This will be the last in the series
which I've been giving on the lives of
great Christians or great believers.
Now I'd like to have you offer, let
me offer a word.
Dear Lord Jesus, we're gathered to thee.
We're not gathered to man, no matter how
good man may be.
We're gathered to thee.
We minister unto thee.
We trust in thee, O Christ, risen from
the dead, alive at the Father's right hand
forevermore.
Death hath no more dominion over thee.
God hath put all power in thy hands
and has made thee head over all things.
Exercise thy great power tonight.
Take the words which thou didst thyself inspire,
for thou art the word, and thou didst
inspire the word.
And make the word to live tonight, the
ancient word that has outlasted empires and kingdoms
and nations and peoples, and is still shining
in its glory tonight.
We pray that thou would make us worthy
to hear thee speak, and help me to
speak as from thee.
Amen.
I'm to speak tonight on the prophet Ezekiel,
the first three verses of his book.
Now it came to pass in the thirtieth
year, in the fourth month, in the fifth
day of the month, as I was among
the captives by the river of Kebar, that
the heavens were opened and I saw visions
of God.
In the fifth day of the month, which
was the fifth year of King Jehoiakim's captivity,
the word of the Lord came expressly unto
Ezekiel the priest, son of Juzi, in the
land of the Chaldeans by the river of
Kebar.
And the hand of the Lord was there
upon him.
He speaks in the first person in verse
one, and in the second or third person
in verses two and three.
And he says, the heavens were opened, that's
one.
I saw visions of God, that's two.
The word of the Lord came expressly unto
me, that's three.
And the hand of the Lord was there
upon me, and that's four.
Now, I want you to notice about this
man Ezekiel something that is true here, and
it's also true throughout the entire Bible.
And that is the explicit clarity of the
encounter that the man had with God.
He didn't forget either the year, nor the
month, nor the day.
And I think if you'd oppressed him, he
could have told you what time of the
day.
For it was the thirtieth year, the fourth
month, and the fifth day.
And so this encounter with God was clear
to the point of being sharply photographically clear.
And there are three things that are always
the same with men who meet God.
Now, testimonies are a wonderful thing, and I
like them, but I'm cautious about testifying very
much about my own personal experiences for the
reason that I do not want people to
copy or try to copy anything that God
has done for or given to me.
For the reason that there are details in
Christian experience that vary with the personalities.
Some people, when they are deeply moved upon,
break into laughter.
Others, when they're deeply moved, break into tears.
We had an elder, he's still there in
our church in Chicago where I was so
long, and he would stand up to testify
and promptly begin to cry, and that's about
all there was to it.
He just cried.
He wasn't a weakling at all.
He was a good, strong man and worked.
He had to be strong to work where
he did in the stockyards.
But he was nevertheless that kind of man,
and he just wept.
And everybody got help.
It wasn't what he said, but it was
the fact that he couldn't say it that
helped people.
And other people, I've heard some people break
out in happy laughter, and others are quiet.
So let us not try to make cookie
-cutter Christians.
I don't believe in that.
I think that it is always a tragic
thing when we try to be exactly like
each other.
But there are certain major elements in Christian
experience that are always the same.
I ask you to notice the three here,
and they go back to all of those
men about whom I've spoken, being six or
eight of them.
The first thing is that they all have
a sense of God.
There's always a sense of God in the
man who meets God.
That would be logical to think it, and
it is true.
And a sense of what I've called the
holy, that overshadowing, overarching mystery which fills the
universe, and which is here but which not
many people in these busy days stop to
think about.
But these great souls always had a sense
of God.
This was what they wanted to talk about.
I'm always suspicious when we talk too much
about ourselves.
Somebody pointed out that hymnody took a downward
trend when we left the great objective hymns
that talked about God and began to sing
the gospel songs that talk about us.
There was a day when men sang, holy,
holy, holy, and oh, worship the King, and
they talked objectively about the greatness of God.
Then we backslid into that gutter where we
still are, where everything is about I.
I'm so happy, I'm so blessed, I'm so
nice, I'm so good, I'm I, I always
I.
Well, the difference between heaven and hell is
the difference between God and I.
Keep that in mind always.
Jesus Christ, by canceling out his I, was
the Christ of God, not as I will,
but as thou wilt.
The devil, by magnifying his I, became the
devil.
When he said, I will arise, I will
raise my throne above the throne of God,
I will, he became the devil.
When Jesus said, not I will, but thy
will, he became the Christ of God, or
at least worthy to be under God, the
one who finally redeemed the world.
So keep that in mind, that when real
Christian experience gives us a great sense of
God being there, and we live and move
and have our being in God consciously so.
The second thing is that the details of
the experience are always sharp and clear to
the individual.
They might differ between you and me, or
you and somebody else, or me and somebody
else, but they're always clear to the person
who experiences it.
I am always worried a little when I
talk to people that can't give me any
details, they can't tell me anything clear.
They hope and they think and they believe
and it's possible and all that, but there's
nothing clear.
But where a man meets God through the
gospel, there is a sharpness of clarity of
detail.
And the third thing is that though brief,
its effects are life lasting.
They're as long as a man lives, like
the flash of a photograph, a flash of
light on a photographic plate or film.
It doesn't take very long, only a split
part of a second for the light to
do its work.
But if you fix that film properly, or
that plate, it will last for perhaps centuries,
or at least for hundreds, for tens of
decades, or scores of years, because what the
light did in that sudden, instantaneous, brief flash
lasts for a long time.
And so when an apostle meets God on
Damascus Road, he never meets him like that
again, but it so changed a man's life
that it printed the face of Christ on
the plate that was inside the heart of
the man, Paul.
And forever and ever after, he had the
picture of Jesus inside of his heart.
But it didn't take long, it was never
repeated.
And I say that these are the three
things then that characterize anybody, anywhere, that meets
God.
All of them have had a strong sense
of God and the Holy, and all of
them have had detailed experience, it was very
clear to them, and all of them have
had a brief experience that lasted for a
lifetime.
Now, that was true of Jonathan Edwards' encounter
in the woods, you'll remember, and I might
mention many others, but I shan't tonight.
But in our time, the textualism, I want
you to get that word, I think I
invented it, I don't know, or borrowed it
from somewhere and forgot.
The textualism, do you know what it is?
Textualism is the magnification of the text and
the forgetting of the God who wrote the
text.
It is putting the Bible before God.
It's holding the Bible up so you can't
see the light.
You only see the book, but you don't
see the God of the book.
And we got so much of that textualism,
I find it almost everywhere I go, it's
deplorable.
The nature of the Bible is misunderstood.
This morning I preached about the Bible, you
know my love for the Bible and my
utter and complete confidence in the Bible.
But the Bible was given for a reason,
and when we use it for something that
it wasn't given for, it becomes blindness to
us.
And this misunderstanding of the nature of the
Bible, instead of leading us to God, then
the Bible simply becomes a substitute for God,
and that isn't good.
And there's no explicit clarity of encounter.
The Bible should lead us to meet God
through the gospel, through Jesus Christ, in a
clear, sharp encounter that burns itself on our
hearts forever and ever and ever.
Now he says here, I was among the
captives by the river of Kebar.
As for Ezekiel, all hope was gone.
You see, this was the captivity.
They had just been taken captive and carried
down into Babylon, and this man Ezekiel was
one of the displaced persons.
That's the word we'd use now.
They'd literally been uprooted as a nation and
had been taken into Babylon, and they're dumped
down where they stayed for 70 years.
And here was a man, a young priest,
and he should have been back in Jerusalem
ministering in the temple there, and his people
should have been back there, for that was
the land where they belonged.
But they were taken out as though the
population of Canada were suddenly to be uprooted
and put in ships and sent down in
the middle of Siberia.
Well, that's exactly how they felt about it.
The whole population of Israel was picked up
and plumped down in Babylon, the foreign people.
And they mourned and they said, why would
you demand of us a song in a
strange land?
They hung their harp on the willow and
they could not sing the songs of Zion
in a foreign land.
They were a depressed people.
Old men and old ladies and young mothers
carrying their babes in their arms, and little
half-grown children trudging along, and strong men
in bonds, all carried down into Babylon and
put to work down there.
And Ezekiel was one of them.
And somehow he got over by the river
Tebar and was sitting there by the river.
I don't suppose that you could have found
anywhere in human history a more dejected man
than this priestish young Ezekiel was.
Human hope was about all gone.
There he sat in complete despondency, an expatriate,
someone uprooted from his own land, his job,
his work, his calling gone out from under
him.
No temple, no altar, no sacrifice, no taunting
of the hymns, no slinging of the censer,
but only surrounded by his enemies and men
whose language he did not understand.
And the book of Ezekiel came out of
such an experience as this, such an experience
of being stripped down and uprooted and everything
he loved taken away from him.
And thus the book of Ezekiel was quite
literally squeezed out of the blood of the
man.
He did not write it in an upstairs
room overlooking a beautiful scene.
Somewhere he wrote it in the depths of
despondency and gloom.
Now this is the way of God with
men.
Always this is the way of God with
men.
This, this cheap religion that passes for Christianity
in our day, that makes Christianity to consist
of a bit of poetry and a note,
a bit of a few flowers and a
kindly smile and a deed done for your
brother.
That's the Christianity of the day.
And I don't know, I'd like to turn
loose sometime on it, re-let myself go,
but I'd probably have to repent for some
of the things I said, because while they'd
be true, I shouldn't have been saying them.
Because there are some things you ought not
even to say about the devil, you know.
Not even Michael the archangel dared say anything
nasty about the devil.
He had to say, let God handle you,
the Lord rebuke you, and he dismissed him.
So this Christianity that we have in nowadays,
that passes for the Christianity of the Bible,
the faith of our fathers is living still
in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.
I don't know anything, I don't know how
it's possible to use language strong enough for
its condemnation, because it isn't of the truth.
Here's the truth.
Here's the way God meets men.
Here was a man sitting in utter dejection
by the King Bar, all his hope was
gone, the light had gone out in his
heart, and there wasn't anything left.
But now we don't want that.
We don't want the plow, we want the
harvest.
We don't want the night, we want the
morning.
We don't want the cross, we want the
crown.
The Lord says, Thomas Acampus hath many lovers
of his crown, but few lovers of his
cross.
We don't want the betaine, but we want
the baby.
We don't want to have to do the
work of plowing, but we want to reap
the harvest.
And we are getting every kind of cross
cut in order to get something for nothing
in the kingdom of God.
You can't do it, brother.
Now don't anybody flare up and say, isn't
grace something for nothing?
Oh yes, but some have used grace and
have made a god out of their belly
and turned the grace of God into lasciviousness.
They don't know what the word grace means.
Grace doesn't mean that salvation is not a
costly thing.
It simply means that God, out of God's
full goodness, he gives it to us, though
we are unworthy of it.
But he said, take your cross and follow
me, and it always costs to carry a
cross.
There is a difference between cheap grace and
tough, hard, costly grace.
A great man of God by the name
of Bonhoeffer wrote a book called The Cost
of Discipleship.
It's getting quite popular now, and I'm glad,
because he was hanged by Hitler.
He wouldn't let Hitler push him around, and
he preached the gospel and went back to
Germany to take care of his flock, even
knowing that he would die.
And the time came, he was still in
his thirties, and they took him out, put
a rope around his neck and hanged the
man of God.
But before he went, he wrote some books,
and one of them was this one, and
in it he makes a distinction between cheap
and costly grace.
And he says it's costly grace because it
costs us everything, but it's free grace because
it's given freely by God to a people
that don't deserve it.
There's a distinction.
Our fathers knew the distinction, but their poor,
degenerate sons don't seem to know it.
And as soon as you talk about the
grace of salvation being a costly way to
live, Christian life being a costly way to
live, and salvation being costly, people say, oh,
you're preaching legalism, you're a legalist, and they
dismiss you with a wave of their hand.
But I'm hard to dismiss, I'm telling you
that.
I've been at it now too long, and
the fellow can dismiss me, but I don't
stay dismissed.
I'll be back the next week saying something
on the same order.
Now, incidentally, I've never been thrown out of
very many places.
I've not been invited back some places.
But that's the greatest compliment you can pay
a man, it's certain people not to invite
him back.
Well, now, I notice here that this man
of God, he was despondent and down, and
it was then, it was then, in that
place of dejection and being stripped down and
everything taken from him, and he had nowhere
to look and nowhere to lean.
Oh, we're a tricky crowd, we humans.
We're a tricky crowd, and if we can
find anything human to lean on it, we'll
lean on it.
And if we can find anything earthly to
lean on, we'll lean on it.
And if we can find anybody to help
us short of God, we'll hunt everywhere, and
God is usually the last one that's asked.
Once in a while when I get an
invitation, I'm suspicious that I was the last
one asked.
I remember one time a fellow called me
long distance, and he said, he said, we'd
like to have you come up to such
and such a conference, and he named the
date.
It wasn't too far in the future at
the time, and I said, I don't think
I can come.
No, I can't come, I'm sorry.
Well, he said, could you recommend anybody?
And he said, yes.
I said, yes, I'd recommend Vance Hefner.
He said, we've asked him.
And he said, could you recommend anybody else?
And I said, yes, Dr. Alan Redpath.
He said, we've asked him.
So I knew that I was at least
number three.
I didn't know, but I might have been
number six or eight or ten.
But I don't mind that, because you can
get away with that easily enough.
But there's one thing we can't get away
with easily, and that is putting God last
on the list.
God stands under the everlasting shadow of usually
being the last one consulted.
When we've tried everything else, then we turn
to God.
And sometimes without any sense of humor at
all showing through, people will get up and
testify, I've done everything, and all I can
do now is trust God.
It's not funny, and yet it sounds funny,
and they don't know how funny it sounds,
that God Almighty is the first one we
should go to, and he's the last one
we go to.
So we're a pretty tricky crowd, and that's
why God sometimes has to take everything away
from us to make us see that he
ought to be first.
We ought to go to him first, not
last.
Now, just when he was in the dumps
and doldrums here, I don't worry too much
when people come to me and be dejected,
and claim to be bothered a little when
they're too self-confident, but I'm never bothered
when they get too humble.
You can't get too humble, brother.
I remember hearing a man, he preached this
in a church, as I recall, where I
shouldn't have heard it, you know, that church
didn't have any such truth, but he got
in, he leaped into a crack somewhere and
was preaching, and he did pretty well, and
he said, he said, the church is to
be without fault and without wrinkle, and he
preached on how to take the wrinkles out
of your soul, and he said that there
were two ways of getting wrinkles out of
things.
He said the way to get a wrinkle
out of a sack is to fill it,
and so he preached a while on that.
He said the way to get a wrinkle
out of a rug is to lay it
down and walk on it.
He said God uses both methods.
He said sometimes he just fills it and
takes the wrinkles out, and sometimes he just
puts it down and has everybody walk on
it.
Now, if we could pick the people that
walk, it would be different.
All these cute little boys and girls around
here, I wouldn't mind lying down letting them
walk on me.
My daughter, he was up to visit his
last, our daughter, I forget if there's anybody
else when I talk about her, you know
my daughter.
She was up, I'd let her walk on
me.
In fact, I used to when she was
smaller.
It all depends on who does the walking,
and if I could choose the walkers, I
wouldn't feel so bad, but also the wrinkles
wouldn't go out.
The Lord sends people that you don't want
to walk on you, lets them walk on
you, people that aren't worthy to untie your
shoes, but they don't try to untie your
shoes, they walk on you.
David said, they've plowed long furrows up my
back.
That was an old countryside expression, but it
hurts to have furrows plowed up your back,
walking around on you with their hobnailed boots.
This poor man had it, this man is
equal.
And it was just then that the heavens
were opened, and I saw visions of God.
So if you're despondent about your spiritual life,
and you're inclined to be down a bit
about it, don't let the joy boy cheer
you up, don't do it.
Don't let these tin tuckers that come around
and tuck you under the chin and say,
all is well, all is well.
These tin tuckers with their New Testament, they've
done the kingdom of God more harm than
communism, by their trying to make people that
God had stripped, unstrip them again.
God strips them, waits for them to look
up and receive the light.
And some tin tucker, enjoyed bell boy, comes
around, wants to put a garment on them
again, leave them in their nakedness before the
great God almighty.
And when he clothes them, they'll be clothed
with golden garments.
But we try the easy way out, easy
way.
We write books on how easy it is
to be a Christian, and they're all lies.
And we preach sermons about how easy it
is to be a Christian.
Nobody was ever a Christian for one year,
was ready to get up and say, boy,
I found it a snap.
It's just a snap.
It's never a snap to carry across.
And it's never easy to follow the man
who was opposed and rejected of men.
But there's joy in it.
Paul said there was joy even in sorrow.
And Peter said there was joy unspeakable and
full of glory.
And there are tears, but there's sun that
shines on the tears, and as the orator
said, it makes the rainbow.
But there are tears nevertheless.
And a tearless Christianity is no Christianity at
all.
Now undoubtedly the world's greatest calamity is not
communism, not secularism.
The world's greatest calamity is the heaven's closed,
the closed heaven.
There are many causes for the closed heaven,
many causes.
But there's one ominous consequence, and that is
men are left to themselves.
God meant us to have him, and the
heavens are closed, and now we're alone, we're
without him.
The world is by itself, and yet men
without God nurse a groundless hope, a hope
that somehow things will come out all right.
But it won't.
The promotion cometh neither from the east nor
west nor from the north, but it's the
Lord that sets up one and pushes down
another.
And my help cometh from the Lord that
made heaven and earth.
Always remember that anything worth having you'll get
from God, my friend.
Always remember that.
Then he said the heavens are open, and
these open heavens are how we need it,
and now how we need the open heavens.
Take the veil away, take the clouds away.
And I saw visions of God.
Men have reasoned God out of his world.
What used to be God has now become
the laws of nature, hence the universe is
empty.
And there is an old friend, I think
I told you in a previous talk, about
how in India the missionary said they would
go to the trees and to the rocks,
and would catch them gently in reverency and
whisper, are you there, are you there?
Hoping that a God might be present in
the tree or in the rock.
No man taps anything much in our time.
We're too well satisfied with what we have,
satisfied with our superior standard of living, satisfied
with our advanced technological knowledge.
It enables us to put a spy in
the sky, satisfied with our ability to get
in a big machine and go 500 miles
an hour.
And I did it.
The other day out on the west coast,
back when I drove a horse and buggy,
if anybody told me that I'd ever ride
525 miles an hour, I'd have thought that
he needed to be caged up somewhere until
he cooled off.
But I did it.
We're satisfied with that kind of thing.
Making advances, always we're making advances.
We have antibiotics now and geriatric pills for
older people so they'll get older.
And then when they get older we don't
know what to do with them.
Throw them out of work when they're 60.
And then they go to Florida.
Sit around down there and die.
Or they go to some old folks home.
There's no place anymore in our cute, neat
little houses for old people.
They have to be turned out to pasture
somewhere.
And here are these poor old folks that
100 years ago they'd all been sleeping peacefully
under the oak tree.
But now they're running around with nobody to
love them, nobody to appreciate them, nothing to
do and nowhere to go.
And we call that advance.
If we were as smart as we think
we are, we'd not only make them live
longer but we'd make them happy until they've
died and give them something to do and
respect them and love them and ask them
questions occasionally.
But you don't ask anybody questions after he's
65 anymore.
He's supposed to be indulged.
And I haven't reached that so don't look
at me, it isn't sour grapes.
But it's a lonely world we're in, a
lonely world.
Somebody's written a book called The Lonely Crowd.
You know the loneliest place in the world?
Staten Madison in Chicago or Times Square in
New York.
Men to the right of you, men to
the left of you, men to the back
of you, men and women in front of
you.
And yet you can stand there a complete
loneliness.
It's not the presence of others that cures
loneliness, it's the presence of God.
I think it was, yes it was, Ferdinand,
he said after he'd become an older man,
he said, I can testify that never for
15 minutes since my conversion have I been
without a sense of the presence of God.
Never 15 minutes since I was converted, said
the great man, have I been without a
sense of the presence of God.
And when you have God with you, consciously
with you, now that he's in you is
another matter and we'll deal with that some
other time, but I'm thinking tonight about his
being with us.
And when you have God with you and
you're conscious of God being with you, you're
conscious of it out on the thruway when
you're driving.
You're conscious of it by a kind of
reflex when you're working.
You're conscious of it all the time, whatever
you may be doing.
Now these men who met God, Jacob and
Moses, that I talked about in Elijah and
Isaiah and now Ezekiel, the world was filled
with God.
It was for them a rising of a
sun.
Now I want to give you four facts,
four or five facts.
I want you to take them down if
you haven't before, I want you to take
them down.
This series on men who met God or
the whole Bible itself, I think we can
convince it into these five.
You meet God, that's religion.
You have an encounter with God.
You know God and God knows you.
And Paul said, I know God, or rather
I'm known of God.
He backed out a little on that one
when he said, I know God.
And then he backed out and said, I'm
known of God.
But they were both true.
God knows you and you know God.
There's an interchange of personality with personality.
And it's both true.
You know him, he knows you.
That's religion.
But you must meet God.
That's the imperative of religion.
You must meet God.
It isn't simply that you can, it isn't
simply that it's a good thing, but you
must.
There's an imperative there.
And you can meet God and that's the
Christian message.
You can meet God.
You do not have to travel the world
around looking for God and tap on a
tree or a rock, seeing if God is
there.
Don't climb up into heaven to pull God
down, to go into depth to bring him
up.
But the word is night, even in thy
mouth, even the word of faith which we
preach.
If you believe in Jesus Christ, you can
witness to the fact you shall be saved.
So you can meet God.
And how to meet God, that's the gospel.
The gospel tells us how to meet God.
If I were to stop here, that is,
if I were to stop two minutes ago,
and point out a closed heaven and an
orphaned human race and a secularized world and
a world without heaven being open, and the
fact that a prophet saw God, it might
be, it might inspire you a little, but
it wouldn't be enough.
It's never enough to tell people they ought
to meet God.
They must be told they must meet God
and how to meet God.
And the gospel tells us how to meet
God.
The gospel tells us that there is a
door and only one, and Jesus Christ is
that door, and through that door we meet
God.
It tells us that God takes, that Christ
takes God in one hand and man in
the other and brings them together, introduces them,
and man is reinstated in the favor and
grace of God.
It tells us that.
It tells us that the Lamb of God
taketh away the sins of the world.
It tells us that he died that just
for the unjust that he might bring us
to God.
It tells us that we are saved by
faith through grace and that not of works
lest any man should boast.
And it's at the cross of Jesus and
at the open tomb of Jesus and at
the throne of Jesus that the people meet
God.
We can meet God.
I say there might be a fifth and
that is the missionary imperative that when we
found out all this that we should tell
others.
Now I close.
I just ask you to do two things.
Repudiate self-help.
Self-help.
Somebody wrote a book called self-help.
All these little books on how to help
yourself.
They ought all these, I wouldn't burn them,
I'd give them to Salvation Army for waste
paper and reclaim them and turn them into
something worthwhile.
Self-help.
Now any doctors here, you know, one thing
you have to worry about these patients is
they always want to prescribe for themselves.
They want to determine what this does.
I've diagnosed my diseases.
I've had everything there is.
Everything.
Except cervix.
Down to the present time, you know.
I get something and then I hear about
it and read it in a digester somewhere.
I got it.
But I never had it.
You know, I just think I had it.
And I want to go medicating, you know.
Stop by a drugstore and look tensely in
as a woman looks.
Stop in a hat store and look tense.
Go in and buy a bottle or something.
Hope maybe that if I got it, what
I'm buying will cure it.
But since I don't have it, why I
can't cure it.
For years I said I had an ulcer.
And I complained to my wife about my
ulcer.
So finally after years and years of that,
I went to a doctor and he sent
me to an X-ray.
Stood me up, you know, and fed me
a lot of stuff.
Stood me up, lay me down, pushed me
around.
Photographed me from various angles and announced there
is absolutely nothing wrong with your stomach.
And I haven't had a pain since.
Said there isn't a crack in the wall
anywhere.
It's a perfectly sound stomach.
And my ulcer left when I hear that
I had one left.
But I'd been medicating myself.
I'd swallowed enough carbonated what?
Well, ordinary cow brand soda.
I'd swallowed enough of that, you know, to
float a battleship with bubbles and all the
rest.
But I didn't need it and I was
making myself worse.
And if my stomach hadn't had more sense
than I had, I'd have got an ulcer.
Self-medication isn't good, my brother.
It's never good.
And when you try to help yourself, I'll
fix myself up.
I'll make myself holy.
I'll do it.
No, you won't, brothers and sisters.
You just won't.
For it won't work.
You're too dead all self-help.
And when you lift your eyes, you will
see a smiling father.
And he upraised the hands with nail prints.
And God will meet you all the way.
And the Christian life that you can have
is so much more wonderful than the Christian
life that you do have.
That it will be like, as Milton said,
a new sun risen on noonday.
Father, we pray.
God bless you.
These words, thou didst put that in the
Bible, Lord.
It's written there by thee for our help,
upon whom the end of the ages has
come.
And we've looked at Ezekiel.
And we've looked up and we've seen heaven
open.
And we thank thee that there are little
visions of thee.
And thy word came expressly to Ezekiel.
We pray that thy word may come expressly,
for faith cometh by hearing the word.
May we hear thee speak to us expressly,
so that we're nobody else.
May we believe it, obey it, and rise
out of our despondency, out of our emptiness
and despair, into fullness of joy and brilliance
and rich and fruitful Christ.
We pray thee for the sinner outside the
fold.
We pray thee for the doubter standing looking
in, but not in.
We pray thee for the backslider who wants
no better days.
We pray thee for the stubborn who comes
to a place now where to see the
surrender go back, and they can't decide what
to do.
Oh God, may they not emulate demons in
going back to this place.
May they not turn away from following thee
as the rich young ruler did.
May they come and surrender and say yes
to Jesus.
Yes, Lord, forever yes.
We welcome all thy holy will and sweetly
answer yes.
Yes, Lord, in his holy name, amen.