Now please turn to the sixth chapter of
the Gospel according to John, John's Gospel, sixth
chapter, verse forty-five.
It is written in the Prophets, And they
shall all be taught of God.
Every man, therefore, that hath heard and hath
learned of the Father cometh unto me.
Verse forty-four.
No man can come to me except the
Father which hath sent me draw him.
And then verse thirty-seven.
All that the Father giveth me shall come
to me, and him that cometh to me
I will in no wise cast out.
Now this will be, I think, of all
the sermons that I have preached and may
yet preach on the book of John, this
will be the most difficult.
It will be the most difficult to preach
because it deals with the deep profound of
Bible truth.
And it will be the most difficult to
understand because it may sound self-contradictory.
And to use the language of Peter, it
could easily be that the unlearned and the
unstable might rest these words to their own
destruction.
But I notice that even though Peter said
that, he didn't recommend that we forego reading
Paul.
He said, Paul's there, and go ahead and
trust God somehow that it won't happen, but
it's potential dynamite for the people who come
in the wrong spirit.
I think the same thing might have been
said about all the scriptures.
But it was said by Peter of Paul's
writings, and I would apply the same passage
to the text before us tonight.
And what I want to bring to you,
there will be many familiar truths appearing.
But you know that I think of the
Bible like a loom with, say, about a
hundred threads, each of a different color, each
of a different color, shades of the same
color but distinct from each other in their
shades and tone, about a hundred and no
more than a hundred.
And yet, using that same loom and using
no more than that hundred, and I might
easily have cut it down to half a
hundred, using no more than that hundred or
half hundred threads, each of a different color,
there can be produced in that loom tapestries
and rugs of the most exquisite beauty of
shades and richness of tone such as might
make it worthy to hang in the palace
of kings.
So in the scriptures, whether it be a
simple pastor in some country church, or whether
it be some great, well-known preacher in
some cathedral, if he is true to the
scriptures, he has only about, I've said, a
hundred threads to work with.
They are the familiar threads of Christian doctrine.
And no matter what he's preaching on, and
no matter to whom he's preaching, no matter
where he gets his text, and no matter
what passage he's expounding, he'll always be using
those same threads.
But out of those threads the Holy Spirit
weaves the gorgeous tapestry that hangs in the
church of the living God and makes it
not only a safe haven for sinners, but
a place of charming beauty for the saints.
Now, we notice here that nine times Jesus
in the passage is read, nine times he
refers to the Father.
And he refers to him in such a
context as to present him as sovereign.
And I want to talk for a little
while about the sovereign Father, the sovereign Lord.
For it always must be kept in mind
that the Father was not incarnated.
It was the Son who was incarnated.
The Father and Jehovah are the same.
Jehovah and the Son are not the same
persons.
So that it is never proper to say,
and right here I'm throwing a tiny little
zoop bomb into the neatly made up theology
of the average fundamentalist, for I am myself
a fundamentalist on the edges, and certainly an
evangelical all the way through.
But there are those who say that the
Jehovah of the Old Testament became incarnated in
the New Testament, which is false, it's bad
theology, it isn't so.
The Father is the Jehovah of the Old
Testament, but Jesus Christ is the Son, the
second person of the Trinity.
It was not God the sovereign Father who
became flesh and dwelt among us.
It was Jesus Christ the Son who became
flesh and dwelt among us.
There's a distinction there.
You say, how do I prove it?
Well, take such a passage as this.
Jehovah said unto my Lord, sit thou on
my right hand.
Find that in the 110th Psalm.
Jehovah said unto my Lord, who is David's
Lord?
Jesus.
Who is it that sits at the right
hand of the Father?
Jesus.
So that Jehovah said unto Jesus, sit thou
on my right hand.
Jehovah the Father said unto the Son, sit
on my right hand.
That text alone ought to make it clear,
but you'll find it throughout all the Bible.
You'll find the sovereign Father mentioned here, and
it was the Son that became incarnated, not
the sovereign Father, Jehovah, the Great I Am.
And yet the Son was as much sovereign
and as much I Am as the Father.
For as I have said over and over
again from this pulpit, the three are one.
And what can be postulated about the Father
can be postulated about the Son.
And what can be said about the Father
and the Son can be said also about
the Spirit.
I received a letter this last week from
a Presbyterian brother out somewhere on the California
coast.
And he ended up by saying something of
this effect, God bless you and may the
Lord the Spirit bless you and your ministry.
I like that, I've never had that in
any letter that I remember, nor have I
ever seen it in print except in the
book of 2 Corinthians.
The Bible has no hesitation at all in
calling the Spirit the Lord.
It has no hesitation in calling Jesus the
Lord, and it has no hesitation in calling
the Father the Lord.
For as the old creed says, the Father
is Lord and the Son is Lord and
the Holy Ghost is Lord, yet there are
not three Lord but one Lord.
This is also very wonderfully beautiful to me.
I preached one time in a Bible conference
this summer on the Trinity, and when I
was through, the man who ran the shebang
said to me, shaking his head, he said,
Brother, when you preach thus on the Trinity,
it makes it sound as if there were
three gods.
Well, I don't understand how anybody can be
so infamously and exquisitely plain dumb as not
to understand English when it's preached in their
presence.
And when I have explained and explained that
there is one God and that he is
of three persons, the Father is God, the
Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is
God, yet there are not three gods but
one God.
The Father is Lord, the Son is Lord,
the Holy Ghost is Lord, yet there are
not three Lords but one Lord.
The Father is sovereign and the Son is
sovereign and the Holy Ghost is sovereign, yet
there are not three sovereign gods but one
sovereign God.
That doesn't sound like three gods to me.
That sounds like one God in three persons.
And so we have the Father spoken about
here, the Son is speaking about the Father,
and he calls him nine times here, the
Father, and calls him and puts him, I
say, in the context of the sovereign, most
high ruler and the God of heaven, earth,
and hell.
Now, I want to talk a little bit
about sovereignty.
I preached a sermon several years ago on
the sovereignty of God, and if I ever
get around to it and God ever delivers
me from little duties that I can write
my book on the attributes of God devotionally
considered, I want to deal with the sovereignty
of God.
And when I do, I will have the
Calvinists on one shoulder and the Arminians on
the other pecking away at my poor, rapidly
bawling head.
But tonight I want to talk a little
bit about the sovereignty of God and show
you what it means as applied to God
the Father.
Well, now I give you a definition.
I like to give definitions, I like to
define, because if I use a word and
I mean it one way and when you
hear it, you mean it another way, I
haven't communicated with you at all.
I might as well have been talking Sanskrit
or Welsh.
So that if I use a word and
you don't know what I mean by the
word, not that you are not as well
educated as I am, but merely that you
may give a different meaning to a word.
So when I use the word sovereign, I
think it well that we define what we
mean by the word sovereign.
So I want to give it to you
simply like this.
I don't borrow it from any book.
It comes out of my own heart and
I trust out of the scriptures that God's
sovereignty is that by virtue of which he
is free to do always as he pleases
and fulfill all his good will without hindrance.
That's sovereignty.
That turns God loose in his universe, free
to do as he pleases in heaven, earth
and hell and to have his final way
and to carry out his eternal purposes to
perfect completion in the time to come.
Now that's sovereignty.
That's what it means and that's all it
means or at least that's the outline of
all that it means.
Now, God's will, when I say that the
sovereignty of God means that God is free
to carry out his will, then we come
to what is the will of God and
I point out something to you here which
you may not be familiar with or hear
some places by oversight and that is that
the will of God is on two levels.
There is the primary will of God and
the secondary will of God.
The primary will of God is the sovereign
purpose of God whereby he has his way
always and always succeeds in getting everything he
wills to have done.
That's the primary will of God.
Now, the primary will of God touches all
of God's eternal purposes.
I'm a great believer in the eternal purposes
of God.
They talk about our State Department.
I saw a cartoon.
Now, you won't think I'm getting political with
you, but I saw a cartoon that, well,
I don't like the cartoonists.
I had to admit he had something there.
It showed a picture of Dulles, the Secretary
of State, our present Secretary of State, our
peripatetic traveling Secretary of State.
And it showed his desk there and here
was he just disappearing on his way to
catch a plane.
And he had his briefcase in his hand
and one thing he had not.
He had no head on him.
His head was still on his desk and
his head was saying, well, you can't blame
a fella for forgetting something sometimes.
Here he was, hustling off, but he lost
his head.
Now, that, of course, was the politician, the
political cartoonist's way of saying that he was
no good and that he didn't know where
he was going.
Brethren, I think he may be a good
man, but you know, I wonder if he
knows what it's all about.
And I think that these brethren, these men
are all opportunists and they are like a
mother with 14 sets of twins trying to
keep them in line.
She never can predict what anybody's going to
do and the best she can hope is
to block something when she sees it start.
Junior starts over this way to knock over
a quart of milk and she grabs him
and blocks that and another one starts over
here to wreck a mirror and she grabs
him and she spends her blessed life just
blocking.
But she never knows ahead of time what
she's going to do.
The best she can ever hope to do
is to watch these, how many did I
say, 14, that'd be 28 kids, to watch
these 28 kids and get to them before
they get it done.
Now, brethren, my dear friends, without any political
meaning whatsoever, that's where dear Harold is.
He has no more purpose in what he's
doing than the boy down the street.
But he's just hoping if he sees a
commie jump out, he'll block him and rush
there and break Eddie's head, but get to
him in time.
And so we have a foreign policy of
watch him and then jump and stop him
before they get it done.
Ah, brethren, if I thought God Almighty was
like that, I'd hold my Bible, shake hands
with my friend Maccabee and leave the whole
business and say, what's the use of being
a Christian when all God does is stand
up there nervously watching for the devil to
make the next move and then blocking him?
Oh, no, my brother.
This is not a football game.
God Almighty is the sovereign Father.
And before the hills in order stood, earth
received her frame.
God had it all planned.
And in his primary will, he is carrying
it out.
And he will do his will.
And heaven and earth and hell someday will
bow and declare that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God's eternal purpose, the
glory of God the Father.
So that's why I can be as relaxed
as I can ever get.
Because I'm not worried about the future.
I'm not scared.
Because I know it's going to work out
all right.
God has a primary will.
And I can see now that I've got
two sermons here instead of one, but I'm
hoping that...
But brethren, God has a purpose for the
universe.
He has a purpose for the earth.
He has a purpose for the human race.
He has a purpose for the church.
And he has a purpose for Israel, his
people.
And every one of those has a specific
interlocking purpose which God himself brought out of
his own triune heart before the world was.
When there wasn't a cloud in the sky
nor a drop of water in the ocean
nor the ocean bed there nor a star
in heaven or an angel beside the throne.
And as the poet said, Thou didst live
and love alone without creation.
God had it all planned.
So never worry about God being afraid and
rushing in and hurrying off and grabbing a
long-distance phone and trying to get somebody
blocked.
Nah.
God wouldn't stoop to that kind of child's
play.
His eternal thoughts move on his undisturbed affairs.
And his primary will means that he is
carrying on his purposes.
That's God's primary will.
Then there's a secondary will.
And that secondary will is that God has
given people a will.
And he's given them a right even to
exercise that will even if one opposes the
will of God.
I wonder if we could illustrate it like
this.
I wonder if we could say that the
primary will of God is like a great
ship.
It pulls slowly and majestically away from Pier
39 and starts out down toward the ocean,
down the great mouth of the Hudson.
Liverpool is its destination.
The ship's papers, the captain, whoever handles them,
has the ship's papers there.
Liverpool.
He's responsible to get that ship in and
have her pulled in and tied up at
the dock in Liverpool in five days.
About, I think it takes five days.
Is there six for the great ships?
Well, all right.
He's going over there and he's the captain
in charge of that ship.
So the purpose is that that ship should
leave New York at such a day, pull
into Liverpool at such a day.
That's the purpose.
Now that purpose is going to be fulfilled.
And the owner of the ship, all that
are on board the ship in the capacity
of crew and the captain and all the
rest, that's their purpose.
And they'll carry that purpose out.
But now in the meantime, there's a great
deal on that ship that doesn't know a
thing about that purpose.
A little baby may be tumbling around over
the deck and a weary mother may be
lying out there trying to get a little
sun.
And a fat old boy that can barely
see over may be playing shuffleboard.
And there may be rats running about the
ship and sailors playing cards and people just
naturally doing as they please.
They're not paying any attention to the purpose
of the captain.
He knows what the purpose is.
His primary will is to get that ship
into the dock at last.
But the secondary will is you can do
as you please as long as you're decent
on board.
And I won't bother him.
So God has a primary will.
It is to bring the ship of His
purpose into the ultimate, to the ultimate goal,
to the harbor.
In the meantime, the rats run all over
the ship.
Brother, we're alive with them today.
And somebody says, if God is God, why
doesn't He stop this?
God knows where He's taking the ship and
all of His purposes will be worked out.
But in the meantime, His secondary will allows
certain people to oppose His will, to be
careless of His will, to be ignorant of
His will, or to go directly against His
will.
Now, if you were on board the ship
and it was moving at so many knots
an hour due east and you decided to
buck that ship and you'd start in the
prowl, that's the front of the ship, and
walk to the stern, and you'd say to
yourself, I'm not going.
I'm not going.
But you'd be going all right.
I don't imagine you wouldn't.
You'd just be getting some exercise.
But even though you determinedly walked in an
opposite direction, the great old ship would be
carrying you there.
So we have our Hitlers and our Mousselines
and our Starlings and all the rest of
them, our Moussipons, and our Go and Lies.
And we have them all.
And we have them all around over Chicago.
They're walking against the direction of the ship.
But don't you think for a second God
won't have His way with them at last.
It'll be heaven or hell.
Heaven for those who do His will and
believe His Son and hell for those that
don't.
God's in charge of His great purpose.
And while He allows people to have a
lot of freedom, He still will fulfill His
purposes in that day.
Now, I want to give my definition again.
I've given this definition.
We're in colleges and before people who are
supposed to know the difference.
And I've never had it challenged.
Nobody's ever come to me and said, How
come?
And yet I never read it anywhere.
I don't know whether it's in print.
It ought to be.
But here's our difficulty, you see.
If God is sovereign and has His will
and can't be thwarted, then how can man
be free?
There it is.
Now, you put a Methodist over here and
a Presbyterian over here, and you ask a
Presbyterian, How can it be?
He says, Man isn't free.
He is God's sovereign.
Ask a Methodist and he says, God isn't
sovereign.
Man's free.
And they can't get together.
But I don't see why they shouldn't link
up.
Because I believe in both the freedom of
man and the sovereignty of God.
And I'll show you how it is.
God's sovereignty is His freedom always to have
His own way and to do His will.
And man's freedom is his right to say
no to God's will and to go the
other direction.
How then can you bring them together?
You bring them together like this.
That when God in His sovereign freedom created
the heaven and the earth and all things
that are therein and made man on the
earth and put a soul within him, He
said in His sovereign freedom, Now to man
I bequeath a limited freedom and the right
to oppose me within limits.
And I give you that right and I
hand it to you.
Now use it.
Use your own free will.
I sovereignly declare that it's my will that
you shall have your will.
So when man rises against God, he is
exercising the free will which God sovereignly gave
him.
And when Judas Iscariot turned his back on
God and sold the Son of God for
thirty pieces of silver, he was fulfilling this
much of God's will that he was using
the freedom God gave him, ladies and gentlemen.
And so instead of canceling out the sovereignty
of God, he was only using that limited
freedom which God sovereignly had given him.
So when I refuse to obey God, I
am only doing what God has sovereignly given
me the right to do.
That's God's secondary will.
He allows the rats to play over the
ship and the winds to beat the waves
across its deck.
But he's going to carry her through to
the harbor nevertheless.
And that doesn't mean that everybody's to be
saved.
It only means that those are to be
saved who are repentant, believe in Jesus Christ,
and are born again.
But it does mean that the overall purpose
of God will be sovereignly fulfilled and that
man in his freedom has the right to
make his own little choices on the little
deck of that moving vessel.
And if he makes choices that are contrary
to the will of God, it's because God
said, Son, you're free to do it if
you want to.
I give you that freedom.
So when a man readily raised his fist
against God, he is not thwarting the will
of God.
He is fulfilling God's gift to him which
made him free.
Now, if that's as badly confused as I'm
afraid it is, come back next week and
we'll see what we can do.
But I've never had that challenge.
Nobody's ever said, Now, wait a minute here.
That isn't true.
It can't be true.
And I have given this little definition of
mine before a great many people and before
a great many theologians.
So that's what I mean when I say
that the Sovereign Father is sovereignly carrying on
his will.
Now, it says here, They shall all be
taught of God.
You see, men are in the hand of
God and subject to the sovereign disposal of
God's primary will.
Thine they were, said Jesus, thine they were,
and thou gave them to me.
And they have believed that thou didst send
me.
So God deals with the men whom he
has created.
He deals with them as fallen creatures.
And how does he deal with them?
He deals by testing them and teaching them
and instructing them.
They shall all be taught of God, Jesus
said.
And so he teaches and tests and instructs.
Now, this is the Sovereign Father who does
this.
And he does it with these creatures by
virtue of their creaturehood and his creatorhood, not
as Christians, but by virtue of their being
creatures of his hand and beings whom he
has created.
And so God teaches and tests and instructs.
They shall be all taught of God.
How does God teach and test and instruct
sinners?
By the light of intelligence, working on natural
creation, plus moral conscience, plus the mysterious presence
of the Logos.
My brethren, I don't know in all Christian
theology anything that shuts my mouth tighter and
makes my head bow more quickly and silences
me when I am not forced to speak
in the Lord's name as I am now.
But that makes me more, bows my head
more quickly than the thought of the mysterious
Logos.
The Word that was in the world before
Bethlehem, before Mary was born, before Abraham, before
Adam, before oceans and seas, before stars and
planets, that was in his universe.
And when stars and planets and oceans and
seas and creatures came into being, the mysterious
Logos, the light that lighteth every man that
cometh into the world, was present instructing, teaching.
And wherever there is a moral creature, that
holy one is there.
This is the light that lighteth every man
that cometh into the world.
And in Romans 2 we are told of
that strange light, that strange moral knowledge that
men have who have never heard of the
law of God as given by Moses or
the scriptures as given in the New Testament.
And so God goes among men.
They shall all be taught of God.
And God goes among men.
And he tests them, I say.
And they are tested in a hundred ways
for their basic reverence.
Now there was Esau and there was Saul.
What was the matter with Esau?
Find a bad thing Esau did.
He never did a bad thing.
At least I can't find anything evil that
he did.
He got hungry and sold his birthright.
But that was a bowl of soup.
No more immoral act there.
Mess upon us.
I can't find anything bad that Esau ever
did.
But God was testing Esau for basic reverence
and didn't find it there.
And found that Esau was akin to the
red clay and they named him Edom, red
clay.
He had no side of his soul open
to heaven.
The window at the top of his soul
was shut in the blind pool.
There was no window open toward God.
No reverence there.
Nothing basically reverential.
Look at Saul.
Great strapping tall fellow.
And the beginning of his life was all
right.
But there was something wrong with Saul in
that he was not basically a reverent man.
God, before he ever brings a man to
Jesus, before he ever presents Jesus to a
man, God tests man.
This is the doctrine you don't hear.
But brethren, if it isn't here, and you
prove it isn't here, I'll buy you the
best chicken dinner at Walgreens.
It's here all right.
They shall all be taught of God.
I'd better read my text a few more
times.
They shall all be taught of God.
Every man, therefore, that hath heard and hath
learned of the Father, cometh unto me.
No man can come to me except the
Father which hath sent me draw him.
And all that the Father giveth me shall
come to me.
And him that cometh to me I will
in no wise cast out.
And there you have the mysterious working of
the sovereign God over the souls of men.
And ladies and gentlemen, this is to my
mind one of the most awe-inspiring thoughts
in the Bible.
That before I ever heard the name of
Jesus, before the Holy Ghost ever presented him
to me as Savior, the Father was dealing
with me.
The sovereign Father.
They shall all be taught of God.
And he was determining and finding out whether
I was a basically reverent man, whether I
was a greasy Esau, fond of the sticky,
slippery red earth, or whether I was a
man with the top side of my soul
open so God could look down and I
could look up.
And then God looks for humility in a
man.
The sovereign Father goes among the men, as
he is going among you tonight, and looking
for humility, and seeing if it is there.
And he is looking for that hidden something
that I have said the top side of
his soul is uncovered.
Now, I don't say that saves any man.
I know it doesn't.
But I only say that there are some
people that God never preaches to.
It is a great mistake, ladies and gentlemen,
to believe that every man who has heard
the gospel has been evangelized.
It is a mistake to believe that every
man that has heard a Christian or heard
a sermon has been talked to by God.
There are some people to whom God can't
talk.
Their ears hear, but having ears they hear
not, and having hearts they cannot obey.
They shall all be tested of God.
They shall all be taught of God.
And the sovereign Father who created them before
he sent his Son to redeem them, as
their Creator, is testing them to see which
ones will go to his Son.
And as many as hear the Father and
are taught, they come to Jesus Christ, and
he doesn't cast them out, but he gives
them eternal life, and no man can pluck
them out of his hand.
Now, we make a mistake.
And that is, we urge the claims of
Christ upon men that have never heard God.
They are not prepared for Christ.
They will not believe, and they could not
if they wanted to.
No man can come unto me except the
Father drawn.
And he that has heard of the Father
will come.
But, oh, the millions that hear the gospel
without hearing the Father, the millions that hear
the truth without ever being affected by the
truth.
But our trouble is that we rush in
with our tract and try to ram Christianity
down the throat of a person that has
never had a moral preparation for it.
There has been no evidence of humility there.
There has been no repentance there.
There has been no fearing and trembling there.
There has been no willingness to break with
the world and serve God.
But in our mistaken zeal, we try to
make converts, and then we wonder why they
backslide or why the level of Christianity is
so tragically low.
It's so low because we've forgotten part of
our Bible.
We have forgotten that the Bible says they
shall all be taught of God, that God
deals with men as Creator before he deals
with them as Redeemer, and that the light
shines in the world.
Two men are riding in the same car
and they pass a church.
They are both sinners, both lost and both
on their way to hell.
One man looks up and sees the church
and instinctively something in him causes his head
to bow a bit and he's silent for
a moment.
The other man laughs as though it were
a tavern, goes his way.
Two women playing cards together, both lost and
both on their way to hell.
The third person comes in and raises a
religious question.
One laughs it off.
The other is strangely silent.
They shall all be taught of God, and
the Sovereign Father that created them deals with
them and prepares them.
And as many as have heard the Father,
they come straight to Jesus.
And when they come, he gives them eternal
life.
Am I wrong on this?
No man can come to me except the
Father which hath sent me draw him, and
I will raise him up at the last
day.
It is written in the prophets, and they
shall all be taught of God.
Every man therefore that hath heard and hath
learned of the Father come unto me.
Then he said, But I said unto you
that ye also have seen me and believed
not.
And why have they not believed?
Because they have not tested us.
Because there is no sight of their soul
open to heaven.
They would enjoy singing a fast chorus, I
suppose, and they would enjoy a banquet, a
three-course banquet, a five-course, ten-course
banquet.
They love religion all right.
They like to be around where there is
something nice going on.
But there is nothing open to God in
their soul at all.
They hear the word, but they don't hear
the word.
They have ears, but they hear none.
They have not been taught of the Father.
Then they get jockeyed into believing in Christ,
and they make such poor, hopeless Christians.
And the reason is that they are not
Christians at all.
Every man therefore that hath heard and hath
learned of the Father, he cometh unto me,
not that any man have seen the Father,
save he which is of God, he has
seen the Father.
I am that bread of life.
And this is the bread which came down
from heaven that man may eat thereof and
not die.
I am the living bread which came down
from heaven.
So you see, my friends, there is such
a thing as the mysterious workings of the
Holy Ghost, of the Sovereign Father through the
Holy Ghost, before the Spirit ever presents the
claims of the Savior to the soul at
all.
How different this is from our come when
you want to, do what you please, think
it over, and then decide.
That is a modern heresy.
And it's not biblical, and there's no place
for it in the entire Scriptures.
No man can come to me except the
Father which is sent me draw him.
So before God has tried and tested and
proved, and at that hour then there's no
impotent will of the man.
The man has a will, and he knows
it, but no more the impotent will that
says, my will, my will, no more of
that.
There is conscience.
The man that can't sweat because he's sinned
can never repent.
And the man who can't repent can never
be forgiven.
And the man who can't be forgiven must
perish.
And by sweat, of course I don't mean
physically, physical perspiration.
I mean grown before God for his own
iniquity.
And I've said reverence and repentance in our
general attitude toward God and the world above.
O brethren, the sovereign Father is here, and
the Holy Spirit is exercising his right to
select and test and try and prove and
see and know whether we will or not,
whether there's anything here that can respond.
Ah, Jacob, who would want to save you,
you crooked conspirator?
Jacob, you're a wicked young chap, you're a
delinquent.
Why don't you be like your brother, a
good, obedient fellow that smells of his work?
The Bible says he did.
It says he smelled of the field which
the Lord had blessed.
Esau was a good fellow.
Jacob was a crooked, nasty little guy that
you wouldn't want to live around.
But the difference was, Esau loved Esau, and
Jacob hated Jacob.
Therefore, God hated Esau and loved Jacob.
And though Jacob was deserving of death and
damnation a thousand times, there was something inside
the heart of Jacob that leaped to the
voice of God, that leaped up.
The top side of Jacob's soul was open
to heaven, and he could look up, and
God could look down.
Esau was well thatched.
He had no top to his soul.
What top he had, had no window in
it.
He was a pretty good man and a
forgiving man and a nice, stodgy fellow, but
he belonged to the earth.
Jacob was a man who didn't know where
he belonged, but he was a miserable fellow.
He hated himself, and he sinned and all
the rest, and he wanted to do God's
will, and couldn't, and tumbled and fell.
But all the time, God knew he had
a man.
So no matter how bad you are and
how crooked, no matter what a sinner you've
been, that doesn't need to mean anything to
you if you've been honored by God, if
you've heard the voice of the Father.
And in your spirit, there is that basic
reverence and a desire to do God's will
and a hatred, self-hatred for your sin,
and you want to come to the Lord
Jesus.
You come, all right.
They that have been taught of the Father,
they come to me.
And them that come to me, I never
turn away.
And I give them eternal life, and no
man can ever cut them out of my
hand.
They're mine because I am the Father as
they were, but he has given them to
me, and I have given them eternal life.
That's how every Christian became a Christian, the
mysterious working of God, conscience, repentance, and our
general attitude toward the world above.
Oh, how different from all this mechanical conveyor
belt Christianity, this conveyor belt Christianity.
Do you know what I heard this last
week, brethren?
You won't believe this.
I heard of a man, a soul winner,
so-called, who was too eager to make
converts and to get the convert to say
he believed in Jesus Christ, that he actually
tricked sinners into saying, I believe in Jesus.
Moved the conversation and got the conversation going
around and got the fellow to moving and
got him in a corner and jumped him
back on the checkerboard.
And when the fellow finally admitted he believed
in Jesus Christ, he said, there, you're a
Christian.
There, I got you, you're a Christian.
Now, that fellow, he's supposed to be a
Christian.
I'm glad there aren't very many men with
ears that long in the world.
We'd be worse off than we are.
God knows we have hair enough on our
long ears in a lot of places.
But when they get that bad, brother, somebody
ought to throw a net over them.
But that kind of soul winning.
I've heard that almost that bad.
I've heard it talked from this pulpit on
one occasion.
It wasn't my image, this fellow in here
preaching for some other organization, but I was
present.
And I heard something almost that bad.
You can trick a man into saying I
believe in the Son of God.
All right, then, you're a Christian.
You're a Christian, you hear?
For the Bible says, he that believeth on
the Son hath everlasting life.
You said you believed.
You're a Christian.
Goody, goody.
The sovereign Father has never, and the Holy
Ghost has never prepared him.
And he's never been taught to God.
And he's never heard of the Father.
And the basic reverence isn't in him.
And basic humility isn't there.
And repentance isn't there.
But they've jockeyed him and tricked him into
saying I believe.
And that's why we're as we are.
Oh, my brethren, if God's people would only
pray and pray till the presence of God
would become as thick as fog, holy fog,
and men would walk around with a sense
of reverence and fear and repentance on them
so terrible that sin would become intolerable and
the thought of hell and judgment and death
would be unbearable, we'd get some converts that
would come bounding out like a healthy child.
But we jockey them and trick them and
push them and massage them into the kingdom
of God.
And when they get in there, they don't
know what it's all about.
How about you, sir?
All that the Father giveth me shall come
to me.
He said, verse 37, All that the Father
giveth me shall come to me.
All I want to ask is, are you
of the kind of moral material God can
give to his Son?
Is there any repentance there?
Any sorrow for sin?
Any grief that you're wrong doing?
Any fear in the presence of the great
mysterious?
Is there anything there God can handle or
deal with?
Then you'll have reason to hope.
Turn thou to Jesus Christ, God's Son.
He is the bread of life.
And I said last week, believing is eating.
Just as you take the bread into your
mouth by eating, you take Jesus, the bread
of life, into your heart by believing.
So you can come tonight and you can
believe tonight and you can be saved tonight.
And he says, I will in no wise
cast him out.
Now, whether that means, various translations have it
differently, whether that means I will not turn
him away when he comes or I will
not cast him out after he's in, to
me it means both.
Because if he takes him in, he has
no reason to cast him out.
So there he is.
When I think of how many, many years
ago it is now, I came up out
of a pagan home, a father that had
no knowledge of God, a mother who hadn't
been but two or three times to church
in probably 30 years, surrounded by ungodly people,
not bad evil people, because my mother managed
to keep the moral standards very high, very
high, so high indeed that not one of
her three boys ever smoked or drank, and
not one of her three girls ever did
anything that you could consider evil, perhaps except
one.
Apart from her, Mother's family was a high
-living family, and they were all that on
morals.
They didn't have to get born again to
live right.
They were living right on sheer morals alone.
And into that home, to a 17-year
-old, jangling, ignorant boy, came the Sovereign Father
in the Holy Ghost, and talked from anywhere
else in fear and terror of God, in
reverence and a longing to be right, and
a yearning to sin.
It all played like shadows and light.
And then one day I heard a man
on a street corner say, If you don't
know how to pray, pray, God have mercy
on me, a sinner.
I went to my mother's attic and got
on my knees, stretched my two hands up
to God, and said, God have mercy on
me, a sinner, and God save my soul.
Then, after that, it was all like the
opening of a flower, like the developing of
a field.
Jesus Christ became all in all to me.
I trusted him perfectly as I do this
night.
Why did God come to the worst member
of the family?
It was generally, generally and publicly stated.
I'm not trying to be humble now.
Everybody knew that.
Mother knew it.
Everybody knew it.
I was the only one who would swear.
I was the only one who would sass
my mother.
I was the only one who would disobey
my father.
I was the only one that was a
little devil.
Why did Jesus Christ find me and my
brother, seven years older, a gentleman, walk into
his presence?
He makes me look like a hillbilly, gracious,
suave, friendly, knows what, when to talk and
when to keep still.
And I dealt with him and talked to
him and preached to him and dealt with
him until I gave it up.
Never a spark.
They shall all be taught of God.
And they that have heard and have learned
of the Father, they come to me and
I give them eternal life.
So if there is the longing, the dream,
the aspiration, the want to be good, the
fear of sin, the future, you are already
one upon whom God's hand has been laid.
Oh, how wonderful.
More than the check for a million dollars,
more than being elected president, that God has
laid his hand upon you.
That out of those teeming millions, God's laid
his hand on you.
How about it tonight?
How do you feel about it?
What's your response?
Anything there?
Any live nerve there?
Or are you another Esau without a live
nerve?
You can jab and probe and not a
response.
No live nerve.
But if God the Father has taught and
tested and by the Holy Ghost convicted of
sin and righteousness and judgment, there's a live
nerve, you can come.
No man can come to me except the
Father drawing.
But if you've got that live nerve that
the probe of the Holy Ghost makes you
wince, come unto me, all ye that labor
under heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.
Will you do it?