42nd of Isaiah, Behold my servant whom I
uphold, mine elect in whom my soul delighteth.
I have put my spirit upon him.
He shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.
He shall not cry nor lift up nor
cause his voice to be heard in the
street.
The brood shall he not break, and the
smoking flax shall he not quench.
He shall bring forth judgment unto truth.
He shall not fail nor be discouraged till
he hath set judgment in the earth, and
the isles shall wait for his law.
Thus saith God the Lord, he that created
the heavens and stretched them out, he that
spread forth the earth and that which comes
out of it, he that giveth bread unto
the people, and spirit to them that walk
therein, I the Lord have called thee in
righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will
keep thee, and give thee for a covenant
of the people, for a light of the
Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring
out the prisoners from the prison, them that
sit in darkness out of the prison house.
I am the Lord, that is my name,
and my glory will I not give to
another, neither my praise to graven images.
Behold, the former things are come to pass,
and new things do I declare.
Before they spring forth, I tell you of
them.
Sing unto the Lord a new song and
his praise from the end of the earth,
ye that go down to the sea and
all that is therein, the isles and the
inhabitants thereof.
Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift
up their voice, the villages that Kedar doth
inhabit.
Let the inhabitants of the rocks sing, let
them shout from the top of the mountains,
let them give glory unto the Lord and
declare his praise in the islands.
The Lord shall go forth as a mighty
man, he shall stir up jealousy like a
man of war, he shall cry a roar,
he shall prevail against his enemies.
I have long time holden my peace, I
have been still and refrained myself.
Now will I cry like a traveling woman,
I will destroy and devour at once.
I will make waste mountains and hills and
dry up all herbs, and I will make
the rivers islands, and I will dry up
the pools, and I will bring the blind
by way that they knew not.
I will lead them in paths that they
have not gone or known.
I will make darkness light before them and
crooked things straight.
These things will I do unto them and
not forsake them.
Then there is another passage in the book
of Revelation, this time the 2nd chapter, unto
the angel of the church of Ephesus writes,
These things saith he that holdeth the seven
stars in his right hand, who walketh in
the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.
I know thy works, and thy labor, and
thy patience, and how thou canst not bear
them which are evil.
Thou hast tried them which say they are
apostles, and are not, and hast found them
liars.
This born in his patience and for my
name's sake hath labored and is not fainted.
Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou
hast left thy first love.
Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and
repent, and do the first works, or else
I will come unto thee quickly, and will
remove thy candlestick out of his place, except
thou repent.
But this thou hast, that thou hatest the
deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.
He that hath the nearer, let him hear
what the Spirit saith unto the churches.
To him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the tree of life, which is
in the midst of the paradise of God.
Father, we pray that thou wilt answer a
great many prayers tonight.
Prayers have been made in home groups, pre
-service prayer meetings, in lonely bedrooms and kitchens.
Now, O Lord, we pray, answer.
And may we have a visitation of thy
grace to our hearts this night, that you
may hear us, the complement of assuming that
you were serious-minded and responsible adults, that
you were seriously concerned with the religious situation
today, and that you were deeply desirous of
enjoying the approval of the great God Almighty,
and that you were eager to be and
make this church a New Testament church, a
little ark in the midst of the waters,
a fountain of truth in the midst of
deserts.
And I hear God saying to me, Son
of man, I do send thee unto this
people, thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith
the Lord.
And they, whether they will hear or whether
they will forbear, yet shall know that a
prophet has been among them.
Now, I want to talk a little tonight
briefly about the great decision, the great decision
that every denomination has to make somewhere in
the development of its history.
And every denomination does make it.
And every church has to make it somewhere
at its beginning or a little later, usually
it's a little later.
And every board is faced with a decision
and has to keep making it, not by
one great decision once for all made, but
a series of little decisions every time they
meet, adding up to one great big one.
And every pastor has to face it, every
pastor has to make this decision and keep
making the decision and keep renewing it on
his knees before God.
And every church leader has to make it,
every editor, every evangelist, everyone has to make
this decision.
And this decision is a matter of judgment.
It is a matter of judgment upon that
church, that denomination, that board, that pastor, that
leader, and upon their descendants and spiritual children.
Now, I've talked about the decision, but haven't
told you what it is, and now I
want to tell you what it is.
The decision that denominations have to make at
first or later, often later, that churches have
to make sometime in their history, usually a
little long after they become prosperous, that boards
have to make and pastors have to make,
is this one.
Shall we modify the truth to attract more
adherents, or shall we preserve the truth and
go with God?
This is the decision, I repeat, that every
denomination has had to make.
Shall we modify the truth in doctrine and
practice, or doctrine or practice, and gain more
adherents, or shall we preserve the truth in
doctrine and practice and go with God and
take the consequences?
Now, if the decision is the first one,
that we modify the truth and the practice
of the church, then we're responsible for the
consequences, whatever they may be, and God knows
what they are.
History has shown what they are.
But if we make the second choice, to
preserve the truth and go with God, then
God accepts the responsibility.
Now, I say that this is the choice
we've got constantly to be making.
You businessmen have to make that choice in
your business.
You have to make it when you make
out your income tax.
You students have to make it in school.
We have to make it everywhere in our
life as we touch society.
Shall we preserve the truth and the practice
of the truth and go with God, or
shall we alter it just comfortably in order
to be more popular, gain more adherents and
get longer in the world?
Now, actually, such a question never should need
to be asked at all.
It is like asking, Should a man be
faithful to his wife?
There is only one answer to the question.
Only one answer to the question.
When we say, Shall we preserve the truth
and practice of the church and go with
God, or shall we modify it for immediate
and visible results?
We ought to have only one answer to
that.
It's not a debatable question, and yet it
is one that has to be constantly debated
in the secret prayer chamber, constantly debated when
the great conferences meet, debated when boards meet,
debated when the pastor must make a selection
or a choice or a decision.
Here is what separates me from a great
many men who are perhaps greater power than
I am in ability.
It is this, it is my conviction long
held and deeply confirmed by knowledge of the
fact that modern gospel churches, almost without exception,
but not quite, modern gospel churches, almost without
exception, have decided to modify the truth and
practice a little in order to have it
easier, to have more adherents and to get
along better.
Now, I say that when we make such
a decision, we have the consequences then upon
ourselves.
We are responsible for the consequences.
Now, what have the consequences been?
The consequences have been an absence of the
spirit of worship in the church, so that
many people do not even know what you
mean when you say a spirit of worship.
That's what's tragic to me.
I wish God would either change things a
little and give me a sight of his
glory among his people, or I wouldn't dare
take me home.
Elijah said that, and they sent a chariot
for him.
I want to stick around a while and
work.
I'm not anxious to go home right now,
but I want to stay around a while.
But I admit sometimes I feel like the
man of God who said, Oh, that I
had the wings of a dove that I
might fly away into the wilderness and be
at rest.
But so many of the Lord's people don't
know what you mean when you say a
spirit of worship in a church, and they
look at you and don't know what you're
talking about.
That is because they are poor victims of
boards and churches and denominations and pastors who
have made the ignoble decision to modify truth
and practice a little.
God said, All right, if you do, I
withdraw from you the spirit of worship.
I remove your candlesticks.
And then there is the absence of spiritual
desire.
I want to ask you a question tonight.
Do your own preaching, brother.
You don't have to have me stand up
here.
You have to do your own preaching.
How many people do you know that are
all burnt up with spiritual desire?
Tell me that, will you?
How many people do you know in Toronto?
How many do you know that are all
burnt up with longing after God, that when
you talk to them there are tears in
their eyes, tears of eagerness?
When you talk to them and the conversation
soon gets around, Oh, that I might know
God better.
How many?
Yet our fathers had it, and used to
go and spend days with God, days with
God.
And the coldness of heart, which of course
is the same thing.
That is one of the consequences, another one
of them.
And we are responsible because we have made
the wrong choice.
The coldness of heart, oh, the cold heart!
To be baptized with the fire of inward
longing just a little, when you have once
known it, you are never satisfied afterward with
the coldness of heart.
When G.
Campbell Morgan, the great British, great English preacher,
had been over to Wales and had seen
the Welsh revival and then had come back
to Westminster Chapel beside Buckingham Palace.
Incidentally, I've been invited over there a number
of times to preach and never have gone.
I haven't got any good censure, I'd go,
so I could say I preached there.
But I never did.
When he was over to Wales and came
back to that place, what he had seen
in Wales so moved the great expositor that
he got up and roundly lectured his audience.
He said, You're a cold, but you don't
even sing warm.
I suppose he said warmly.
But anyway, he blamed them, he said, You
don't even sing right.
He had heard them sing, and you know
how they did it.
They sang the psalms, they sang nothing but
the psalms, they sang only the psalms, they
sang the psalms.
And the man would get up to preach,
and down there in the audience somebody would
raise a sand.
And off the whole congregation would go singing
the psalms, and the preacher would have to
sit down in confusion.
God never told him to preach anyhow, and
they knew it.
So they just sung the boy down.
And then two or three people would get
down on their knees and get converted down
there.
No altar, just got converted where they were.
The fire of God would fall upon them
everywhere.
One fellow got up and said, I have
a sermon tonight that consists of three C's.
And he gave his C number one and
C number two and C number three.
And before he was half through with C
number one, the Holy Ghost fell on the
audience, and somebody with a high voice raised
a sand.
And they sang him down, and he sat
down with the other two C's unmolested, never
even opened them.
That was that warmth of heart, that kind
of thing, warmth of heart.
But we don't have it because we have
made the ignoble decision that we would rather
compromise a little bit with truth and practice
than to go with God.
And then the lack of the spirit of
prayer.
The spirit of prayer.
No child is born until there is labor,
until there is labor.
And when Israel prevails, she shall bring forth.
Then that man whom God used to start
the great revival, Evan Roberts, where Evan Roberts
was in a prayer meeting, somebody said to
him, some old Ethan said to him, Evan,
never miss a prayer meeting, because if you
miss a prayer meeting, that may be the
one where the Holy Ghost falls.
He said, I'll remember that.
I want to be present when the Holy
Ghost falls.
And so Evan never missed a prayer meeting.
And one night when he was on his
knees, the Holy Spirit fell on him, and
he began to pray, O God, bend me,
bend me, bend me.
And he didn't want to break in on
another man's prayer, and he said, I waited
for the other man to get through, but
it seemed he would never get through.
He prayed on and on and on.
Finally he tapered off and petered out and
said, Amen.
And Evan began to pray, and the place
was shaken with that man's prayer.
And from there on, the revival in Wales
was under way.
Now, that's the spirit of prayer.
When the spirit of prayer falls on people,
God answers their prayers, and things are done.
When the spirit of prayer isn't on us,
we just mumble on endlessly.
But when the spirit of prayer is on
us, the spirit praying in us to the
God above us will get things done around
us.
And then no sense of God's presence in
the average church.
I get around quite a little, but I
don't go into many places where I find
the sense of God's presence at all.
I preached the other night in the Presbyterian
Church, and we went in with the processional
and went out with the recessional, and I
walked up the wrong side and got in
the wrong seat.
But let my children say I never do
know which foot to head or where I'm
going.
I did it, but it was all right.
I preached to them and told them about
what I tell you here and went home.
Some of them said it was good, but
that's all I was to it.
But it was average, a good average church
and a nice Brother in Charge, and I
enjoyed it.
But I didn't sense particularly God's presence there,
as I don't particularly sense God's presence almost
anywhere.
I have almost no answers to prayer and
almost no divine manifestations.
And then, as I've pointed out before, this
deadliest of all, the absence of saintliness.
We got a few Saints around Avenue Road
Church, thank God.
I've never been in a church yet that
there weren't a few Saints.
The few that were so sold out to
God that you couldn't keep them still and
that they were always coming up with something,
you know they had been in the presence
of the Lord, and who lived their lives
regularly and consistently, right down the way.
Everything they did was congruous with everything they
testified to, but as a rule, were not
a saintly people.
And why?
It's God that the spirit of worship should
be on us until tears would be as
common as the snow over Toronto.
And it's the will of God that we
should be burnt with spiritual desire, that when
we sing, O Jesus, Jesus, dearest Lord, forgive
me if I say for very love thy
precious name a thousand times a day, we
wouldn't be singing hypocritically, but we would mean
it.
It is God's will that we should have
no coldness of heart.
You know the difference between coldness of heart
and warmth of heart?
It's the difference between being in love and
not being in love.
When a person loves deeply, whether it's the
opposite sex or whether it's a baby or
a child or someone you deeply love, it
warms the affections.
When our telephone rings at night and the
lady at the other end of the line
says, Would you receive this phone call, please?
It's collect, somebody named Becky.
Why, sure, and as soon as that voice,
Hi!
Why, there's something warm inside of you.
It's the difference between, I get calls from
people and I don't feel anything warm, a
long distance call, somebody down here or there
wants me to do something, and I like
them, but I'm not particularly warm.
But that's the difference.
God wants us to have warm hearts, and
he wants us to have a spirit of
prayer so that prayer is effective.
Most prayer is forever turning the key on
a dead battery and sit there and turn
the key and it doesn't even whine.
Turn the key for a half hour, 20
minutes, and say, Our Lord and our Father,
29 times.
And still when it's all over, not a
buzz, nothing!
God doesn't want us to pray like that.
He wants a spirit of prayer to be
on the people, and you know you can
have that spirit of prayer.
We can have that spirit of prayer.
And he wants to answer our prayers, and
he wants the sense of his presence to
be upon us.
And always remember one thing, when the Spirit
of the Lord comes, that is the presence,
and you have that presence.
And he does want to manifest himself.
I'd like to put myself on record, I
don't care what people say or what they
think of me, other churches and other people,
but I'd like to put myself on record
as saying, Our eagerness to be proper and
never get out of order or do anything
or have anything happen, fanatical, has chilled us
down until nothing happens at all.
No divine manifestation and an absence of saintliness.
He wants us to have all of this.
How do we get into this fix that
we're in?
Evangelicals follow the trend.
It's always dangerous to follow a trend unless
your eyes are open and you know where
the trend is going.
Evangelicals followed a trend that began in the
last decades of the last century and carried
on over with some big names promoting it,
largely United States preachers, I am very sorry
to say.
And it was weakly adopted by the churches,
even by our good Canadians who were weak
enough to adopt some of the degenerate practices
of the U.S. preachers.
And in their zeal to make converts and
adherents, they oversimplified the Christian faith.
See, that's our difficulty, we oversimplify it and
yet we never get simple.
Isn't that odd?
We oversimplify the truth and yet we're the
most complex, mixed up.
The average Christian is like a kitten that
has found a ball of yarn and he
has played with it and romped until he's
wrapped in a cocoon and can't get himself
out.
He just lies there and whimpers.
Somebody has to come and unrewind him.
And yet we've tried to be simple, but
instead of being simple, we've simplified, but we've
not become simple.
We're sophisticated and over-complexed.
We've simplified it so that Christianity amounts to
this.
God is love, Jesus died for you, believe,
accept, be jolly, have fun and tell others.
And away we go.
That's the Christianity of the day.
Ladies and gentlemen, I wouldn't give a nickel
for the whole business of it.
Once in a while God has a poor
bleeding sheep that manages to live on that
kind of thing, and we wonder how.
I've traveled through the American Southwest and I've
seen cattle there with swaybacks and you could
count every rib if the train wasn't going
too fast, standing out there between stalks of
long grass that's brown and dry and hard.
And as we sailed by on a fast,
streamlined train, I wondered how the poor thing
ever lived, but somehow they managed to do
it.
So you'll find a few God people here
and there, even in that kind of an
atmosphere.
The whole generations of Christians, that's the hard
part about it, have grown up believing that
this is the faith of our Father, living
still inside a dungeon, fire and sword.
The devil wouldn't be caught dead trying to
kill anybody for acting like that.
It doesn't bother him, you see.
The only thing the devil hates is somebody
that's after him.
Somebody that's after him.
When my good friend Alan Redpath shakes your
hand to say goodbye, he smiles and says,
well, K.O.K.T.D. Now some
of you English people know what that means,
but a lot of you don't.
It means, keep on kicking the devil.
Keep on kicking the devil, he says.
The devil doesn't mind if you're not a
bother to him.
If you're not a bother to him, and
most of us aren't a bother to him,
the devil looks at us and smiles and
says, that poor little emasculated, effeminate weakling can't
do my kingdom any harm.
The whole generation has thought that that's Christianity,
that that's the faith of our Father, living
still inside a dungeon, fire and sword.
Nobody would ever put that fellow in a
dungeon, he was already there, he was born
in it.
Nobody would ever throw him to the flames
because he was harmless, I repeat.
Well, there must come a reformation, a revival,
if you like, that will result in a
fresh emphasis on neglected truth.
I don't preach any new truth, none.
I don't have a new doctrine, not one
lonely new doctrine do I believe in, not
one.
And if anybody would come here preaching a
new doctrine, I'd say, I'm sorry, brother, but
the place is taken.
I wouldn't lie him in the pulpit.
We don't want a new doctrine, we want
a fresh emphasis on doctrine already well known
by all of us.
And then we must have a revival that
will mean purity of heart as a normal
standard for everybody.
Purity of heart.
We must be clean people, not only clean
outside.
The average evangelical doesn't smoke, and so because
he doesn't smoke, he feels that he is
doing God's service.
And he also doesn't drink.
Thank God for that.
Thou hast, says the Holy Ghost, done a
few things.
He said, I know your works.
Thou dost not smoke, and thou dost not
drink.
And thou dost not go to theatres, but
thou dost not mind having them come to
your house.
Excuse me, that was another version, but it's
there.
And the pure purity of heart is taken
for God.
That we must have, purity of heart, so
that we are a clean people.
Even in my lifetime, and I haven't lived
500 years yet, I can well remember where
if anybody got mad, he had to go
to an altar and get cleansed.
Everybody knew he was out of victory and
wasn't right with God.
Anybody got jealous, he had to go down
before God and get cleaned out.
He took that for granted.
People were supposed to have pure hearts.
And we need and must have a revival
that will mean divine energy to give our
Christian witness.
You shall receive power when the Holy Ghost
has come upon you and you shall be
my witnesses.
It's pretty tough to try to talk to
people about the Lord and not get anywhere
with them at all, not have any power
at all on you.
And then where there are frequent answers to
prayer and this, the calling out of Christian
missionaries and preachers, I'd like to see our
young people come up and feel the call
of God on them until they had to
leave us and go.
And begin to preach everywhere, everywhere preaching as
the book of Acts says.
I'd like to see the Spirit of God
move upon us until our young people can't
afford to sit and figure out who they
are going to marry and when.
But that will come in its time, but
they are thinking, where can I serve God?
And then one day suddenly the hand of
God will be laid on their shoulder and
off they'll go.
How many have I seen like that?
That the Lord laid his hands on young
fellows and young girls.
I don't like to speak about it because
I know how odious it is.
And I also know, as I have pointed
out, that always a blessing comes someplace else.
But I've seen it so many times.
Some people come and say, I feel that
God has his hand on me.
And I've had people say, God's got his
hand on me.
I knew God during the Second World War.
He's an oddball, literally, and that's a matter
of temperament, just a plain oddball.
I never thought him to amount to very
much, really.
He went off to the war and he
got wounded and was tumbling over a crag
over a cliff and would have fallen to
his death below.
Before he went over there he said, I'm
called to Ethiopia.
When he got on the war he said,
I'm called to Ethiopia.
Nobody would have him, the lions wouldn't have
him, nobody would have him.
When he got wounded he said, I'm called
to Ethiopia.
And when he was tumbling and sliding slowly
to certain death, he was called to Ethiopia.
And a great big old tough sergeant saw
him and grabbed him as he was going
over and hauled him back.
And he got well.
He came back after the war, nobody wanted
him, hadn't been to the proper amount of
schools, but finally some society got hold of
him, a well-known society and as large
as the Alliance, and they sent him to
Ethiopia.
He went over there and has been preaching
there ever since.
I believe this.
So desperately needed now that such times of
revival and reformation have come, in Exodus they
came to end 400 years of Israel's defeat.
I read only today of Hezekiah, the son
of an evil father Ahaz, who had brought
Israel to the lowest condition morally that she
had been in for a long time.
He died, I almost said thank God, and
his son Hezekiah reigned in his stead.
Hezekiah was a holy man and he sought
God immediately.
And he threw the dirt out of the
temple and sent word throughout all Israel and
said, Come to the meeting.
And they began to be blessed and they
cleansed the temple and started the fires again,
and first thing they know they had a
revival on their hands.
And it was Hezekiah that prayed when this
Sennacherib came down like a wolf on the
fold, with his cohorts all gleaming in purple
and gold.
It was under Hezekiah that the breath of
the Lord smote all those thousands and delivered
Hezekiah.
Then they returned from Babylon when God spoke
to a man who cared, a man with
a concern who was compared to the king.
And the king said, What's the matter with
you?
You haven't been gloomy like this before.
And he said, Your Majesty, pardon me, please,
but I can't help it, my heart's not
broken.
He said, What's the matter with you, Nehemiah?
He said, My father's city lies in rubble
and the foxes run over the walls, and
the glorious temple where we used to worship
Jehovah has been razed to the ground, and
the religion of Israel has gone into decay.
The old king, not knowing that God was
working in his life, said, You go back
and look it over and then come back
and we'll send somebody over.
That was the beginning of the return from
Babylon.
Since Bible times, we've had these periods of
refreshing from the presence of the Lord, and
now I, in my conclusion of this series,
lay it at your feet.
Hear what the Spirit said unto the churches.
But I don't want to leave you in
low key.
I want to read something to you here
that one good brother who wrote a book
on this that he sent me last week,
I just happened to notice this today as
I was looking at the 2nd chapter.
He said, God added a postscript to that,
and here is the postscript.
He that hath an ear, let him hear
what the Spirit saith unto the churches.
To him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the tree of life which is
in the midst of the paradise of God.
To him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the tree of life which is
in the midst of the paradise of God.
Each of you has a private battle on,
each of you has a private fight, and
you are in the midst of a wicked
and adulterous generation.
But you've got to overcome.
He that overcometh indicates that you can overcome,
but he that overcometh indicates that not all
do overcome.
But the overcoming Christian, they used to teach
it even, they used to say, we've got
to be overcomers to be ready for the
Lord's return.
But you can overcome.
You can overcome your own flesh, which will
be the hardest.
You can overcome tradition and custom, which will
be the second hardest.
You can overcome all things, the devil and
the world.
To him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the tree of life which is
in the midst of the paradise of God.
My brethren, Toronto doesn't know it yet, but
Toronto is waiting to hear an authentic voice.
Toronto is waiting to hear an authentic voice,
a voice that's from God, not an echo
of what others are doing and saying, but
an authentic voice.
Oh, it would be an honor that we
don't deserve if it would be from here
that God would send that voice out.
It would be an honor we don't deserve
if it would be from here that the
news would slowly get booted abroad and wouldn't
cost a penny.
Why do you know that God is working
over there?
God is working, and they would come to
see him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the tree of life.
I know you're with me in this.
With my whole heart I know it.
I know mobs and masses are not, but
I know you are.
I'll tell you what I'm going to do
tonight.
I'm going to ask that you will join
me in a time of prayer.
Maybe the best way would be to stand
one after the other and pray instead of
going to a side room and pray.
I thought we might go into a side
room, but I don't know we'd need to.
Suppose that we just get quiet now for
a little bit and we wait a little
on God for a moment or two, and
then when I give you the word, one
after the other rise.
Maybe it will be to pour out a
confession to God.
Maybe it will be to pour out a
brief but heartfelt yearning for God.
Maybe it will be to intercede for some
loved ones with groanings that can hardly be
uttered.
If we're not free enough in the Spirit
to pray and make ourselves heard and pray,
then we're even worse than I've described.
But I believe we're free, and let's pause
for a moment now in the stillness and
get our hearts tuned to God's voice.
Remember, God's word comes down from heaven as
scripture.
It goes back to him as prayer and
comes back again from him as answer.
So the answer and the word are all
tied up together.
The word comes down from God to us,
goes back to him as prayer and comes
back from him as answer.
Remember that.
Now, those of you who feel free in
God, please don't pray a long time.
If you pray a long time, I might
have to tap the microphone or something.
But pray your heart out to God, one
after the other.
Who will stand first and lead off in
an earnest prayer for revival for this church,
for this city, for the evangelical churches, then
to spill over into the semi-liberal churches
until Toronto shall feel the throb of a
new, new afflatus of power.