Zechariah 4, verse 6.
This is the word of the Lord unto
the people of Avenue Road Church.
Not by might nor by power, but by
my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
And I believe that we are at the
beginning, the eve of a great, or the
morning of a great season.
And we're going to work hard at it,
and pray hard, and be true.
And I'd like to add what I said
this morning, that those of you who are
enjoying yourself, you're for us, you're with us,
you ought to join us.
You're with us, you're part of us, whether
you join us or not, I told you
that too.
Because this is a spiritual fellowship, and just
as soon as you walk in among the
people of God, you're a member.
But we haven't any way of knowing who's
for us, and who's dragging his feet, and
who would like to see it go on,
or which we were dropped dead.
We haven't any way of knowing that, unless
you do something about it.
So I invite you, see me, or Mr.
McNally, tonight, tonight yet, don't put it off,
and wait, but tonight.
And say, put my name down, I want
to join.
Quite a number came this morning, and I
was encouraged by the numbers of people, older
people and younger people, who came and said,
Mr. Tozer, you can count me, we're for
it, we're for you.
All right, I can't work if I don't
know that, and the only way I can
know it is if you join and give.
Give of your money, and be present.
All right, with that text.
Not by might, nor by power, but by
my spirit, says the Lord.
Now that isn't the text for tonight, and
neither am I going to preach on the
text, any text tonight particularly, although I will
certainly give much scripture.
But I want to read a passage here
that will be my credential.
Why are you talking to us?
All right, listen.
1 Corinthians 2, And I, brethren, when I
came to you, came not with excellency of
speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the
testimony of God.
For I determined not to know anything among
you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.
And I was with you in weakness, and
in fear, and in much trembling.
And my speech and my preaching was not
with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in
the demonstration of the Spirit and of power,
that your faith should not stand in the
wisdom of man, but in the power of
God.
Now those are my credentials, and that is
the authority I have for beginning a series
of talks to you that I have never
given before, though certainly much that I will
say has been woven in here and there
into my various messages.
I thought when I came here that I
could just go to the old familiar barrel
and take out the old outlines and use
them without too much study or hard work.
I said to myself, and I spake as
a fool, I said, Well, you spent a
good part of your life and hard work
getting these messages, and now you can just
give them.
But here I find I'm working just as
hard at my sermon preparation here as I
did when I was a young fellow just
starting out.
So this is a new series that I
have not given at all anywhere before.
And I think that I ought also to
preface what I will be saying over these
evenings by reminding you that I am not
a radical, but rather a very cautious and
conservative man, and I have not swept up
by the wind from somewhere that you have
to watch with raised eyebrows and question.
This church is a member of the Society
of 1100 Churches on this North American continent,
founded by the great Canadian minister, Dr. Albert
B.
Simpson, and with headquarters in the United States
and Canada, and operating in 24 fields of
the world, fifth largest in the world, including
the great denominations with their millions of members.
And your humble and unworthy servant has been
on the board of that society, the board
of directors for so long I forget, and
editor of its magazine for years, and vice
president twice.
So that I just want to clear the
air now so that you won't say, Well,
this boy, he's seen something and we ought
to watch him.
You don't have to watch me at all,
because what I'll be saying to you would
pass anywhere in the evangelical circle.
I've preached this same kind of thing in
Moody Church and Wheaton College and elsewhere, though
not this series of sermons ever.
All right, now I begin a series that's
born out of three things, the word and
the Holy Spirit and the present religious situation.
I mean by that that what I'll be
saying night after night is born out of
the word of God.
If it is not born out of the
word of God, then I want nothing to
do with it, whatever.
But it is also born out of the
Holy Spirit.
It is the burden and the grief and
the joy of the Holy Ghost.
I would say to any of you who
are wondering about the spirit-filled life, if
you just want to be happy and nothing
else, you'd better steer away from the spirit
-filled life, because the same Holy Spirit that
will give you joy will also allow you
to share his burdens and his griefs.
And out of the burden and the grief
comes the joy and the victory of the
Holy Spirit, come these messages, and the present
religious situation.
The scripture says, our Lord himself speaking, that
a faithful and wise steward, he gives the
people their meat in due season.
Some people preach, and they preach the Bible
all right, and you can't deny they preach
the Bible.
They do preach the Bible, but they preach
the Bible this way.
They go to the Bible as you would
go to a book of symptomology, a doctor's
book, to find out what you should prescribe.
And instead of their prescribing to suit the
patient, they just prescribe for everybody at one
time.
When we were in the Army, some fellow
would get sick, and they would put medicine
in all of our coffee.
Everybody got it.
I've even drunk more bitter coffee because somebody
got a tummy ache, and I had to
drink the medicine.
Just give it to everybody without any thought
that maybe it didn't fit there at all.
Now, preaching, when we're not preaching to a
given situation, is like giving medicine indiscriminately to
people that it is not particularly fitted for.
Or, teaching the word of God, even though
it's faithful and true, without any regard to
the current situation, is like teaching the multiplication
table.
That is, you say, Children, 2 x 2
is 4, 2 x 3 is 6, 2
x 4 is 8.
All right, but so what?
It's true, all right, but so what?
What does that mean to me in my
present situation?
The New Testament epistles are written to specific
conditions, as were the seven letters that serve
the Revelation.
You will find that they were written to
particular situations that developed, and then the man
of God wrote to these particular people.
And the seven letters to the Revelation are
found in Revelation 2 and 3.
They are also written to that particular church,
having regard to the need of that particular
church.
And it was so with the prophets of
the Old Testament.
No prophet of the Old Testament went into
an ivory tower and settled down and relaxed
and breathed deeply a while and took out
a pen and said, Now I'm going to
write me a book of prophecy.
He didn't do it that way.
He wrote to the need.
He wrote to the situation.
He aimed his arrow at a target.
And if we don't do it that way,
then I suppose we might as well not
talk at all.
Now, God is speaking, and it is when
God is speaking to a particular situation that
the power of the Holy Spirit is present
and also active.
When David sinned, Nathan the prophet came to
him and put a little parable before him.
And then when David gave his judgment on
what to do with the sinful man, he
pointed his finger at the king and said,
Thou art the man.
And David immediately threw off his crown and
his robe, dropped his scepter and fell on
his knees, and there repented before his God.
Now, that was a particular situation.
You can read the 51st Psalm, which was
his prayer of repentance.
You can read it, and it's as meaningless
as the multiplication table for anything moral or
spiritual, unless you apply it to a situation
that needs it.
But it is when we are talking to
a situation that the sheep are separated from
the goats and the veil is removed and
the judgment begins.
Now, the question these evenings is not going
to be, Is this the voice of God
to us?
I hope nobody will try to evade responsibility
in that way.
But there are two other questions which will
be before us.
And those questions are, How many of us
are willing to hear the voice of God?
Jesus, you know, said in that wonderful, terrible
23rd of Matthew, that terrible 23rd of Matthew,
one of the most awful books in the
entire Bible, when I see the tender, curly
-bearded Christ with an angelic smile, a kind
of a Mona Lisa smile on his face.
When I see that, I don't know who
wrote that 23rd chapter of Matthew.
That terrible castigation, that frightful attack upon the
hypocrisy and unreality and insincerity of those religious
people.
And yet the tender Jesus ended that terrible
castigation by saying, Wherefore, behold, I send you
prophets and wise men and scribes and some
of them you'll kill and crucify, and some
you'll scourge and persecute from city to city.
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets
and stonest them that are sent unto thee,
how often would I have gathered thy children
together, even as a hen gathers her chicks
under her wings, and ye would not.
Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
There we have, were these people willing to
hear the voice of God?
And the answer was no, they were not
willing to hear the voice of God.
Way back then, a thousand years before Christ
was born in Bethlehem, the Holy Ghost said,
Wisdom crieth without, and she uttereth her voice
in the streets, and she crieth in the
chief place of concourse in the openings of
the gates in the city.
She uttereth her words, saying, How long, you
simple ones, will you love simplicity and scorners
delight in scorning and fools hate knowledge?
Turn ye at my reproof, and I will
pour out my Spirit upon you and make
known my words unto you.
But because I called and you refused, I
stretched out my hands, and no man regarded,
but ye have said not all of my
counsels, and would have none of my reproof.
I will laugh at your calamities, and I
will mock when your fear cometh.
Now, I'm quoting those scriptures to show, the
question is, how many of us are willing
to hear the voice of God?
And the second is, how many are worthy
to hear the voice of God?
In Acts 13.46, it was necessary that
the word of God should first be preached
unto you, but seeing that you have counted
yourself unworthy of eternal life, therefore we turn
to the Gentiles.
This is a terrible thing.
Now, here is the gist of what I
want to say, that a radical and sweeping
reformation is imperative among the people called Christians,
Protestants generally, and Evangelicals in particular, and such
people as we are.
We're Evangelical, but we're also supposed to be
full gospel, in that we believe in some
things that some Evangelicals don't.
We believe in the anointing of the Holy
Ghost, and we believe in healing of the
sick in answer to prayer.
A lot of people don't.
We don't make an extreme fanatical point of
it, but if they come and want to
be prayed for, we believe it's right that
we should pray for them.
We believe that, and some don't, though more
increasingly they do in the Evangelical churches, Baptists
and other churches.
But I say that this is for us
now, that there is a radical sweeping reformation,
and that it is imperative, absolutely imperative now,
if we are going to save Christianity from
the wreck which is before us.
Now, what do I mean by reformation?
Some people may recoil from that word, because
I have heard men wave their arms as
if they were doing setting up exercises before
the open window, and say, I don't believe
in reformation, I believe in regeneration.
Sounds good, and it gets some amens, but
the fact is, if you don't have reformation,
you can't have regeneration.
The Holy Ghost won't come and regenerate a
carnal and stubborn people who won't obey him.
There must first be a reformation.
Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your
hearts, ye double-minded, and turn unto the
Lord, and he will hear you.
Learn to do good, and cease to do
evil, and then return unto me.
Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall
be as white as snow.
But I want to be fine in that.
I always walk the chalk line between being
hopelessly dull and interesting.
Because, you see, if you're not defining, you're
not interesting.
And if you define too much, you're dull.
So I say I walk the tightrope between
the two.
I want to define what I mean by
saying that Protestantism and Evangelicalism and this church
and the Christian and missionary alliance and my
friends among the Baptists and Presbyterians and I
might name them all, for I take them
all in, I say that we are in
need of a sweeping reformation.
And what now do I mean by reformation?
Well, let me give you the definition of
reformation as it's given in the dictionary of
religion.
It's simply change by removal of faults or
abuses and a restoration to a former good
estate.
Now, that's not so bad, is it?
A change brought by removal of faults and
abuses and a restoration to a former good
estate.
Now, I don't know anybody in the wide
world who believes he's a Christian could ever
object to this.
Changing in the direction of the removal of
faults and abuses toward restoration to a former
good estate.
Now, here's the word change.
Let's look at that word.
This very word disturbs many people.
They have accepted the status in quo as
being the very tablets given by the Holy
God in the mount.
The status in quo.
Collard Brothers said the status quo was the
Latin for the mess they were in.
And I've often smiled about that good practical
point of definition.
But most people accept, if they happen to
be in any church anywhere, they accept the
status in quo without knowing or caring to
inquire how the status got into that quo.
In other words, they don't ask anybody, Oh
God, is this of thee?
Is this divine?
Is this out of the Bible?
But because it was done and being done
and a lot of people are doing it
and some people come to see them do
it or hear them do it, they assume
that that's all right.
Songs are written about it and books are
written about it and it gets into magazines
and pretty soon people are called to it.
And the first thing we know, we have
gotten into a situation, a religious situation, where
it is not of God, not according to
the scriptures, and where God isn't pleased with
it at all but angry with it.
And yet we don't know it because we
don't like the word change.
The change took place slowly before we arrived
on the scene and we think because that
is everywhere current that it's therefore right.
And so we accept the status in quo,
the existing state of things, and say this
is it, forgetting that history demonstrates that religions
invariably degenerate.
Now this is one of the hard things
that people don't like ever to face up
to.
But just as fruit rots and just as
people get old in spite of all they
try to do to drugstores if they could
help us, they'd help us.
You can go there and buy anything in
the wide world to try to help you
and pep you up and make you young
and keep you young.
And if you finally give up and say,
I can't stay young, all right, they'll give
you something to make you look young.
But we do get old.
It's an inevitability.
It's built in.
And so it is with religion.
It's just built in that we start to
deteriorate shortly after God comes and blesses us.
You go back to the story of Israel
and look what happened there.
God called Israel out of Egypt and she
began to deteriorate before she reached the Red
Sea.
Then he gave her a revival by taking
her through the Red Sea and got her
over into the wilderness and she started to
degenerate before she'd gone 20 miles in the
wilderness.
And then for 40 years she wandered.
You can just follow the history of Israel.
You can see the story of the kings.
It's the most depressing story, the story of
the kings in the Bible.
The story, here's a man, he lives and
he did evil in the sight of the
Lord and he begets a son.
And his son did evil in the sight
of the Lord as his father before him,
yet he did not attain unto the wickedness
of his father.
He helped a little bit there.
The Lord gave a little bit of revival.
So it's degeneration.
Then somebody comes along that dares to question
the status in quo and say, wait a
minute here now, where do you find this
in the Bible?
Read the word and see.
Is this script true?
And they say, no, this isn't.
All right, says Zechariah.
All right, boys, be out here Thursday morning
at 10.
I've got a job for you.
So they all showed up at 10.
He went to the temple.
He said, now that statue there, God hates
it, get it out of there.
And that place where they sacrificed pigs, get
that out of there.
And this place over here, this picture over
here, God hates that thing, take that out
of there.
And all this dirt that's swept under the
pew, get that out of there.
And he said, all of this evidence of
your carnality and your wickedness, get rid of
it.
And they spent days with wheelbarrows wheeling out
claptraps that never should have been there in
the first place.
And when they had done it and had
got the claptrap out, God came on them,
and they were blessed for a whole generation.
But the spirit of degeneration and deterioration seems
to be present just as soon as God
blesses anybody, anywhere.
And this idea that all you have to
do is to accept Christ and you're in,
my brother, it's a great mistake because it
leaves the people with the impression that if
they accept Christ, they have no fight to
fight and no warfare and no job to
do and no temptation.
They're just in.
Well, you accept Christ rightly as your Lord
and Savior.
You're in, all right.
But being in, the honest man has got
to tell you that you've just started to
fight.
Put a uniform on a young fellow and
he squares his narrow shoulders back there and
is thankful for the padding and gets his
picture taken and sends it home to his
girlfriend.
He's a soldier now.
What's he in there for?
To get his picture taken and look pretty?
No, he's in there to fight.
And so they send him out there somewhere
and start shooting at him.
That's what he's in there for.
It would be unfair to a young fellow.
I've seen the posters, Join the Navy and
See the World.
Join the Army and Learn Mechanics and all
that.
What a slick way to get a young
fellow to go sign up thinking he's going
on a tour of the world.
He will if he doesn't get shot.
He doesn't get shot somewhere because that's what
they're out there for.
We don't know it now, but right in
Vietnam they're shooting down American planes.
We Americans have a lovely habit.
I don't know.
You know I'm one and I love them.
We have the loveliest habit of doing stupid
things when we know better.
If it weren't done, we'd just act stupid.
And now we've sent airplanes over there to
get shot down in Vietnam.
We could go over there and clobber them
in 20 minutes if they had a little
something where their belt goes around.
But instead of that, we're fooling around with
the thing.
Letting our fellows go over there.
Well anyhow, that just happens.
It's not a part of the sermon.
But here I tell you that we get
people converted and we don't tell them here,
listen, you've got to fight all your way
through to heaven because the spirit of degeneration
and the tendency to deteriorate and lose out
will follow you like a hound dog should
you die.
You've got to fight it and pray it
through and suffer it out and live in
praise and worship because if you don't, you'll
deteriorate.
And then read the history of the Christian
church if you can keep your faith and
keep from weeping.
Read the history of the Christian church.
As they say, it's just three generations from
church-leave to church-leave and it's just
three generations from backsliding to backsliding.
Now that's first change.
There's got to be some changes.
And some people would die before they'd make
a change.
They just want what they want and they
want to be that.
How?
Well, that's the way it's done everywhere.
Nobody ever stops to inquire whether it should
be done that way or not.
Then by removal of faults and abuses.
Well, where are the faults and abuses?
I was trying to recall today whether it
was Michelangelo in the 16th chapel or whether
it was Sir Christopher Wren in that building
there in London.
I've forgotten which one.
But I think it was Wren, Sir Christopher
Wren, the great architect.
They had a little plaque.
He was long gone, of course, from the
scene.
They had a little plaque.
People would come in to see his great
cathedral and they'd look around for his monument.
There was a little plaque there and it
said, If you would see my monument, look
around you.
Look around you, see it.
Now when I say that reformation means the
removal of faults and abuses, or all abuses,
somebody says, Where are these faults and abuses?
All I say is, Look around you, brother,
at the religious scene.
Look around you at the religious scene and
you will see the faults and abuses and
the desperate call for change.
Now, where are the sample saints?
We ought to be raising sample saints.
The model saints were Christians who could take
them as examples and say, I want to
follow this man, this woman, and be like
them, as they are like their Lord.
But we are simply not producing saints in
this day in which we live.
Somebody kindly gave me the story of Holy
Ann, the Irish Saint.
My wife is reading it, I see.
I've been stealing a chapter or two here
and there.
Again, I read it years ago, written by
Mrs. Bingham here of Toronto, who is now
in Heaven, I think.
I think she's gone from this scene here.
I know she would be in Heaven if
she weren't in Toronto.
But anyway, this dear soul wrote about this
great soul, a myth.
I don't even know her last name, but
her first name was Ann.
There was a sample saint.
There was somebody that we can read about
and talk about still, and we're building her
sepulcher and writing her life and quoting her.
Where are the Ann's?
Where are the Billy Bray's?
Where are we?
We're simply not producing sample saints.
And I want to say this cautiously, and
I don't want you to get mad at
me now.
Oh, I won't lose sleep if you do,
but I hope you won't, because I want
you to accept it as being true.
Mostly we Christians are bad examples to other
Christians.
Now, that's the sad thing.
We work hard to get a man converted,
and we think we do God's service.
And then after we get him converted and
he gets to know us, we're a bad
example to him.
This is a terrible thing.
I consider this an abuse in the Church
of Christ.
Now, I ask you, are these false laziness,
for instance?
It's a terrible thing to say, but if
we evangelicals had one quarter of the enthusiasm
for Jehovah's Witnesses, we could take a continent.
But we've got the power, and they don't.
That is, we have it available to us,
and they don't.
They deny the Lordship of Jesus and the
Deity of Jesus, and you can't have spiritual
power by denying the Deity and Lordship of
Christ.
But we have a lazy bunch of evangelicals
on our hands.
In carnality, Paul talks about the carnal Christians
of Corinth.
He labored and prayed and wept over the
carnality of the Christians and said, I couldn't
talk to you as I talked to grown
-up Christians because you were carnal.
You acted like babies.
You were yet in your babyhood stage.
Now, what is there about a baby?
Well, helpless, irresponsible, and loves play and drinks
milk.
Paul said these Christians of Corinth, here they
were, irresponsible and weak, and they loved pablum
to be given to them with a bottle,
and they couldn't eat meat.
They weren't grown-up.
They didn't grow up.
This describes this, my brethren.
This describes Christianity.
This describes the Alliance.
This describes evangelicals almost everywhere.
Carnal, immature, no miracles, no wonders, no wonderful
sense of the presence of God, but holding
together by social activities and nothing else.
And then the prayerlessness of the Lord's people.
Think of the Moravians for 100 years.
They never stopped praying.
They had their prayer tower, and they manned
that prayer tower as a factory manned its
machines in 8-hour shifts.
A man comes in, works 8 hours, takes
off his overall, wipes his tools, goes home,
and another man takes his place and works
8 hours.
Around the clock, 24 hours they do it
in some places.
And they did that for 100 years in
hernia, because they were going to pray it
through or die.
And the result of that was a mighty
upsurge of missionary zeal and power such as
the world never knew before.
Since Pentecost and the Christian Missionary Alliance is
a direct outcropping of that thing.
So is the Salvation Army, and so are
the Methodists, and so are a great many
other movements that have blessed the world in
days gone by.
And the carelessness, careless Christians.
I've met a few Christians that I thought
were scrupulous to a point where they harmed
themselves.
But for every scrupulous Christian, I have met
100 careless Christians.
And a careless Christian is one who doesn't
discipline himself and doesn't examine himself.
I think it was Plato who said that
a life that is not examined, that is,
an unexamined life, is a kind of death.
That is, the man who simply lives by
his instincts and does the best he can
and works enough to get enough money to
fulfill his instincts, and doesn't examine himself and
won't be taught to, and doesn't worry about
his condition, he's a careless man.
He'd better be dead.
So said the Stoic philosopher.
And I say the idealistic philosopher.
And then coldness of heart.
Oh, the coldness, the coldness.
Did you ever worry over your coldness?
Did you ever worry?
Did you ever wish that you had fire
in your bosom?
And if you ever worry about it, somebody
has to tell you, because the temperature of
evangelical churches all around about us and Protestantism
everywhere around about us is so chilly that
nobody imagines that he's cold in his heart.
We sing songs, these beautiful songs, we sing
them, and there were some of them at
least written out of hearts that were hot
as fire.
And we sing them coldly to a slow,
creeping tempo.
Ah, brethren, we say, Then I have accepted
Christ, and all is well.
Of course I'm cold in my heart, but
I've accepted Christ, and all is well.
Of course I'm careless about the way I
live.
I lose my temper, and I do lots
of things I shouldn't do.
Of course I do, but I've accepted Christ,
all is well.
Of course I don't pray very much.
I nibble a little at prayer occasionally when
I'm in trouble.
Pray before me eat, but that's about all.
But of course, I've accepted Christ, and all
is well.
Of course I'm carnal.
Of course I'm filled with lust and pride
and jealousy and all that.
I try to keep it down the best
I can, but all is well.
I've accepted Christ.
Of course I love money.
Of course I have fleshly habits.
Of course I'm carnal.
But I've accepted Christ, all is well.
Now, that's evangelicalism, as I've known it, all
throughout the continent.
And they want me to accept this and
shut my mouth and say nothing and go
on trying to promote this and give my
life to it and say, We want to
promote more of this, promote more carnality, promote
more carelessness, promote more laziness and unfaithfulness and
worldliness.
No.
These are abuses and faults.
And reformation is the change by removal of
faults or abuses.
Are these abuses, for instance, spending millions for
religious amusement for the saints of the Lord,
supposed saints of the Lord?
I was thinking about this.
Maybe I'm mistaken.
I could be radical, a little too radical
on it.
And if I am, we'll modify it a
little.
But I think I'm right in saying that
if the money the saints had spent having
fun during 1962 were put in the hands
of missionary societies, two thousand Protestant missionaries could
be on the field now preaching the gospel
to the heathen, getting in ahead of the
condemnants, getting in ahead of the Mohammedans, getting
in ahead of the atheists.
But we're dragging, and the Alliance is proud
of its 880 now it will be, 880
missionaries.
We're proud of the fact we ought to
have 2880.
But you can't get it because the Lord's
people have accepted a necessity for fun.
And it costs a lot, I'll tell you.
It costs a lot.
There are rattles for the saints and teething
rings for the retarded children of the multi.
You know, you can't predict.
You can predict, and you say to yourself,
Now, I'm making a prediction, and I sound
like a fool in making it.
It'll never be.
And then you'll read about it somewhere.
It happens.
You know what happens?
Well, the saints in a certain town, I'm
not going to tell you the town, but
it's in the States.
Big town, over a million population.
Nearly two million.
They had been looking with covetous eye on
the nightclubs of the town.
And they said, Well, now, why should we
allow the whirlings and the unbelievers and those
who haven't accepted Jesus to have all the
fun in the nightclubs?
Let's start nightclubs of our own.
So they started nightclubs, the Christian nightclubs.
And they have drinks, but of course, no
alcohol.
Somebody said, water on the rocks.
And they also have entertainment, but it's nice
Christian entertainment.
They get nightclub singers who also say they're
Christians to come in and do their stuff.
And then somebody said, I think this might
have just been sarcastic, but somebody suggested they
probably sold candy cigarettes, too.
I don't know.
But here we go, brother.
Here we go.
We can't be saved from the fact that
the world has the condemnation of Almighty God
on it.
And if we're Christians, we're going to have
to separate from the world.
God's got enough, my brother.
If he hasn't got enough to satisfy you
in Toronto, he won't have enough to satisfy
you in heaven.
And if Jesus Christ isn't big enough and
wonderful enough and good enough to please you
in Toronto, you will be deeply disappointed with
him in heaven.
And anybody who is disappointed with Jesus in
heaven will have a quick trip to hell.
Because the people who love Jesus Christ and
adore him and say, he's enough for me,
he is all I need there, they're going
to be the ones that fill heaven.
Well, then what do I mean by reformation?
I want to make it broader and talk
more about it.
But as I go on, that means simply
that I return to the faith of our
fathers.
The faith of our fathers.
Oh, how sweet that faith of our fathers,
in belief and practice, in the individual Christian
life and in the local church.
I was praying yesterday, O God, show Toronto
there's a God in Israel.
Show Toronto there's a God in Israel.
And I thought of old Samson and I
prayed, O God, just this once more, show
that thou art a God in Israel.
Samson slew more in his death than he
had in his life and delivered Israel dead
than he could deliver them alive.
And I think I'd be willing to be
the one the building would fall on if
I thought that I could gather to me
and to my good and beloved brother here
a people, a serious-minded, joyful, optimistic people
who are ready to make in their own
lives the changes that might be necessary to
remove the faults and abuses and restore to
a former good faith.
It would be pleasing to God that our
young people could gather.
I was cheered this morning at the young
people who came to me.
Not only older people, but young people who
came to me with a quiet word of
deep assurance that they wanted me to know
they were on our side and that we're
going someplace here at this church.
We want this sort of thing.
That's our hope, dear friends.
That's our hope.
The hope of this church is its youth.
The hope of this church is its serious
-minded youth.
Its serious-minded youth.
The playboys.
They're all everywhere.
Yak-yackers.
You can find them a dime a dozen.
They're not worth taking out Wednesday morning for
the man who drives the big truck.
But there are serious-minded men and women,
young people, too, who believe in God and
in his Son Jesus Christ and who want
everything God has and who want to be
in the vanguard of the revival that may
come to sweep the earth or at least
to revive it in places.
And I'd like to see our New World
Church the leading church.
Out from here there might go such a
wave of beautiful Christianity that the other churches
would say, how do they do it?
And get on their knees and ask God
how it's possible to have a growing church
and have young people coming in for nothing
else but to know about God and Christ.
And it could set a trend here.
But I won't say more about that later.
Because what we may be doing at a
given time is not important so much as
what trend we're setting at a given time
by what we do.
And I'm concerned that our trend should be
in the direction of producing a few such
saints as Geoffrey and Simpson and Holy Ann
and Billy Bray and Tom Hare and a
few that have been.
Some are gone.
Well, that's the first talk.
Talk number one.
I'll be with you, God willing, for talk
number two next Sunday night.
And we'd like to have you back.
Bring your friends.
New students, new young people, you come on.
You may have a little snow on the
roof, but there's fire in the front.
And don't you for a minute imagine that
because I'm not young and good-looking like
this man, that I don't have a youthful
heart for you, the young people.
All right.
Now, beginning next Sunday night, I want to
begin to ask for decisions and committals.
And I will give invitations.
And when this series is ended, we will
go right on into evangelistic terms, into the
synod.
But tonight I'm going to leave you, after
we've sung a number, to just quietly think
this over and decide what you want to
do.