Over the next few Sunday mornings, the Lord
willing, I want to talk on a chain
of topics or ideas which the Church of
God needs very badly, and I'm going to
read this morning, or rather I'm going to
let Paul talk to us and give us
the scripture, out of which later, over the
next few Sundays, I expect to draw some
truth.
Now, I'm not going to tell you from
where I'm reading, because I'm reading from Weymouth's
translation, a very old and honored translation, deliberately
this morning.
I rarely do it, but I want to
today.
The man of God is talking to us.
He says, about spiritual gifts, brethren, I would
not have you ignorant.
We can go astray as easily by being
uninformed as we can by being wrongly informed.
We have no right to be heathens.
You know that when you were heathens, pagans,
I guess, Americans, you went astray after dumb
idols.
By dumb he means idols that couldn't talk.
Paul wanted his God to talk.
And what disgusted him was that the gods
of the heathen couldn't talk.
Jeremiah and Isaiah had something to say about
that too.
A dumb idol is no good.
Dumb gods know God at all.
And he said, for this reason I inform
you that no one speaking under the influence
of the Spirit of God says, Jesus is
a curse.
That is, it's quoted.
Nobody says, and the quotation is, Jesus is
a curse.
And that no one is able to say,
in quotes, Jesus is the Lord, except under
the influence of the Holy Spirit.
That is, I assume he means no one
is able really to say, with a mouth
and tongue, that nobody can actually say and
believe that Jesus is the Lord except by
the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now, he says, there are various kinds of
gifts, but there is the same Spirit.
Various kinds of official service and yet the
same Lord.
Various kinds of effects and yet the same
God.
Notice he has a trinity here, Spirit, the
Lord, and God.
The same God who produces all the effects
in each person.
But to each a manifestation of the Spirit
has been granted for the common good.
God never gives a gift to anybody except
for the common good.
To one, he says, the word of wisdom
has been granted to the Spirit.
We can use a little of that now.
To another, the word of knowledge by the
will of the same Spirit.
To another, in the same Spirit, spatial faith.
To another, various gifts of healing in the
same Spirit.
To another, the exercise of miraculous power.
To another, the gift of prophecy.
To another, the power of discernment between spirits.
To one, varieties of the gift of tongues.
To another, the interpretation of tongues.
But all these results are brought about by
one and the same Spirit allotting to them
each individually as he pleases.
For just as the body is one and
yet has many parts and all its parts,
many as they are, constitute one body, so
it is with Christ.
In fact, in one Spirit all of us,
whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free men,
were baptized to form one body.
And we all are imbued, or were imbued,
with one Spirit.
Now, he writes to a different group and
says this.
To each of us individually his grace was
given, measured out with the munificence of Christ.
For this reason, scripture says, he ascended on
high, he led captive a host of captives
and gave gifts to men.
And he puts in parentheses this explanation.
Now, this ascended, what does it mean but
that he had first descended into the lower
regions of the earth?
He who descended is the same who ascended
again far above all the heavens in order
to fill the universe.
And he himself, which is Jesus, of course,
appointed some to be apostles and some to
be prophets and some to be evangelists, some
to be pastors and teachers, in order fully
to equip his people for the work of
service, for the building up of Christ's body,
so we all of us arrive at oneness
in faith and in the knowledge of the
Son of God, and at mature manhood and
the stature of full-grown men in Christ.
So we shall no longer be babes, nor
shall we resemble mariners tossed on the waves
and carried about with every changing wind of
doctrine, according to men's cleverness and unscrupulous cunning
that makes use of every shifting device to
mislead.
But we shall lovingly hold to the truth
and shall in all respects draw up into
union with him who is our head, even
Christ.
Dependent, he says, on him, the whole body,
its various parts closely fitting and firmly adhering
to one another, grows by the aid of
every contributory ligament with power proportioned to the
need of each individual part, so as to
build itself up in the spirit of love.
He wrote to another, not a group this
time, but one of his boys.
He wasn't going to be around too long,
and he wanted to get everything straightened out,
so he begins now, doesn't mean about every
time.
He says, Now the Spirit speaketh, expressly declares,
that in later times some will fall away
from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits
and to teachings of demons.
Paul, obviously, had not been taught not to
offend.
This is offensive language.
Some people are listening to deceiving spirits and
to teachings of demons, and this through the
hypocrisy of men who teach falsely and have
their own consciences seared as with a hot
iron, forbidding people to marry and insisting on
abstinence from foods which God has created to
be partaken of with thankfulness by those who
believe and know the truth.
Paul wasn't married, but he was determined that
nobody was going to lay the yoke of
celibacy upon anybody.
They could marry if they wanted to, as
far as he was concerned.
He told them that they would have double
trouble, but he said, If you want to
get married, it's natural.
I told him that somewhere else.
Then he was a man who wasn't a
great eater.
He was a frugal, careful man, practicing fasting
in long cryings and tears, but he was
determined that nobody was going to lay compulsory
fasting on anybody.
So he says, These false teachers are forbidding
people to marry and insisting on abstinence from
foods which God has created to be partaken
with thankfulness by those who believe and know
the truth.
For everything that God has created is good,
and nothing is to be rejected if only
it's received with thanksgiving.
It is holy by the word of God
and prayer.
He said, If you put this to the
brethren, you will be a good servant of
Jesus Christ.
Nourish on the lessons of the faith and
of the good teaching which you have faithfully
followed.
But profane stories, fit only for old women,
have nothing to do with them.
Praying yourself for godliness.
Exercise for the body is not useless, but
godliness is useful in every respect.
Physical exercise helps you a little, but godliness
helps you in every way.
Possessing the promise of the present and the
future life.
Faithful is this saying and deserving of universal
acceptance.
This is the motive of our toiling and
wrestling, that we have our hopes fixed on
the living God, who is the Savior of
all mankind and especially of believers.
Command this and teach this.
Let no one think slightingly of you because
you're a young man.
I don't mean that.
But in speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity,
be an example to your fellow Christians.
Shall I come, pay attention to public reading?
What do you suppose you want them to
publicly read?
Scriptures.
Exhortation and teaching.
Whether that says public reading or not, I
don't know.
You'd have to look it up in the
Greek, and mostly it simply says reading.
But he says public reading in his translation.
Do not neglect the gifts with which you
are endowed, which were conferred on you by
prophetic indication when the hands of the elders
were placed upon you.
Practice these duties and be absorbed in them,
so that your progress in them may be
evident to all.
Take pains with yourself and your teaching.
Persevere in these things, for by doing this
you will secure your own and your dear
salvation.
Well now, of course, I read.
1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and 1 Timothy
4.
Now it is my duty and my high
Christian privilege first to pray for this Church.
No man has any right to talk to
a crowd he hasn't prayed for.
No man.
So it is my duty, if you want
to allow the word duty in your Christian
thinking, most people don't.
I think the old word duty might well
come back again.
A colt out in the pasture field knows
no such word as duty.
But his well-trained, hard-working mother in
the harness, pulling the wagon of the plow,
she knows duty.
The colt only knows freedom, but the mother
knows duty.
And I wonder if our inordinate desire for
freedom and our strange fear of duty may
not be one thing that's wrong with us
now.
But it is a duty nevertheless, but a
privilege, certainly a high privilege, to pray for
this Church.
And it is another, though perhaps not such
a high duty and privilege, to preach to
the people who foregather here.
And by Church I do not mean this
organization.
Strictly speaking, you cannot organize a Church, and
the Church is not a Church by organization.
We live in society, and we live under
laws.
And therefore, being what we are, it is
necessary for us to organize.
I believe in organization, a free, loose organization.
I think it's necessary.
Paul told Titus to set things in order
and to appoint men.
That meant organization.
It could have meant nothing else.
But I say you can't organize a Church
the same as you can't organize a ball
club.
You can have a ball club which has
a captain and so many pitchers and so
many catchers and so many outfielders and so
many infielders and so many basemen.
But that doesn't make a club, as a
certain Chicago club proved.
It's just an organization.
And so you can't organize a Church.
You can have your pastor, elders, deacons, deaconesses,
and all the rest, and under law, constitution,
but you don't have a Church.
The Church is something else altogether.
The Church is within that organization, maybe, but
that organization is not the Church.
The Church is the assembly of the saints.
And wherever the saints meet, you have the
Church.
And wherever they habitually meet, then you come
to name the Church, maybe.
And thus you have a Church, such as
this one or some other Church.
And so it's a joy to preach to
those who have, over the past years and
who do now, and who will preach or
foregather in this place, and it's a privilege
to preach to them, and to guide and
to plan for the future.
Now, I try to see the Church whole.
I want to see you as a part
of something vastly bigger.
I'd like you to think of yourself as
part of something bigger than you are.
You know, the sociologists and psychologists talk about
the need for belonging.
They say that a rejected child may develop
dangerous mental or nervous traits because he has
no sense of belonging.
And they explain the clubs of youngsters, the
wolf packs that tramp our streets, as those
who in the main come from homes where
they have been rejected, where the father drinks
and the mother too, and where they're out
nights, and where they're not loved after they're
five years old or six, and where they
feel they don't belong to anything, and they
want to join something in order to feel
that they belong.
There's strength, there's human strength and a sense
of belonging to something.
That's why we have secret orders, men who
are pushed around by their wives and pulled
off by their bosses, until they get the
feeling they have no soul they can call
their own, not a tattered shred of self
-respect they've left to go join a lodge.
And as the cartoon had it, the wife
is speaking to her husband, and she says,
the high-exalted potentate can't go tonight because
I won't let him.
And they become high-exalted potentates and name
themselves big names, but the point is, little
men want to belong to something.
And that is not a bad thing, that's
a good thing, because we're gregarious by nature.
We're not wolves to go alone, or travel
in narrow packs which break up immediately, but
we're sheep to travel in flocks that stay
together a lifetime.
So when I talk about the Church, I
talk about the whole Church.
Unless I say this Church, because I want
you to know that this Church is a
part of a great Church.
I can imagine how lonely, now I'm talking
in the presence of a young soldier who's
just back, and he may contradict me for
this good-naturedly afterward, but I don't think
he will.
I can imagine how lonely a soldier would
feel in a foreign land among a people
whose language he can't speak except for his
uniform, that identifies him with a vast crowd
of such fellows all over the world, and
particularly with his homeland and his flag.
A sense of belonging is necessary.
A young fellow somewhere in some remote corner
of the earth wearing an American uniform received
a cable or word somewhere from the commander
-in-chief that he'd received a dishonorable discharge
and was no longer a part of the
Army.
I can imagine what an utter collapse it
would be to him.
Psychologically, he'd break down, and half his manhood
would leak away from his broken heart.
Belonging to something is what matters, my brethren.
Belonging to something that's going to last, and
something that's worthy, something that's valuable.
I couldn't belong to a man-made society,
I couldn't possibly do it.
Imagine me getting on my knees and swearing
to follow the order of this and that
Lord.
God made my knees hard to bend, and
my American upbringing has made them impossible to
bend, unless God bends them.
And imagine that I could ever do that,
I never could.
But I want to belong to something.
No man is ever individualistic enough to go
it alone, no man.
And the man who does is sick.
The hermit is sick.
The man who lives alone in his attic
and who refuses even to answer the door
and who sneaks out in the dark and
buys something at a delicatessen and sneaks back,
that man's sick.
He's not a normal man.
A normal man, good or bad, sinner or
saint, wants to walk out and look around
at others of his kind and say, I
belong.
This is my race, these are my people.
This is my language I hear spoken there.
That's my flag flying there on top of
that school building.
I belong here.
That is necessary to our welfare, necessary to
our health, our mental health.
And that is why rejection, unwanted children, and
persons who feel themselves rejected, can sometimes develop
very serious and dangerous trends.
I want to think of this Church, then,
as its relation to the whole Church of
Christ.
That's why I like to sing songs about
the Church, the Church of Jesus Christ, which
he purchased with his own blood, part in
heaven and part on earth, and of every
color and tribe and nation and tongue around
the world, as the Bible says.
And we're a part of that.
We didn't begin when Dr. A.
B.
Simpson organized the Society for Christian Missions back
in New York in 1884.
I thought that for a second.
I'd never finish this sentence.
I'd break off with a semicolon, and I'd
close this Bible and leave and resign and
find the Church that went back to Pentecost.
But I believe that we're a part of
that which does go back to Pentecost.
I believe in the apostolic succession.
And I believe that it's not a succession
of bishops and men with names and organizations.
I believe it is a group, it's a
living organism.
Just as I believe that my organism goes
back to my great-great-grandfather Adam, and
that I'm a part that the living stream
floated down the centuries and ties me organically
and racially and vitally with the first man.
So I believe that this Church is organically
and vitally a part of the true Church
of Christ that began when the Holy Ghost
fell on a body of believers and made
them one, and baptized them into one body
and made them God's people in a way
that no people ever had been before.
And therefore, every Christian is a part of
us, and we're a part of every Christian
group around the world.
When I hear a good thing or read
a good thing that's said or done by
some great man or good man or good
woman anywhere in the world, for Christ's sake,
I have a good feeling in my heart
that's part of me, that's part of me,
that belongs to me, and I belong to
that.
And whether I ever meet that person on
earth or not doesn't matter.
The Church of our Lord Jesus Christ is
one, and she's one around the whole earth.
So I want to think of her that
way, and I want to think of you
as belonging to the great Church of our
Lord Jesus around the earth.
And I want to think of you and
your relation to God first of all.
Your relation to God first of all.
A man got into the papers here the
other day by starting a little campaign to
get all of his people to vote.
Whether you vote or not is your business.
I expect you.
If you do or don't, I'm not going
to needle you about that.
I'm only going to tell you that every
country has the kind of readers it deserves.
But I'm not concerned so much with whether
you're a Democrat or a Republican.
Or I'm not concerned so much for whom
you're going to vote.
But I'm deeply concerned about your relation to
God.
That's first.
Before there were any Tories or Whigs or
Democrats or Socialists or Republicans or Christian fronters
or what have you around the world, there
was God.
Before man ever knew the privilege of the
ballot, there was God.
And your relation to God is absolutely first.
And then your relation to others is very
important, too.
And your habits and your tastes and your
service, all this is very important.
And so we're going to think about what
a Church must do and what it's our
privilege to do and what God will give
us power to do.
And the gifts of the Spirit and all
this over the next weeks.
To do all this requires itself a gift
of the Spirit.
Now, back in the book of Isaiah, and
I can find it without keeping you waiting
too long, in the book of Isaiah there's
a passage which I love very much.
There shall come forth a rod out of
the stem of Jessup, and a branch shall
grow out of his roots.
Now that, of course, is Jesus.
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest
upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit
of knowledge and of the fear of the
Lord, and shall make him a quick understanding
in the fear of the Lord.
And he shall not judge after the sight
of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing
of his ears, but with righteousness shall he
judge the poor, and reprove with equity for
the meat of the earth.
Now, that's said about Jesus.
But that's true, or ought to be true,
of the members of the body of Christ.
For just as the oil was put upon
the high priest's head, and it ran down
to the skirts of his garment, and cleared
down to his feet, and gave fragrance and
sweetness to his whole body, so the mighty
power that was poured upon the head of
Jesus must trickle down and flow down to
every member of the body.
And so what was true of him can
be true of his ministers.
The Spirit of wisdom shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of understanding, the Spirit of counsel
and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of
the fear of Jehovah, and shall make him
a quick understanding, and he shall not judge
after the sight of his eyes.
The curse of modern leadership is looking around
and getting your bearings from what you see.
Neither shall he reprove after the hearing of
his ears, listening carefully to see which way
things are moving, and then judging accordingly.
No, he'll never make that mistake, but with
righteousness shall he judge the poor.
And with equity the meek of the earth.
And righteousness shall be the girdle of his
loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.
And he'll always be right in his spirit,
and right in his wisdom, and right in
his judgment.
And he'll not be judged, nor allow himself
to be judged by what's going on round
about.
Now, my dear friends, I'm going to break
this off here within five minutes.
This is Communion Sunday, and I've got lots
more to say developing this thesis, perhaps until
Brother Reed had come.
But it takes a lot of patience and
a lot of persistence and a lot of
courage in this day in which we live
to find the will of God and to
take it.
And I believe that God wants to help
us.
I believe that he wants to do something
new for us here in this church.
In our fellowship, I believe it.
He's doing something new for me, and I
can't see why it should not flow out
and down and over and up and around
until we're all swimming in it.
And I can't see why God should omit
any of us in the breaking of the
bread nor in the pouring of the oil.
You and I stand here and mingle together
here and foregather here as an assembly of
the saints, with all of the obligation resting
upon us that rested upon them at Pentecost.
It has not diminished one little bit, and
there is not anywhere one sentence of scripture
to be found.
Nowhere is there any proof or line that
could be twisted nor tortured into teaching that
the organic, living, vibrating church of Jesus Christ,
just before he comes, won't have every obligation
and every privilege and every right and every
power at her disposal that she had when
she first was born in the early part
of the book of Acts.
No, there is such a thing as being
tough about this, my brethren.
There is such a thing as saying to
God and to yourself and at times maybe
over your shoulder to the devil that you're
not going to give up to the times,
that you're not going to give up to
the ways of the world or even to
the common ways of religion round about you,
that you're not going to judge yourself by
others.
You're not going to allow your church to
be judged by others.
And if it looks a little better or
a little worse, then worry about it or
be glad.
But you're going to take the New Testament
standards as your standards.
Just as sure as God sits in his
high heaven, unless Christ comes within the next
25 years, unless he comes within the next
25 years, the Christian Missionary Alliance and all
such groups as we are, fundamentalists generally, are
going to have to recall and have back
upon us a revival that will eventuate in
a new moral power and a new separation
and a new cleanness and a new bestowment
of the mighty enablings of the Spirit.
For God will have to raise up from
somewhere a new group to carry the torch.
I prophesied 12 years ago about something, and
it came to pass that my only mistake
was I didn't go far enough in what
I said.
I'll tell you about that next Sunday.
If you honor me by appearing here, honor
your own soul by coming to the house
of the Lord.
And I'm prophesying this without fear.
If we do not do something, if the
church doesn't do something, if we don't make
a hard swing back to the roots of
Christianity and begin again, over again, to seek
the face of God, God is going to
pass us up as a farmer passes up
eggshells that are empty.
He throws them out and buries them.
As you throw away tin cans that have
been emptied and their contents taken and they're
thrown out to be carried away in the
refuse.
As we bury dead men whose spirit has
left them and who can no longer stand
up or talk or hear.
We reverently lay away the shell where they
were.
There was a day when Israel, believing in
the perpetuity of her place in the Son,
said to Jesus, We be not born of
fornication, we be the seed of Abraham, and
this temple is the temple of God.
Jesus said, They are the children of Abraham
who do the works of Abraham, and as
for this temple, there will be a day
when not one stone will be upon another.
And that came to pass literally and the
Roman Emperor sent his plows and plowed the
foundation with plows to fulfill.
He'd never heard it said, and he didn't
know Jesus had ever said it.
But Jesus said, Not one stone will stand
on another.
And they plowed up the foundations after knocking
every stone down level with the ground.
The very sacred temple.
God will leave it when it ceases to
fulfill his purpose and do his will.
There isn't an organization in the world God
won't desert.
Salvation Army, Christian Missionary Alliance, the Nazarenes, the
Mariners, Christian businessmen, any group anywhere, God will
desert them in the hour that they cease
to fulfill his will.
There isn't a denomination on this wide earth
anywhere.
You can't make your robes long enough, nor
your chains heavy enough, nor your titles long
enough to save a church when once she
ceases to fulfill the will of God.
There isn't a group anywhere.
God will raise them up in 1884 and
desert them in 1864 unless they continue to
fulfill the will of God.
There isn't a group like this anywhere, my
brothers, unless we follow on to know the
Lord and humbly and meekly follow Jesus Christ
in fear and godly reverence and in faith
and in love and charity.
There isn't a church, I say, anywhere that
God won't turn away from and go to
some colored mission or some group somewhere of
simple-hearted people that don't know too much
and don't have too much but that do
love God and want to obey and say,
God will desert a crowd anywhere.
It doesn't mean the individual members of that
group who are Christian people will be deserted,
but it does mean that the cloud will
lift from that ascending.
Dear God, I pray that if it ever
lifts from this church, God will tell me
24 hours before the tragedy occurs or I
want time to get out of town.
I want time to get away where I
don't have to stand and look at the
despoiling of the church.
Only when the cloud is there and the
fire, only when the Holy Ghost is present
and the chicana glows is the church a
true church.
And then if you lack everything else, you
still have a true church.
Now I've read from Paul about the possibilities,
the privileges, the obligation, the commission that is
ours, the job we've got to do, our
future, what we've got to do right here
to the ends of the earth.
I've read to you about the power that
God gives to enable us to do it.
And I have read of the strange teachings
that come in from everywhere to spoil that
holy oil.
So over the next weeks we're going to
talk about it, God willing.
But that will be all for now.
Now we're going to obey the teaching that
comes just a little before the text that
tells us that the Lord, the night he
was betrayed, took bread and blessed it and
said, take ye, this is my body which
is broken for you.