Dear Lord Jesus, here we are between heaven
and hell, in this spinning world, and our
time is short, and our days are few,
and we so much need thee.
Thou hast put a light in the dark
place, that we might not be as those
who sleep, and who sleep in the night,
but that we might know, and be awake,
and be informed, and alert.
We pray thou wilt help us tonight, O
God, in hearing.
May we hear thee speak, Lord.
We have heard men, we have heard them,
Lord, until there where we were of them.
We have heard men who know not whereof
they speak, speaking of that whereof they know
nothing.
Thou, O God, knowest all things.
Speak thou, Lord, to our hearts.
May the people hear a voice, it's not
only the voice of a man, but within
it and back of it, may they hear
thy voice, and be conscious that they are
listening to a proclamation, a trumpet, a voice.
Great God, make it so.
Help us now tonight, in Christ's name.
Amen.
Now turn to the book of Revelation, please,
the 8th chapter.
The 8th chapter of the book of Revelation,
and we'll see what we can find here
for the lesson tonight.
The man of God said, when he had
opened the 7th seal, there was silence in
heaven about the space of half an hour.
And I don't want anybody to come up
to me and say, what does that mean?
Because I don't know.
If I knew, I would tell you, but
I don't know what it means, silence in
heaven about the space of half an hour.
And I've found that what we don't know
usually is very fine material for some wonderful
sermons.
But I refuse to preach about that of
which I know nothing, and I know little
about this, except that there was a pause
there.
Perhaps it was a sort of a sila.
You know in the Old Testament, they're reading
along in the Psalms, you come to the
word sila.
Nobody knows what it means, some read it
and some don't.
But it means pause, stop here.
Maybe a musical notation, we don't know.
And God is working, the seals are being
opened, and when the 7th seal is opened,
there is a pause, a kind of a
divine sila in heaven yonder, as though the
wheels of judgment had ground for a little
while to a merciful stop.
And then, after the passing of that space
of half an hour, I saw the 7
angels which stood before God, and to them
were given 7 trumpets.
Now these 7 angels are pointed out here
as being something special for the occasion, but
they're certainly not all the angels, for we
read of 10,000 times 10,000 of
them.
And to them were given the 7 trumpets,
but these 7 trumpets indicate that God was
giving these special 7 trumpets to these special
angels for a purpose.
There were other trumpets also throughout the word
of God.
And when these trumpets were about to sound,
I noticed something here which I wonder if
you have ever thought of.
Another angel came and stood at the altar,
at the divine altar in heaven.
This scene evidently takes place in heaven.
And the angel stands at the altar.
This angel, or messenger of God, probably was
sent from the throne of God.
Some would think it was Christ himself.
But there was given to this one a
golden censer, and there was given unto him
much incense, that he should offer it with
the prayers of all the saints upon the
golden altar which was before the throne.
You see, the earth is waiting, and God
is watching the earth's cup of iniquity fill
up.
And the people of God are praying.
And they have been praying ever since our
Lord opened his mouth and said, When ye
pray, pray our Father which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven.
And the people of God have been praying,
O God, thy kingdom come, thy will be
done.
And back in the 6th chapter, the souls
under the altar have been praying, How long,
O Lord, holy and true, how long?
And the saints have been in prayer asking
that the kingdom of God might come on
the earth.
And you know the kingdom, that prayer can't
be answered, that prayer can't be answered unless
there's first the judgment of God to shake
loose the earth from the usurpers who now
hold it and give it back over to
the Son of God to whom it belongs,
who created it and who bought it back
with his own precious blood.
And the prayers of the saints were upon
the golden altar, but they were for the
time ineffective there.
And I'd like to point out in passing
here that there are times when the prayers
of the saints are ineffective, that is, they
are held for a while, as the seed
is put into the earth in the fall
of the year.
It doesn't die, but there's no evidence that
it's there.
The winter is on and the snow comes
heavy and it melts and freezes and more
snow comes.
In the field where ten thousands of living
grains lie ready to burst into blossom and
bloom, they are lying cold under the ice,
dormant and for the time ineffective.
And then when the right circumstances come, they
suddenly break out and you have a great
waving field of grain.
So the prayers of all the saints have
gone up to God upon the altar and
they're kept there.
And then when they are mixed with prayer
from off the altar or with incense, much
incense, when the prayers of Christ from the
altar are mixed with the prayers of the
saints living and dead, that is, those who
are now living and dead, then the smoke
of the incense, which came with the prayers
of the saints, ascended up before God out
of the angel's hand and the angel took
the censer and filled it with fire of
the altar.
I repeat that the earth is not going
to have the talons of the usurper shaken
loose from it until there is judgment and
the fire of the altar.
And it was cast upon the earth, or
into the earth, and when it was cast
into the earth, then there were voices and
thunders and lightnings and an earthquake.
Men like to believe that this nation or
that nation, this army or that army, this
weapon or that weapon, this bomb or that
bomb, is going to hold the balance of
power and determine the situation.
But I tell you tonight, my friends, that
the world's ultimate outcome, the outcome of things,
will be determined not by the nuclear bombs
of men, not by armies and generals and
summit conferences and general assemblies of nations, but
the outcome will result from the prayers of
the saints.
Every time a soul in the Holy Ghost
prays, "'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,'
that prayer is registered there before God as
a seed is put into the earth.
But conditions down here in the world have
iced over and piled snow upon those prayers
for the time.
But a time is coming when God will
pour out incense with the prayers of the
saints and the effective prayer of Jesus Christ
will join with the effectual prayers of righteous
men.
And then when God sees this, he will
pour out of that censer fire on the
altar of the altar upon the earth and
there will be voices and thunderings and lightnings
and an earthquake.' And then the seven angels
which had the seven trumpets prepare themselves to
sound.
Why are they sounding the trumpets?
They are sounding the trumpets in order to
announce to mankind that there is another world
than this.
Now let's look at the trumpets in the
scriptures for a little while.
125 times in the Bible the trumpets are
mentioned, 125 times.
In ancient Israel the trumpets served as a
bugle in an army.
As an army camp is always within sound
of the bugle, so Israel in the wilderness
could always hear.
If you were to blow a trumpet down
in Toronto's downtown, people out where I live
on the city limits couldn't hear it.
But the camp of the army can be
heard, the bugle can be heard, and the
trumpets could always be heard in Israel.
It was small enough, that is the city
was small enough, so that the trumpet when
it was blown could be heard.
And different calls meant different things.
The trumpet blew a certain sound, it was
alarm.
Anybody who has ever served in the army
knows what old first call is.
That miserable first call that gets you out
of bed.
And you know what the call to the
colors is at night.
You know what the call to mess call
is when you are called to meals at
noon and morning, noon and night.
And you know what taps when it's good
night, when that's finished and the lights are
out and everyone rests.
And so it was in Israel.
They had a call that was the sound
of the alarm.
And they had another was a call to
assembly.
They had another was the call of the
feast.
They had another was a call to war.
They had another that sounded forth the day
of jubilee, or as our colored friends sing,
the day of jubilee.
They sing for the day of jubilee, the
day when God shall deliver all men everywhere
from the bondage of iniquity.
And the prophets carry that figure over and
use it, and blow the trumpet in Zion
and sound the alarm and warn the people,
cries the Holy Ghost through the prophets.
And Paul in the New Testament said, If
the trumpet give an uncertain sound, how shall
a man prepare himself to battle?
You'll remember that on Mount Sinai, the trumpet
of God sounded with darkness and earthquakes and
thunder and lightning.
And in the judgment time, I read here
in the book of Matthew, immediately after the
tribulation of those days, shall the sun be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her
light, and the stars shall fall from heaven,
and the powers of the heavens shall be
shaken.
And then shall appear the sign of the
Son of Man in heaven, and then shall
all the tribes of the earth mourn.
And they shall see the Son of Man
coming in the clouds of heaven with power
and great glory, and he shall send his
angels with the great sound of the trumpet.
And they shall gather together his elect from
the four winds, from one end of the
heaven to the other.
And the trumpet shall sound, says Paul in
1 Corinthians 15, that the trumpet shall sound.
Behold, I show you a mystery.
We shall not all sleep, but we shall
all be changed in a moment in the
twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet.
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead
shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be
changed.
Now, that's the reason for the trumpet, for
that's the scriptural setting for it all.
And when it carries over to this book
of Revelation, it comes not as a new
thing introduced, but as something with which any
Bible student is familiar.
Now, the reason for the trumpets of judgment,
I want to talk a little bit about
that.
God once walked and talked with men, and
he spoke to them in the quiet voice
of love.
He spoke to them in the cool of
the day, and they heard his voice as
the voice of love walking among the trees
of the garden.
But men sinned, and now we cannot hear
or will not hear the voice of God.
God has spoken, and God is speaking in
many ways.
He spoke by the prophets, he speaks by
the seers, he speaks in nature, he speaks
by reason, he speaks in the scriptures, he
spoke by holy men who were moved by
the Holy Ghost, he has spoken through holy
men who have lived and preached and prayed
and sang since the Bible was written, and
he spoke most loudly and most clearly in
his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
But sinning men are not listening, they are
not listening tonight, and only an occasional believing
ear at any rate will hear.
He that hath an ear, let him hear,
says the Holy Spirit.
He that hath an ear, let him hear.
And in this hour of the world's agony,
when men have filled a cup of iniquity
and rejected the Father and the Son and
the Holy Ghost, fouled the beautiful earth and
then gone out to do the like to
other worlds, for I have no doubt that
if we go out to other worlds, we'll
foul them there as we're fouling them here.
You know that there is a new law,
a new kind of law.
Not a new law, but a new kind
of law.
You know there's criminal law, there's the tax
laws, there are the laws having to do
with marriage, the laws having to do with
real estate, laws having to do with immigration
and our relation to governments, and there are
patent laws and the laws that I'm interested
in sometimes, copyright laws.
I don't like the copyright, but publishers won't
handle it any other way.
There are copyright books.
And so we have many kinds of laws.
But there's a new kind of law.
We have international law.
There are treaties, for instance, between, say, Canada
and the United States.
Many things that are done are the result
of treaties, laws that are understood and are
valid between the two nations.
Tomorrow morning at ten o'clock I'll get
in a little plane out here at Malden
Airport and we'll hop down to New York,
down across New York State, down over the
boundary line and into New York.
And the next day I'll get in a
plane and hop back.
Well, the reason I can do that and
have nobody bother me is because of treaties
between the two countries.
I find I pay my taxes both places.
Sorry to learn that, but I do.
And that's because of a treaty they tell
me down in Washington that I pay some
here and I pay some down there and
I get kicked around both places.
That's because of a treaty.
But there's another kind of law that is
coming out, and that is space law.
That is how far up is up and
how far up does Canada go?
And if somebody says, well, Canada goes as
far as space goes, well, wait a little
while, the earth turns around and pretty soon
up isn't Canada anymore but some other country
or the Pacific Ocean.
And so we go, there's got to be
laws all worked out.
And there'll be laws one of these times
about the moon and there'll be laws about
the planets.
Pretty soon we'll be having wars and quarrels
and fights and summit conferences and cold wars
over what we do when we get to
the moon.
The United States sent up something the other
day and it blew up on them and
fizzled and landed in the ocean.
But when they get it perfected, and they
always do, they have a few blunders and
then always get it perfected, they'll send a
man over there to the moon.
And when he lights over there in that
cosmic dust, lands over there in that cosmic
dust, why, he'll want to plant the American
flag there or else he'll be told by
international law no, you can't do it.
This is international territory.
Another kind of law.
We're not satisfied with making a hell on
earth.
We're going to make an earth of the
planets and the moon up there.
And when we do, we're going to foul
it up the same as we've fouled everything
up here.
And in this hour, when the cup of
iniquity is filling up, that's a figure of
speech, a frightful, alarming figure of speech used
in the scriptures.
The cup of iniquity is almost full.
And when the cup fills, God watches it
fill up, watches it from his silence, watches
it from his heaven above.
And when the cup of iniquity is just
about ready to brim over, God speaks to
the seven trumpeters.
And they come forth and start blowing their
trumpet.
And God, in the hour when the world
has gone over to Antichrist and enslaved the
major portion of the world and violated every
natural and spiritual law, even the judgments of
God will be considered something else and be
explained away.
I have no doubt about it at all,
but the judgments of God are going to
be explained away.
Remember when God spoke out of heaven to
his Son, the people around heard a voice
and they said it thundered.
But it was the voice of God.
And men are refusing to believe that God
speaks even when he speaks because of our
unbelief.
Science is explaining it all away.
You consider the amazing and terrifying things that
are being done in the realm of biology
now.
You consider that it can be without too
many generations have passed away, that marriage may
be abolished from some countries altogether, and babies
will be in test tubes, just as the
famous Englishman said in Brave World or the
Brave World of Tomorrow, whatever it was.
I read it but can't remember the title.
He went a long way out and he
wrote it a few years ago.
And I heard him on the air the
other day.
He said it was so fulfilled so completely
now that it wasn't new anymore, that the
thing had been not this particular thing, but
it's being fulfilled.
And everybody is saying, instead of saying, listen,
listen, God is speaking.
They are having wise men come up and
adjust their eyepiece, whatever that's for, and explain
it.
And so, my brother and sister, it's going
to take the concord of God to arouse
us.
It's going to take something out of this
world.
And when God shakes the world loose from
her scientists and her politicians, when he shakes
the world loose from her playboys and her
pleasure lovers, when he shakes the world loose,
I say, and turns it over to the
one to whom it belongs, Jesus Christ the
Lord, he's going to do it in a
way that everybody will know that it is
a miraculous manifestation.
Some say that we can believe the book
of Revelation now because of nuclear bombs and
because we have now found the secret of
nature.
I believed it long before the time of
the nuclear bomb.
I lived not too far, preached for 31
years, had a good-sized stone trove, had
a good arm, from where the nuclear bomb
was created, from where it was born.
And yet, I don't believe for one minute
that God is going to allow Khrushchev or
anybody else to take any credit for all
of this.
When God gets ready to take the earth
over and send out his angel to say
the kingdoms of this world have become the
kingdoms of our God and Lord and of
his Christ, in that hour, everybody in heaven
and earth and hell is going to know
this is not a man, not a scientist
working in a laboratory.
Or should I say laboratory and being silent,
because I notice people here do it based
on the radio.
But I was taught to say laboratory and
said it for 60 years, and I don't
know how I can change now without violence
to my dentures.
So I'll say laboratory.
And here, no laboratory anywhere is going to
compound the fire that God pours out on
the earth.
This didn't come out of Russia.
This didn't come out of Oak Ridge.
This came out of heaven.
And the first angel sounded.
And there followed hail and fire mingled with
blood.
And they were cast upon the earth, and
the third part of the trees were burned
up, and all green grass was burned up.
Men loved fire, and God said, All right,
blow the trumpet and give them all the
fire they want.
The second angel sounded and where a great
mountain burning with fire was cast into the
sea.
And the third part of the sea became
blood.
Men loved blood and said, God, blow your
trumpet and give the world all the blood
they can take.
And the third part of the creatures which
were in the sea and had life died.
And the third part of the ships were
destroyed.
And the third angel sounded and there fell
a great star from heaven burning as it
were a lamp and fell upon the third
part of the rivers and upon the fountains
of water.
And the name of the stars was called
Wormwood.
And the third part of the waters became
Wormwood.
And many men died in the waters because
they were made bitter.
Men loved bitterness and hate and gave it
to them.
The fourth angel sounded and the third part
of the sun was smitten.
And the third part of the moon and
the third part of the stars, so was
the third part of them, was darkened.
I wonder if it would be.
I wouldn't attempt to say and I wouldn't
introduce here anything that I could not back
with Scripture.
So I'm only doodling now as I talk
here for the next minute, Matt, and wonder
if it won't be because of what man
has done out in space that God will
finally take his sponge and mop the skies
as well as the earth.
And God will take his divine detergent and
cleanse the heavens as well as the earth
below and cleanse space as well as the
earth.
The fourth angel sounded and the sun was
smitten and the third part of the moon
and the third part of the stars, so
was the third part of them, was darkened.
And the day shone not for a third
part of it and the night likewise.
Then I beheld an angel flying through the
midst of heaven saying with a loud voice,
Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the
earth by reason of the other voices of
the trumpet of the three angels which are
to sound.
Next week I shall talk about Abaddon and
Apollyon and the destroyer and the scorpions that
come up out of the pit.
But I want to talk a little bit
now about this woe, woe, woe.
And God says, if today you will hear
his voice.
You and I are not listening for trumpets
now.
We sing about that and we poetically talk
about listening for the trumpets.
But we have another voice to listen to,
you and I.
It's not the voice of the judgment trumpets,
not the voice of the trumpet blown by
one of the angels marked out, but it's
another voice altogether.
But I want to say to you there
will be manifestations from heaven that cannot be
mistaken.
There will be.
There will be manifestations from heaven.
God says, Christ our Lord said, and it
is written for us in the Gospels, that
the time would come when it should be
and men should be filled with great fear
for things that are coming upon the earth.
I don't know that time is upon us
yet, but I know that time is coming.
All the prophets say so and our Lord
says so and all the apostles say so
and the book of Revelation says so and
the saints down the centuries have believed it
and still believe it.
But do you know what has happened?
We have talked about these things until we
reach the point of diminishing return now.
You can talk about a thing often enough
and long enough and carelessly enough and spiritlessly
enough and pretty soon you reach a point
of diminishing returns and it has no effect
anymore, no meaning anymore.
And that's what's happened to us who are
evangelicals.
Between the first war and the second world
war, men ran out everywhere with their charts
and their pointers and their tickers and their
films and they were telling us more than
the prophets knew.
And we finally got hardened over.
Now we've reached a point of diminishing return.
You hand your baby a glass of milk
now, you don't know whether it is good
milk or whether if you put a Geiger
counter it would click and show that it
was filled with radiation.
You don't know.
And we don't know when we look up
and see something bright in the sky whether
God put it there or whether man put
it there.
And we're getting so we're not frightened anymore.
We're not scared at all.
I understand Russia is preparing to send a
man around the moon right after the first
of the year.
I wouldn't doubt they will do it.
They have not refined things but they have
powerful things.
The United States is sending up refined instruments
and we're earning a great deal scientifically.
Russia cares less.
Russia is sending up vast, huge things and
whirling them around the world up there.
So I wouldn't wonder at all they will
send a man up there and he'll go
out there and spend two and a half
days going and two and a half days
coming back and the world will go wild
over the man who has been to the
moon.
Well, I know that these manifestations that we're
now seeing that man is creating are such
that we are losing our ability to be
afraid anymore.
There's no awe left in the earth.
You know when you get scared enough you
stop being scared.
And when you have been frightened often enough
you stop being frightened anymore.
The old story of the wolf, the boy
that cried wolf when there was no wolf
and cried it so often that he reached
a point of diminishing returns.
And when he cried wolf, when the wolf
came nobody listened to him and the wolf
stole the sheep.
It's simply a wise old man who knew
the human psychology, wrote that little fable, and
it's true enough.
Christians hardly believe the prophets anymore.
Our Lord said, O fools and slow of
heart to believe all that the prophets have
spoken.
We don't believe.
And it's been the result of ignoring.
We have ignored.
We're ignoring God now.
And we're living like twentieth century fatlings in
the stall.
And we're ignoring the truth now.
How long since you've read the prophets and
wept over them?
How long since you've read the prophets and
even been worried about them?
How long?
How long since you've heard a real sermon
on a prophecy and the end time and
the coming of the Lord and the winding
up of these world things and world events?
If Noah had not believed in that hour,
the human race would have been wiped out.
Noah believed.
If Noah had not listened and listened and
not believed, and God spoke and spoke and
Noah hadn't believed, thank God one man believed.
Thou hast found grace in my sight, said
the Holy One to Noah.
And Noah believed.
The preachers tell about how Noah suffered persecution
as he was building of the ark.
I don't know.
It doesn't say that in the Bible.
But knowing humanity, I suppose that he did.
And I suppose that when Noah stood out
there tall and gaunt and thin with his
scraggly beard and a fiery eye and said,
he was a preacher of righteousness, you know,
we're told in the scriptures.
And when he said, The flood is coming
upon the world of ungodly, I can imagine
that nobody believed it at all.
Nobody but his own family believed it.
And if Lot had ignored the warning when
the angels came down and took him by
the arm and said, Come, get out, haste,
get thee away, for the fire is going
to fall on Sodom and Gomorrah, if Lot
had ignored the warning, I am sure that
the world would have been a different world
and the scripture would have had a different
story there.
But Lot believed.
He believed enough.
He wasn't too good a man, but he
believed enough to get up and get his
family, some of his family together and said,
Come on, let's get out of here.
Knowing what his wife did afterwards, I imagine
he had a hard time getting her away.
She said, Listen, Lot, you're mayor of the
city here.
You sit in the gate.
You're a high up in politics and men
bow to you.
And we've been able by a little fast
footwork to get ourselves fine property and nice
car and wall-to-wall carpeting, and you
want us to leave it here now.
You want us to leave it.
But Lot said, I heard the voice of
God.
She said, You're an old fool.
You've been drinking too much.
You think you heard the voice of God?
I wonder if you did.
And he said, You're going with me now.
And the family is going, and she finally
yielded under the heat of the pressure of
it, and she went.
But she looked back.
She never wanted to go.
She looked back and became a pillar of
salt, and the scientists have talked about how
a sudden jut of hot lava came up
and covered her, and then when it hardened,
it was salty.
And so she was a pillar of salt.
And those scientists are always prepared to explain
everything.
But there will be something they can't explain
one of these days.
And that is when those angels, those mighty,
all-inspiring angels of God, pick up the
silver trumpets and blow, they'll be heard among
all the planets and stars and everywhere on
the earth.
And nobody can say it thunder.
They'll know better.
And Christians are now at ease in Zion,
engrossed in luxuries and pleasures, forgetting to pray,
forgetting to pray.
And the result is, we're not hearing these
things.
You say, I'll hear the trumpet.
When you hear the trumpet, it'll be too
late.
It'll be too late when you hear the
trumpet.
When the book of God tells us that
there'll be the seven trumpets, but when they
start to blow, it'll be too late then.
You'd better listen for another voice now.
Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the
earth, says the mighty voice.
And that's the other trumpets are to sound,
the one we'll talk about when we get
up next week.
But in the meantime, that isn't the voice
we listen for.
We listen for another voice.
It is the voice of Jesus calls me
home.
It is the voice of Jesus saying to
me in this hour, this lull, this silah,
this hour of man's hope and possibility and
opportunity, this voice of God, as gentle as
a mother calling in her firstborn, this voice
of Jesus Christ is calling, come unto me.
All ye that labor and are heavy laden,
even if we will not hear that voice,
we may hear the voice of the trumpet.
But we must hear this voice.
And we Christians must hear a voice.
And we must hear the voice of God
saying, that we are to beware, lest we
be overcome with surfing and drunkenness in the
cares of this life and so that they
take us unawares.
Surfing and drunkenness surfeiting and drunkenness in the
cares of this life.
What is surfeiting?
Surfeiting is overeating.
It's an ominous and awesome thing, what is
happening in our day.
An ominous thing that when you listen to
the radio, it tells you that Canada's most—and
the same in the States, for I've heard
it there—our most serious disease is mental disease.
And mental patients take up more beds—I could
hardly credit this, but I heard it—mental patients
take up more beds in Canadian hospitals than
all the other kind of sick people put
together.
I'd want that verified, but I heard it
announced.
You may have heard it.
Strange, isn't it, in this hour?
Strange, isn't it, that one other disease or
one other phenomenon that is causing a great
deal of talk and a great deal of
trouble and a great many jokes and a
great many cartoons and making a lot of
people rich and a lot of people miserable
is overweight.
We have too much.
We eat too much.
We sleep too long.
We settle down into the world too much.
We have too many pleasures.
And we expect to hear a trumpet, but
it'll be too late.
There's a quieter voice.
God is not calling men to him with
a trumpet.
It's written of him that he never cried
aloud nor lifted up his voice nor made
it to be heard in the streets.
He has sent his messengers.
He has sent the quiet voice of men.
He has sent the beautiful, sweet voice of
song.
He has sent the personal worker.
He has sent the evangelist.
He has sent the quiet old pastor, maybe
now retired but still able to point his
soul to Jesus.
He has sent the simple housewife who teaches
a Sunday school class.
He's sent plain people.
He's sent services like this, quiet services without
any fanfare or hoopla, quiet services.
He's sent them.
He's not sent the angel with the trumpet
yet.
And the voice that we hear is not,
woe, woe, woe, but the voice we hear
is, Come unto me, all ye that labor
and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn of
me, for I am meek and lowly in
heart, and you shall find rest unto your
souls.
The voice we hear is, Wake thou that
sleepest and rise from the dead, and God
will give thee life.
The voice we hear is, Repent, repent.
It tells us back in this third chapter
of this same book.
Remember therefore, for four points 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.
Then every time, seven times, he says, He
that hath an ear to hear, let him
hear what the Spirit is saying unto the
churches.
I love people.
I like children.
I like a little humor.
And I'm jovial sometimes, but I'm a troubled
man, and I'm a serious man.
And I'm serious enough that if God were
to whisper to me tomorrow morning, they'll never
hear you at Avenue Road.
I'd phone my resignation in to the board
that meets Tuesday night.
I won't fool with people who won't listen.
Remember therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and
repent and do the first works.
Here's the terrible thing, Brother Gray, the terrible
thing.
I hear these things when I go to
cities here and there.
People gather and talk with me, and I
lunch with them or meet them in church,
or we talk.
And I hear how among the Episcopalians, Anglicans
they call Episcopalians in the States, I hear
among the Episcopalians, some are meeting God with
old-fashioned baptism of the Holy Ghost, resulting
in the healing of bodies.
I hear of Presbyterians that have broken past
their dignity, and some of the pastors are
meeting with Baptists and Anglicans, and they're quietly
waiting on God.
I heard of two pastors of these churches
that sat in an automobile, and suddenly the
Holy Ghost fell on both of them.
Is God going to have to turn from
us who've heard the truth for a lifetime,
and turn to the liturgical churches and to
what we call liberal churches, and begin to
win them and pass us by?
You say, it can't be, it can't be,
God will bless us.
That's what the Jews thought.
The Jews said, we're of Abraham's seed, shut
up, don't talk to us, we know who
we are, we're four-fold gospel believers, we're
of Abraham's seed, we weren't born of fornication.
He said, if you were Abraham's seed, you'd
act like Abraham.
But if God is able of these stones
to raise up children unto Abraham.
Billy Sunday wanted to die before liquor came
back to the States, he did.
Somebody said, wouldn't it have been terrible if
Billy Sunday had lived to see the 18th
amendment rescinded.
I don't want to play with my own
life or tell God when I want to
go.
But I should hate to see the hour
when God has to turn from such as
we who have heard the holy truth and
played with it and fooled with it, and
equated it with fun and religious nonsense.
And the result has been that we have
hardened ourselves to a point where God can't
talk to us anymore, and we don't hear
that voice anymore.
And so God turns to Anglicans and Lutherans
and Presbyterians, and we think we have it
all, and they don't claim too much.
And maybe God will bless them and pass
us by.
I feel like singing, Savior, Savior, hear my
humble cry, when on others thou art pleading,
do not pass us by.
I pray that God might not pass by
Avenue Road Church.
Look at you.
Look what you've heard.
Look what you know.
I pray that God may not.
Let's sing that one, brother, will you?
Savior, Savior, hear my humble cry.
I don't know the number, but get it
for us.
We're going to sing it.
I pray that I may not have to
see God pass you by.
You've heard so much, and you've done so
little.
May God have mercy upon our souls.