...the school to the sheep and the sand
and the silence and the stars.
And yet he wasn't ready.
After all that, he could have been a
poet and an artist and all that added,
and a philosopher, and still he wasn't ready.
God had to do something for him, which
he did in this experience here.
He had to give him what I've called
a sense of sacredness.
He had to, uh, and beat him down
and defeat him with, uh, an encounter, a
crisis of encounter.
This had to come to the man.
He had the theory, he had the doctrine,
he was smooth and he'd had lots of
time to dream and to think, but he
still wasn't ready.
God could make him ready only by bringing
him to himself in the crisis of encounter.
He had to meet God.
And so, here, God revealed himself to the
man at the bush alone, under the frowning
brow of Sinai.
He experienced God.
God revealed himself as fire.
Now, I want to mention that a little,
talk a little about it.
You know, they say that God is inscrutable
and ineffable.
He's a lot of other things, but he
is those two things.
You can't get at him with your mind.
I'd like to say this to you, but
I can't because I haven't the time.
But, uh, this, uh, neo, uh, uh, rationalism
that's passing for, uh, for Christian theology and
evangelicalism irks me, because we are trying to
figure God out with our heads, and you
can't do it, my brethren.
You can only experience God.
God rises infinitely above the possibility of ever
any man's grasping him intellectually.
And so, God, knowing that he's ineffable, cannot
be spoken forth, inscrutable, cannot be reached, dwells
in light that no man can approach unto,
God sets himself forth by figures and similitudes.
And it seems to me his favorite one
is fire.
You remember that God came to Israel as
fire, the fire by night and the bush
and by the cloud by day.
And later on, when the temple was built
or the tabernacle, he dwelt between the wings
of the cherubim as a fire.
They call it the Shekinah, the presence of
God.
And then at Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost
came upon those 120, he perpetuated that idea
of God as fire and carried it over.
And each one of those disciples went out
with a flame of fire on his forehead,
the same fire, the presence of Almighty God.
Not some wild, irrational impulse as some people
believe, but the very presence of God is
the fire in the scripture.
And now God wanted to show Moses who
he was and bring him into an encounter
with himself in experience.
Now, if there are anybody here that incline
to be shy away from the word experience,
I'm not one of them.
I believe in experience.
You know, experience has been defined as a
personal, conscious awareness of something by somebody, and
that's how we know.
That's how we know, a personal, conscious awareness
of something by somebody.
The somebody was Moses, and the somebody that
he was aware of was God, and it
was personal and conscious.
He wasn't unconscious.
He didn't seep through into his subconscious.
He was awake and aware of what was
going on, and he had an encounter with
God that changed him so he never was
the same man.
Moses experienced God, and from here on it
was no longer theory, no longer knowledge by
description that now became knowledge by experience or
by acquaintance.
The Scottish philosopher Carlyle once was walking with
the new minister in the garden beside the
Kirk, and he linked his arm in the
minister's arm and said, Reverend, what this parish
needs is somebody who knows God otherwise than
by hearsay.
I'm convinced that a great many of us,
even evangelicals, know God only by hearsay.
He is what we want him to be
or hope that he is, rather than what
we know him to be by spiritual encounter.
I think a tragic breakdown in evangelical circles
is this one, that we have used doctrine
as a substitute for spiritual experience.
Spiritual experience should be the outgrowth of doctrine.
But we make doctrine terminal, and if we
can recite the creed and know the notes
of the Scofield Bible, we're all set.
We have it, but a lot of people
stop right there and never go on to
experience God.
Bible doctrine is a highway to lead us
to God, but there are many evangelicals asleep
beside the highway, and because they are on
the highway or near the highway, they call
themselves evangelicals.
To me an evangelical is somebody who not
only believes the credo of the Christian, but
who experiences the God of the Christian.
I believe that there ought to be some
prophets rise in the day in which we
live and declare that God can be experienced,
that we can know God, that we don't
have to make God a logical deduction from
premises, but that we can experience God as
we can experience our children.
My son came to meet me with four
grandchildren at the airport last evening, and I
knew they were my grandchildren.
I could prove they were by deduction, but
when they grabbed me, I knew they were
my grandchildren by experience.
I believe that God can be known deep
in the heart by spiritual experience.
God wanted to say some things to Moses,
and he did.
He defeated Moses here and took all the
self-confidence out of the man and beat
him down and then raised him up.
It's always God's way.
Some of the things that I think he
taught Moses there, and I think he wants
to teach you and me, if we are
going to be used at all of God,
I will give you now.
One is that the fire dwelt in the
bush, and the bush was at the mercy
of the fire.
That is, it accepted the rule of the
fire.
When you hold a creed, that's all very
well, but you'll never amount to anything until
the creed holds you.
As long as you hold the doctrine of
God, that's all very well.
It's better than being an atheist.
But until God holds you and uses you
as an extension of his own hands, you're
not yet where you ought to be.
This is indicated here or taught us in
the beautiful figure, if not in the type,
that the fire dwelt in the bush.
Now, I'm a great believer in the indwelling
Christ, Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Not Christ with you only, though that's true,
but Christ in you, which is the hope
of glory.
The problem of personality, interpenetrating personality, isn't a
heavy one for me.
I get blessed on lots of things that
other people don't understand, and I admit I
don't either, but they look good to me,
and God blesses me, as the brother said,
without much provocation.
So I get help, I get a lot
of help, and there are a lot of
problems that I don't have.
An Anglican pastor came to me once and
said, I'd like to ask you two questions.
One, how do you explain the problem of
the eternal God entering time?
And the second one is, what's meant by
the light that lighted every man that came
into the world?
And I said, Doctor, as for that first
problem, I don't have the answer to the
question, I don't even have the question.
It isn't even a problem to me how
the eternal God can enter time's low tabernacle
and become flesh to dwell among us.
So I waved him off on that.
He said, all right, about the second one,
and then I did have an opinion on
that.
But the problem of how personality interpenetrates personality
was settled for me a long time ago.
That is, my head got hold of it
by the iron in the fire.
You put the iron in the fire and
blow the old-fashioned bellows, and pretty soon
you have the fire and the iron.
You do not have the loss of either
personality.
The iron is still the iron and the
fire is still the fire, but you have
them fused in experience.
And if the fire goes out of the
iron, you still have the two.
So God enters the human breast and fuses
his divine, uncreated personality with the created personality
that is his child, and they do not
become metaphysically or ontologically one, but they become
experientially one.
The fire, the glowing incandescence of the presence
of God in the breast of a man,
he becomes a little like God, and there
is much of God in him and about
him.
And yet he is not God, and God
is not the man.
Forever and forever God remains God, and the
man remains the man, and yet their personalities
are united.
God was trying to say that to Moses,
and he is saying that to us.
This is what we need for Christian workers,
any kind of Christian workers.
Then I noticed that the bush was purified
by the fire.
I suppose that if we were to pass
around the questionnaire and ask your definition of
sanctification, there are 700 of me, and we
would have 700 definitions.
For that reason, I cannot possibly allow myself
to get involved in doctrinal disputes over the
word.
But I believe that God wants his people
to be holy.
I do believe that.
But I do not believe holiness is ever
separated from God.
God is holy, and only God is holy.
And where God is, there is holiness, and
where God is not, there is just us.
And there is no use to try to
make it any otherwise.
The bush was purified by the fire.
Do you ever stop to think that all
the fungi and every bug and all the
larvae and worms and all perished out of
that bush?
There wasn't a single thing there but bush
and fire.
And I believe that the presence of God
burning in the human breast purifies that breast,
and as long as it burns there unhindered,
those evils that used to follow us around
and be part of our personality will be
burned away and there will be nothing but
white ash to show where they used to
be.
I don't know much about medicine, you know.
I'm a preacher, and of course I read
the Reader's Digest.
It's an awful lot of medical education.
You can get a tremendous amount of medical
education from Reader's Digest.
But I read that there are heat-proof
microbes that you can boil them for 2
hours and they still come up smiling, they
don't die.
But nothing can stand raw fire.
Nothing, nothing can stand raw fire.
All life dies before the flame.
And so there are evils in the breast
that can stand the presence of all kinds
of revival meetings and religious meetings and prayer
meetings.
There are sins that can get on a
board, that can take the Lord's supper, that
can get baptized, but there are no sins
that can stand up under the presence of
the indwelling God.
The third thing is that the bush was
transfigured by the flame.
That bush was only a scrub thorn, an
acacia bush, and there were millions of them
growing around there, and Moses had seen them
by the hundreds.
But this bush suddenly became the most famous
bush in all history and still remains the
most famous bush in all history.
Its glory was a derived glory.
God did not make the bush great, he
simply got in the bush and was great
in the bush.
And so the attention of everybody was called
to the bush.
The Sunday school teacher was teaching about the
bush, and she said, you know, Moses was
a great scientist, he was a very observing
man.
And when he saw the fire burning in
the bush, his scientific spirit came out, and
he said, now I'll go and turn aside
and examine this.
Imagine that, those poor kids had to listen
to that kind of stuff.
The simple fact is, anybody with an I
.Q. above 6 and 7 8 would have
turned aside to see a fire in a
bush at sundown, miles from human habitation.
That's all Moses did, he turned aside to
see that bush, that transfigured bush.
And it took on meaning, it got significance
there.
It itself was related by nature to all
the other Acacia bushes, and yet nobody ever
talked about them, except me, and they all
talk about that one bush.
Why?
Because it had the fire in it.
You know, one of the saddest things I
know is the anonymity of the average man.
Emerson said the average man and woman is
only one more couple, and you go out
on the highways or down to the street
corners or into the far jungle areas, wherever
you will, east or west, north or south,
and you find thousands of people crawling like
animated clothespins over the face of the earth.
And then they're born, they live, they suffer,
they have a bit of joy, then they
die and the place knows them no more.
They're faceless, without significance and without meaning.
But when Jesus Christ lays hold of a
man, the first thing he does is to
give him significance.
He amounts to something, he gets a face.
God gives the man a face and dwells
in the man and he becomes transfigured in
the fire.
And the faceless man, touched by the mighty
Christ, now takes on significance and meaning.
And the humblest new convert in the Baleen
Valley among the Danis or Manis in New
Guinea is more in the kingdom of God
than the Churchills and all the rest of
the great of the world, because they've taken
on a meaning that they never had before
and that nobody can have, except by the
fire.
Well, I was going to say, I'm watching
that clock, that the fire protected this bush.
I think I'll mention it just briefly.
No evil could bother that bush as long
as that fire was in it.
You ever think of the hungry goat browsing
at twilight?
He didn't go near that bush.
He went over and browsed on another one,
but he didn't go near that one.
And he buzzered lighting to look around.
Never lighted on that one.
There wasn't a bug that could crawl up
it, nor a caterpillar that could lay an
egg on it.
It was perfectly safe as long as the
fire dwelled in it.
Now, I believe in separation, but I don't
believe in insulation.
And I don't believe that it's the will
of God that his evangelical believers, his children,
should insulate themselves from others.
If you won't speak to a man, how
can you speak to a man about the
Lord?
If we'd withdraw our holy skirts about us
and wrap ourselves in cellophane and mark heaven
on us and expect to get there finally
when we pass customs, I wonder how we're
going to help anybody all insulated like that.
No, no.
We are to be separated, but certainly we're
not thus to be wrapped in cellophane.
Monasticism was a historical error.
They said, I've got my fire, and now
I'm going to have to cup it and
keep it.
So they cupped it and cupped their hand
around it so the wind wouldn't blow it
out, and they went to the monasteries.
It was a great mistake.
I honor them for their intention, but it
doesn't speak too much for their knowledge of
the scriptures.
Simeon Stylites was an example, and probably the
most horrible example, of an effort to keep
good by getting away from folks.
He got up on a pillar 30 feet
high and stayed 30 years.
There he was, and he never came down
even to take a bath, never came down
for anything.
They fed him up there.
I'd let him, I'd have starved him down
if I'd had it to do myself.
But they got it up to him, and
he pulled it up by a rope.
He thought he was being holy.
The Son of God who walked among men,
among publicans and sinners, and talked at the
well to a fallen woman, he was holy
and pure because the purity was inside of
him.
And so a Salvation Army lassie passing around
war-tribes in a saloon is just as
pure and just as safe from contamination as
if she were somewhere in a convent.
We do, in fact, pure.
We do not become safe by hiding.
We become safe by the indwelling fire.
I'm perfectly convinced that when God dwells in
a human breast, nothing can harm that breast,
nothing can harm that individual until God wants
him in heaven.
I'm not much of a flyer, you know.
I was born 30 years too early.
But I have to fly.
I flew down yesterday.
I flew out of what they call in
Toronto a gray drizzle.
It was goop to me.
We flew out of that.
As I walked up the plane, I said,
Now, Lord, I'm in your hands.
It's either Chicago or glory, one or the
other.
And I have every reason to believe that
a man or a woman is perfectly safe
while the fire of God's presence dwells in
him.
And then lastly, by the way, I'm going
to get too early.
It's unheard of in ministerial circles, but I'm
going to do it.
Maybe this is the most important for us
in our work, as believers, that Bush became
beautiful in the fire.
Moses, many years later, probably 80, probably 40,
35 years later, wrote, Let the beauty of
the Lord our God be upon us.
And I wonder if Moses was not thinking
of the beauty of God in that bush,
that solemn, wonderful hour when he saw God
and met God in the fire.
Let the beauty of the Lord our God
be upon us.
You know, the old Greek philosophers, for all
the fact they had no revelation, sometimes in
their blindness they did blunder close to truth.
And they believed that beauty was a part,
somehow it was near God.
They believed that virtue, that somewhere there was
a central virtue, that because we're intellectual, somewhere
there was a central intellect, and they believed
there was a central beauty somewhere.
Well, Moses knew there was, and he said,
Let the beauty of the Lord our God
be upon us.
And here was an acacia bush that nobody
would have brought home and planted in his
yard.
It had no beauty, but now this one
was beautiful because it was aglow.
It was a bush burning, and so it
was beautiful.
The old hymn says, Stay, O beauty uncreated,
ever ancient, ever new.
The beauty of God was there, and when
Jesus came down to become man, his garments
smelled of myrrh and aloes and acacia out
of the ivory palaces.
We just passed through another hectic Christmas period,
but if you got past the lights and
Santa Claus and the rest of it, you
could see the beauty of Jesus and smell
the fragrance, the aloes and myrrh and acacia
from his holy garments.
He has, though he was slain on a
hill outside of Jerusalem, the fragrance of his
life have made the world smell a bit
better, this dirty world in which we are,
because he was here.
Well, there is an attractiveness about true Christianity,
and I don't mind telling you I'm not
as happy a man as I ought to
be.
I don't want to be irresponsibly happy.
I pray God will never allow me to
become an irresponsible, happy, jingle-bell Christian.
I don't think we ought to be.
I think we ought to take the weight
and woe of the world and of the
Church on our shoulders.
We have to be miserable, sanctify your misery,
and dedicate it to God and suffer through
it.
One of the things I am miserable about
part of the time is the unattractiveness of
Christianity in our day.
The tragedy of unlovely orthodoxy, of unbeautiful Christianity,
is without doubt one of the major tragedies
of the day.
Now, I heard the talk last night given
by Brother Bloxner, and he tipped us off
and he would say things that we didn't
believe, and I tried my best to find
something that I couldn't, that I didn't agree
with him on.
But he was talking, he gave us a
brilliant summation of conditions all over the world.
One reason I believe they exist is this,
this mess we're in all over and missions
everywhere, is that we have taken a decadent,
degenerate brand of Christianity and we've transplanted it
on foreign soil, and we believe that we're
doing God's service.
It doesn't make a man holy to cross
the water, whether he goes over on the
Queen Mary or whether he flies by a
Boei Sea Jet.
He's just the same man when he gets
over there as he was when he was
here.
You can put a donkey on an airplane
and fly him to Germany and his ears
will still wiggle, and you can put a
holy man on a plane and when he
gets over there he's neither less nor more
holy than he was before.
We in our society, the Christian Missionary Alliance,
we do everything but bow down to missionaries.
They're sort of a Virgin Mary to us.
We get on their knees to them.
But I've been around on a mission board
now for, oh, I forgot how many years,
too many.
But I've been on a mission board and
I know missionaries pretty well, and they're people,
they're just the same as we are.
And they will transplant and take with them
over and under the same brand of Christianity
they've known here.
If they were brought up on cheap religious
fiction, they'll soon be writing cheap religious fiction
for the literate Natives, or Nationals, excuse me.
And if they sung bouncy choruses over here,
they'll be writing bouncy choruses over there.
And instead of having pure Christianity, God dwelling
in a human breast, we'll have the unloved,
lovely monstrosity of a Western Christianity transplanted on
Eastern soil.
I don't believe in it and I wouldn't
give a dime to support that.
I believe the great tragedy of the hour
is unattractive, unbeautiful, unlovely Christianity.
And the saddest part of it all is
that most people don't know how unbeautiful it
is.
They see the ugly thing that passes for
evangelical Christianity today and think that's all there
is, when actually what we want and ought
to have is the beauty of the Lord
our God in human breasts.
A winsome, magnetic Saint is worth 500 promoters
and gadgeteers and religious engineers.
Used to be, give a man a Bible
and a songbook and turn him loose and
you had an evangelistic campaign on your hands.
Send a missionary over there with a Gillette
razor blade to perform surgery and a pair
of pliers to pull out teeth and you
had a missionary.
And nowadays you've got to take a course
in electronics to get through.
It's a big, ugly, top-heavy thing and
sometimes I wonder if it won't be the
will of God to break the whole thing
down and start over.
But how will we start?
We'll start with Saints, my brothers and sisters.
I believe in Saints.
I've met the comics and I've met the
promoters and I've met the founders, who puts
his name on the front of the building
so people know he founded it.
I have met converted cowboys, not too well
converted, and converted Pugilists that all got converted
but their fists.
I have met all kinds of weird Christians
throughout the United States and Canada.
But my heart is looking for Saints.
I want to meet the people who are
like the Lord Jesus Christ.
A good many years ago over in the
state of Ohio, I heard an old gentleman,
losing his sight, lecture.
Now the odd thing about it is I
don't know what he said.
I don't remember what he said.
But all I remember is what he looked
like.
He looked like my conception of Jesus if
Jesus had lived to be old.
What a beautiful face.
I sat entranced by that beautiful face.
But I don't remember too much of his
sermons.
That was Dr. Jonathan Goforth, the great Presbyterian
missionary.
Later on I was preaching in Toronto and
the newspapers came out and said, Dr. Jonathan
Goforth has died.
He will lie in state in such and
such a church until the people pass by,
by the hundreds and I imagine thousands upon
thousands, to look at the face of the
man who had looked like Jesus.
He'd never written a great book.
I don't think he ever did.
I've never seen it.
He'd never painted a great picture.
He'd never founded anything particularly.
But he had lived what he believed.
And the fire glowed in the bush until
Dr. Goforth's face told more than his tongue
could tell.
And so they went past and looked down
on that dead face.
Not even death could take away the beauty
of the Lord God that had been so
long burning in that personality.
That is what we need, my brothers and
sisters, that is what we need.
And so to you, particularly to the young
people going out into religious service, I would
say this, you are called to be a
burning bush.
You are called to be a bush that
has fire in it.
This is the world's sundown, and there are
men as Moses alone looking for somebody that
looks like God, somebody that has fire in
it.
A lonely man somewhere is looking your direction.
And it's my conviction that unlovely Christianity has
done more to turn more people away from
Christ than all the liberalism in the world,
though I'm not a liberal.
I'm an evangelical.
If you strain it a little and stretch
it and put a few footnotes around it,
I'm even a fundamentalist.
But I'd leave them an evangelical and an
essentialist, a believer in historic Christianity, the faith
of our fathers which is living still.
And yet I believe that until evangelical Christianity
gets through and meets God in the fire
and gets God burning and glowing within it,
we're going to have all these troubles and
we're not going to solve them by conferences.
I'm sorry that I can't believe that we're
going to solve them.
You're going to do a lot here, and
I'm for you.
But you're not going to solve this one
basic problem unless you solve it on your
knees.
For it's not techniques to follow, methods to
be followed, it's the man and his God,
God and the man, the man in God
and God in the man, the fire of
the Holy Ghost burning in the breast of
the man.
Brothers and sisters, if the fire burns hot
enough it'll burn through an awful lot of
problems that you won't be able to solve
in a thousand panel discussions.
So now that's all for this morning, and
may God help us as we go out
from here to serving in his world that
we may remember that the most important thing
is that we should have met God himself
in living, vivid spiritual encounter.
Father, we pray that thou will be pleased
to bless these words.
Thou knowest how stupid we are, how our
words fly about like birds around the chimney.
O blessed Lord Jesus, take the words, at
least the text, and carry it home to
our hearts.
Put in us, we pray thee, a great
longing after thee, a great overwhelming desire to
know thee in living encounter by the Holy
Ghost through the blood until all our self
-confidence is gone and we rest in thee
our God.
We ask these things in the name of
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
In the eighth chapter of John's gospel, gospel
according to John the eighth chapter, beginning with
verse 31, John 8 31 and following, then
said Jesus to those Jews which believed on
him, if he continue in my words then
are ye my disciples indeed and ye shall
know the truth and the truth shall make
you free.
And they answered him, we be Abraham's seed
and were never in bondage to any man.
How says 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 forever but the son abideth.