Again, more or less, I'm not preaching from
a text exactly, any time, any night.
But I certainly am weaving plenty of scripture
in all the time.
But remember I gave you a text, Zechariah
4, 6, Not by might, nor by power,
but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of
hosts.
My thesis is, for these nights, that radical
reformation is the present imperative in Protestant circles.
And I defined reformation, last Sunday night, as
being the removal of faults and abuses, and
the restoration to a former good state.
And that's my thesis, that we need this,
need it desperately bad now, in Protestant circles.
Now, one area of our thinking that needs
to be reformed, that is, needs to be
changed by the removal of abuses and faults,
and restored again to its former bright and
good state, is this.
We must reform our practical beliefs about God's
design for mankind.
Now, I say practical beliefs, because there is
a difference between nominal beliefs and practical beliefs.
The nominal belief is what you hold in
name, and the practical belief is what you
hold in reality, and what holds you.
And while there probably isn't as much fault
to be found with the nominal beliefs, there's
a great deal to be found with the
practical beliefs.
And it's these practical beliefs, particularly in our
circles, that need to be restored again to
their happy and bright state, with the faults
and abuses purged out of them.
Now, it has been a long time since
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and died on
a cross, and rose again the third day,
and ascended to the right hand of God
the Father Almighty, and sent the Holy Ghost
to establish his Church.
And I say it has been a long
time.
And since those days, there have been changes
in the world, changes so radical and sweeping
and all-pervading and revolutionary, as to be
entirely incredible to anybody living in Jesus' day,
and entirely and totally unimaginable to the world
of those times.
Now, have these changes forced God to modify
his plans for his Church and for mankind?
And here is where we have fallen by
the wayside, and here is where we need
to have a reformation, a purgation, a removal
of the faults and a restoration again of
the faith of Christians to a belief in
the truth.
Now, I say, have these changes that have
come forced God to modify his plans for
his Church and for the world?
Now, a large number of professing Christians say
yes without a question.
They say yes, that's true, or I suppose
they wouldn't like to have it put up
to them like that.
They don't like, people don't like to have
the most realistic construction put on things.
What they would say, and they are the
liberals and the modernists, question mark after both
words, but they wouldn't like to stand right
up if you backed them into a corner
and took all the little lapels and said,
Do you think God's been forced to change
his mind?
I don't think anybody would quite have the
courage to say yes.
But nevertheless, they do say it, and here
is what they say in effect.
They say it little by little, and here
a little, and there a little, till it's
brainwashed their people.
They say that the Bible must be interpreted
in the light of new developments.
That a book that was written in the
day when men wore togas and Mother Hubbards,
and when they rode on mule backs, that
a Bible or any book written at that
time necessarily has to be reinterpreted in the
day when women wear what they wear now,
and when you ride in airplanes.
And they say that the prophets and the
apostles were mistaken about God's purposes, that God
hasn't changed his mind, maybe, but the prophets
and the apostles were mistaken about what God
had intended to do.
And they say the Bible is outmoded and
largely irrelevant.
Irrelevant is a word which, if you don't
use, you haven't been to school at all.
And the more you use it, the more
for longer you've been in school.
They say that the Bible is outmoded and
irrelevant.
Irrelevant, of course, as you know, means it
isn't related to anything.
And outmoded means that we have new modes
now, new modes of thinking and living, and
the Bible is outmoded.
It's a back-number magazine.
And they say that we must therefore reassess
its teachings and rethink our beliefs and our
hopes.
Now, I'm not overstating this at all.
This is what we're being taught right along.
It gets into the newspapers, and people are
saying it, that the Bible must be interpreted
in the light of all these changes which
I have mentioned, and that the prophets and
the apostles were mistaken.
They had ideas which were good and advanced
for their day, but not advanced for our
day.
And that therefore we must reassess the Bible's
teaching and we must rethink our beliefs and
our hopes.
Now, they say that we're more advanced than
they were in those days, that we know
more about ourselves and more about human motivation
and more about the nature of things than
we did in those days.
Therefore a book written at a time when
people thought that the earth was flat and
that the sun went around the earth, rose
in the morning and crossed over and went
down into the sea behind, that no book
living, written in a time when men believed
those things, that it can possibly be taken
too seriously.
And while it certainly contains some beautiful poetry
and some marvelously inspiring thoughts about human nature
and the world in which we live, nevertheless,
all this is to be understood and it
is to be reinterpreted and reassessed and rethought.
Now, I just want to put this in.
It isn't really part of the sermon, but
I can't possibly keep myself from saying it,
that I challenge the truth of this idea
that we are advanced.
I challenge it, even though I know that
99% of the modern educators and the
modern newspaper men and TV men and radio
men and politicians and all the rest, 98
% anyhow, don't agree with me.
Nevertheless, I challenge that we're any further advanced
than they were in the day of Jesus.
If we are so far advanced, then I
want to ask you some questions.
Why did we kill 850 human beings made
in the image of God?
If we're advanced in this day and we
know so much and because we can ride
automobiles instead of mulebacks, therefore we're advanced.
Why was it that we used those automobiles
to kill 850 human beings in one country
alone?
And if we are so advanced in this
day, I want to ask you why it
is that our penitentiaries are packed absolutely full
and our mental hospitals are crowded to the
doors.
If we are so far advanced, I want
to ask you, why then is the whole
world a powder keg?
And a man in Ottawa or Washington or
Berlin or London or Moscow, if he says
the wrong thing, they blow up the world.
It wasn't so in the day of Jesus.
Save your whole life, you couldn't have had
anything but a brash fire war in that
day.
But you can have a war now that
will blow up the world and leave nothing
but puffs of white ash around where you
used to be.
And if we're so far advanced, I want
to ask you, why is it that we
not only killed 850 human beings celebrating Christmas
in one country of the world, and we'd
have to add other countries on, but why
is it that we, one country, one advanced
nation, has spent $40,000 million, that's $40
billion, to defend itself from other advanced nations?
Now, if we've advanced so far, and the
fact that we're riding automobiles instead of the
backs of mules, if that proves that we're
so far advanced, then why did the United
States have to spend $40 billion, that's $40
,000 million, not $40,000 or $400,000
or $40 million, but $40,000 million to
protect itself from other nations that are also
so far advanced?
And if we're so far advanced in our
day, then how is it that for the
first time we have weapons of destruction now
that can annihilate the world?
You know, they began with the fist.
And if one man was mad at another
one, he just poked him with his fist.
And then somebody thought up how to take
a stone and make it sharp and bop
him over the head with that stone.
And then somebody else thought that they could
take something and sharpen it and shoot it
and get him if he wasn't close enough
to bop back.
And so they had the bow and arrow
and the spear.
Then they went on from that to gunpowder,
which was invented by the Chinese, and then
on to our present weapons, the terrible, awful
weapons that can annihilate cities and nations and
the world if we don't watch.
Well, why is it that it's in this
advanced period, when we are so far advanced
in every way, so far advanced that the
Bible is now outmoded and irrelevant, why is
it this is the first time we've got
a hold of this devil weapon?
I ask you again, if we are so
far advanced in our day, why is it
that women don't dare walk in the parks
anymore?
And now I don't want you to tell
it, but I say there are men who
don't walk in parks either.
I'm one of them.
When I go to New York City, I
like Central Park, beautiful place, but I don't
walk in Central Park, particularly after the sun's
down, because I don't want to be mugged.
That's a modern word, that's Greek, mugged.
I don't want to be mugged and have
my little money taken away from me and
my watch and my credit card and flying
card.
I don't want to lose that, so I
stay out of Central Park.
Why is it that in Chicago, Illinois, they
had a great, beautiful park there with a
hedge all the way around it?
And so many perverts hid in the hedges
and jumped out on women that they had
to cut the hedge as level as the
ground so everybody could see all the way.
And if anybody saw a pervert on the
way, he could duck around some other way
and miss him.
Why is it?
Why is it that happened in this beautiful
advanced age when we know so much about
ourselves and therefore we're so far advanced over
those men who wrote the Bible?
Why is it, I want to ask you,
why nurses who get out at midnight never
walk home anymore but take taxis three or
four together and split the price in order
that they might be able to get home
safely?
Why is it in this advanced age that
dope and violence and illegitimacy and divorce are
soaring?
Well, that's not part of the sermon, but
I thought I'd put that in, because I've
been told that the Bible is irrelevant and
outmoded because we know so much now and
we're so far advanced.
You see, there's a type of mind that
thinks that every motion is progress.
Every time you make a move, you're progressing.
Then there's a type of mind that thinks
that every time you move in a straight
line, you're going forward, forgetting that you can
move in a straight line and be going
backward.
But of course, that's old-fashioned and obscurantist.
I've been called obscurantist.
They haven't really named me, but they've drawn
a picture and it's mine.
They said every time we move, we move
forward.
So we're moving forward toward full penitentiaries and
mental hospitals crowded.
We're moving forward toward the killing of so
many people on the highway that it's a
disgrace on the North American continent and all
over the world.
We have moved forward to a place where
the world's a powder keg and if Jack
Kennedy or Nickity Khrushchev get up some morning
or John Diefenbaker or Mr. Green and they
have had a bad night of it and
say the wrong thing, they can blow up
the world.
Why is it we've moved forward to that?
We've moved forward to the place where we
don't dare walk anymore, where we can't walk
on the street.
All right, we've moved forward, yes.
Now, the tragedy of the century is that
the Protestants have accepted this progress and move
forward thing and actually believe it.
And if anybody calls up a preacher, he's
sure to say this.
They want him to say it, you see.
They call him up.
I get called up occasionally by the newspapers
and want my poor little two cents worth.
And there's not much use because I don't
believe what they want me to believe and
I don't say what they expect me to
say.
They wanted me to go on TV over
in Ottawa and I wouldn't do it because
I knew that what I would say wouldn't
be the thing that they wanted at all
and I would simply be, I have a
name for it but can't use it tonight
and I wouldn't want to spoil their party
for them.
Now, the tragedy, I say, of the century
is that the Protestants, the sons of the
great protest, the sons of the great protest,
the sons of the Reformation have been brainwashed
and re-indoctrinated by these who believe that
changes have made a difference in God's plans
and a difference in Christianity and a difference
in Christ and that we can't read the
Bible as we used to, face to book,
but that we have to read it through
colored glasses, colored by the changed, the ones
who made the changes.
And they have been hypnotized so by that
old serpent, the devil, into believing that we
no longer have a trustworthy Bible and so
Protestantism is no longer a moral force in
the world.
I hope I'm talking to a congregation of
people that have too much background and too
much intelligence to believe that Protestantism is a
force in the world anymore.
Protestantism is not a force in the world.
Protestantism has sold out to the brainwashers.
And instead of being the sons and daughters
of the great protest, we are now yes
-men and yes-women.
I saw a cartoon one time of a
fellow standing in the middle of an office
and he was saying, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And he was saying, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no.
And somebody said, what's the matter with that
fellow?
He said, he's a yes-man on his
vacation.
And we are now having yes-men in
the churches of Christ.
Yes-men everywhere.
We're training them in the schools and sending
out little yes-men who bob their head,
yes, like a plastic duck, by what, in
the 10 cents store.
Up and down goes their little heads, yes,
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
But the great protest that could stand in
moral protest to what was going on in
the world and say, this is what God
says, that day is over almost in Protestantism.
And we now have running the Protestant world
a lot of people who talk very solemnly
about Christ but don't mean what the Bible
means.
Talk about God but don't mean what the
Bible means.
Talk about revelation but don't mean what the
Bible means.
Talk about inspiration but don't mean what our
Fathers meant.
And the gospel churches, and this is the
second great tragedy, that the gospel churches are
also confused and intimidated.
They're confused and intimidated by numbers.
And they accept the belief that there has
been a change and that Christians must adjust
to the change.
The word we have now all the time
is adjustment.
They say you've got to get adjusted, forgetting
that wherever the world has been blessed, it's
always been blessed by the man who wasn't
adjusted.
The poor little guy that gets adjusted, he
can't do much anyhow, and he's not worth
having around.
The great men who stood, the great men
who stood in Canada and helped make her
a world power were the men who didn't
bow.
They stood and protested and dared to, if
you're going to be any adjusted, let them
come around to me, they said.
Same almost everywhere in every field of human
endeavor where there has been any progress that
has been made.
That progress has been made by those who
stood up and said, I will not adjust
to the world.
I tell you now, if you don't adjust,
you'll get a complex or something.
If you don't adjust, you'll have to go
to a psychiatrist after a while.
Well, Jesus, I said one time to him
in a college, that Jesus was among the
most maladjusted men of his generation.
They wrote in their paper afterward and said,
I rocked the theologians onto their heels with
that one.
But they should have been rocked onto their
heels because Jesus Christ, our Lord, never pretended
to adjust to the world.
He came to die for the world and
to call the world to him, but the
adjustment had to be on the other side.
If there was any adjustment, it had to
be on their part.
It wouldn't be on his.
He was right in the first place.
And because he was right in the first
place, he would make no adjustment.
But they said, adjust.
Every poor little guy, we start with him
when he hasn't cut his first tooth yet,
trying to get him to adjust to the
world.
And one of the most all-embracing, omnibus
compliments that a teacher can pay to a
child is that she adjusts beautifully, he adjusts
beautifully, forgetting that the great composers and the
great poets and the great architects were people
that wouldn't adjust at all.
There's a certain college, I won't mention it,
but it's a religious college, and they say
that a student is never any good unless
he's kicked out of it, that he goes
to it, but if he graduates the regular
way, they have brainwashed him until he'll never
amount to anything.
But if he has the courage to stand
up and get kicked out, he'll amount to
something.
And I know a number that got kicked
out, and they amounted to something.
I don't know the cause and effect relationship,
but I assume it's pretty close.
But now they say, let's get adjusted.
And so we're all busy trying to get
adjusted.
Some of you people that starved out poor,
shivering sheep with every kind of sheep disease
known to man, and you had it in
some denomination that was brainwashed, where they taught
you that the Bible had to be reinterpreted
in this new day and that it was
outmoded and largely irrelevant, and then you go
to some gospel church and you're not there
three months until you're trying to introduce the
very baloney that you ran away from into
the church where you went for help.
What's the matter with us anyhow?
Are we on hold in our heads?
If we ran away from death and we
ran away from unbelief and we ran away
from this phony advanced stuff and get to
a church where they love God and believe
the Bible, then we start making changes, because
we have been confused and intimidated by the
changes.
We've accepted those changes.
Now the contemporary world, I don't mind telling
you, is the result of radical changes down
the generations, changes amounting to a revolution.
Let's look again, the scientific revolution.
That is, we're learning to control the world
instead of being controlled by the world.
That's at the base of the scientific revolution.
And then there's the industrial revolution.
It means that goods are now made in
factories instead of in your house.
Every man used to make his own shoes,
and every woman her own clothes, and the
clothes of her family.
Now they wouldn't do it and don't do
it.
They make them in factories.
That's industrial.
You see, every man used to go out
and cut down trees and saw them up
and get his own wood.
Now they have unions and they dig coal
or get oil, and that's the way we
get our heat and our light and our
power.
So that's the industrial revolution.
Then there's the communicational revolution.
I was reading along with my wife in
a section of the book of 2 Kings
the other day, and they came upon those
runners.
They used to send a runner out, right
on this continent, right in this country, 200
years ago, 150 years ago.
If they wanted to get a message to
somebody, they picked a long, lean, wiry Indian
and said, Now, dogleg, big chief, you go
on the run.
So dogleg takes out with a message, and
away he goes.
He's a runner.
And some of those runners could run 20,
30, 40 miles, you know, and hardly be
puffing when they got there.
They went there with their message.
Now, those were the runners.
But what do you do now?
You step to the radio, two-way radio,
and call up and tell the fellow.
And there's been nothing but the union used
up about one-fourteenth of one watt.
There's a difference now, they say.
See, that's communicational difference.
Then there's the philosophical difference.
I might mention that communication business.
Some of you, I don't know who you
are, but some of you have gone to
somebody's home or had in your own home
shortwave radio and have talked to your friends
in other parts of the world.
HCJB, the Christian station down in the Andes.
Sometimes the missionary will get on down there
and he'll talk to somebody in Canada or
the United States or somewhere.
Beautiful, you know.
You don't have to stand a runner or
wait three months for a sailship.
You just radio the thing.
And then there's philosophical revolution.
And I could, I suppose, talk for 20
hours on that subject.
But at the bottom it just means this,
that men are man-centered in their thinking
now instead of God-centered.
That's the difference.
Men are man-centered instead of God-centered.
And there's been the social revolution.
That is, there's a new and radical change
that has come, a new attitude completely, a
new attitude toward marriage and a new attitude
toward sex and a new attitude toward parenthood
and a new and radical attitude toward work.
The day when men worked and were proud
of it.
Even in my grandfather's day, we had an
old rocking chair made by my grandfather, a
very comfortable old rocking chair.
The old boy made it himself, cut down
the trees and made it himself, you know.
And they were glad to have it and
it came down to us and then finally
got lost.
You know, we got one of these functional,
we got these functional chairs now, you know,
that make you feel like a potted flower
when you get down into them.
But anyhow, they used to make things and
enjoy making them and keep them for two
or three hundred years.
Say, my great-great-grandfather made that.
That was when work meant something.
Women made jelly and pick a lily and
all the rest and were proud of it
and telling my wife today about my old
mother.
She made butter and sold it in a
little town nearby and she had a reputation
for making good butter.
She never let it get rancid.
It was always just the right, everything was
good.
My mother was really and properly and pardonably
proud of the fact that people when they
came to the store said, we'd like a
couple of pounds of butter.
Have you got any made by Mrs. Tozer?
And she was proud of it, God bless
her little old heart.
She was proud of the fact she could
make butter.
You don't even know, you've never even seen
the cow that gave them milk that your
butter came from, you know.
You've got no pride in your butter now,
got no pride in your jelly.
We buy jelly that says made in Scotland,
of all things you know.
Not jelly, but it's, what do you call
this stuff you put on food?
Marmalade.
Made in Scotland.
Work used to be something you could be
proud of.
It's something you get through with as fast
as you can now in order to get
the money out of it, in order that
you can go play.
So there's been a radical change in our
views of work and a radical change in
our views of money.
I was mentioning to somebody recently of the
first penny I ever owned, I remember, ever
earned, I remembered, first penny, not dollar, penny,
I remember it.
I went out and helped a fellow pull
weeds out of a corn patch.
I was a little sawed-off fellow and
I'd never earned a penny in my life.
And I helped him with his weeds and
he gave me a penny.
I didn't keep it, I wish I had,
but I think I know probably what I
did with it.
I would dash off, it was a mile
and a half to the store, and I
had to go across and I'd buy a
penny's worth of candy.
I got a handful in those days and
I always kept some for my mother, I
remember that.
No, I'd no more do it than I'd
cut my own head off, eat all the
candy.
It was sticky and it was dirty the
time Mother got it, and it was usually,
I pulled it out of a pant pocket
covered with lint, but Mother got a little
of it anyhow and thought best that she
was too smart to ever let me see
her eat it or ever know that she
didn't.
But I rather suspect that she didn't or
at least washed it first.
But that was the day when money meant
something to somebody, but money doesn't mean anything
to anybody now much.
You get enough of it and away it
goes.
There's been a radical change in our attitude
toward our reason for living.
Our old Presbyterian friend said, man was born
to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
But now we've changed it so nobody knows
why he was born.
And our human goals and heaven and eternity
and the world to come, vastly different attitude
toward that now.
You remember the old poem written by a
long fellow, the village smithy beneath the spreading
chestnut tree the village smithy stands, and in
one place he says about the old village
smithy with his hard hands and his soft
heart, he went on Sunday to the church
and sat among the boys.
He heard his daughter's voice singing in the
village choir and it made him think of
her mother's voice singing in paradise.
And with his hard rough hand he wiped
a tear out of his eye.
But we're not thinking so much about that
now.
The churches are not thinking about heaven.
They're thinking about whether we should have the
atom bomb in Canada and whether capital punishment
is right or wrong and whether we should
or should not live with Khrushchev.
They think about earthly things.
And the views of men have to do
with earth.
The views of the church in the early
church had to do with heaven and God.
And now it has to do with this
world.
The communists have made us ashamed.
They have said, you're not worried about people
now.
You're looking for pie in the sky.
And because these poor creatures were only half
-saved to begin with, they allowed themselves to
get intimidated by the mocking shout, pie in
the sky, pie in the sky.
Well, if any commie ever came up to
me and said, you're selling pie in the
sky, I'd say three things.
First, I'm not selling pie.
Second, I'm not selling anything in the sky.
And third, I'm not selling anything.
But I believe in heaven and God and
the future nevertheless.
But these changes have come.
Now, part of the liberals have outright said
that they've come and we've got to face
them and we've got to adjust to them
and we can't be the way our fathers
were.
And we can't expect Christians to be the
kind of Christians they were in those early
days.
They were simple-hearted, childlike people with no
knowledge of astronomy and no knowledge of science
and no knowledge of themselves, no knowledge of
human motives or the nature of the universe.
And they just took things simply and naively
like children.
We've got to be different now.
Now I want to ask you, haven't you,
old church, and you that listen to me,
I want to ask you this night in
God's name, choose you this day, are we
going to accept, that is, accept in act
if not in creed, in act if not
in creed, are we going to accept the
belief that the Bible must be interpreted anew
in the light of a new development?
Are we going to allow ourselves to accept
the doctrine that the prophets and apostles were
mistaken about God?
Are we going to allow them to tell
us that the Bible is outmoded and largely
irrelevant and must therefore be reassessed in the
light of modern advancements?
Are we going to do it?
If we are, then God help us, for
it is already written across our door, which
way shall we go here?
Has God changed?
Are we going to accept it?
Is there a change in the purpose of
God?
Have these changes in human society, have they
startled God?
Have they shocked him?
Have they brought him to heel?
Have they changed the everlasting God, the Creator
of the heaven and the earth?
Is Jesus Christ, who said, I'm the same
yesterday, today and forever, is he changed?
Is he now chiefly useful as a name
to be used when you baptize your baby
or at Christmastime or Easter?
Or is Jesus Christ what the apostles and
who the apostles said he was?
Have the scientists now been able to do
and the industrialists, have they been able to
do what Jesus said the gates of hell
couldn't do, prevail against the Church?
And is the day of miracles past?
Must we, in order to keep intellectually respectable
and have good standing with these who doubt
the word, must we humbly say, well, I
don't believe in miracles.
You're right, Doctor.
I don't believe in miracles anymore.
Or have we got enough left of our
Protestant protest and enough of our courage to
stand up and say, I believe in miracles
whenever God Almighty wants to perform them?
And I believe that whenever God wants to
do anything, it's out of the ordinary and
contrary, or at least above the common processes
of nature, and God's able to do it.
And I believe the miracles of Jesus Christ.
I believe they were real miracles.
I believe the miracles of the Old Testament.
I believe they were real miracles.
But are we going to allow ourselves to
be brainwashed along with all the rest?
Or are we going to dare to stand
and protest and be known around, over this
country as being Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare as being
Protestants indeed?
to stand and protest and be known around
as being Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare to stand
and protest and be known around as being
Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare to stand
and protest and be known around as being
Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare to stand
and protest as being Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare to stand
and protest and be known around as being
Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare to stand
and protest and be known around as being
Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare to
stand and protest and
be known around as being Protestants indeed?
Or are we going to dare Or are
we going to dare to stand and protest
as being Protestants indeed?
or are we going to dare abroad.
After all, we mustn't be radical, we mustn't
be extreme.
We've got to reassess our faith in the
light of new advanced knowledge.
We've got to rethink our beliefs and our
hopes in the light of new views of
things.
If you adjust, sir, you're done.
But if you dare to stand, the world
will adjust to you, I can promise you
that.
Not all of them, but some of them.
There'll be people that adjust to you.
And I ask, has Jesus Christ been defeated?
There are people right now, Americans and Canadians
and Britishers and Scotsmen and all the rest,
who are worried for fear communism was the
great unforeseen invasion.
They said nothing's been like it, and they're
right, nothing like it since the history of
the world.
But when Karl Marx and Lenin and the
rest of them thought out communism, it was
like opening the pits and letting out their
locusts.
They have taken one-third of the world's
population, and they've killed Christianity wherever they've gone,
except for a few that are hiding away
in secret.
Some are saying to themselves, is communism the
unforeseen, unpredicted invasion?
Is that that thing that God didn't know
about, that Christ didn't foresee?
And so is Christ after having come down
this century, triumphant?
Has he at last met his Waterloo?
What's your answer to that?
My answer is a loud, roaring, resounding, No!
He's never met his Waterloo, and he never
will.
He, the Lord Christ, is going to ride
down the sky on a white horse, and
upon his thigh there will be written, King
of kings and Lord of lords, and the
rich men and the mighty men and the
scientists and the doctors and the lords of
finance will cry for the rocks and the
mountains to fall on them, to hide them
from the wrath of the Lamb and from
the fury of his power.
Have his people at last been plucked out
of his hand?
He said we'd never be plucked out of
his hands.
But did he know enough to tell us
that?
Hadn't there been some new developments he didn't
foresee?
The answer again is, No.
Shall we surrender to the world?
No.
Shall we surrender to liberalism?
No.
Shall we surrender to apostate Protestantism?
The answer is, No.
Shall we surrender to the brainwashed gospel churches
whose preachers are afraid to stand up and
talk as I am talking tonight?
And the answer again is, No.
Our church is going to go the way
of the gospel.
We're not radicals, we're not fools, we don't
fast 40 days, we dress like other people
and drive around and have modern homes and
are human and like to laugh, but we
believe that God Almighty has not changed and
that Jesus Christ is the same and that
he's victorious and that we don't have to
apologize for him and we don't have to
modify nor adjust nor amend.
He stands, that glorious Lord, and nobody needs
to apologize for him.
If our answer to all the questions that
I've asked you is, Yes, then we leave
to our children a heritage of death and
nothing but death.
I'm nearly finished.
Shall we believe the ringing words which say,
I, Jehovah, change not?
I believe them.
Shall we believe those words of the Lord
which say, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday,
today and forever?
I believe them.
Shall we believe the words that say, He
that overcometh I will give to each of
the tree of life.
He that overcometh shall not be hurt of
the second death.
He that overcometh shall sit with me on
my throne.
My dear brother and sister, we're not going
to be sheep running over the precipice because
other dumb sheep are running over the precipice.
We see the precipice, we know it's there,
and we're listening to the voice of the
shepherd, not the voice of the terrified sheep.
But the terrified, intimidated sheep are going everywhere.
I look at the newspaper Saturday night and
I'm hurt inside of my heart.
I read magazines, Christian magazines, religious magazines, that
ostensibly are orthodox and stand for truth, and
the stuff they advertise makes me sick to
my stomach because they've given up to the
belief that the Bible is largely outmoded and
they've got to think up some new deals
in order to get anywhere, that they've got
to reassess our beliefs and rethink our hopes,
and that the prophets and apostles were all
right in their day, but while we believe
in Jesus and want to accept him and
get saved, still we've got to rethink this
whole thing.
I stand solidly in protest against it.
I believe that we need a reformation everywhere,
again in Christian circles, back to the belief
that God knew what he was talking about
in the first place, back to the belief
that Jesus Christ did not miss anything but
saw it all and foresaw it all, back
to the belief that the apostles spake as
they were moved by the Holy Ghost, back
to the belief that our fathers who gave
us the great creeds were not fool but
wise saints and knew what they were talking
about, back to the belief that Protestants are
to protest, that dissenters are to dissent, and
nonconformists are to refuse to conform.
Use of the Scottish blood.
Read your history and be ashamed.
Read your history and see how the day
was when the Covenanters stood and died rather
than give up to the enemy and left
sweet blood on their heather, but they left
it there.
And you of other countries and nations and
generations, use your German blood.
Use the Scandinavian blood.
Read your own history and see how back
there they stood, those fathers.
Are we satisfied to be degenerate sons of
great fathers?
The name of Simpson, my brother mentioned his
name tonight, the man who walked the shores
of the Atlantic Ocean with cardboard in the
soles of his shoes because he didn't have
money to buy new shoes.
The man who walked and prayed and groaned
in spirit as he walked the shores of
that Atlantic and cried to God for men
of all colors that hadn't heard the gospel
and prayed, Oh God, I believe Jesus Christ,
thy son, is the same yesterday, today, and
forever.
We're his descendants supposed to be spiritually.
We ought to spend a day in sackcloth
and ashes.
The man who at 36, the Presbyterian preacher,
was sick, but he said, I feel I'll
fall into the grave when I have a
funeral.
So sick that he couldn't preach for months
at a time.
Went to a little camp meeting in the
woods and heard a colored quartet, four colored
boys sing, No man can work like Jesus.
No man can work like him.
And he went off among the pine trees
with that ringing in his heart.
Nobody can work like Jesus.
Nothing is too hard for Jesus.
No man can work like him.
And the learned, stiff-necked Presbyterian threw himself
down on the pine needles and said, If
Jesus Christ is what they said he was
in that psalm, heal me.
And the Lord healed him.
And he lived to be 76 years old
and founded a society that's now the fifth
largest in the world.
And you can add in Baptists and Protestants,
Baptists and Presbyterians and Methodists and Catholics.
And it's still the fifth largest.
We're his descendants.
We sing his songs.
But are we going to allow ourselves to
listen to the world that will modify our
faith and modify our practices and modify our
beliefs and water down our gospel and thin
down and dilute the power of the Holy
Ghost?
I for one am not going to.
And I'm cheered to know so many of
you are with me in this.
We're going to go to the New Testament.
We're going to be Bible Christians.
We're going to sell out to God and
not to the devil.
We're going to pray more.
We're going to read our Bible more.
We're going to attend prayer meeting more.
We're going to give more.
We're going to break bad habits by the
power of God.
And we're going to become Christians after God's
heart, aren't we?
Amen, aren't we?
And we're going to be protesters in an
hour when that smooth, sticky, slippery, rotten, backslidden,
degenerate and apostate Christianity is the big thing
of the day.
We're going to stand for God, not to
be fools, not to be idiots, not to
be intolerant, not to act like the Duke
of Boers burning their houses down, but to
act like simple Protestant Christians, to act like
our Presbyterian Scottish forebears, to act like our
English Methodist forebears, to act like the dear
old Baptist who broke the ice in the
creek and baptized them through the ice.
And they had a saying in those days,
nobody ever thought they would get baptized in
the ice.
God Almighty thought that nobody ever died on
the moon.
They made these two nations.
They made this continent.
Are we going to be descendants of which
they can be ashamed?
Or are we going to say, Lead on,
boys, we're following.
You follow Jesus Christ and we'll follow you.
I believe, my brethren, that God's hearing our
prayers and hearing our declarations and that we're
going to see him do some wonderful things
here at Av.
Hewitt.
I feel good about this myself.
I do.
I believe he's going to do wonderful things
for us here.
Now, some people won't like it.
Some people will get mad.
But if you don't make anybody mad and
they're glad and they're sad, you never were
called a priest anyhow.
So for everyone I make mad, I promise
you to make two glad.
And for everyone I make sad, I promise
you to make three glad.
You'll just believe it and go along and
follow God and Christ and not be brainwashed,
nor dare to listen to the voice of
the siren that says, Things have changed and
you've got to change.
That's what he thinks.
The only change is going to be on
their part.
We're going to stand like rocks, aren't we,
and say, O God, you will give us
the strength and we'll do the standing.
There was an old Welsh preacher I used
to hear.
He had a nice little beard.
He was as beautiful as a picture.
His name was John Thomas.
Now, there isn't a good name.
John Thomas.
And I used to hear John Thomas preach.
He looked like an angel while he preached,
and he'd raise his hand and say, You
supply their grit and God will supply their
grace.
He's right.
You've got the grit, God's got the grace.
Amen?
All right, we're going to sing.