Hark, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine
ear.
Forget also thine own people, and thy father's
house.
So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty.
For he is thy Lord, worship thou him.
Now I've been using that verse as a
kind of a point of departure for where
I have to take off from in this
series on worship.
And my thesis has been, and is, and
shall remain, that God made everything for a
purpose and that he made man to worship
him, and that man fell away and is
failing to carry out the creative purpose.
But that God sent his only begotten son
into the world, not only that men should
be saved from hell, and not primarily that
they should be saved from hell, though that
will be a byproduct of the other, but
that they should be able to fulfill the
original purpose for which he created them, to
be worshipers of the Most High God.
Now all through the Bible, and I give
you some proof texts, but more important than
any proof text is that the whole important
substance of the Bible teaches the same thing.
That God wants us to worship him.
That God, who doesn't need anything, nevertheless wants
worshipers.
That God, who in his uncreated nature is
self-sufficient, yet wants us to worship him.
And the proof texts I might mention tonight,
one would be Genesis 3, 8 and 9,
Adam, where art thou?
God cried out to the man who had
fled from him and hidden among the trees
of the garden.
And Adam heard the voice of the Lord
in the cool of the day.
What was God coming to Eden Eastward, the
garden of Eden Eastward?
What was he doing there?
He was coming for his customary time with
Adam, when Adam should worship and admire and
adore the God who made him.
Then Christ our Lord said, Thou shalt worship
the Lord thy God.
Him only shalt thou worship.
And in the book of Psalms I have
already quoted that, So shall the King greatly
desire thy beauty.
And then we are told in 2 Thessalonians,
that when our Lord shall come, he shall
be admired, he shall be glorified first in
the Saints, and admired in all that believe.
There is glorification and admiration, and our Lord
is coming for that.
I'd like to say this to you, which
contrary to what you usually hear in the
average evangelical pulpit, that not only does God
want men to worship him, but man, even
in his fallen state, wants to worship God.
Now I know that is contrary to what
is usually heard, because usually we say that
men do not want to worship God.
But do you know that there isn't a
tribe in all the wide world that has
some kind of religion?
And Paul talked about the whole world that
stretched out its hands, if perchance they might
feel after God?
So men do want to worship God.
This was said for us in marvelous language
by Isaac Watts, the great hymn writer, when
he said, Eternal power, whose high abode becomes
the grandeur of a God, infinite lengths beyond
the bounds where stars revolve their little rounds.
Ye, while the first archangel sings and hides
his face behind his wings, and ranks its
shining thrones around, fall worshiping upon the ground.
Then, Lord, what shall earth and ashes do?
We would adore our Maker too, from sin
and dust to thee we cry, the great,
the holy, and the high.
Lord, what shall earth and ashes do?
We would adore our Maker too, and from
sin and dust to God we cry, who
is the great and the holy and the
high.
Men want to worship God.
I once said in a sermon, or no,
I wrote this in a little piece somewhere,
that when a man falls on his knees
and stretches his hands up and says, Our
Father which art in heaven, he is doing
the most natural thing in the world.
Well, a nice old chap down in Florida
didn't like it, so he wrote to the
President of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and
told him that I was a liberal, and
that he had better keep an eye on
me, because I was teaching that worship was
natural, and therefore that I was a liberal.
He thought he would go over my head
to the President.
Well, I hadn't been editor of our magazine
very long until I told everybody at a
conference, a council, an international council one time,
that I might as well lay off of
that, because it would do them no good
at all to go over the head of
anybody, my head to anybody, because I don't
recognize anybody except the Lord Jesus Christ, and
if you appeal to him, it's perfectly all
right with me.
But apart from that, I don't mind what
men say.
I've never had any trouble with those who
have been over me in the Lord, and
I've always gotten along beautifully with them.
But I just wanted to tell all and
some degree who might be interested, that if
I make a statement, there's no use to
write to New York about it, because there
won't be anything done about it.
Anyhow, he said that I was all wrong
in this.
Now, my brethren, let me say to you
that if man had not fallen, then worship
would have been the most natural thing to
him in the world, because God made man
to worship him.
But man fell away, and sin came to
his life, and sin is not natural.
Sin, we say, is natural because man's nature
is bad, but sin is not originally intended
to be so.
If everybody in the world had cancer, then
we would say that cancer was natural.
But also, we might say that it was
not natural, because when God made the human
body, he didn't mean that wild cells should
form and be called cancer.
So when God made the human soul in
his own image, and that's that he acted
according to that nature, he never intended that
man should have the virus of sin in
him.
So that sin is the unnatural thing, in
that it was never intended by God to
be in a man's nature.
But still it is natural in the sense
that everybody has it.
And worship is unnatural only in the sense
that so few people really do it.
But it is natural in that that's what
God created us for, that's what he meant
us to do, to worship him and enjoy
him forever.
Now, I want to point out that you
cannot worship God just as you please.
And my talk tonight will be a little
bit negative, but I don't apologize, because as
I've said before, there are two sides to
every coin, the positive and the negative, and
without two positive and negative poles, you couldn't
have any light here tonight.
So I want to give a little of
the negative side tonight and point out that
you can't worship just any old way that
you will.
This is one of the tricks of the
Devil, and also it is a very favorite
pet of unconverted poets and unconverted people with
a bump of sublimity on their head, but
without the new birth to teach that we
just worship, just worship God any way you
want to worship God and all will be
well.
Let me point out to you, brethren, that
authentic religious experience is altogether possible apart from
Christ.
Authentic religious experience is possible apart from redemption.
It's entirely possible to have authentic religious experience
and not be a Christian, not be converted
and be on our way.
You remember that Cain had an experience, it
was an authentic religious experience.
He talked to God and God talked to
him, and that was authentic, it was entirely
authentic.
And Judas, the same.
Judas talked to God, and it's entirely possible.
Judas talked to Jesus Christ, our Lord, and
it's entirely possible, to have an experience with
God and yet not have a saving experience
with God.
So it's not only possible to have an
authentic religious experience apart from Christ and apart
from salvation, it is possible to have authentic
worship also apart from Christ and apart from
salvation.
And this is the thing that chills me
and brings me upright to attention when I
think that it's possible to worship and not
worship aright.
They worship, they know not what, said Jesus
of a certain group.
And it's possible to have the elements of
worship, admiration, adoration, self-abasement, surrender, and attachment,
all can be present and still may not
be redeemed at all.
Thomas Carlyle, in his Heroes in Hero Worship,
warned us not to make the mistake of
thinking that the great pagan religions of the
world were all phony.
He said, it's not true.
They were not phony, they were real, and
the terror of them was that they were
real.
I was in Mexico once, and well, numbers
of times, but once when I was in
Mexico I saw an old, old church without
any floor except the ground.
And I walked into it with my hat
off and looked around at the statues and
all the rest, and I saw an old
Mexican lady come in.
She had been shopping evidently, she had a
little bag with her, and she walked straight
down to the front as if she knew
the way and could go in the dark
with her eyes closed.
She'd been there so often.
She walked straight to the statue, I think
it was of the Virgin, and knelt and
looked up into the face of that statue
with a longing and with a poured-out
devotion that I'd like to see turn to
the Lord himself.
She was having an experience of worship.
It was real to her.
She was no phony, she was a real
worshiper, but look what she was worshiping.
The American Indian used to stand on the
bank of the river and stretch his red
arms up to the sky and say, "'Twill
get thee, Manitou, praises be, praises be, "'Twill
get thee, Manitou, praises be.' You tell me
that that noble, strong, red man, not the
degenerate person we know today after we white
people have gotten done with him, but the
strong, noble red man of the early days
of this continent's civilization, he was real.
And when he cried to his Gypsy Manitou,
the great Manitou, he meant what he said.
Our missionaries tell us that the African devil
-worshippers go through a ritual in their teens
and are baptized into devil worship, and they
seek to become as much like the devil
as possible.
They labor to become like the devil that
they've taken as their patron.
Now, I say it's possible to have a
religious experience without God.
Judas Iscariot did, Cain did, many others.
It's possible to have an experience of worship
and not be worshiping according to the will
of God, and not be accepted by God
at all, because idolatry is hated by God,
and it's hated for the very reason that
it is real.
Listen to this.
But I say, says Paul, that the things
which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice the devils
and not to God, and I would not
that she should fellowship with devils.
Now, the man of God said this, so
it's possible to have a religious experience and
worship and not be accepted of God at
all.
Our Lord said that there would be a
day when people would say, Did not we
do miracles in your name?
Did not we speak for you on the
street corner?
And he said, I never knew you depart
from me.
He did not accept their worship.
Now, there are certain worships, certain kinds of
worship which God does not accept, though it's
directed toward him and meant to be given
to him.
Let me name them for you, one I
will call Cain's worship.
That is, God has condemned and rejected the
worship of Cain, that is Cain's kind of
worship, because it's worship lacking atonement.
I saw a church bulletin the other day,
and they said our creed is the good,
the true, and the beautiful.
Isn't that sweet?
This is our creed, the good, the true,
and the beautiful.
I doubt you could get in there, no
matter if you were a gangster or with
your gun smoking hot from the last bump
-off.
You could still get into that church if
you went in and looked real nice and
said, I believe in the good and the
true and the dead.
Now, Cain's worship, that is, worship that lacks
atonement.
Worship that rests upon three errors.
Cain came bringing not blood sacrifice, that is
atonement.
Cain came to God with a gift.
He said, it's time for me to take
a gift from my Creator.
So he went out and plucked himself a
nice bunch of flowers and some nice, delicious
fruit, and he took it to God.
And God said, where is the blood?
He said, what blood?
He said, why, you can't come to me,
you're a sinner, and there's got to be
atonement.
Somebody has to die.
And Cain didn't understand that.
He said, I don't know about sin.
He said, I'll just bring the gift.
And the Lord pounded on the gift and
it made Cain so mad he went out
and killed his brother.
His brother brought in a lamb and God
accepted it.
Now, that was Cain's worship, and that can
be educated and turned out of a seminary
and taught how to use his hands and
taught how to open his A's and make
them sound learned.
And you'll have a little preacher on your
hands.
It makes three mistakes, I say.
One is that God is a different kind
of God from what he is.
To worship God, acceptable to God, you'll have
to know what kind of God he is.
And Cain didn't know what kind of God
God was.
He thought that sin was nothing to God.
And then it has this error that man
occupies a relation to God that he doesn't
in fact occupy.
Cain assumed that he belonged to God and
could talk to God without an intermediary.
That was false, because Cain was alienated by
sin from his God.
And then it assumes that sin is less
serious than it is in fact.
Sin is no serious, my brethren.
And God never smiles upon it, nor God
never looks with any sympathy upon it.
He hates sin, because sin has filled the
world with pain and sorrow, and sin has
robbed man of his purpose in life of
worshiping his God.
So Cain's worship.
For that reason I wouldn't spend one hour
in any church that didn't teach blood atonement
by the cross, that didn't teach redemption by
the blood of Jesus Christ the Lord.
I wouldn't teach it, I wouldn't spend one
minute where they didn't teach it.
Because Cain's worship, no matter how gentle and
tender it is, and how it may be
garlanded with beautiful flowers plucked from all the
poetry of the world, it's still false, and
God frowns upon it because it's false in
itself.
Now, when there is Samaritan worship, you know
what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman.
She said first to him, "'Teacher,' she was
embarrassed to know, because he had said to
her, "'You have five husbands, and the one
you are living with now isn't your husband.'
And she sweat under that, and so she
started arguing theology with him.
She said, "'Teacher, I'd like to know.' He
said, "'Here's a question I'd like to ask
you.
The Jews say that you worship in Jerusalem,
and our people, the Samaritans, say you worship
in Samaria.
Which is true?' And he said, "'Nor in
Jerusalem, nor in Samaria, do men worship God.
They worship the Father in spirit and in
truth.
The Jews know who they worship, but ye
know not who you worship.'" So that's Samaritan
worship.
Now, Samaritan worship is heretical worship in the
correct meaning of the term.
You know what a heretic is.
A heretic is not a man who denies
all the truth, he's just a very cushnickety
man who picks out what he likes and
rejects the rest.
A man came to this city not very
long ago and went to a big and
famous church and told a lot of kids
with their feet up on the desk, beatniks,
that I'd been preaching too much, and said,
"'Get your feet down on the floor, bud!
Won't you sit there listening to me and
insult me by looking like that?' Well, I'd
have got their feet down anyhow.
He told them, "'Don't believe anything in the
Bible that doesn't square with your own experience.'
A lot of kids not dry behind the
ears, and this man has the infinite effrontery
to tell them to take the word of
God and judge it by their own wicked
hearts.
How can you get any worse than that?'
That's Samaritanism, you see.
That is heresy.
Heresy means, I take what I like and
I reject what I don't like.
But the Bible says, if any man adds
to or takes away, he shall be cursed
and his name removed from the book of
life.
But this selecting and rejecting business, we have
applied psychology and humanism under various disguises and
religions of all sorts.
That's Samaritan worship.
The Lord rejects that because it's selective, it
picks what it likes.
If it thinks this is true, it says
that's true.
If it doesn't like it, it says, why,
that was taken in there from somewhere else.
The Lord never said that.
And they set themselves up as judges about
what the Lord has said.
Instead of going down on their knees and
letting the Lord judge them, they stand and
judge the Lord.
Well, then there's nature worship.
Now, when we get here, I get clear,
I get clear saccharine, you know.
I run like honey on a hot day
when I get here to this nature worship
business, because it is the poetry of religion,
you know.
It's the high enjoyment and the contemplation of
the sublime.
I used to see a fellow down in
Chicago, I'm afraid he got hit with a
car probably, but anyway, I used to see
him go up the street and he had
his eyes fixed on the heavens.
I think he was a sun worshiper because
he was always looking up toward the sun
in that general direction.
And I used to worry about his crossing
the street looking up at the sun, and
then suddenly I missed him.
I'm not sure, but somebody ran over him.
But he was a sun worshiper.
He believed in the heavens above.
And you remember what God said to Israel?
He said, when you get into the land
and you look up and you see the
sun and you see the stars, don't get
on your knees and worship the sun and
the stars, because Jehovah will destroy you from
out of the land when you do it.
But we have an awful lot of nature
worshipers, and worshipers of God through nature, I
suppose, would be a better way to say
it.
It's a high enjoyment.
It's a concentrating of the mind upon beauty
as distinct from the eye and the ear.
If your ear hears beauty, that's music.
If your eye sees beauty, that's art.
But if you think beautiful thoughts without music
or art, then that's poetry, and you can
write that down.
Don't do it.
I always say, don't write poetry, sister and
brother, don't do it.
Only the person who can't help it can
write good poetry.
The ones who can write poetry, they can't.
But the ones who just can't help it,
they must.
Maybe they'll make it.
But anyway, we write what we feel inside,
that's poetry.
Now, some people mistake a rapt feeling for
worship.
Emerson, you know, said that he used to,
and Emerson was not a Christian by his
own definition, but Emerson said that he used
to cross the meadow.
He said, I have crossed the meadow after
it rained on a moonlight night, when the
moon had come out and the rain puddles
were still lying in the meadow, and the
moon shining on the little puddles of water
in the grass.
And he said, I have been glad to
the point of fear.
He was so happy he was a fool.
Odd, but I felt it myself.
And this man yet did not believe in
the deity of Christ, the blood of Christ,
resigned his church rather than serve communion, and
denied the folk.
And yet he was glad to the point
of fear, because he was a good man,
he was a great man, and he was
a poet and an artist, this man, a
mighty man.
But I don't think God accepted his worship
at all, because it's nature worship.
And some mistake the music of religion for
worship.
That of whatever elevates the mind and raises
to a near rapture the soul, that's supposed
to be worship.
Well, it could be, but also you could
be having an experience as the Mexican woman
had looking at the Virgin.
You could be having an experience as the
Red Indian had when he looked up and
called on Gethsemane too.
You could be having an authentic experience of
worship that was not real and not accepted
by God Almighty.
And then the scripture tells us that God
is spirit, and they that worship him must
worship him in spirit and in truth.
And the word must clear away, that word
must there, clears away all the myths of
obscurity.
He takes worship out of the hands of
men and puts it in the hands of
the Holy Ghost.
Now, brethren, I have preached from this pulpit
about the necessity of knowing the Holy Spirit.
I stand to tell you tonight that it
is totally impossible to worship God except to
be apart from the Holy Ghost.
The operation of the Spirit of God within
us enables us to worship God acceptably through
that person we call Jesus Christ, who is
himself God.
So worship originates with God and comes back
to us and is reflected from us as
a mirror, and that is the worship God
accepts.
But he accepts no other kind.
But in this mixed-up world in which
we live, there is always a world of
people that claim to be seekers after truth.
We are seekers after truth, they say.
Come to our church, you don't have to
believe anything, just be a seeker after truth.
I have piles of religious poetry, and I've
got them all sacked around in boxes I
haven't unpacked since I came to Toronto.
It may just as well stay there, because
I've read most of them.
I find that when people haven't found God
and they do not know the new birth
and the Spirit is not on them, and
yet they have the ancient impulse to worship
something, if they are not educated, they kill
a chicken and put a funny thing on
their head and dance around and call them
doctors.
But if they are educated, they write poetry.
I just want to quote tonight, and I
don't want to sit in the seat of
the scornful, and I want to have all
the sympathy I can for this man.
I won't name him, though if you come
to me afterward, I'll tell you who he
is.
His name is Edwin Markham.
But Edwin Markham was an American poet who
is dead and gone now.
He wrote two or three good things.
He wrote Lincoln, and he wrote The Man
with the Hoe, and that's good poetry.
But I quote this because this is a
sample of the way the human mind goes.
And there are bushels of this, bushel baskets
full of it, that you can throw out.
This is the kind of poetry and religion
that has no anchor, no God, no high
priest, no blood, no altar, but floats around
like a drunk butterfly, floating and flopping about,
not knowing quite where he wants to go.
And they all say about the same thing.
It runs like this.
I went out in the morning looking for
God, and I couldn't find God.
And then on my way back, I saw
a baby, and something in me said, God.
All runs like that.
I'll read you one of them here.
This man wrote this.
He shouldn't have, but he did.
It says, I made a pilgrimage to find
the God.
There was an American poet brought up in
the country where you can go to church,
and no matter where you are, just go
any direction, you'll find a church, and buy
a Bible for a dollar from the Gideons.
They distribute them for nothing, but you can
buy the Bibles for a dollar from the
various societies.
You can go to a hotel, the Gideons
will give them to you for nothing to
read while you're there.
So, this fellow says, I made a pilgrimage
to find the God.
Now, I wonder why our Father in heaven
would be called the God.
He's trying to be a pagan.
He's so educated and he's such a genius
that he isn't willing to humble himself under
the mighty hand of God, so he's out
there looking for the God.
So he said, I listened for his voice
at holy tombs of all the places to
go to listen for God in a graveyard.
I listened for his voice at holy tombs,
and I searched for the print of his
immortal feet in the dust of broken altars.
I don't know what he'd be doing there,
but he said he was there looking for
God at broken altars, old, broken down, forgotten
altars in the tombs and other places.
He said, yet turn back with an empty
heart.
There we have the old pattern.
Then he says, But on the homeward road
a great light came upon me, and I
heard God's voice singing in a nestling lark.
Now, he was a good poet, but his
ornithology wasn't very sound, because nestling larks don't
sing.
A nestling lark is a baby lark, not
a nesting lark, but a nestling lark, and
that's a baby lark, and baby larks don't
sing.
But he said he heard God's voice singing
in a nestling lark.
Then he says, And I felt his sweet
wonder in a swaying rose.
I received his blessing from a wayside well,
and looked up on his beauty on a
lover's face.
Now, I ask you, my friends, and I
want to be kind, we're all dumb on
different subjects, but this fellow, how he could
get this bad, I'd like to know.
This man in the land of the Bibles,
where is the gospel being preached?
He writes that he went looking for God
in altars and tombs and in all dark,
dusty places, and didn't find him, and started
home and heard him singing in a nestling
lark, and saw him in a rose and
saw him in the face of a young
lover.
Then he looked up and, lo and behold,
God was signaling from the Son.
I never had any signals from the Son
myself, and I don't know of anybody who
did except Edwin Markham.
He wrote about this.
Now, I know this made some of you
mad.
I realize that, I can sense it, but
it doesn't make any difference.
I enjoy that.
Because if you haven't made somebody mad or
glad or sad, you might as well have
stayed home, out of the pulpit.
And this kind of thing, it seems to
me, needs to be exposed.
We need to tell the world, God is
spirit, and they that worship him must worship
him in spirit and in truth.
It must be the Holy Ghost and truth.
We cannot worship in the spirit alone, for
the spirit without truth is helpless.
It cannot be in truth alone, for that
would be theology without fire.
But it may but not be in the
spirit and in truth.
It must be the truth of God and
the spirit of God.
And when a man, yielding and believing the
truth of God, is filled with the spirit
of God, then his warmest and smallest whisper
will be a worship.
So, we can find we'll worship God by
any means if we are full of the
spirit and yielded to the truth.
But when we are neither yielded to the
truth nor full of the spirit, the so
-called worship is not worship at all.
Some people wonder why some of us are
so rough, and I'm not rough compared with
certain brethren that they're preaching these days.
But I'm rough enough to ruffle some people.
And why?
Why am I?
Because I can't rest at night, nor can
I feel comfortable with the knowledge that there
are millions of educated Canadians and Americans and
Englishmen and Scotsmen who have a tradition hundreds
of years old of Protestant Christianity, who are
carrying on some kind of church activity and
paying it plenty to carry it on, who
are not reaching God at all.
Like Cain, like the Red Indians, they are
having emotions about it, but they're not reaching
God.
And this is a terrible thing, ladies and
gentlemen.
For one of these times you and I
are going to have suddenly to be called
before God.
You remember old everyman of the Middle Ages?
Death came to everyman and said, Everyman, I'm
sent to call you home to judgment.
You must die.
And everyman said, My God, I'm not ready.
I can't.
I can't die.
Can't you let me off?
No, no, he said, I am sent of
God.
I am sent to tell you that you
must die and come to judgment.
He said, I'm afraid to die, and I
dare not face judgment.
What will I do?
And he said, Please, please give me a
few days that I may go to my
friends and see if I can get them
to go with me and stand for me
and be my advocate and helper in that
hour when I render up accounts.
Death said, I'll give you a few days,
but I'll be back.
He disappeared.
Everyman, in a fever of fear and anxiety,
went among his friends.
He went among the friends with whom he
had made money, the moneymakers and the big
businessmen, and he told them a story, and
they said, We're busy, we can't go with
you.
Then he went to those that he had
his pleasures with, went to the saloons and
the bars, went to the theaters, went everywhere
where people were that he had rejoiced with
and had his fun with, and said, I
must render up accounts and I need somebody
to go along and go with me, please.
They turned him cold, each one one after
the other, turned him cold and said, Now,
we can't go with you.
Always remember it, my man and woman, that
the fellow that will last with you is
not willing to die with you.
And if he would, he couldn't, and he
cannot help you in the hour of your
need.
Everyman searched among all of his friends and
found nobody that could help him or was
willing to help him.
They said, We'll rejoice with you and have
fun with you and drink with you and
play with you, but we won't go with
you to the judgment.
Finally he turned to the Lord, and the
Lord went with him.
And dear friends, we're going to have to
go one of these times.
These terrible, terrible thoughts of me.
I've been around in the world quite a
while, not as long as you think by
looking at me, but quite a while.
And I can't have anybody.
If I got sick and went to the
hospital, my wife would be there, my boys
would come up from California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan.
I'd order from New York, buy my website.
But in that hour when I'm called to
account, not a one of them can go
with me, not one.
And if I have fooled my soul, and
if I have listened to cheap, meaningless poetry,
if I have worshiped without atonement and been
religious by selection as the Samaritans, or misjudged
the poetry of religion for salvation, and have
felt because I enjoyed hearing the Christian, or
because I liked to hear this old house,
I was a Christian.
No.
We must worship him in spirit and in
truth.
You stand before the truth to be judged
tonight.
And the Holy Ghost is not a luxury,
he's a necessity.
But you should know the Holy Ghost in
surrender and faith and warm adoration is not
optional, it's imperative.
Without an infusion of the Holy Ghost, there
can be no true worship.
So shall we tonight think this over?
Not all worship is acceptable with God.
And there's a lot of worship in cultured
Canada that God will never receive in this
world of the mix.
And there's religious experience right here that God
never accepts and will not accept.
There is the warm feeling of personal friendships
with religious people, there's the sound of the
organ and the beauty of the hymns.
But apart from truth and the Holy Ghost,
there's no true worship.
Isn't this serious, my friends?
This is serious to me.
Now, I could be smoother than this, but
I shan't, because I'll tell God sometime, you
say to me, you preached to those people
in Toronto, there at Avenue Old Church.
Were you faithful to tell all I told
you?
Oh, brother, in that hour I hope I
can say, yes, God.
I feared none of them, but I loved
them all.
And I told them all I knew to
tell them.
How big and broad and comprehensive is the
work of Christ.
How imperative is repentance and regeneration in the
Holy Spirit.
And by rejecting the Holy Spirit, we put
out our eyes and wander on in darkness,
sightless and lost.
Let's not be guilty of that in a
day that opened my books and plenty of
truth.
Let's pray.
Oh God, you've asked me that as we
speak, heaven might be opened and there might
be a sense of thy presence.
The feeling that there is impinging upon this
world, another world above.
The eternal world touching the time world.
The kingdom of heaven touching the kingdom of
man.
We believe thou hast heard our prayers.
Oh God, we pray, speak thou to these
friends and let them not take anything for
granted.
Let them not believe that is true, which
isn't true.
Or assume they're all right when they're not.
Or think that their worship is acceptable when
it's not.
May we one and all, each and every
one of us, come humbly, meekly, looking to
the sacrifice, the mighty sacrifice, and hear the
words of love, and see the mighty sacrifice,
and have peace with thee.
Grant this, we pray, in Christ's holy name.
Amen.
Now, dear friends, it's been my experience that
the Lord converts people without my putting pressure
on them.
So I'm not going to put pressure on
them, but I'm going to tell you this.
After service, any time I'm happy to talk
with you with my open Bible, any time
Brother Gray will, and there are, I could
name a dozen standing here now who are
here tonight who would be happy to spend
a long time with you if you need
it, you can call and make an appointment
for a personal interview for prayer instruction.
So I'm not going to make an invitation,
but instead of that, I'm going to ask
you to rise and to sing with me,
all four stanzas, full voice and full tempo,
the song 382, 382.