Now, in the Book of John, verses 31
to 44, 45, Then said Jesus to those
Jews which believed on him, If ye continue
in my word, then are ye my disciples
indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free.
They answered him, We the Abrahams see, and
were never in bondage to any man.
How sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?
Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto
you, Whosoever committed sin is the servant of
sin, and the servant abideth not in the
house for ever, but the Son abideth ever.
If the Son, therefore, shall make you free,
ye shall be free indeed.
I know that ye are Abraham's seed, but
ye seek to kill me, because my word
hath no place in you.
I spake that which I have seen with
my father, and ye do that which ye
have seen with your father.
They answered and said unto him, Abraham is
our father.
Jesus said unto them, If ye were Abraham's
children, ye would do the works of Abraham.
But now ye seek to kill me, a
man that hath told you the truth, which
I have heard of God.
This did not Abraham.
Ye do the deeds of your father.
Then said they to him, We be not
born of fornication.
We have one father, even God.
Jesus said unto them, If God were your
father, ye would love me, for I proceeded
forth and came from God.
Neither came I of myself, but he sent
me.
Why do ye not understand my speech?
Even because ye cannot hear my word.
Ye are of your father the devil, and
the lusts of your father ye will do.
He was a murderer from the beginning, and
a boor not in the truth, for there
is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of
his own, for he is a liar and
the father of it.
And because I tell you the truth, ye
believe me not.
Now, our Lord said here, Ye shall know
the truth, and the truth shall make you
free.
This was the world's Redeemer.
Any name our Lord bears is a lovely
name because we associate that name with him
who bears it.
But there are few names as sweet as
the name that is the title of a
great anthem that our choir sings, O Savior
of the world.
Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world,
and here was that Savior of the world
saying to certain people, soon to die, If
ye become my disciples, ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you free.
And he had said that he was the
light of the world, and he was calling
them to that light, and he was calling
them to himself, the life of all mankind.
He was calling them to hope and to
deliverance and to freedom.
And now, what was the reaction of these
persons to the call of the Savior?
They were insulted.
Now, the reason they were insulted by the
call of Christ was that his assumptions reflected
on them.
He said, If you will come to me,
I will make you free.
And the assumption was they were not now
free.
And he said, Ye shall be free indeed,
and the assumption was that they were not
indeed free.
And so they were insulted.
And this they could not and they would
not endure.
They would not let anybody insult them.
Now, I point out to you, my friends,
that these persons had lost the power to
learn.
As soon as we think we already know
it, we've lost the power to learn.
Did you ever try to explain anything to
someone and have them always cutting in with
a, sure I know that, certainly I know
that, pretty soon you gave up.
It was no use because there's no use
to repeat what everybody already knows.
And as soon as we have arrived at
that place, we instantly cut off all possibility
of learning anything.
Self-acknowledged ignorance that carries that meek ignorance
to all of life is the only attitude
possible.
I remember hearing a man years ago preach
on the text, The meek shall inherit the
earth.
Now, I know he wasn't right.
An old brother told me once that a
bee could get nectar even out of weeds
as well as flowers.
And I've heard sermons that I didn't believe
a word of, and yet they did me
some good because I managed somehow to translate
them backwards into something I knew.
Well, this man preached on Blessed are the
meek and he told about Frederick Faber, or
Henry Faber, the great French naturalist, and he
told about his great love for nature and
said he made a career and spent a
lifetime lying on his stomach examining bugs and
worms and beetles and bees and crawlers of
all sorts, little humble things that everybody else
passed up.
He learned all their secrets, learned how they
lived and propagated and grew old and died
and their habits and actually studied them until
he could write brilliantly about them.
I've read his Life of the Bee and
some of these other works and they deal
brilliantly.
They almost give a personality of the very
worm that crawls on the leaf.
And he said this was a fulfillment of
the meek shall inherit the earth.
Well, I think probably his exegesis was a
bit off, but there is a sense in
which a man when he comes to study
bugs he must say I don't know as
much as that bug.
I may know other things he doesn't know,
but I'm going to have to humble myself
and become a learner from this bug.
When he goes to the bee he says
I don't know as much as this bee
and I'm going to have to learn from
the bee.
And so he goes humbly and meekly to
learn.
Know there was a day when the only
science they knew was all the science of
Aristotle mainly.
Men used to write learned treatises about animals
never having seen the animal.
They used to write about elephants saying they'd
never seen an elephant, but they were passing
on what other people had said about the
elephant.
Then somebody startled the world one day by
suggesting somebody go look at an elephant.
They said boy this is terrifying.
This can't be.
And whoever heard of that said how can
you possibly dare to reflect on the wisdom
of Aristotle.
And somebody looked at an elephant, wrote about
the elephant, and after that science got underway.
Now the point here is I've gone a
long way around the well-known barn in
order to say that as soon as you
lose the power to learn you're frozen.
You can't get any place.
You're mentally stymied and you'll never get any
further than that.
They had lost their power to learn because
they had lost their humility.
They couldn't admit that anybody could teach them
anything.
And then they had not only lost their
power to learn, but they had forfeited their
hope because they'd lost their sense of personal
sin.
As long as a man can keep alive
in his booth a sense of personal sin
there is hope for that man.
He may not be saved, but he can
be saved.
But as soon as a sense of personal
sin dies in him he might as well
be in the hell where he's going because
he never can be saved when the sense
of personal sin dies.
The wise, wily old devil has named that
sense of personal sin a guilt complex and
has made people afraid to get it.
We're afraid if we have a sense of
sin that we have a guilt complex.
We fell off a table when we were
a child or something and we have a
guilt complex.
My brethren, let them call it what they
will, there is still hope for the man
who can feel his sin.
But they had lost their power to feel
sin.
There was their great woe.
They were insulted when somebody told them they
weren't morally free.
They didn't say, wait a minute here now,
this man says I'm not free, I'd better
look myself up, I'd better examine myself.
They said, I know I'm free and if
he says I'm not, he insults me.
And they walked away angry because he had
challenged them and said they weren't free and
he could set them free if they became
his disciples.
Now, sinners rarely get into this condition.
It takes a religious man to get himself
stuck in this kind of a state.
As I have said many times here, my
people, religion is the greatest thing in the
world and also the most dangerous.
There is more glory in the religion of
true faith and there is more woe in
all other kinds of religions than in any
other thing in the world.
It takes a religious man to get himself
entrenched in his own faith, his own belief
concerning himself.
You do something to a man, you sprinkle
him or you initiate him or you do
something to him and he feels that he's
arrived.
Well, after that, there's not much you can
do.
An old French cynic said one time that
infant baptism was vaccination against the new birth.
And I don't speak against infant baptism, though
I don't baptize infants, I baptize believers.
But I'm not knocking those who hold that
doctrine and hurt any baby to get water
on his head.
But the only thing is that if that
baby is brought up to believe that when
he got a little water on his head,
he entered a realm where he was untouchable,
he'd better never have had it on his
head because he's likely to become entrenched in
his religion and his condition become incurable.
These persons believed that they were established in
religion and they claim vested rights in it.
They said, Ours are the Father's.
Abraham belongs to us.
We're the seed of Abraham.
We're the descendants of Abraham.
Look at it.
We wear a nose.
Look at it.
We've got Abraham's physiognomy.
We're the descendants of Abraham.
And they were firmly assured of their unassailable
position.
So they were untouchable and beyond criticism.
O brothers and sisters, when we get to
a point where we feel touchy about being
criticized for our spiritual lives, we have arrived
at a state of death.
We ought to keep very meek and very
lowly about all this.
And if somebody challenges my faith and my
right to believe that I'm a Christian instead
of it insulting me, it ought to drive
me to examine my foundations and see if
these things indeed be true.
If you couldn't get them to examine anything,
they knew.
They were untouchable.
They were beyond criticism.
And any upstart that suggested that these entrenched
religionists were not all right was insulting them.
Now, this is a deadly snare, my friends,
a deadly snare.
It's a deadly snare when a denomination gets
the idea that it contains about all the
truth there is and that to challenge that
denomination is to challenge God.
That's a deadly snare.
I don't know for the life of me,
this may hurt some of your feelings, but
I don't know for the life of me
how anybody can be a confirmed denomination.
Down at Urbana, a week before last, I
prayed with and walked around and shook hands
with and listened to men of Anglicans and
Lutherans and Quakers, and here's just a Quaker.
And why, they just talked like any other
Christian.
They loved the Lord.
They were happy faith.
They prayed.
They were interested in lost men.
They loved the Lord and the Bible.
And for me to sit down and say
my denomination has the major, parched portion of
all truth and while we do admit furtive,
scattered bits of religion here and there, maybe,
we've got it.
It seems to me that something has to
go wrong with a man's head before he
can arrive at that place, brothers and sisters,
because there are too many good people all
around over the world that don't belong to
my church.
Too many people that aren't Baptists.
Too many people that aren't Presbyterians.
Too many people that aren't Nazarenes.
And yet, it's perfectly possible for any of
us to talk about ourselves, measure ourselves against
ourselves, judge ourselves by ourselves, and listen to
the sweet music of our own self-praise
till we actually arrive at the place where
we believe we're a little bit better than
anybody else.
These Jews hadn't only arrived there, brothers, they
were camped there permanently.
And they were sure they were right.
And if anybody challenged them, they pointed to
the hills of Zion.
They pointed to the robes of the priests.
They pointed to the towers on the temple.
They pointed to the grooves worn in the
stone steps.
They pointed to the scriptures of the prophets.
They pointed to the scrolls and the priests
and the phylacteries.
And they pointed to hundreds of years of
history.
They said, You dare challenge our spirituality?
You dare say that we're not free men?
Look at our background.
Look at our heritage.
Look at our tradition.
Look what we have, man.
Who are you to challenge us and say,
I'll make you free if you'll come to
me?
Who are you to free men already free?
And the same thing can go on in
any denomination.
We say, This is my denomination.
And I'll remain with it all my life
because this is wonderful.
I criticized somebody here not long ago or
something, and it was taken as a criticism
of an institution.
And somebody wrote me a long, mournful letter,
and the burden of the letter was this.
How could you ever bring yourself to criticize
an institution founded by so-and-so?
He founded it maybe nearly a hundred years
ago.
And I opened my little mouth and said,
Well, what's the matter there?
Is that lint there on the floor?
And somebody said, Oh, how could you dare
point to a piece of lint on the
floor?
Well, this was founded by so-and-so,
that good man.
He's been dead and in heaven all these
long years.
His descendants have been busy with his institution.
Well, brothers and sisters, let's get free from
that.
You won't bother me at all if you
come around and say that the Christian missionary
alliance needs a lot of corrections, a lot
of things wrong with it.
Sure, a lot of things wrong with it.
You won't hurt me if you tell me
there's a lot wrong with our church, because
there probably is a lot wrong with it,
but it would be too bad the day
we think there isn't.
Now, they said this.
They said, We're Abraham's seed and we're never
in bondage to any man.
And I said, The old Greeks had a
saying, Whom the gods would destroy, they first
make mad.
That is, to make them crazy.
And the book of Romans, first chapter, seems
to tell the same story.
It's the story of a mind that is
so fixed on its own self that God
takes the light out of it.
The light that lighted every man that cometh
into the world and shines on all men.
Some men God takes the light away and
they go into a state of moral insanity,
dementia.
And these people were in that condition.
Now, notice what they said.
To protect themselves, they said, We are Abraham's
seed.
And they were willingly ignorant of the fact
that in their own book, Exodus 1, 13
and 14, it said they had been for
400 years in bondage to the Egyptians.
They forgot that when they said, We've never
been in bondage to any man.
And they forgot that in Judges 6, 1,
they had been delivered into the hands of
the Midianites for seven years.
In Judges 13, 1, they had been delivered
into the hands of the Philistines for 40
years.
In Judges 4, 1 to 3, they had
been delivered into the hands of the Canaanites
for 20 years.
And they had been 70 years in bondage
to Babylon.
And for the very men who were uttering
these words, were being kept in line by
Roman policemen that walked the streets of Jerusalem.
For Israel was an occupied country under the
domination of the Roman Empire.
And they dared to stand up and say,
We've never been in bondage to any man,
deliberately trying to twist it to a political
meaning that they knew our Lord never had
them in his mind at all.
And so they hid behind a political meaning
and said, We've never been in bondage to
any man, and then I can give you
six cases, and there were certainly very many
more, and right while they were talking, I
repeat, they were in bondage to Rome.
You see, what these poor friends didn't know
was this, that you can't inherit spirituality.
I wish you'd mark that little thing down.
You can't inherit spirituality.
You can have a spiritual father and he
can beget a little devil of a son,
and your mother can be as saintly as
Holy Anne, and she can have a daughter
that's as proud as the devil.
You can't inherit spirituality, men and women.
You'd better settle that.
I wish we could.
Wouldn't it be wonderful for even those who
believe in eradication, that you get the old
nature eradicated, somebody dying, and he said, what
happens when an eradicated man marries an eradicated
woman and they have a baby?
What's the baby like?
Well, they admit it.
They said he's born in sin.
How can an eradicated father beget a baby
born in sin?
How can an eradicated mother have a baby
born in sin?
Simple fact is that they pass on their
human, physical, fallen nature and not their spirituality
to their children.
And yet there are a lot of God's
grandchildren running around the world.
They're the children of the children of God.
My father is a child of God and
everything is all right with me.
Ten o'clock and all is well.
That's what he thinks.
You ought to remember this, sir, that you
can't inherit grace.
The grace of God is given individually to
each man.
It's not given by inheritance.
Sometimes when I go to some of our
conferences, and I hope this is taken on
tape, it will never get to headquarters, but
sometimes they talk about, men will stand up
and moist-eyed talk about our heritage, our
noble heritage.
You would think that we had inherited spirituality
from A.B. Simpson.
No, you can't inherit it, dear friend.
You can't inherit grace.
They should have known, these learned teachers of
the law, they should have known that to
stand where Abraham stood, it was necessary that
they have the faith of Abraham and the
obedience of Abraham.
Sure, we will respect and honor the Presbyterian
Church.
John Knox, that fearless Scots preacher that made
evil queens tremble with his prayers and his
mighty preaching, founded the Presbyterian.
But for any modern Presbytery to have what
he had means that he has to have
the grace John Knox had.
And so were the Methodists founded by the
great John Wesley.
But any modern Methodist, I'd tell him, I
did tell one Methodist church that one time
and got invited elsewhere, but it was years
ago when I didn't have any better sense,
many years ago.
But to stand where Wesley stood, you must
have the faith of Wesley.
A book of discipline won't make you like
Wesley.
Nor a hymn book marked with Wesley's name
won't make you like Wesley.
You're going to have to have the humility
of Wesley and the faith of Wesley and
the penitence of Wesley.
So was Moody.
One of Moody's instructors one time said, you
know, Moody founded Moody Institute, but Moody Institute
never produced another Moody.
A.B. Simpson founded Nyack, and Nyack never
produced another A.B. Simpson.
And you can go all around and say
the same thing about all his institutions.
They try to inherit the blessing of their
founders.
No, it won't do such a thing.
It won't do.
You don't become spiritual by going to a
spiritual church and having it rub off on
you.
You become spiritual by going the way that
spiritual men go, by paying the price they
paid, by believing what they believed and sacrificing
as they did and trusting and yielding and
surrendering.
That makes men good.
Well, Jesus, our Lord, said, I know you're
Abraham's seed, but this did not Abraham.
If Abraham were your father, he made a
distinction between being Abraham's seed and Abraham's father,
or Abraham being her father.
He said, you're the seed of Abraham, but
you're not the sons of Abraham.
And you know what I think.
I think we Protestants ought to rethink the
whole, our whole position.
I really do.
I think that instead of spending our time
trying to create, as they did up at
Evanston, artificial ecumenicity, which means all getting together,
see, that's what that word means, instead of
trying to create a united Protestant front politically,
it seems to me that we ought to
all call a moratorium on activities and wait
before our God and see if we're worthy
to be called the sons of the Reformers.
The Reformers paid a price for Protestantism, my
friends.
They paid a price for the German Bible.
They paid a price for justification by faith.
They paid a price to be delivered from
bondage.
And we glibly accept the deliverance and think
that we have what they had because we're
the seed of the Reformers.
It's perfectly possible to be a descendant of
the Reformer and not be a son of
a Reformer.
Ever think about that, sir?
You're a Protestant.
I don't want to say I'm a Protestant.
I want to say I'm a Christian.
And if I'm an even in remotely worthy
to be called a descendant, spiritual descendant of
such men as Huss and Luther and Melanchthon
and the rest of them, I humbly thank
God for them.
But never take it for granted, sir.
Never take your Protestantism for granted.
Thank God for every treasure that's given you,
but never take it for granted.
To have what our fathers had, we must
pay the price our fathers paid.
Humility, I repeat, and weakness, and penitence, and
holy tears.
Now, our Lord said, You're not children of
Abraham, and I know why.
He said, It's because you don't act like
Abraham.
Abraham was a friend of God.
And here I come from God the Father,
and you reject me.
How then can you be true sons of
Abraham?
Now, the logic here is simply this.
The logic is that we take our nature
from our father.
There is a law in the Bible after
his kind that everything bring forth after its
kind, and that law runs through every bit
of life everywhere.
And the logic is that we take our
nature from our father, and we act according
to that nature.
And they were claiming to be sons of
Abraham, and Jesus said, You're breaking one of
the simplest laws of spiritual heredity.
You claim to be a son of Abraham,
and it's well known that a son of
Abraham a father has the nature of the
father.
And normally a boy, a man, acts like
his father acted before him.
Modification, certainly, but not major modification.
And Jesus said, You're acting like the son
of the devil, and you're claiming to be
the son of God.
And, of course, they were getting madder all
the time.
Our Lord should have had Dale Carnegie's book,
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
He'd have said, common ground of interest.
Find out what you believe together, and emphasize
that.
And avoid speaking of those things about which
you do not agree.
All right, Brother Carnegie.
But our Lord didn't know that, fortunately.
And they got madder and madder all the
time, because he was proving to them by
the .
.
Our Lord would have made a great prosecuting
attorney.
He's the defense attorney at the right-hand
side of God tonight.
And he's the advocate above, the Savior by
the throne of love.
But he'd have made a great cross-examiner,
for he knew how to make men convict
themselves.
And here he made these persons convict themselves.
He said, you say you're the seed of
Abraham?
All right, I grant it.
But you're not a son of Abraham, because
a son acts like his father, and you're
acting like the devil.
Ye are of your children, and ye are
the children of your father, the devil, because
you're full of lies and violence.
And he was a liar and a murderer.
Oh, my friends, this bothers me.
I'm afraid of it.
I can't preach this glibly and go home.
This bothers me.
I've been preaching a long time now, a
long time.
And I want God to keep after me.
I really do.
I want him to keep after me, keep
me penitent.
I want him to keep me penitent, and
keep me distrusting myself, keep me bothered about
myself, because if I ever settled back into
the entrenched privilege I did, firmly assured of
the unassailable position that I had, how easy
it would be for me to settle back
and say, now I've written some books, and
I can die.
I won't even read those books.
I refuse to let anything tie me down.
I will not.
I don't own one.
And I will not allow yesterday's victories to
tie me down there and make me believe
that I am a better man than I
am.
I want the God's sun to rise on
me every morning and expose the blemish and
save me from the idea of entrenched privilege.
Settled, established with the past to prove it.
I prove my past.
Look at the record.
I heard the politicians say, look at the
record.
Never want to hide behind records.
The Jews said, look at our record.
We be Abraham's seed.
And Jesus said, I looked at your record,
and you're not acting like Abraham.
That's watching.
Now, I just want to make a little
application of this and close.
I promised I wouldn't preach as long.
I heard myself four times this week, preaching
on tape, and how you people ever have
the patience to sit through as long as
I preach, I can't ever tell.
But I'm going to So tonight I'm going
to be briefer and simply ask this question.
What did your conduct prove you to be
last week, and yesterday, and last night?
You are the descendant of somebody, the son
of somebody.
And from somewhere you've received a nature.
And you'll act like that nature.
And you'll act in accordance with that nature.
What did your conduct prove your nature to
be?
Now, that's a fair question, and it's one
that's found right here in the text.
I didn't put it in it.
It's here.
Are you the son of ambition?
Are you the son of desires?
The son of evil thoughts?
The son of evil words?
Your deeds?
What do they prove about you?
You ought to consider what they prove about
you.
Or are you a son of faith and
love, and pity and love?
And if you are happy, how are you?
And in great meekness you can say, I
am his and he is mine.
And you can say, Arise, my soul, arise,
shake off thy jazzy fears.
I don't want to so preach as to
keep anybody in hot water or in a
state of uncertainty.
You can be sure, but your certainty will
not be the certainty of pride.
It will be the certainty of humility.
You can know that everything's all right between
you and God, but it won't be the
sharp, proud knowledge of the Pharisees.
It will be the meek knowledge of the
saints.
For you can know, oh, there are sons
of lust walking the highways and sons of
spite and pride and greed and pleasure.
But if you ask them, What about your
soul?
I'm a Presbyterian.
What about your soul?
I'm a Methodist.
What about your soul?
I heard Dr. A.
B.
Simpson preach.
What about your spiritual condition?
I'm a Methodist.
I once heard Moody preach.
If that meant anything, I didn't ask anybody
what denomination he was in.
But what about your soul?
What does your conduct prove your origin to
be?
Whose child are you?
Oh, I'm glad to tell you that whatever
you have been and are, I'm glad to
tell you you can be a child of
God through Jesus Christ.
You accept Christ as your Savior?
All right, well and good.
I'm glad to tell you you can be
a child of Now, if that worked, if
it worked, it changed your nature and you
became a child of God.
And if it changed your nature and you
became a child of God, you'll be living
like a child of God and proving whose
son you are by your conduct, as the
Jews did.
But I wonder now what your conduct proves
you to be.
Now, this isn't preaching works.
This is preaching conduct as a proof of
nature.
And Jesus said bluntly, you're of your father,
the devil.
You know that in all the years of
my ministry I've never preached on that text
and only referred to it two or three
times.
I'm afraid that's an awful text.
I can't use it.
I'm not a good enough man to use
that text.
It would take a holier man to use
that text and not hurt himself by using
it.
So I could never tell a congregation you're
a child of a devil.
Dear old brother Nicholson told us we were
hogs and dogs here one night, and I
wondered if you'd ever come back, but you
did.
But I couldn't, I can't use those texts.
It takes a better man than I am
to use those texts and not hurt his
heart in using them.
But I can tell you that if your
conduct has proved you to be a son
of the devil, then I can't see how
you can be anything else.
And if you claim to be a son
of God and your conduct is not in
line with God, then I don't know how
you can claim to be a son of
God.
So that's the teaching of Jesus.
It's not very inspiring, but it's wonderfully diagnostic.
It gets through to you, finds out what's
wrong with you.
That's what diagnosis means, you know.
It means knowing clear through.
And the Holy Ghost through the scriptures here
will know you clear through.
Now, look at yourself.
You say, I believe it's faith that saves
me, not conduct.
I agree with you there, all right, sir.
But conduct follows faith, and it's clear as
a stream of water follows the fountain.
And if the water that runs away from
the fountain is dirty, the fountain is dirty
too.
You can know whether your life is flowing
from a pure fountain by looking at your
conduct and knowing whether it's pure conduct or
not.
I hope it is, and I know in
many instances it is.
And we thank God for wherever it's found.
But let's not take too much for granted.
Let's not say, I'm an Alliance Christian, all
right.
All right, so what?
Lots of Alliance people be in hell.
I'm a Methodist, all right.
There'll be more Methodists in hell, and you
know what to do with them and where
to put them.
I'm a Presbyterian.
Lots of Presbyterians in hell.
I belong to a Bible church.
Lots of fundamental Bible church fellows with a
Schofield Bible be in hell.
They won't have the Bible there.
A lot of them.
Why?
Because they took for granted their spirituality, and
thought that by believing what somebody else believed
in joining a good church and getting along
with the crowd, they'd be saved.
Oh, no.
I know you're Abraham's seed, but you're not
Abraham's son, said Jesus.
And he made a distinction, a sharp distinction,
between my profession and my possession, what I
believe I am and what I am actually.
And it isn't very hard to find out.
Look yourself over.
Look at your past days.
Look at yesterday, the day before and last
week, and last month, and last year.
Look it over.
Does that tell you that you're acting in
keeping with your holy character as a child
of God?
If it does, well and good and thank
God and happy are you.
But if it doesn't, then it ought to
disturb you.
It ought to bother you.
It ought to say, wait a minute here
now.
Is it possible that I've been trusting to
a false, on false premises, that I've been
leaning on false promises?
If so, you ought to do something about
it.
And I think we ought to do something
about it now.
Let's pray.
Lord, we're more concerned that if everything be
all right with us now and in the
day of our death, or at the coming
of thy son, we're more concerned than that
we stand well in religion.
We're more that we have a reputation among
the saints.
We're more concerned, Lord, that things be now
right with us.
Oh, we thank thee, Lord Jesus.
How did say to such poor world wonders
as we are, if ye become my disciples
and follow me and go on and become
disciples, indeed ye shall know the truth and
the truth shall make you free.
And if the sun sets you free, you
shall be free indeed.
For I am the light of the world
and he that follows me shall never walk
in darkness, but shall have the light of
life.
Thank thee, Lord, there need be no concern,
need be no doubts, need be no worries.
We can know that we're following thee.
As we walk in the light, as thou
art in the light, we have fellowship with
thee and with one another.
And the blood of Jesus Christ thy son
cleanses us from sin.
This is a greater treasure than all the
gold of Ophir or the diamonds of Africa.
More to be desired is it than all
jewels, all rubies, all the corn and wheat
and all the granaries of the world.
And so we seek tonight to know and
be sure that we're not only sons of
the descendants of the Reformers, but true sons
of their faith and faith and faith.
we're not only sons of the descendants of
the Reformers, but true sons of their faith
and be sure that we're not only sons
of the descendants of of their faith and
faith.
And so we seek to know and be
sure that sons of the descendants of of
their faith and
faith of entrenched privilege, of vested interests, and
believing everything's all right because we're descended from
parents that are all right.
Great God save us from this.
Now, we trust thee that thou wouldst send
us out from this Church with a quiet,
certain, sure gaze at the light of the
world, meekly disclaiming all self-righteousness, humbly denying
ourselves, willingly taking the cross, sorry for all
that is imperfect and wrong, glad for the
blood that cleanses, grateful for the grace that
pardons, and remember sin no more forever.
Blessed be thy name.