment, when the soul
stands poised, timidly, the creative word has been
spoken, rise, take up, get up, and take
up, and yet there is no power there.
It's just as powerless as before, and faith
has to do something wonderful.
Faith has to make a leap across the
gap, and dare to do that non-reasonable
thing, that super-rational thing, and believe on
Christ regardless.
This man lay there, and he knew he
couldn't move.
He managed to talk enough to be heard,
but that was about all.
Now comes the command, get up, take up,
two strong, active commands, and this man knew
he had nothing to lose.
Thirty-eight years of it, what could he
lose?
And so a kind of divine panic descended
upon him, and a despair, and a daring.
And he said, if I lie here, I'll
rot, and I haven't much longer to go.
Here is a strange, wonderful man about whom
I've heard things.
I don't know who he is, but he's
here, and he's different.
And he said, get up and take up,
and his soul, in that moment of critical,
obscure darkness, decided to obey and leap across
and believe.
And where before there had been impotence, now
there was strength.
Where before he was unable to move, now
he could stand up on his feet, all
because there was a response in his heart
to the creative word of the living Christ.
Now, I want to talk a little bit
about the psychology of conviction.
I hesitate to use the word psychology.
I might just say the laws of conviction.
What do we mean?
It's a word nobody ever uses anymore.
When I was even a young fellow, they'd
say, Jim is under conviction.
I haven't heard that word for a long
time.
Nobody gets under any conviction anymore.
Maybe we use other words to mean the
same thing.
I wouldn't be unfair about it.
But they said the man was under conviction,
and in the days of the early Methodists
in this country, oh, not only the Methodists,
the Salvation Army, they used to get, the
men used to get under such blistering conviction
when they preached in the early days of
the Salvation Army that it was almost a
kind of epilepsy for a moment.
They were so in such despair, such terrible,
twisting agony of body and mind just for
that dark moment when they were being commanded
to do what they couldn't do.
They were being commanded by the bold ringing
voice of Jesus Christ to get up and
live like Christians, and they were bums and
knew it, and sinners confirmed.
But now they were being commanded by the
gentle, roaring, life-bringing voice, get up, get
up, get up and move and live and
be, and be saved.
And I say that the sense of the
despair that comes from knowing we can't be
good, the frightful sense of self-accusation that
comes from knowing that we can't live as
we should live, and yet we'll perish if
we don't live as we should live, all
this will drive men, sometimes it drives men
to suicide.
It drove one man to suicide.
One classic example was the Judas's carrier.
He looked into the tender eyes of Jesus
Christ and hated himself like hell, and went
out and slew himself in a rage against
himself.
That was not a response to the wooing
voice of God.
That was despair that heard no voice, despair
that had no faith, conviction that had no
cross and no place to look, self-accusation
that had no fountain in which to cleanse.
Judas committed suicide.
And it's not unknown that when revivals move
over the face of the land and the
white person of God walks among men, and
by contrast the vileness and serpentine testings of
our human walk suddenly are revealed to us,
such conviction comes to the human heart.
It's not unknown that men have put an
end to their lives because they had no
voice, no light, no fountain, no hope.
But it's not the will of God.
That's when Satan wins, when conviction comes upon
a man, the terror of God is upon
his soul, the stinging lash of conscience, and
the sense of lostness and despair drives the
soul into a corner, corners it, grinds it
between the upper and the nether millstones.
Jesus was ground in Gethsemane's garden.
That's conviction.
But it's something we don't have anymore.
And the imperfection of present conversions is being
talked about by everybody.
Everybody that is making any surveys on the
religious scene, asking questions and investigating, everybody is
deploring the imperfection of present conversions.
They're saying, we're not getting conversions.
The conversions we do get are not radical
enough, not extreme enough, not revolutionary enough.
They can be explained.
There isn't any of that mystery in it.
There isn't any of that sense of human
defeat and divine triumph.
There isn't any of that despair that drives
men to tears.
They're all saying that, but nobody seems to
know quite why.
I think I know why.
It is because we have no conviction.
There is not that sense of despair, that
thing that Isaiah felt and gave voice to
when he said, I am a man of
unclean lips and I dwell in the midst
of a people of unclean lips, or that
Peter felt when he said, depart from me,
I am a man, an unclean man, or
Job felt when he said, I will lay
my hand upon my mouth for I am
vile, or that David felt when he knelt
in the ashes and cried out to his
God that he was sinful and that God
was holy, or that Daniel felt, or Ezra,
or Paul.
And because this divine element's missing, all we
have is a theological element.
We get converted theologically.
But that zone of darkness that we call
conviction, that being pushed into a corner and
backed up by God Almighty and the scriptures,
and driven till we see how wicked we
are, now we deserve hell.
People are not preaching hell much in our
day, and it's because there's not much sense
of sin.
When we know how sinful we are, hell
will seem a moral, logically necessary thing, even
to the man who's going there.
It will seem perfectly logical, morally logical, that
I should go to hell after I know
what sin is.
But when we lose a sense of sin,
and there is no feeling of guilt upon
our hearts at all for anything, we just
know we need some help.
We need somebody to help us box in
the ring, or knock home runs, or run
our business, or fly our airplanes, or sell
our goods.
We need a helper.
And so we seek Jesus Christ.
Oh, what heresy, what damnable heresy, what hell
-born heresy, that Jesus Christ should be given
a red cap and a uniform, and made
to carry suitcases for impenitent souls.
And yet it's happening in evangelistic circles today.
All you have to do is just hop
twice in any direction, and you can find
a meal somewhere where some fellows are sitting
around congratulating themselves that they've been born again.
And they know they've been born again because
they got help now when they go out
selling.
They got help now when they need help.
God has ceased to be this sovereign I
am, and has become the servant of a
carnal people in fundamental circles.
No conviction, of course not.
And the only thing that was wrong with
us, we had all sinned in Adam.
And old Adam gets all the blame.
A redheaded boy can't help it, you know.
If his hair is red, he blames Dad.
It's his father who gave him the red
hair.
And what do you say?
You say, carrot top?
Well, you say, I didn't do it.
I had a father who was redheaded.
And as long as you can blame it
on somebody else, there's no conviction, no sense
of guilt.
You'll never get driven into a corner and
made to sweat.
But when we are driven by the Holy
Ghost, driven, driven, hunted, tongued by the Holy
Ghost, as a beagle hound tongues his way
through the autumn forests and fields, following a
nemesis on the trail of the poor beast,
following on and on.
So the Holy Ghost follows some people and
drives them on and on until a sense
of their own guilt comes over them.
John Newton, the slave of the slave, they
said he was.
John Newton got a sense of despair, that
zone of darkness he moved into, until he
knew he was lost, and knew he was
going to hell, and knew that he was
a sinner, and knew that he had to
die.
And they said he used to look at
the dogs loping down the street and say,
Oh God, I wish I was a dog,
because a dog can die and never rise
anymore, but I have to face judgment.
That sense of guilt is not on us
anymore.
The only thing that's being preached now by
way of repentance, men are being told they've
got to be politically good or Solomon will
get them, and he's dead.
That they've got to be good and believe
in Christ, or else there'll be an atom
bomb, wipe their city out.
But that sense of personal guilt, brethren, as
long as sin is only in the mass,
you can always hide your cowardly head in
somebody else's bosom.
When I was a lad I used to
hear it, and occasionally I'll read a book
like that, but if I heard a sermon
like that, I'd get out as soon as
I could reach the exit.
But it's the we-don'ts type of preaching.
It's always we, we, we, we, we, and
the preacher takes himself in, and he makes
everybody feel comfortable.
And the prayer is, Father, we do every
day things we shouldn't do, forgive us, and
we leave every day undone things that ought
to be done, forgive us.
And the preacher makes himself comfortably sinful in
order that he might make his congregation comfortable
in their sinfulness.
Nobody is very bad.
Of course, never drink anything any more infinite
than Coca-Cola.
Of course, taking for granted we were not
bad like that, but we're just all a
bunch of sinners, and dear Lord knows it.
And the result is nobody has any conviction
on them, no sense of guilt, and religion
has become cute and cozy.
And prayer is often simply brazen chatter.
Have you ever heard these Jesus dear prayers
and Father dear prayers?
I've heard them.
Oh, Father dear, come and help us.
Oh, Jesus dear, how we love you.
Brazen prayer.
There's Isaiah, a learned, polished courtier, a poet
in his own right, clean and good, a
Jew, and he sees God.
And suddenly a sense of undoneness comes upon
him until he trembles before his God, who
says, my God, I'm a man of unclean
lips, no cute praying there, no brazen chatter,
but an awful sense of the presence of
a holy God.
And if this could come to us, it
would cure a lot of our ills, just
like justice to a man who's dying of
suffocation.
You don't have to do a thing to
him except open the windows and give him
fresh air.
Just as a man dying from dehydration, all
you have to do is give him water.
So all we need is to be backed
into a corner and made to sense all
by ourselves, not comfortably with a whole crowd,
but all by ourselves.
Oh, God, I was born in sin, conceived
in iniquity.
I have sinned and come short of thy
glory.
I did it, I'm to blame.
And this can't be laughed at nor shrugged
off.
There's nothing comfortable about it.
Oh, God, sin is sin.
Whenever we get that back on us again,
there'll be conversions.
And there'll be conversions of a kind that'll
be so radical, so explosive, so sudden, so
all-embracing, so revolutionizing that it'll be like
a burst, which indeed it'll be.
But in our time, we're all so nice,
and so we chatter our little prayers to
Jesus.
And our religion is cute and cozy.
My God, what a miserable business it all
is.
I'd rather fold up my Bible and I'd
weep bitter tears to do it, but I'd
rather respect my Bible enough to close it
and lay it reverently away and leave the
church and walk out of its doors, turn
around and look sadly at the friendly people
and never come back to it, than to
accept as biblical and right this cozy, cheap,
snug, lovemaking type of religion that's passing in
the day in which we live.
Brethren, we need a visitation of awful, awe
-inspiring conviction that will bring despair to the
souls of men, until they're driven into a
corner and God Almighty drives them back and
drives them into the darkness, until they throw
up their hands and say, God, I'm an
impotent man, I'm an impotent man, I'm an
unclean man.
Then in that hour, that strange, wonderful, mysterious
thing takes place.
The voice of Jesus sounds to our hearts,
get up and walk, take thy bath.
Strangely enough, we're able to do it.
Strangely enough, the newborn soul can do it,
and he doesn't know how.
Something's taken place he never can explain.
When I hear these cozy chatterers get up
and say, I was there when it happened
and I ought to know, and a lot
of these cozy songs, oh, I'm a little
afraid for my friends.
I wonder if they were.
This poor man could never tell how it
happened.
He could never tell.
He only knew one thing.
He knew that he used to be an
impotent man.
Now he was able to walk and he
knew Jesus Christ had done it, and that's
about all he knew.
The wonderful mystery, the vibrant, life-bringing voice
that said, get up, it all came to
him as his heart responded.
He leaped in response.
His heart responded, for he was driven to
despair.
What could he do?
A helpless wretch, 38 years lying on his
back.
Bluntly, the supernatural element is not present in
religion in our day.
You get a little more of it when
you sing such songs as we sang tonight.
Get a little more of it.
But I have been in meetings where the
supernatural element simply wasn't there.
It simply wasn't there, and any psychologist with
any sense in his head at all could
take a pad and pencil and sit down
and trace back and identify everything he saw
in the It was all human.
There wasn't any miraculous element in it.
No supernatural essence there.
The soul was never driven into darkness, its
feet knocked out from under it, and find
itself sinking in despair and cry, God help
me.
Never happened.
All is on the human level, with religion
tucked on as an orchid on the love
path, but not a part of the real
thing.
I want to see the Lord revive us
again in the day in which we live.
But you can have all the manufactured revivals
you want.
You can have all of the manufactured religion
that you want, worked up and taught, imitation,
and have it all.
I don't want any of it at all.
I would rather take my New Testament and
go off under a tree somewhere and spend
my Sundays there, with a hymn book and
a Bible, than to mingle with the cozy
religionists who make Jesus Christ a great big
pal.
Oh, my brother, when John saw him, and
John was a good man and full of
the Holy Ghost, and when John saw him,
he fell at his feet as dead.
And Jesus picked him up and said, Stand
on your feet.
He stood on his feet and said, Now
listen to what I want to say to
you.
And he said, Arise and walk.
And so the man got up, and confidence
came to him, and it came to him
as confidence, and it came to the people
as proof.
They saw what had happened.
If he had not gotten up, his healing
wouldn't have meant very much to him, and
it wouldn't have meant anything to the people
around about him.
But Christ said to him, Now listen.
Change your pattern of living.
I have given you life.
Now change your pattern of living.
Quit living the way you have been living.
But they tell us now, Accept Jesus.
You don't have to do anything differently.
Accept Jesus, and you don't have to change
a thing.
Everything is just all right in your Father's
house, and it's a lovely world, and there's
nothing wrong.
Accept Jesus.
That's all that's the matter with you.
Christ said, Change the whole pattern of your
life.
Get up.
You used to lie down.
Get up now.
You used to lie on that old mat.
Get up and take the mat and walk
around with it under your arm.
As dramatic growth, something happened to you, and
of course you got into trouble immediately.
The old deacons looked at him and said,
Fine young fellow, but altogether too enthusiastic.
We'll have to cool him off.
And they said, Don't you know this is
done on the Sabbath day?
Here was a happy man, newborn from the
gutter, with a dirty mat under his arm,
walking around there with shiny light in his
eyes.
And they said, It's the wrong time of
day to shine.
He said, Don't let that light shine out
of those beaming orbs of yours.
It's the Sabbath day.
Go around and look miserable.
But he didn't know anything.
Thank God for a humble, dumb fellow such
as he was.
He'd never been anywhere.
He'd been 38 years laying on his back,
and you don't get far.
And he'd never been around, and he wasn't
sophisticated, he hadn't traveled.
Just lying there, and he didn't know a
thing to do, and he'd do what he
was told.
I ought to preach a third sermon on
this, basing it on his words, The man
that healed me told me to do it,
and that's my reason for doing it, and
show that if Jesus Christ can deliver me,
he's earned the right to command me.
I don't know whether I will, but I
ought to, if I ever get around to
it.
Now, what about you?
If you're new created, why don't you begin
to live like a new created soul?
If you say you've accepted Jesus Christ, why
don't you take up your mat and get
out from that mess where you've been for
the last 38 years?
Change your way of living, alter the pattern
of your life, get out and prove you're
a Christian.
Drop the old friends that have been your
damnation, almost.
Put away the old life and start over.
That's what he commanded here, and the man
did it.
We don't even know his name, some of
the dear nameless Saints that have gone to
heaven.
We'll find them there and we'll identify them,
but this man will be one of them.
It's always been the method of Jesus to
corner a man, find the man that had
no helper, ask him if he wants to
get well, drive him to a corner, nudge
him into a moment of dark despair, and
then say, Get up!
And when he got up, he said, Now
go tell everybody, Go on, I'll let your
light shine, let it be known what you
are.
If this would begin to happen among the
people of God, there'd be revival.
That would be revival.
You wouldn't have to import it at great
expense.
That would be it.
Do you know what I mean, people?
When you were converted, what kind of conversion
did you have?
Think for a minute with me now.
Did you just accept Jesus because somebody told
you to, or was there any of that
sense of darkness and sin and despair and
loss?
And then did your heart leap across and
believe in Christ?
If it did, thank God that's the way
it's done.
But if it didn't, I'd consider seriously whether
I'm converted at all or not, because there
are millions who say, Lord, Lord, that will
be driven from the presence of the Lord
in that terrible day, and I don't want
to be one of them.
A man had better lose his right eye
and his right hand and his right foot,
yea, and his life also, than to go
on deluded to the end and find that
he'd been a religionist, a follower of the
cozy, cheap religion of the hour, but had
never known what it was to hear the
life-giving voice come in like a golden
tone to his heart and make him live.
That's conversion.
And enough of that is revival.
May God send it.