A certain man was sick named Lazarus of
Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister
Martha.
His sister sent unto Jesus, saying, Lord, behold,
he whom thou lovest is sick.
When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness
is not unto death, but for the glory
of God, that the Son of God might
be glorified thereby.
These things said he, and after that he
said unto them, his disciples, Our friend Lazarus
sleepeth, but I go that I may wake
him out of sleep.
Then they said, Lord, if he sleep he
shall do well.
Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is
dead.
Then when Jesus came, he found that he
had lain in the grave four days already.
Bethany was near to Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs
off, about two miles.
Many of the Jews came to Martha and
Mary to comfort them concerning their brother.
Then Martha, as soon as she heard that
Jesus was coming, went and met him, but
Mary sat still in the house.
Then said Martha, Lord, if thou hadst been
here, my brother had not died.
But I know that even now, whatever thou
wilt ask of God, God will give it
thee.
Jesus said to her, Thy brother shall rise
again.
Martha said, I know that he shall rise
again in the resurrection at the last day.
Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the
life.
He that believeth in me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live.
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall
never die.
Believest thou this?
She said unto him, Yea, Lord, I believe
that thou art the Christ, the Son of
God, which should come into the world.
Then, verse thirty-four, Jesus came and said,
Where have you laid him?
And they said, Lord, come and see.
And Jesus wept.
Then said the Jews, Behold, how he loved
him!
Some said, Could not this man, which opened
the eyes of the blind, have caused that
even this man should not have died?
Jesus therefore, groaning in himself, cometh to the
grave.
It was a cave and a stone was
laid upon it.
Jesus said, Take away the stone.
Martha, the sister of him that was dead,
said to him, Lord, by this time he
stinketh, for he hath been dead four days.
Jesus said unto her, Said not I unto
thee that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst
see the glory of God?
Then they took away the stone from the
place where the dead was laid.
And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said,
Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard
me.
And I know that thou hearest me always,
but because of the people which stand by,
I said it, that they may believe that
thou hast sent me.
And when he had thus spoken, he cried
with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.
And he that was dead came forth, bound
hand and foot with grave clothes.
And his face was bound about with a
napkin.
Jesus said unto them, Loose him and let
him go.
And many of the Jews which came to
Mary and had seen the things which Jesus
did, believed him.
But some of them went their ways to
the Pharisees and told them what things Jesus
had done.
Now the Bible has a way of setting
forth abstract truths and then surprisingly, unexpectedly illustrating
them by some miracle or some never-repeated
wonder, in order that we might have by
illustration the truth which we had before only
by mental apprehension.
Now one such truth is the life after
death.
It is taught through the entire Bible but
is dramatically illustrated here by the raising of
Lazarus.
Now the teaching of the Scripture which this
miracle of our Lord illustrates is that human
life is to be perpetuated beyond the grave.
To a group of persons reared in a
land like ours where the Bible is the
common property of all citizens, this does not
come as a startling announcement.
But to a Mohammedan or a Buddhist or
a Shintoist or an Animist or a Zoroastrian
or any of the a thousand religions of
the world, this is wonderful truth, or would
be.
For it means that Jesus Christ came and
brought life and mortality to light through the
gospel.
And the Bible teaches that human life is
to be extended into the eternal future without
end.
But the Bible is plainer and clearer than
any other religion because it is authoritative and
final.
And it teaches that these things are to
be present and perpetuated, which I shall name.
One of them is consciousness.
If you were ever unconscious, you know that
what passed while you were unconscious was lost
to you.
And it was only when you returned to
consciousness that life had any meaning at all
for you.
You might lie in the queen's palace and
be surrounded by the royal servants.
And if you were unconscious, it would mean
nothing to you.
You might be carried by some mysterious power
through some of the wonderfully beautiful islands of
the world.
But it would mean nothing to you if
you were unconscious.
It is consciousness that gives meaning to life.
And any kind of immortality, which is taught
by any philosophy or religion, that ignores consciousness
is robbery.
And whoever teaches is a thief and a
robber.
For he is teaching that we are to
be forever in a heaven or a palace
called heaven but not know it.
If you could be in heaven and not
know it, you would not be any better
off than if you were in hell and
not know it.
It is the knowledge of it, the conscious
experience of it that gives heaven its meaning
and hell its pain.
So our consciousness is to be perpetuated on
into the future world so that we will
know consciously and be aware and experience.
And the Bible teaches further that this second
ingredient is to be present, personality.
We are not to be angels as some
imagine, and we are certainly not to be
naked souls.
We are to be personalities.
You are to be a personality.
I don't know exactly what personality means.
I know what the old psychology says about
it.
That is emotion, will, and intellect.
But I do not know that that is
a very good explanation.
Certainly it's not an exhaustive definition of personality,
but at least those ingredients must be present
in personality.
Now, I mention this because there are those
who teach that we are to be perpetuated
beyond, but not as personalities.
Something is to happen to us.
We are to be dissolved into the flow
and flux of things.
And if that is the case, if I
am now a personality and have consciousness, but
at death I am to be dissolved as
a personality and not have consciousness anymore, our
personality, then I might as well be annihilated.
In fact, that would be a kind of
annihilation.
But the Bible teaches the perpetuation of personality
beyond death.
It teaches first, and further, and I'm glad,
the perpetuation of individuality beyond death.
You are an individual.
Did you ever stop to think?
I don't think very many people think in
the day in which we live, because we
don't have time to think.
We have our thinking done for us in
Washington, New York, and piped to us over
the ABC system.
But anybody that'll stop and think a little
bit, it's a wonderful thing that you are
you and not somebody else.
Did you know that there never was a
human being yet alive that wanted to be
anybody else but what he is?
Not the humpiest, ugliest, crooked-nosed, slant-eyed
fellow that hobbles down the street ever would
consent to be anybody else but himself.
Now, he might look at a baseball player
and wish he had his body.
He certainly might look at some movie star
and wish he had his looks.
But you never could get a man to
say, and me that I wish I were
somebody else.
God has made us in his image, and
part of that is individuality.
I am myself, and you are yourself.
And we could not consent in a million
years to be anybody else but ourselves, our
own individual self.
That's more precious to us than all the
diamonds and rubies and gold of the world.
So God says, I've given you your individuality.
You will be yourself while the ages roll.
You will be yourself in heaven above.
You will be yourself at the right hand
of God.
You will be yourself when you walk in,
leaning on the arm of your beloved, and
are presented without spot before the throne of
God's glory.
You will be yourself.
You will not be somebody else.
There are those, of course, who teach trans,
what do they call it, reincarnation and transmigration
of souls, and have lots of long names.
I've always discovered that the more foggy the
doctrine, the longer the name they invent for
it.
And they have invented a long name to
mean that when you die, you're going to
reappear somewhere else.
They're going to push you down one, but
you'll come up somebody else.
Well, I'm not going to settle for that.
I'll ask God for an isolation.
I'd rather cease to be than be anybody
else.
That isn't pride, and it doesn't mean that
there shouldn't be a thousand others shining the
glory more than you or I, but it
does mean that God made me me, and
not somebody else.
God made me me, and he didn't make
me you, nor you me, and there never
can we meet, and never can we mingle.
We'll touch and fellowship, but we'll never change
our individual being into the being of somebody
else.
It would certainly be no.
What a clown that devil is.
What a cynical humorist he is, that he
can teach people that if they will abstain
from certain meats, and will perform certain fasts,
and take certain pilgrimages, that when they die,
they can be reborn as cows.
You'd think even the devil would know better
than to pull that on people, but he
has harnessed that kind of doctrine onto whole
nations for generations, and there are women in
India today with all the modern education that
reverently hope that if they drink the water
from their husband's feet, the bath water from
his feet, and do other humbling things, that
they'll have the high privilege of being cows
when they're born again in the next world.
That sounds funny.
It's not funny.
It's a vast, cosmic, cynical, cruel, sadistic joke
the devil has played on men made in
the image of God.
And I'll not settle for any cow.
And I'll not settle for being somebody else.
If God had ordered it that I could
die tomorrow, three weeks later be born, a
man with the brain of Shakespeare, and the
brilliance of Napoleon, and the mathematical genius of
Einstein, and the grave solemnity of Lincoln, and
not be myself, I'd say, excuse me, God,
please.
I want to be my little old no
-good self.
You made me that way, and I don't
want to change.
I want my own individual personality to persist
after I'm dead and beyond.
That's what the Bible teaches, incidentally, exactly that,
that our individuality will persist, and then our
experience and memory of that experience, it's that
that gives life its rich quality, experience and
the memory of our experiences.
You have a marvelous treasure stored up for
you.
There are those who have jewel boxes.
They keep costume jewelry and little bits of
jewelry not costing very much in it.
They look pretty, but they wouldn't sell for
much.
There are those, then, who can afford to
have real jewel boxes with vast wealth stored
there.
But I can tell you of a jewel
box which God has given you in which
you can compress more riches than Solomon ever
knew.
That old King Midas was a pauper compared
with what can be stored away in the
jewel box of your memory.
The experiences you've known, both pleasant and unpleasant,
the marvelous experiences you have known, the high
emotions that you have felt as the winds
of time and space played over you as
a harpist overed a golden harp, and you've
got that all stored away.
And the psychologists say we never forget anything
somewhere in what they call the subconscious.
I don't know what God calls it.
As soon as I find out, I'll use
that term.
But I have to borrow their term.
In the subconscious, you never forget anything.
Recite a poem in Sanskrit, and then put
you into hypnotic sleep, and you can repeat
that poem back again word for word, inflection
for inflection.
Nobody forgets anything.
A professor of Greek once had a maid.
She was dusting around his office.
Something happened to her.
She became ill and went into some sort
of partial coma or delirium.
I don't know what they call it technically.
But she was raving on, and to his
surprise, or this was years later, she left
the professor, and he may even have died.
I don't know.
But this was years later when she was
in this state.
She was reciting Aeschylus, the Greek poet.
And somebody said, well, this woman hasn't even
been educated in our ordinary great schools.
How could she know ancient Greek?
And then they found that she used to
dust around the study of this professor and
hear him read aloud the poetry of Aeschylus
and Homer.
She was reciting.
Stored away somewhere there in the subconscious.
She didn't know she could do it, but
the subconscious knew, and no experience ever disappears.
It riches and mellows and takes the beauty
of the skies as a sunset, but it
never dies.
And so memory and the experience, and the
memory of that experience, shall persist.
For it is experience and the memory thereof
that give to life its riches.
And if immortality meant or persistence beyond the
grave meant that we were to come up
all brand new, it would mean that all
the riches would be lost out of our
lives.
Suppose that you got complete amnesia tomorrow morning
or tonight at midnight, complete amnesia.
Everything you loved and everything you'd experienced and
enjoyed, everything you dreamed and hoped, all that
may give your life its vibrancy and riches,
all suddenly disappear.
You'd be a zany indeed, a dead walking
man, walking about on the earth with no
reason for living and no music, nothing, nothing
to enrich you.
You'd be a hollow shell of a man.
But God says your memory of your experiences
and all that you have known will be
perpetuated beyond the grave and beyond death, on
out into the future world.
That's what the New Testament teaches.
It teaches it so clearly and fully that
only a fool could doubt it.
And now what assurance can we have that
this is so?
We have the assurance that there was one
who came down from heaven above and was
born to the Virgin Mary to suffer under
Pontius Pilate, and to rise again the third
day and give assurance to all men that
the doctrine the Bible taught was true, and
that he who had had experiences for thirty
-three years died and entered the grave and
in three days came out and picked up
those experiences and forgot none of them, carried
his individuality, his personality, his memories, his experiences,
and his consciousness on with him out and
walked around and baked fish on the shore
of Galilee and talked to his disciples and
left beautiful teaching behind him and then soared
away to be a high priest at the
right hand of God.
And from thence he shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
And this is all the assurance we need.
God has given us one sample man, one
sample man, whose individuality persisted beyond the grave,
whose memory, whose personality persisted, and in a
smaller way he illustrated by Lazarus.
Because when Lazarus went down into the grave
and came back out again, he had been
dead four days.
Why did Jesus carry two days and give
Lazarus a chance to die?
And then why did he carry and give
him the chance not only to die but
to begin to decompose?
So no devil, not even the devil, would
have the brazen effrontery to say Lazarus wasn't
dead.
The stench that came out of the grave
when they rolled the rock away told the
story, Lazarus was dead.
And his own sister turned modestly away and
said, don't roll the stone now.
Leaking around that poor-fitting hole in the
ground there comes evidence that my brother is
dead.
And when he came out of the grave,
do you suppose he knew where he lived?
Certainly he walked straight there.
Suppose did he talk to Mary and Martha?
Do you think he knew them?
Do you think as they sought around afterward,
after the wonder that this had worn off,
do you suppose they ever smiled and chatted
over the fun they'd had when they were
kids?
Does my sister Mildred and I often meet
and laugh over the fights we used to
have?
Why, before we were converted?
Why, sure, Mary and Martha and Lazarus talked
about old times, talked about their mother and
father that had gone, about their old home,
about that sick spell they'd had.
They told him what he didn't know about
how he'd died and all the rest after
consciousness left him, that his physical consciousness left
him.
He didn't know, but they told him.
They brought him up to date on how
things had been when he was dead.
Sure, all that he had, his memory, his
experiences, his individuality, his personality, and all that
made him Lazarus, persisted beyond the grave.
He died again, and he's dead now.
The Bible teaches that because another greater than
he lived and died and rose and didn't
die again, Lazarus is all right.
Don't worry about Lazarus.
Don't worry about any saint that ever died.
It was the guarantee.
And Jesus Christ, our Lord, came out of
the grave and carried out with him his
memory, his knowledge, his experience, his personality, his
friendships, his ties, his loves.
We know it's all right with us.
It's all right now.
So don't ask the foolish question, will we
know each other in heaven?
Don't ask that foolish question.
It's got a doubt at the very root
of it.
The worm of doubt is eating at the
very root of your flower.
Of course, we'll know each other.
And the old Scotsman, Jamie, sat by the
bedside of Jeannie, his dying wife.
He said, Jeannie, do you think we'll ken
each other in the world to come?
And she said, don't ask foolish questions, Jamie.
Do I ken you now?
She said, yes, you know me now.
But I wonder if you'll know me then.
He said, do you think I'll have no
less sense then than I have now?
Of course not.
In the same sense, the same knowledge, the
same ability to sense personality will follow us
all out there, year into the world to
come.
When Jesus our Lord had risen from the
dead, he said, Mary, and she turned and
said, Rabbona.
She knew him because his knowledge of individuals,
his personality, all that made him Jesus, had
persisted beyond the grave.
Now, what does all this mean?
Well, what does it mean in practical application?
Well, for instance, it makes this life a
preparation for the next life.
It takes away the period.
There is no period.
The trouble with sinners in the world is
that they put a period after me.
Einstein died, and they put a period there,
and then put a monument up and say,
that was Einstein.
Mary said, they've taken away my Lord.
She didn't even say the body of my
Lord.
She said, they've taken away my Lord.
No period there.
God doesn't deal in periods in this world.
He deals in colons and semicolons and dashes.
When a man dies, God doesn't put a
period there.
God puts a dash there and says more
later.
Carries it on over to the next page.
Starts all over.
So this life is a preparation for the
next life.
If this life was all, then I fail
to see how existence could be justified.
How God could make a man intelligent enough
to know he had to die and then
let him die would be a contradiction I
think no philosopher ever could untangle.
My cat that sleeps on the rug at
home is getting as big as the rug.
She'll die, but she doesn't know she's going
to die.
And God didn't visit her with the knowledge
she's going to die to let her die.
He lets her die without knowing she's going
to die.
But God lets you know that you had
to die and gave you the consciousness of
it.
And then for God to let you die
and put a period there, it would mean
the throne of God was guilty of dishonesty.
Thou madest life in man and brute.
Thou madest man, he knows not why, but
he knows he was not born to die,
and thou hast made him, thou art just.
So pleaded him, a Tennyson, that the God
who made man and made him to know
he wasn't born for a finality and a
period and an end, but that death was
only a semicolon, only continued to the next
page.
God then maintains his honesty.
He can't be blamed for cruelty nor sadism.
What the devil would like to have is
think this is the end.
It isn't.
And this life is a preparation for the
next life, that's all.
We're getting ready for the life to come.
So that is a powerful incentive to religion,
and a powerful incentive to go to the
book that knows.
And that book will turn us to the
one who can help us, the sample man,
the man who was dead and rose again.
And then the fact that human personality and
consciousness and life persist beyond the grave teaches
us how to use our possessions.
Jesus said, Lay not up for yourself treasures
on earth, but lay up for yourselves treasures
above.
In 1 Timothy, listen, it says, Charge them
that are rich in this world, that they
be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain
riches, but in the living God, who gives
us richly all things to enjoy.
See that they do good, and that they
be rich in good works, and ready to
distribute, and willing to communicate, laying in store
for themselves a good foundation against the time
to come, that they may lay hold on
eternal life.
Now if Paul hadn't believed in perpetuation of
my personality beyond the grave, why would he
tell me that I was to lay up
in store for myself a good foundation against
the time to come?
And then in the 16th chapter of Luke,
our Lord Jesus gave them the parable of
the unjust steward, and then he made the
application, as I find it here, 16.
He said, I say unto you, verse 9,
Make to yourselves friends by means of the
mammon of unrighteousness.
Now what does he mean there?
The mammon of unrighteousness is money.
And he said, Make to yourselves friends by
means of the mammon of unrighteousness, so that
when this world fails you, they, those friends,
may receive you into everlasting habitation.
You ever see that?
It's there.
And it's not only there, but it's illustrated
by money.
And what Jesus taught there was this, that
in the course of my life, a certain
amount of money comes into my possession, and
that I can so use that money as
to bind men to me in friendship for
the world to come.
And when I die here and I meet
them there with that quickened knowledge and penetration
of understanding, they will know that it was
my gifts and my money that made it
possible for them to live.
And I think that's the most powerful missionary
incentive in all the wide world.
I don't know anywhere in the Bible any
incentive for foreign missionary giving that's stronger than
this.
But I give $500 to missions this year,
and unknown to me beyond my ken, that
$500 will go to buy food or a
car fair or a donkey or a cart
or something for a missionary.
That may win somebody, and in the world
to come when that quickened understanding makes all
things plain, God will introduce me to somebody
that my money has won.
And they will receive me into eternal tabernacles
because I've made friends of them to help
a man in this world, and the chances
are he'll turn against you.
But in that day when sin's removed, nothing
like that will be true.
So it teaches us how to use our
money.
And friend, if you don't know, you'd better
learn quick how to use your money.
Because this life is only just a little
line going to be continued over, and you'll
pick it up again after we have that
little experience we call death.
All that you are and have by way
of personality will be carried on.
And then the other thing is that the
knowledge that there is life following death renders
hard times tolerable.
There is a certain restful humor in some
things religious people do in all seriousness.
Now that song colored brethren sing, I'm so
glad trouble don't last always.
We smile at that and learn that men
write about that, and they say that's because
they were one-time slaves, and because they
had nothing in this world, they pushed what
they wanted up into the world to come
and invented a heaven.
For there were any colored slaves down in
Dixie, there was a Bible that told us
that we could endure anything in this life
because it was only a wink of an
eye, and the real life, the spotless life,
the endless life was over there.
I'm so glad trouble don't last always.
And it's been told I suppose thousand times
and a hundred of those times in your
hearing of the colored brother that said with
great seriousness that there was one passage of
scriptures that helped him more than any other
when he got in trouble.
He said when the road gets long and
hot and dusty and hard and full of
thorns, and my friends turn their backs on
me, and sickness visits me, he said the
passage that I love the best is the
passage that says, and it came to pass.
He said, I know that this has only
come to pass, and if I just wait
around it'll pass.
And that was a delightful misunderstanding of the
text, but I think it was delightful.
He got more out of that than all
the Greek theologians who could get possibly out
of the book of Romans.
When things got tough he said, thank God
it came to pass.
It isn't going to stay always.
Troubles don't last always.
And we used to sing in camp meetings,
there's a better day coming, I know, I
know, it will not always be so, it
will not always be so.
There's a better day coming.
Now we smile at these brethren, we think
we're very much superior to our colored friends
in camp meeting friends who shouted and sang
such songs.
And with deep appreciation and great reverence I
take my place with them.
I've read the classics, and I'm wholly unfamiliar
with what the philosophers teach, but I'll take
my place with simple-hearted men who believe
God, and who find the hope of a
future life makes this life's troubles tolerable.
You can put up with it if you
know it came to pass, and that it'll
pass and heaven will bloom out, and the
bright rose of Sharon shall shed its heartsome
bloom, and one time more, with all of
your rich personality intact, you will walk streets
that are gold and gaze upon the face
of your loved ones again.
Do you know what, incidentally, what makes hell
intolerable?
The fact that it didn't come to pass,
the fact that hell will remain hell.
To walk up to a suffering saint and
say, bear it a little while longer, brother,
it can't last, he'll smile and shake off
a tear and say, thank God, and go
ahead.
But where is he that will go to
the soul lost in hell and say, it
can't last?
It will last, and that's what makes it
intolerable.
But because troubles can't last here, and because
we know that we're only now going through
the, so to speak, the labors of birth,
and soon we'll be, by the grace of
God, born into a new day, carrying all
the riches of our lives with us, personal
riches, I don't mean the riches of this
world, certainly.
We can endure it and put it up
with us.
Now again, knowledge that we are perpetuated beyond
the grave tends to detach us from earthly
things.
If this life were all, common sense would
say, get all out of it you can.
But knowing that this is only the kindergarten,
and that we have the long, long road
to go yet before we graduate, and then
when we graduate, we'll still be only beginning
anew in a land that is fairer than
day, instead of our motto being, get all
you can out of it, our motto is,
put all you can into it, and make
this life as rich as possible by giving
in sacrifice and prayer and self-denial and
detachment, free yourselves from the burden of this
world and put everything you have into it
and lay up a good story against the
time to come and lay hold on eternal
life.
A great German theologian, von Hügel, has written
a work that I have tried to read
and have not had yet time, but I
bought a two-volume set, and I opened
the first volume and looked at the first
chapter as I rode along on the train
one day, and that's as far as I
got, but that was far enough for this
time.
Here's what he said in effect, it seems
that the only thing that will move men's
emotions are the things of this world, and
the only thing worthy to move their emotions
are those things of the world to come.
Only time moves men, and only eternity is
worthy to move men.
Oh, brother, why is it that the only
thing that will stir people is business and
sports and travel and sex and food and
pleasures and fun?
That's the only thing you can move.
People in the newspapers know it.
They know that if they show a picture
of a seductive woman and a beautiful baby
and an animal, those three will keep the
public buying their papers.
They know that things that pass away move
us, move us, shape us and change us.
The nation goes into the throes of a
world series once a year.
Things that don't matter move us, and only
that is worthy to move us which never
passes away.
Only eternity has any right to my loyalty.
Only the world to come has any right.
And yet you can't get people moved by
talking about the world to come.
Only the world that is.
Oh, eternity, eternity.
Did you ever try to think about how
long eternity is?
Let's think of the shores of Lake Michigan,
all the vast shore of Lake Michigan.
I don't know how many hundreds of miles
it might run around that shore.
Think of it, the sand.
Take in all the sand dunes of Indiana.
Clear on around the shores with all of
its sand.
Let us imagine a pigeon coming down from
God once every ten thousand years and taking
one grain of sand away, waiting ten thousand
years and coming for another grain of sand.
And when the last grain of sand on
the ten thousand-year visits had been plucked
up and carried away, eternity would be in
its early morning.
Yet eternity doesn't move people, it's only time
that moves them.
Great God, what has sin done to us?
What has sin done to us that we
are sons of eternity and live as children
of time?
What has sin done to us?
How has sin poisoned us?
How has it driven us morally insane?
How has it blinded our eyes?
We resist the eternal voice, and when we
resist the eternal voice, we're left victims of
time, victims of time.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, time speeds
away.
And the little electric clock moves as fast
as the old grandfather clock ever did.
Time gets away.
How long since it was January 1st?
Today is May 1st.
Time speeds away, and we're the victims of
time.
But God's put eternity in our hearts, and
he has said, children, if you will trust
in my son and dare to believe him
and rest on his love, time will mean
nothing to you.
The nervous tick-tick of the clock, with
the slow motion of the passing of the
wheel of the heavens, will not change you
at all.
Everything will be all right with you.
But it's Jesus Christ that makes the difference,
for he said, I'm the resurrection and the
life.
This is not a poetic thought I'm bringing
you tonight.
It's not a dream.
It's not a wild, rash hope.
It is a proved fact.
One of our brethren died and rose again
and never died again, and can't die while
the ages roll.
One of our brethren, with shoulders like mine
and hands to grasp, lips to speak and
eyes to see, and feet to walk down
the street, one of our brethren, blood of
our blood and bone of our bone and
life of our life, stood before the brokenhearted
sisters and said, I am the resurrection and
the life.
He that liveth and believeth in me shall
never die, and those who are dead shall
live again.
Our brother, one of us, puts his arms
around us and gathers us in.
He shall lead his flock like a shepherd.
He shall gather the lambs in his arms
and carry them in his boat.
I recommend him to you.
I recommend Jesus to you, Jesus Christ.
I want to tell you something in closing.
If I did not know Jesus Christ, I
think I would desert civilization and go somewhere
and lie face down and fast and pray
and beg whatever gods there be to annihilate
me.
If he would consent and consider it, to
annihilate me, the voice that said be would
say to me, unbe.
He wouldn't, but I say I think I'd
try it if I didn't know and couldn't
know Jesus Christ and he was nothing to
me and I knew he could be nothing
to me.
I wouldn't want to live another hour, and
I wouldn't want to dare to die, but
I'll hunt for no caves and beg God
for no annihilation.
I'm glad I was ever born, glad my
father ever married my mother, glad a baby
was ever born into the Tozer household, glad
I'm alive, and glad that Jesus Christ found
a poor wandering sheep with his wool all
torn and dragging where the barbed wire fence
had torn me and saved me and made
me his child.
By the dear grace of God, I stand
without fear.
Who's Satan?
Who's Billy Nicholson calls him that dirty old
pig?
I wouldn't dare thus to speak to him,
but secretly I think that's what he is,
and I think that he's a sadistic demon,
and he wants every one of you to
get engrossed with time and your looks and
your clothes and your friends and your car
and your radio and your job and your
cabin and where the fish are biting the
bait and where you can get it wholesale.
Dread God, make hucksters out of us, hucksters
and hecklers, and send us out.
Some people, don't be careful, they look like
George Washington.
They've looked at his pictures so often and
so lovingly, not on the wall, but in
their wallet.
We'll be like that which we love.
And if some artist with keen godly vision
could draw a picture of a man and
make what was in that man show out,
some fine-looking fellow with a hundred and
fifty dollar suit on, imagine that he looks
like Gregory Peck.
One eye would be a radio set and
the other eye a TV set, and his
hair would turn into an antenna, and his
legs would become whitewall tires, and if he
looked like what he loved, we'd put him
in a museum, because he's a composite of
things that are of time passing away.
But I believe the day will be when
we look like what we love, and if
we have loved eternity, somehow God will let
eternity come on our features, and I have
seen a few like them.
I know old brother Hall, and old brother
Craig, and some of the dear other brethren
that I used to know, who had long
since ceased seeing anything in time.
They looked at you with that faraway look,
and when they raised their eyes to pray,
their faces to pray, there was something of
the glow that must have been on the
face of steam.
I sat, as I've told you, in the
Heinz home once.
We sat at dinner beside Jeffrey, and I
tried to engage Jeffrey in conversation.
I rode in an automobile with Jeffrey, trying
to engage him in conversation.
You couldn't do it, couldn't do it.
He was looking far off, and I saw
maps, and diacs, and headhunters, and blowguns, and
gospel pots, and baptized wild men all passing
before his vision.
The little things of this world, the things
that are of time that all pass away
from, and only those things matter that we're
geared into eternity.
Converted diacs, they were.
My brethren, the day will be when we
look upon his face, and we shall be
like him, and we shall see him as
he is.
For that day we live.
Are you living for that day?
Come on now.
Are you living for that day?
Are you trying to make sales, get ahead?
Or are you trying to be, forget the
world, and live for the world to come?
Remember, this life is only a schoolroom, a
preparation for the life to come.
So teach us to number our days, that
we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, and
as the choir sang tonight, then shall the
dust return to the earth as it was,
and the spirit shall return unto God who
gave it.
And that day has no tremor, no fear,
the Christ.
He gives his individual body back to the
earth that so sweetly gave it to him.
It's hers, and he lets her take it.
And he gives his spirit back to the
God out of whose heart it came.
It's his, and he lets him take it.
And he perpetuates himself.
God perpetuates him beyond all time, and all
history, and all history to be.
Are you a Christian tonight?
If you're not a Christian, God forgive you,
and help you in pity.
I don't care if you're as rich as
Rockefeller, you're to be pitied.
I don't care if you're famous and well
-educated, you're a pitiful creature.
If you're not a believer in Jesus Christ,
you're a pitiful creature.
I don't care if you're as beautiful as
a Madonna, you're a pitiful creature.
If you don't know Jesus Christ as your
living, loving, present Savior.
Let's pray.
O Lord, Lord, thou hast brought life and
immortality to life through the gospel.
Thou hast set a candle in every Christian
grave.
Thou hast sanctified every floating Christian body in
the vast sea.
Thou hast sanctified every dry fleck of dust
that was once a tabernacle of the Holy
Ghost.
Great God, thou hast taken the darkness out
of the future, and thou hast set a
thousand suns there.
We thank thee.
Thou hast made the bitterest pain tolerable.
Thou hast taught us to solemn over our
days, as those whose days are given as
a school for the world to come.
We pray for any who may be lost
in this room.
We pray that they may turn their hearts
back to thee, back to the scriptures, back
to the cross, back to the blood, back
to the Savior.
O God for our young people.
O God, thou knowest this terrible day.
We're inventing vaccines to keep them from dying
of polio, and we're keeping them alive to
teach them to be fools and to live
like fools and die like fools.
My God, how confused everything is.
We're licking one disease after another.
We've pushed life expectancy up from 34 years
to 60-some years, and all those years
that we've gained on earth were wasted.
My God, forgive us.
We're stupid.
We're as beasts before thee, O Lord.
My God, we pray nobody might go out
of this building tonight that hasn't found thee
as his God, and Jesus thy Son as
his Savior, that doesn't know that immortality has
come to him in essence, an eternal life
in fact, and that now he can spread
his wings and soar out and rise and
become enamored of those things where Christ set
us at the right hand of God.
O my Father, don't let anybody here tonight
be lost, we pray.
Save our young people from the assiminities and
nonsense and foolishness and chatter and all the
devil-inspired traps and tricks that would ruin
them.
Save them from their own lust, save them
from their own high spirits and hot blood,
save them from their poor ignorance.
Great God, save our young people.
Save them all.
Add to their numbers.
Make them such magnets that they'll draw other
young people in off the street.
They won't wait for them to grow up
from the kindergarten, but they'll come in off
the street to see what makes these young
people happy-faced.
My Father, do something for us.
Spread the gospel message.
Bless every man who at this hour in
this city may be ending his sermon and
inviting people to the front.
Bless, we pray, every gospel preacher.
May Satan suffer a major defeat tonight, in
the kingdom of God a major victory, receive
a major victory.
Help us now as we wait upon the
Lord.