It isn't what a church believes that matters
so much, it is what that church believes
enough to emphasize.
It isn't what a preacher will admit theologically
when you pin him down somewhere and make
him talk.
It is what he believes with sufficient urgency
to make that a living, constant part of
his message.
So, the fault that we find, with much
that passes for orthodoxy in this day, is
not what they believe or even what they
do not believe, but it is what they
do not believe enough to emphasize.
I don't suppose that there is any church,
any gospel church, in the whole city of
Chicago.
But what would say tonight if they were
to hear what I'm going to say after
it's over, they would say, we believe that
and we hold that as a part of
our creed too.
That is all well and good.
But now, do they believe it enough to
lay the emphasis there, to strike it and
detonate it and set it off until it
explodes into Christian faith and Christian living?
That's what matters.
There are many churches in this town that
haven't had a conversion since the first Roosevelt
was in office.
And yet if you were to go to
the pastor or a deacon or somebody and
say to him, now listen, do you believe
in the virgin birth?
Yeah, sure we do.
Do you believe in the fall of man?
Yes, sir.
Do you believe it's necessary to be born
again before we see the kingdom of God?
We certainly do.
Do you believe it is necessary to be
justified by faith and to be made a
new creature in Christ Jesus?
We certainly do.
Here it is.
And they'd turn over a book and say,
there it is.
That's what we subscribe to.
We believe it.
But nobody has believed it strong enough to
emphasize it.
And the result has been nobody has entered
into it and lived through it.
My friends, it is not what I hold
as a creed that matters so much.
Although if my creed is wrong, my experience
is bound to be wrong too.
But it is not what I hold as
a creed that matters so much as it
is what that part of my creed that
I have lived through experientially.
Now, some of you may want to know
why I don't say experimentally.
I don't say experimentally because experimentally means in
the nature of an experiment, and experientially means
in the nature of an experience.
I am not an experimentalist in that I
do not believe that God wants us to
experiment with truth.
But I am an experientialist in that I
believe that everything I hold as true should
be mine in living, vibrant experience, so that
only that is really mine which I have
experienced.
Not that which I have believed strongly enough
to write into a book of creed, but
that which I have believed strongly enough to
enter into and experience.
Well, now what is that that is taught
here and is taught out throughout the entire
Bible?
And is believed by almost all Christians, and
yet is taught so little in our day
that it is ceased practically to have any
meaning at all to the average rank and
file of Bible Christian.
It is simply this, that there are two
worlds that coexist for you and me.
That God has put us in the middle
of two worlds, not the middle of one
world, as Wendell Wilkie said long ago, and
as the materialists believe today, but in the
middle of two worlds, that as Bacon said,
God has made us like the animals in
our bodies, but he has made us like
the angels in our souls, and he has
put the two together.
And because there has been a fall and
sin has come, man finds that that part
of him which is the body, and that
part of him which is the soul, do
not always coincide.
So our Lord could say the spirit indeed
is willing, but the flesh is weak, so
that Paul in the seventh chapter of Romans
could give us the sad picture of the
tortured man who wants to go in the
right direction, but whose physical body will not
permit him.
There are two worlds, my listeners.
There is the physical material world, and we
have the wind and we have the sun
and we have the stars at night, and
we have the solid earth that we can
jump up and down on and put sidewalks
on and build buildings on.
We have a material, physical world all around
about us, and that physical world has gotten
into our souls, it's eaten its way in,
it's conditioned our language, it has given to
our language its metaphors and its similes and
its analogies to a point where our language
is a physical thing.
We say that man is upright, and we
think about a tree.
We say that it'll take a long time,
and we think about a journey.
And we say that man is low down,
and we think in physical terms.
And we say that high society, and we
think in terms of elevation.
And in all our language, we are tied
to the earth.
We have made our language to fit the
crude earth as a glove, an old glove
fits the hands.
And for that reason, it takes a little
effort of the mind to break out of
this physical world in which we live and
believe in the coexistence of a spiritual world.
I believe that there is not only a
material world, but that there is, coexisting with
it and impinging upon it, a spiritual world,
a world that is eternal.
For always remember, that which is material is
temporal, and that which is spiritual is eternal.
The New Testament, I repeat, emphasizes the duality
of the worlds in which we live, that
there are two of them, that there is
a material world.
The first man is of the earth, there
is your material world.
The second man is the Lord from heaven,
there is your spiritual world.
Except a man be born again, you cannot
enter into the kingdom of God.
And what does that mean?
It means that he is in the kingdom
of the flesh.
And to be, get into the kingdom of
God, he must be born into the kingdom
of God.
And yet these two worlds dovetail and coexist,
and one is but the shadow of the
other.
I believe that the material world that you
and I know, the universe as we call
it, is but a shadow thrown down from
the throne of God.
That there is a spiritual world there, and
you will find even in your Bible, that
whenever the scriptures describe heaven or the things
of God, it describes them in terms of
things of the earth.
Even that mystic Ezekiel, who sat by the
river Kibar and dangled his toes in the
muddy waters of that foreign river, and suddenly
he saw visions of God, and heaven was
opened unto him, and the word of God
came unto him, and the hand of God
was upon him.
And then he saw visions, indeed, of fire
coming out of the north, chains of fire
unfolding itself.
And then out of the fire he saw
four living creatures come.
And to show that the two worlds, that
world of the fire of God's presence, and
this world in which we live, were very
much alike, he began to describe the living
creatures.
And he showed that they were very much
like the creatures down here.
They were spiritual and eternal and did not
partake of a material body, but they had
four faces, and they had hands, and they
had wings, and they traveled on their feet,
and they were describable in material and earthly
terms.
So that is why I am not a
lonely man, and that is why I do
not believe that this Church is any holier
than some other place down here on the
sidewalk two blocks or somewhere else.
I believe that the kingdom of God coexists
with the kingdom of man, and the two
are together.
But one is inward and the other outward.
One is internal, the other external.
One is of the spirit, the other is
of the flesh.
One is a created thing, well, the other
is a created thing too, but it is
created for eternity.
One will pass away with a great noise
and the other can never pass away.
One is of the earth earthly and one
is of God heavenly.
That is what you do not hear very
much about.
We think about God as being far removed,
infinitely removed on the outer edges of far
space, and we think of our Lord Jesus
Christ as having fled through the corridors of
space far yonder.
Ten days it took him to go, and
he is now seated at the right hand
of God.
And all that is true.
Certainly he is seated at the right hand
of God, our Advocate forever, our Savior by
the throne of grace.
But also remember, brethren, that in the mystery
of God Almighty's creation and presence, that the
persons of the Godhead are also with us,
and that the kingdom of God is close
to us.
And that it is not a matter of
shouting across the spaces to a far removed
God, but you can whisper in your spirit
to a God that indwells you if you're
a Christian.
It is not sending a telegraphic message across
the years and spaces to a God far
removed, but God can read your heartbeats.
And as it were, your very mind is
braille to God, and he touches it and
knows what you're thinking and saying.
And this is what you don't hear much
about in our day, the coexistence of the
two worlds.
Our Lord thought nothing of talking about the
children and their guardian angels, that every hour
saw the face of our Father which art
in heaven.
And when he was weeping in, or rather
praying and sweating in the garden, I don't
know whether he wept, but he sweat blood
there in the garden, he could have had
angels, they did come to comfort him.
The angels' ministry in love, as the hymn
says.
Nothing mysterious about that, nothing strange or strained
about that, but in the day in which
we live, even we fundamentalists are such wretched
materialists.
And we live for this world so much,
and the average Christian knows more about the
horsepower of his car and the batting average
of Resty's Minoso than he knows about the
four-faced creatures that came out of the
fire in Ezekiel's vision.
We're materialists in spite of the fact that
we claim to be spiritual, and I suppose
we are spiritual in a way.
But we certainly think in material terms, and
the whole texture of our brain, and physical
and external and outward and created and belongs
to the world that perishes.
And it is the work of God by
the Holy Ghost and prayer and the scriptures.
It is the work of God to change
all the flavor of our beings.
It is the work of God to let
his water of life flow through and through
and through the pores of our spirits until
he's washed away all this silt and mud
and clay and dirt of the ugly brackish
waters where we were waterlogged so long in
the kingdom of sin, and cleanse us and
purge us and purify us and elevate us
and ennoble us until we're nearer to heaven
than we are.
It's too bad we have to get old
and gray before we begin to see this,
and yet it's not always so.
I was talking with a friend the other
day—I've forgotten who—about those men who were spiritual
when they were young.
Look at that man, David Brainerd, who died
when he was twenty-eight.
Look at that Christmas Evans who died when
he was a relatively young man.
And look at many of the others who
came and blazed and died.
Not long ago, I stood by the grave
and bowed my head reverently of the black
boy, Sammy Morris, who came blazing out of
the deep heart of Africa, crew boy, without
education, without knowing much English, knowing only one
thing, that God had saved him.
He came to the United States and went
to Taylor University, and there lived only a
little while, but he lived there long enough
in that brief span to emblazon himself upon
the life of that university that they've never
gotten over.
You don't have to be old to be
spiritual, and you don't have to live through
the decades in order to find this out.
But it's too bad that it's so, that
for most people that's the way it works
out.
I wonder if it isn't because we have
assumed that our young people are all about
half-cracked, and that in religious things they
have to be tolded to and clowned to
and played down to and talked down to
and teased along and amused and entertained.
And the result is that for the first
years of their lives, until gray hairs begin
to appear here and there upon them, we
entertain them and tease them along and amuse
them.
And then when they get so they don't
care for that amusement and entertainment anymore, then
we say, well, now they'll become saints.
I think it's a wretched way to treat
young men and women.
I do not believe that the calendar means
anything or that it means anything, how old
a man or woman is.
It's not a question of the passing of
years, it's a question of spiritual experience.
And young David, who was so young he
wouldn't have needed to shave, ruddy-faced he
was and clean, and he walked out that
spiritual boy.
And he put to shame his older brothers
and put to shame that old king, put
to shame the old greybeards in Israel who
were a trait.
And David went out a lad, but a
spiritual lad, and all through his life he
was a spiritual man.
And young Samuel, who when he was so
young that he still had to have a
light burning in the room, I'm afraid, Eli,
he'd say, Eli'd say, all right, and he'd
grumble a bit under his breath, good naturedly,
and get up and light a candle.
When he was so young that they put
a light beside him so he wouldn't be
afraid, God Almighty visited him and gave him
a vision and prophetic insight and showed him
how the whole house of Eli was to
be upset and God would raise a new
line for the priesthood.
And he was only a lad.
And Jonathan Edwards it was who said, I
was converted when I was five years old
and never bachelors.
Jonathan Edwards became the greatest religious thinker ever
to touch the American floor.
Some years ago when a vote was taken
among certain groups of men who were supposed
to know about that thing, the question was,
who was the most successful American?
And though there were not Christians, they finally
settled on Jonathan Edwards.
They said, we believe that he was the
most successful Christian because he got done what
he set out to do and because his
religion perfectly satisfied him.
And so they voted him the most successful
American.
And he was converted when he was five.
Our Lord Jesus Christ could thus show the
relation between the two worlds and could talk
about the meat that perishes and the bread
of life, the true bread which perishes not.
Now Christ fed the multitude.
And there were two reasons for his feeding
the multitude.
One reason was the plain practical downright reason
that they were hungry.
And he'd made them so they needed food.
And I repeat, God isn't angry with us
when we eat.
There are some people ascetic, ascetic enough, that
they like to feel that they've got to
apologize to God every time they eat.
And I think when they return thanks, it's
a half apology to the Heavenly Father for
doing such an earthly thing as eating.
I never felt that way about it.
Personally, I don't much enjoy eating, never did.
And I've never been able to understand anybody
that could work up enthusiasm about food.
Food to me is something that you take
in just as you pull up to a
station and say, put in five gallons, please,
and change the oil.
You've got to have it.
If you don't get it, you'll die.
So eating to me is filling up the
tank for another trip.
But I've never been able to act poetic
about it, never.
And my spirit would never rise and soar
when it came down to a pork chop
or a steak.
I just couldn't do it.
But I still have never felt that the
Lord was angry with me when I ate.
These people were hungry, the Lord made them
that way, and they were hungry, and the
Lord fed them.
That was the first reason.
And you'll always find a good, salty practicality
about everything that God does.
He's practical and downright and salty and common
sense and down to earth, and always you'll
find that first.
That which is of earth is earthly, and
you'll find good earthly reasons for everything.
And when I said that there are two
worlds, the material and the spiritual, I do
not mean to rule out the material world.
God made it also, but he did not
make it to last.
He only made it temporarily as they put
up a scaffolding when they're building a cathedral.
The scaffolding is torn down after a while,
and the cathedral stands for ten centuries.
So God has given us the physical, and
we're here, and he's not angry with it,
and we don't have to apologize when we
touch the physical.
But the woe of the present day is
that the physical has swallowed us up, and
we forget there is another world.
Well, Jesus fed the multitude, and it provided
a starting point from which he could elevate
their thoughts to consideration of eternal things and
could lead them and us to the feast
of life.
Now, they learn very slow.
I sometimes wonder if I don't forget more
than I learn.
I think I learn 100 things and forget
95 of them and have to learn them
over again.
But thank God for a five percent batting
average.
Anyhow, it's better than nothing.
But they learned very slowly, and our Lord
said to them, ye seek me.
When they did seek him finally, he said,
ye seek me, not because you saw the
miracles, not because you understood spiritual things, but
because you ate and were filled.
And I think I detect a note of
sadness there.
He said, labor not for the meat that
perishes.
He said, in other words, you're accepting a
deadly philosophy, that there is but one world
and that the only thing inside of you
that matters is your stomach, that if you
can keep your stomach comfortably filled, you're well
off and you're fulfilling the purpose for which
God created you.
But he said, in effect, my friends, this
is a deadly philosophy, for you're looking, overlooking
the presence of that other world.
You have forgotten that there is a spiritual
world that flows all around about you as
water, flows all around the rocks at the
beds of the sea.
And they had forgotten that.
Their philosophy was a narrow, earthbound thing.
And he rebuked them for it and said,
ye seek me because you're like to have
me stand by as a permanent source of
food for your body.
Labor not, he said, for the meat that
perishes, but labor for that which endures unto
everlasting life.
And still they couldn't see beyond bread and
fish.
And they said, well, now that you're talking
about food, I remember one thing, that our
fathers ate manna in the wilderness.
And it's written, he gave them bread from
heaven.
And they quoted the verse of scripture.
And then our Lord flatly contradicted.
He said, Moses gave you not that bread
from heaven.
Now, I want to ask you, how could
he say that?
When it's written in the scriptures, he gave
them bread from heaven, do we?
How could our Lord turn around and say,
Moses gave you not that bread from heaven?
In the light of the Hebrew experience, how
could he say it?
For any one of his hearers could have
flipped over if they'd had a scroll of
the scriptures.
They could have gone back to the story
of Israel in the wilderness and how hungry
they were and cried to God.
And God gave them manna.
And it settled upon them like the dew
at night.
And it was a small, strange thing, the
size of a coriander seed.
And it fell like snow upon them.
And they gathered it up.
And it was a sort of meal.
And they could cook it in a half
a dozen or a dozen different ways.
Bake it and ice-cold roll it.
And it came to them out of heaven.
And they said, this is manna.
What is it?
Manna.
And they didn't know what it was.
And nobody knows what it is.
And some unbelieving historians have tried to pin
it down and say it was the seed
of this or that plant.
How did it come to come down just
when they needed it and then not come
any other time?
How was it that it came down six
days a week and didn't come down the
seventh day?
No, no, it was a miracle.
God was giving them bread.
They needed bread and he was giving them
bread.
And because it came down, they assumed that
it came out of the kingdom of love,
that it was a spiritual thing.
But our Lord said flatly, No, Moses gave
you not that bread from heaven.
Why was he talking like this to them?
My friends, he was urging upon them the
inadequacy of everything temporal and material.
And if I could say this tonight and
get you to feel it and go away
impressed by it, it would have been a
wonderfully successful meeting.
If I could urge upon you what he
was urging upon them by seeming flatly to
throw their own scriptures back in their faces,
though actually it wasn't, but it seemed like
it to them and for the moment to
us, if I could make you see the
inadequacy of material things, that however good they
are, they're not enough.
That even though God sends them still, they
are not enough.
Moses gave you not the true bread from
heaven.
So many years ago, our fathers brought forth
on this continent a new nation conceived in
liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all
men are created equal.
And today I can stand to thank God
that I am an American.
I don't believe that I am quite the
109% red, white, and blue American of
the Chicago Tribune, but I am an American.
I don't know of a better nation in
all the wide world.
And I thank my heavenly father that he
tells of my unworthy love to be born
where the star spangled banner floats in the
blue sky above.
I'm glad I'm an American, but Washington gave
us not that manner.
I'm glad I live in an age when
I don't have to carry a candle around
with me and stumble up a pair of
stairs to bed carrying a candle.
I'm glad you can touch a switch and
the electric lights come on.
But Edison gave us not that true bread
which is from heaven.
I'm glad I live in a day when
we're vitamin conscious and a man can live
10 years or 20 years longer than he
used to be able to do.
I just heard a broadcast today this afternoon
in which a man said that there was
good news for children.
Some scientist has proved that spinach does not
contain anything that's good for children.
That it contains an acid that makes it
impossible for the body to absorb calcium.
And children need calcium for growing bones and
growing teeth.
But, said the newscast, the scientist has also
discovered that spinach is good for grown-ups.
And that when you get so old you
don't need calcium any longer and gives you
arthritis.
Then if you eat lots of spinach, that
same acid will prevent it from bothering you.
Wonderfully worked, wonderfully and strangely made, aren't they?
I'm glad that they have discovered how to
keep babies from dying when they're little.
I had a funeral of an eight weeks
old baby last Friday, a very touching and
tender funeral.
A little tiny doll lay there asleep, little
short trousers and a little sweater on these
little boots.
A little doll of a fella who had
come and stayed eight weeks and gone away
again.
You don't have many funerals.
I haven't had a baby's funeral, oh, it's
been several years.
They don't let them die.
A mother used to have nine and boast
that she knew how to raise children because
she had raised five of them.
The other four died.
Thought nothing of in those days.
Scientists have helped us and I'm glad for
it.
And I wouldn't bite the hand that feeds
me.
I'm probably alive today because some scientists knew
something.
Two years ago I had developed anemia.
They took my blood count and couldn't find
any red corpuscles.
And they told me that if I didn't
do something about that quick I would have
leukemia.
That is, my white corpuscles would run riot
and I'd die of an infection of the
blood.
So I got some funny-looking little bullets
and I took nine of them a day.
Boy, nine of them a day.
And I went back and had another test
and was up.
And I took nine of them a day.
Boy, nine of them a day.
Back before they discovered all that way to
build your blood up, they died.
I know a man over in Toledo, Ohio,
a young fellow by the name of George
Baumberger, Baumgartner.
Well, George died, not George, but his brother
whose name I forgot.
He is the brother.
Died and George was a big fat fellow
and had no trouble, but his poor brother,
he got, uh, he got anemia.
And the result was he died.
And if science had been advanced to a
point where they knew how to cure it
in that day as it was a little
later, when I got in trouble with my
bloodstream, he'd have been alive today, no doubt.
I'm glad for that.
And I'm not going to bite the hand
that feeds me.
And I'm not going to refuse to thank
God for every good thing that has come
my way.
But science giveth you not that bread from
heaven.
Edison giveth you not that bread from heaven.
Washington giveth you not that bread from heaven.
Eisenhower giveth you not that bread from heaven.
You'll get into an automobile tonight and you'll
ride a long distance to your home, so
far that if you had to walk, it
would take you to tomorrow sometime.
Thank God for transportation.
It's better than the ox cart, better than
walking.
But Henry Ford gave you not that bread
from heaven.
These things are not to be overlooked.
They are benefits, which in the will of
God we today enjoy.
But the woe of the world is they've
accepted those things as final.
They have said, here I am and this
electric light which I have invented.
Here I am and this automobile which I
have built.
Here I am in this new diet which
I have invented.
Here I am with these new highways and
this new plastic and all these new things.
Here we are and there is no other.
My brother, that's the tragedy of the modern
world.
That's the tragedy of civilization, that we're a
materialistic civilization.
And we say why God gave Henry Ford
the ability to make an automobile.
Brethren, I'd say that's an open question, but
we'll leave that untouched for the moment.
And God gave Edison the ability to put
a hairpin in a bottle and shoot the
charge of electricity through it and light the
world.
And God gave to the scientist the ability
to tell what a baby ought to eat
so it won't die when it's a week
old.
Here I am and all I have built
and there is the curse of modern civilization.
Jesus said, oh no, no, no.
This is not your bread from heaven.
This is not that eternal life.
This that Moses gave you, this temporary food,
you eat it and have to have another
helping of it tomorrow morning and another one
tomorrow night.
This is not enough.
Some of you are very well fed and
you're slick and you've got good jobs and
your bank account's big and your home is
something to look at.
And if your great-grandfather could see it,
he wouldn't know where it is.
And if your great-grandmother could walk into
some of your fine, lovely, well-appointed, tastefully
decorated homes, she'd go off in the corner
and long for the old-fashioned home she
knew.
All that slick, well-fed, like Ephraim would
wax fat and kick.
But that's not the bread which is from
heaven, my friend.
Well, somebody said, not only we're not talking
about science and modern civilization, we're talking about
religious things.
What about religion?
Doesn't religion bring something to the world?
Well, we're having an upsurge of religion in
the day in which we live.
And religion, religion everywhere.
You can't turn the radio on, but somebody
will be singing about his Ezekiel bone in
the middle of a bone.
Or they'll be singing about, my, didn't it
rain?
I turn off all those blasphemies myself.
I don't listen to them.
You blunder into them, you know.
It's like you tramp on a dead cat
when you're coming home at night, but you
don't stay on it.
Nitwits making laughter about a holy song or
a holy thought in the Bible, I don't
listen to it.
I'd just as soon pick up a slimy,
maggot-infested dead cat and take it home.
Anyhow, religion has given us some benefits.
Morality, for instance.
Everybody's saying that if there were more churches
and more preachers and more religion, there would
be fewer crimes and less juvenile delinquency.
It'd be safer on the streets.
That's all true, and I believe that.
And I believe that if we could step
up percentage-wise, to use a phrase I
don't like, if we could step up percentage
-wise the number of Christians in Chicago, the
danger on dark streets would go down correspondingly.
I believe if we could step up numerically
the number of converted people in the city
of Chicago, our jail cells would be vacant
correspondingly.
And as the number of good Christians went
down numerically, the streets would become more dangerous
and the jails fuller.
I believe that with all my heart.
So I know that the morality that Christianity
brings to the world is a good thing.
But that is not that manna from heaven.
That is not that manna which God sent
unto the world.
That's a temporary thing, a local thing, a
thing belonging to Adam's world and this world
in which we live.
And it won't do you a bit of
good five minutes after you're dead.
I know also the cultural value of religion.
I preached about it yesterday on the radio.
I'm not ashamed of it.
I believe in it.
You can't listen to the kind of singing
this church did today and not be culturally
better off for it.
You can't sing wondrous things of the outspoken
Zion city of our God, for break thou
the bread of life, dear Lord, to me
or some of the great hymns of the
church, without having come upon you a sense
of appreciation of the sublime and the absolute
and the noble.
I know the cultural value of religion.
I know that you take the average rank
-and-file church, whether it's a gospel church
or not.
And I know the people in it live
better than the people who inhabit the saloon
down here.
Down here's a modernistic church, and I don't
mean any one.
Here's a modernistic church where the pastor doesn't
believe in very much except ethics and high
living.
And down here's a saloon.
Nobody's got the hiccups down here in this
modernistic church, but they got the hiccups down
there.
They don't carry anybody out of that church
down there, but they carry men out of
there.
Nobody goes home from that church to beat
his wife and fight his kids, but down
in that saloon they do.
Any kind of a church, I suppose, is
better than a saloon.
But the morality and ethics taught by that
church is not that true bread from heaven.
The benefits of religion that you and I
love to talk about, the church bell that
rings out and says, come, come, come, come,
come to the church in the wildwood, all
very beautiful, all very poetic, and it certainly
has had an elevating and overling influence in
American life.
But that is not that true bread from
heaven which my Father giveth unto you.
Those are God's gifts and God's benefits.
And any kind of goodness is better than
the best kind of badness.
And any kind of moral standard that's a
bit elevated is better than the standard that
drags in the dirt.
The ethical society that meets down in the
loop and teaches ethics is better off than
the halfway house down here where half-naked
women dance to sensuous music.
Those are the benefits, the byproducts of religion.
But they're not that manna, that true bread
which God gives us.
And then, of course, there are the hospitals.
They take care of the insane now instead
of driving them out into the wilderness.
They take care of the blind now instead
of having to beg on the street corner.
And all that is a byproduct of Christianity.
And all the good that is being done
is a direct byproduct of Christianity.
They take care of women now instead of
making them the workhorses.
I have nine children and milked nine cows
and take care of a farm and grow
old when they're 35.
Now they stay young till they're 50.
And I mean that pretty literally.
I can take you to neglected, underprivileged sections
of the United States and go up to
a cabin door and knock.
And a tired, hoarse, saggy woman comes to
the door and you greet her.
A dozen kids try sitting around, all ages,
walkers, creepers, lap kids, crib kids, all sizes.
And a hound dog or two looking around
and a goat tied over there and a
swayback cow back to the house.
And you go and say to your friend,
I wonder how old she was.
Oh, 55.
Poor diet, poor care, slavery.
One child following the
church and Christianity and the ennobling, purifying, sweetening
effects of the gospel of Jesus Christ has
given women a decent place.
Too bad she's betrayed us.
Too bad.
But anyway, we've given women her place in
the world.
It's not that manna which is from heaven.
And you can begin low down as possible
and go to the heights and enumerate all
the benefits of Christianity and all the advantages
of the church.
And when you've said it all, our Lord
could say, no, no, that is not the
true bread from heaven.
You can have all that and perish and
go to hell.
Then he said, verse 35, I am the
bread of life.
He that cometh to me shall never hunger.
And he that believeth on me says
in that day, seven women shall take hold
of the garments of the man.
And they will say to that man, we
will furnish our own clothes.
We will furnish our own food.
We will support ourselves.
We won't cost you a dime.
Only let us be named by thy name
to take away our reproach.
We don't want anything you have, except we
want your name as a front to take
away our reproach.
And in Christianity today, I don't know whether
that's the fulfillment of that passage or not,
but I know that it's an illustration of
it.
We have them everywhere who call themselves Christian
churches, Christian this, Christian that.
And they don't want a thing Jesus has,
except they want his name.
The Christian this, the Christian that, but there's
not one thing Jesus has they want, except
the external benefits.
They want the manna.
They want the quail.
They want the water out of the rock.
They want protection.
They want the ethical and moral help he
gives.
They want to be known as followers of
his, because it's popular if you don't go
too deep.
But they don't want his clothes, and they
don't want his food.
The garments they wear will be strictly garments
of their own needlework.
The food they eat will be strictly food
of their own supply.
Nor do they want to eat that food
which God sent us down from above to
give life unto the world, and reproach by
the name of the man who's earned his
right to be respected.
I am the bread of life, he said,
and he that eateth me shall not hunger.
He that cometh to me shall not hunger.
He that believeth on me shall never thirst.
Now what eating is to the body, believing
is to the soul.
My brethren, I am so afraid that we'll
think we're saved in our...
I'm so afraid that somebody got you down
someplace at an altar and rammed a Christian
worker's New Testament up under your nose, and
showed you by an underlying text that if
you came you wouldn't be cast out, and
logically forced you to say you were converted.
I'm afraid of that kind of mechanical religion.
Oh, there is such a thing as eating
the bread of life and knowing you're eating
it.
There is such a thing as looking in
faith to that bread that cometh down from
above, and getting it into you, and having
an inward spiritual religion, and knowing for yourself
that that which is divine has now come
into you, and being assured in your own
experience for yourself and not another.
But you say, I'm saved because the Bible
says I'm saved.
The Bible doesn't say you're saved.
The Bible lays the condition down whereby you
can be saved, but the Bible never tells
any individual he's saved.
That cannot be done.
God would have to write another Bible to
say, John Jones believeth on me and he
is therefore saved.
God doesn't write the assurance of your salvation
in this book.
He tells you how to be saved, and
then writes the assurance in your heart.
And if we could get no more fundamental
evangelical Christians to realize this, instead of mechanically
saying, God says I'm saved and I believe
it, we would say, God tells me how
to get saved, and I've accepted it, and
it's real in my life, and I know
of a surety that I've passed from death
unto life.
It would be the difference between the kind
of religion we have now and revival.
But we want to make mechanical.
We want to push the button and make
it mechanical.
Somebody quoted a text here in this wonderful
chapter which I preached on some weeks ago,
524, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He
that heareth my word and believeth on him
that sent me hath everlasting life.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe it?
And shall not come into condemnation, but is
passed out of death into life.
Do you believe that?
Now how do you know that's true of
you?
It's true of he that heareth and he
that believeth.
But are you that person?
How do you know that?
He that believeth on the Son of God
hath a witness in himself.
And I wouldn't give a nickel or a
cartload for the Christians that have no proof
they're saved except they quote a text.
The text will lead you to the fountain.
But if you plunge into the fountain and
come up wet, I'll know you're a Christian.
But if you stand on the edge of
the water and quote the text, I'm not
sure the devil can quote texts.
And the devil isn't an unbeliever, don't you
think he is?
The devil believes all right, and the result
of it is he trembles with fear.
But he's not saved and he never will
be saved.
And there are lots of people who believe
texts, but the text never got inside them.
Is the bread of life actually inside you?
Have you been initiated into that other world,
that spiritual world, the kingdom of God?
Are you tonight in that kingdom?
You can be.
Because what eating is to the body, believing
is to the soul.
And if you will fix your gaze on
him who is the bread of life and
keep saying and believing, Lord, I do believe,
I trust thee, I am now trusting thee,
that which is external will become internal.
That which is in the text will get
into your heart.
That that's in the Bible will get into
your soul.
And you can get up and say, I
know, I know for myself, I know.