The Lord, your God, is a God of
gods and Lord of lords, a great God
of mighty and a terrible.
Fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord
thy God.
Shall not his excellency make you afraid and
his dread fall upon you?
With God, his terrible majesty, he bowed the
heavens also and came down when darkness was
under his feet.
And he rolled upon a cherub and did
fly, yea, he did fly upon the wings
of the wind.
He made darkness his secret place, his pavilion
round about him, for dark waters and thick
clouds of the sky.
Who is this king of glory, the Lord
strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle?
And blessed be his glorious name forever, and
let the whole earth be filled with his
glory.
Honor and majesty are before him, strength and
beauty are in his sanctuary.
And the glory of the Lord shall endure
forever.
And I will speak of the glorious honor
of thy majesty and of thy wondrous name.
Enter into the rock and hide thee in
the dust for the fear of the Lord
and for the glory of his majesty.
The Lord shall cause his glorious voice to
be heard and shall show the lighting down
of his arm with the indignation of his
anger and with the flame of the devouring
fire.
The high and lofty one that inhabited eternity
whose name is holy, glorious high throne from
the beginning is the place of our sanctuary.
In the name of Jesus, every knee should
bow, and things in heaven and things in
earth and things under the earth, and that
every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is his times,
he shall show who is the blessed and
only potent, the King of kings and the
Lord of lords, who only hath immortality dwelling
in the light which no man can approach
unto, whom no man has seen nor can
see, to whom be honor and power everlasting.
To the only wise God our Savior be
glory and majesty and dominion and power, both
now and ever.
Amen.
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth and of all
things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son
of the Father, begotten of him before all
worlds.
God of God and the light of light,
the very God of the very God begotten,
not created.
Thou art the King of glory, O Christ,
thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.
And when thou took'st upon me to deliver
man, thou didst humble thyself to be born
of a virgin.
And when thou hast overcome the sharpness of
death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven
to all believers.
Now, I have quoted from some of the
ancient assertions made by the Church down the
centuries.
She has declared herself with great joy and
a sense of deep unwillingness.
I join my voice with theirs and say
I believe these things.
And I believe that he, the King of
glory, the everlasting Son of the Father, took
upon him to deliver man and overcame the
sharpness of death and the resurrection and has
now opened the kingdom of heaven to all
believers.
And now the human mind has got to
have an answer to some questions.
And one of them is, why, O God,
is all this?
God of gods and light of light, he
was born of the virgin, suffered under Pontius
Pilate, overcame the sharpness of death and opened
the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
But there must have been somewhere a purpose
back of this, for God, as I said
at the opening sermon on this series, is
a God, an intellectual God, intellect being one
of the attributes of deity.
And therefore, God must have had a reasonable
purpose back of this, a plan that can
stand up under the scrutiny of sanctified human
reason.
Why did God do this?
And why was his Son born?
And why did he suffer?
And why did they lay the lash on
his back?
And why did they put the thorns on
his brow?
And why did he go into Joseph's new
tomb?
And why did he come out again?
And why did he ascend to the right
hand of the Majesty in the heavens?
Why did he do all this?
Well, the Church thinks it knows, and the
Church does know, because the Holy Ghost was
wrought by the holy men who spake as
they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
And they told us why.
But I am an evangelical, as you are,
and I am very deeply worried and concerned
to the point of some degree of suffering
over the state we evangelicals have gotten ourselves
into.
By evangelicals, I mean the free churches generally,
the churches that have order, that don't have
order, and that have disorder, the churches that
have beautiful services and ugly services and hit
-and-miss, off-the-cuff services, the churches
whose ministers feel that they must be a
cross between Saint Paul, Moses, and Bob Hope.
I am concerned about our evangelical churches, which
I hope and trust under God that I
am a part, and I don't believe that
we have the answer to all this.
I don't think that we know why all
this happened, because we have been told by
our preachers so long that he did all
this in order that we might quit smoking.
Well, I don't smoke unless I catch fire,
but I believe nevertheless that that isn't why
he did all this.
I think the Lord could have found an
easier way, and I don't believe that that's
as important as we make it out to
be.
And then somebody else says, Well, the Lord
did all this in order that we might
go to prayer meeting in place of going
to the theater.
Well, but we haven't answered anything yet.
We have only pushed the answer a little
further away from us and confused it a
bit.
My dear brother and sister, the reason the
Lord did all this for us, the reason
that he was born of the Virgin Mary
to suffer under Pontius Pilate to be crucified
dead and buried, the reason that he overcame
the sharpness of death and rose again from
the grave, is that he might make worshipers
out of rebels.
You put that down, that's not dramatic, and
that will not be quoted in tomorrow's telegram,
and it won't get into the big magazines,
but I'm telling you something out of heaven
tonight, that we are the recipients of a
grace which was meant to make worshipers out
of us and to save us from self
-centeredness.
The eye, you see, was made to look
out and up.
Who was the Roman poet who said that
the difference between a man and a beast
is that a beast looks down and a
man is made to look up.
That a man can engage the God above,
where the beasts go about and they see
the ground underneath their little short legs, but
man can see into the heavens above.
Now this, I say, is the purpose of
God in redemption.
And I'd like to throw in something here
which I have said at various times, but
I want now to put it in here
because it is a part of what I
am saying, that God is infinitely more concerned
that he have worshipers than that he have
workers.
We have degenerated into a place where we
put God on charity and we make God
to be a foreman who can't find help.
And he stands at the wayside asking, how
many helpers will come to my rescue and
to come and do my work?
If we could only remember that God doesn't
need anybody here, God doesn't need anybody in
this city, and if this city were to
be blown from the map by an atomic
explosion tomorrow morning at 7.20, the Lord
God wouldn't lose anything because as far as
his plans are concerned, God doesn't need us.
But we make out that he does.
We make out that he wants to make
workers, and so we say, well, I'll go
to work for the Lord.
Now I think we should work for the
Lord, but I think that it's a matter
of grace on God's part.
But I don't think we should ever work
until we've learned to worship.
A worshiper can work with eternal quality in
his work, but a worker who doesn't worship
is only piling up wood, hay, and stubble
for the time when God sets the world
on fire.
So I am outright and bold about it,
and I don't know how many want to
hear it, and it isn't too important.
I hope the seed of survival, I hope
that that crowd that can hear, that selected
group that will listen, will hear me when
I say that God wants worshipers before he
wants workers.
He calls us back to that for which
we were created, to worship the Lord God
and to enjoy him forever, and then out
of our deep worship we do work.
It is quite a significant thing that all
the great hymns, not all of them, but
almost all the great hymns that ever were
written came out of revivals of some kind.
They came out of the Lutheran Reformation, they
came out of the Wesleyan Revival, they came
out of the Moravian Revival, they came out
of the times when the Church of God
labored and the Spirit fell upon her and
heaven was opened and she saw visions of
God and a radiant beam from the throne
above reflected from the hearts of his people,
and then there were old hymns and we're
still singing the hymn.
I suppose if the devil has a sense
of humor, I don't know whether he has
or not, I suppose he has, Khrushchev has.
But if the devil has a sense of
humor, I think he must laugh and hold
his sooty sides when he sees a bunch
of dead Christians singing a hymn written by
a live composer sometime or other.
When he hears a fellow groaning through, a
lot of hymns are great hymns and I
didn't like them in my early days.
And the reason I didn't like them was
that I heard them sung under bad auspices
at unfortunate situations.
You get into a dead prayer meeting on
Wednesday night with a dead leader who doesn't
expect anything and dead people in front of
him who don't expect anything and would be
shocked if anything happened.
And you get them to singing some grand
old hymn and brother, they can not only
kill it, they can embalm it.
They can put it where they can put
it where it's just no good at all.
And my heart reacted against it.
The Holy Ghost comes on the people.
They're a worshipful people.
They've got to be a worshipful people.
So God wants you to worship him and
then out of your fiery worship, he wants
you to work for him.
But he doesn't want you to jump up
and start any amateurish religious toil.
I heard a college president say one time
that the Church of Christ is suffering from
a rash of amateurism.
And he certainly hit the nail right in
the middle of the head that time.
We're suffering from a rash of amateurism.
Any untrained, unprepared, unspiritual, empty rattlecap of a
fellow who is a bit ambitious, can start
himself something religious.
And then we all listen to him and
we pay and we promote and we work
to try to help this fellow who never
heard from God in the first place.
Amateurism gone mad, gone wild.
Well, that's because we're not worshipers.
Nobody who worships God is likely to do
anything offbeat or out of place.
Nobody who is a true worshiper indeed is
likely to give himself up to carnal and
worldly religious projects.
Now, worship is the normal employment of moral
beings.
Every glimpse that we have of worshiping creatures,
or of creatures, every glimpse that we have
of heaven, shows the people there, or the
creatures there, worshiping.
Ezekiel 1, 1-28.
I read that sometimes.
I never heard anybody preach on that text,
and I don't suppose anybody ever will but
me.
I've preached on it a few times, and
I read it often and think about it.
And I beheld and looked, and a whirlwind
came out of the north, and a great
cloud and fire unfolding itself.
I'll not bore you with reading this whole
thing, but here were strange, beautiful creatures with
wings and wheels, and the wheels in the
middle of the wheels that our colored friends
love to sing about.
And the high and lifted up creatures that
put down their wings and dropped quietly by
the throne of God.
And then at the voice of the Lord
they raised their wings and went hurrying away
again in the service.
And they went, everyone, straight forward.
They turned not when they went.
I love that, too.
I could preach a sermon on that one.
They went, everyone, straight forward, and they turned
not when they went.
And I saw these creatures and the likeness
of their faces.
Four of them had a face of a
man, the face of a lamb, the face
of an ox, and the face of an
eagle.
And their faces and their wings were stretched
upward two ways for everyone.
I won't go on, but we have that
picture there of the creatures, God's people worshiping,
God's creatures worshiping.
Then you find this man Isaiah, the year
that King Uzziah died.
I saw also the Lord high and lifted
up in his train through the temple, and
above it stood the seraphim.
Each one had six wings.
With twain he covered his face out of
modesty, and with twain he covered his feet
because he wasn't going to boast about his
labors and his travels.
And with twain he did fly to serve
his God.
And they answered each other antiphonally, and they
said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God
Almighty, and the whole earth is full of
his glory.
And the temple was filled with the incense,
and the temple doors shook, the pillars shook.
They were worshiping God there.
You turn to the book of Revelation, and
you will find there also that there is
worship.
There is worship there.
And when they had given glory and honor
and thanks to him that sat on the
throne who lived forever and ever, the four
and twenty elders fell down before him that
sat on the throne, and they worshiped him
that lived forever and ever.
And they cast their crowns before the throne,
saying, Now it were thee, O Lord, to
receive glory and honor and power.
For thou hast created all things, and for
thy pleasure they are and were created.
And a little further on, when things had
developed a little further, every creature which is
in heaven, and on earth, and under the
earth, and such as are in the sea,
and all that are in them, heard I
saying, Blessing and honor and glory and power
be unto him that sitteth upon the throne
and unto the Lamb forever and ever.
And the four beasts said, Amen.
And the four and twenty elders fell down
and worshiped him that liveth forever and ever.
I pity these sand-counting, meticulous IBM machine
type of mentality that will spend more time
trying to figure out who those elders were
and who those beasts were, and what the
word really was in their Greek.
Oh, I'm blessedly glad I don't care.
I just see a picture there, a wonderful
picture there of some class of being called
elders.
Now, I don't know whether they're elders, such
as we're going to elect here Wednesday night,
or not.
Could be.
And then there are beasts, which otherwise are
called living creatures.
Beasts being a living creature, we assume that
all beasts are dogs and horses and so
on.
But I'm not sure that there are beasts
that are of the highest type.
And they're up there, these living creatures, and
they're all worshiping the Lord God.
And wherever you look in heaven, you'll find
them worshiping there.
And if worship bores you, my friend, you're
not ready for heaven.
Now, let's get something straight here.
I believe in justification by faith.
Martin Luther never believed in it any stronger
than I do.
He did everything he did stronger than I.
I don't mean that.
But what I mean is, he believed it
and I believed it, and I can say
amen to what he said about it, and
I didn't learn it from him, either.
I believe in justification by faith, and I
believe we're saved by having faith in the
Son of God as Lord and Savior.
But there's an automatic quality about getting saved
nowadays that bothers me very greatly.
It's an automatic quality.
You put a nickel of faith in the
slot and pull down a lever and take
out the little coin of salvation, tuck it
in your pocket and off you go.
And after that, you say, Yes, I'm saved,
how do you know?
I put the nickel in.
I accepted Jesus and I signed the card.
Very good, very good.
Nothing wrong with signing a card.
I believe that's a good thing so we
can know who they are.
But my brother, we are brought that we
might worship, we come to God.
Not that we might be automatic Christians, cookie
-cutter Christians, Christians stamped out with a die,
but that we might be individually, personally vibrant,
individual, personal Christians, loving God with all our
heart and worshiping in the beauty of holiness.
Not only is worship the normal employment for
moral beings, but worship is the moral imperative.
I want to read from the book of
Luke here a little bit.
It said, When they came nigh the Mount
of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples
began to rejoice and praise God with a
loud voice for all the mighty works that
they had seen.
I want to warn you about something, brothers
and sisters.
Two things.
First, I don't believe that it's necessarily always
true that we're worshiping God when we're making
a lot of racket.
Religious racket and worship don't necessarily mean the
same thing.
I also want to warn you, cultured, quiet,
self-possessed, poised, sophisticated people, that if you're
so sure of yourself that it embarrasses you
if anybody says, Amen, you've got some help
coming to you.
Because the people of God always were a
little bit noisy.
I quote that dear old English Saint that
goes back 600 years, that Lady Julian.
She said she got to thinking about how
high and lofty Jesus was, and yet how
he nicked himself down to the lowest part
of our human desire.
She said she just couldn't control herself.
She let go with a shout, now she
prayed God aloud in Latin.
But translated into English, it just meant, Well,
glory to God, isn't this a marvelous thing?
Now, if that bothers you, friend, I'm afraid
something's wrong anyhow here.
When it was come nigh and the whole
multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and
praise God with a loud voice for all
the mighty works that they had seen.
And I'm quite sure they weren't in tune.
Now, I like to hear singing in tune.
I don't think there's any excuse for anything
else if you've had time to practice a
little.
And everybody's stopping and starting and releasing and
attacking and all that.
I like to hear that.
I think there's no reason that we should
sound otherwise.
But when you get a crowd of people
who've been blessed by the Lord and when
they go out of themselves with worship and
joy, they're just as likely as not to
praise God a little bit off-key.
So if you hear me singing off-key,
don't look at me.
Because singing off-key was what they did
here.
And they praised God with a loud voice.
If it wasn't musical, at least it was
loud.
And they said, Blessed be the King that
cometh in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna, peace in heaven and glory in the
highest.
Some of the Pharisees, God bless those Pharisees
with all their degrees and their seminary training.
And they were polished and smoothed and buffed
and lacquered and polished and sanded and polished
again.
And it hurt them to hear anybody saying,
Glory to God, out loud.
So they came and answered and said, Master,
rebuke these disciples.
Rebuke them, their fanatics.
And Jesus said, I tell you, that if
these should hold their peace, the very stones
would immediately cry out.
He said, Why, I am to be worshipped.
God my Father and I the Holy Ghost,
we are to be worshipped.
And if you won't do it, the rocks
will worship me.
The very rocks will shout my praises.
Those Pharisees would have died in their tracks
if they'd heard a rock praising the Lord.
So these poor people here were praising God
atop of their voices.
It's a moral imperative, my brother and sister.
And yet it is the missing jewel in
evangelical circles.
It's the missing jewel.
The crown is here, but there are no
jewels in it.
Or at least that one is gone.
The Church has decked herself with every ornament,
but one shining jewel she's lost.
And that is the jewel of worship.
I tremble when I think and think of
myself related to it.
And this Church is related to it.
None to the angel of the Church of
the Laodicean right.
These things says they are men, the faithful
and true witness, the beginning of the creation
of God.
I know thy works, that thou art neither
cold nor hot.
I would thou art cold or hot, so
then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold
nor hot, I will spew thee out of
my mouth.
Because thou sayest I am rich.
We have the rich Church today.
I'm no good at statistics, as I've said
before.
I can't remember them 20 minutes, and when
I try to quote them, I always quote
inaccurately.
So I'll not try any statistics on you.
I'll only say that this is the hour
of the Church's riches.
You know, we had a little piece in
the magazine that I edited.
Somebody got to looking around and got nothing.
She wrote a little piece and she said,
I cast a little vote against all this
wasting of money to build fancy buildings and
country club style churches and so on.
I had to make it a whole lot
worse if I had written it.
I didn't write it, I just said we
could put it in.
You know, I've had some mean, nasty letters
about that.
I've had letters not from liberals and modernists
and Roman Catholics, I've had it from a
lion people who wanted to know how come.
And a run-one knew how come and
said, listen, he's the head of another department.
I happened to be the head of one.
He said, well, we'd like to know why.
Now, I could write him a letter, you
know, and I could just peel his epidermis
off nicely and hang it up there to
dry, but I won't do it.
If I did it, I'd suffer and I
couldn't pray and I'd have to write him
and ask him to forgive me.
So I'm just going to not do it.
I'm going to write him a nice, respectful
letter and tell him I would put that
in.
Well, I believe it, my brother, and sister.
You know what will happen if a depression
ever hits the North American continent, Canada and
the United States?
There will be more churches going into bankruptcy
and going back to the man from whom
the money was borrowed.
I know one church, another big one, that
borrowed over $100,000 right out of a
bank.
Now, if you were from a bank, you
wouldn't lend $100,000, I suppose, but they
had a good credit rating, so they borrowed
over $100,000 right out of a bank
and went and built themselves a church.
I am rich.
I am rich and increased with goods, this
church said.
And of course, she had statistics on her
side, and if you charged her with it,
she'd write a nasty letter to the editor.
I am increased with goods, and I have
my shuffleboard courts and my breezeways, and I
have all the comforts for the luxurious Saints
who stretch themselves on beds of ivory and
drink out of golden bowls, but are not
bothered by the woes of Israel.
That was the church of Laodicea.
And the church of Laodicea says, I have
need of nothing, look at my statistics.
I have need of nothing, look how much
I owe.
Can you imagine boasting about how much we
owe?
The evangelical church in the last year borrowed
so much money to build, and we owe
that money, and so we boast about how
much we owe.
I pray to God, no, I don't need
it, I'll take that back, I'll let God
handle that without any suggestion from me.
But I don't know if their depression comes,
brothers and sisters, it could easily mean that
we would do what happened right after the
First World War.
Now, some of you people don't remember that.
Right after the First World War, a lot
of healing evangelists and other evangelists got going,
and throughout America, and I don't know about
Canada, I lived in the States then, throughout
the United States, everybody that could built himself
a tabernacle.
And each one tried to outbuild the other.
And then along came that woeful depression that
they blamed on Hoover, who was no more
to blame than I am.
But where came that woeful depression, and those
tabernacles were nailed up by the scores every
place, and the poor people who put their
money into it couldn't get it back, and
the fellow that built it was off somewhere
else.
And that happened.
Now, that same thing will happen again.
We're in a big building boom.
We have everything.
Sometimes it's necessary to build, and if you
don't build when you should, you're not doing
the will of God.
But when you build when you shouldn't, you're
not doing the will of God.
I have need of everybody who had everything
but worship these days.
You can't get to go to a prayer
meeting and sit on a board and decide
how much money you were going to put
into a radiant heat for the men's room,
so that no fellow had to walk around
in giddy little paddies, cold on the floor,
without radiant heat.
But you couldn't get him to a prayer
meeting because he's not a worshiper.
He's just a fellow who runs his church.
I think in any of you people now,
you don't have to like this because this
is not important to me.
I hope you do because you're on the
right side then.
But listen, my brother and sister, it seems
to me that it's always been a frightful
incongruity that men who do not pray and
do not worship are nevertheless able to run
the church and determine the direction it will
take.
No man has any right to debate an
issue or vote on it unless he's a
praying man.
And yet, in the Alliance, we let the
women do the praying and the men do
the voting.
The men sit around and lean back and
stay cool in the law until midnight trying
to make decisions that ought to be prayed
for in the first place.
Because we're not worshipers, we're wasting other people's
money tremendously, we're marking time, we're spinning our
wheels with the axles up on wood blocks,
burning the gasoline and making a noise and
getting no place.
Oh, brother and sister, God calls us to
worship.
And I find this missing in the Church
of Jesus Christ, our Lord, in this day.
We have learned instead of worship, we are
now second in entertainment to the theaters.
I want to tell you something.
I want to tell you something tonight.
It's this.
If I want to see a show, I
know where I can see some good ones,
put on by top-flat geniuses who know
what they're doing.
And if I want a show, I'll duck
right out and go down to O.T.
Theater and I'll see a show that's straight
hot right out of Hollywood or London.
And by men and women who, though they've
devoted themselves to that thing, nevertheless, I have
seen their funeral.
I will not go to a church and
see a lot of ham actors putting on
a home-talent show.
Yet that's where we are in evangelical circles.
We've got more shows in evangelical circles than
we have anyplace else.
I'll tell you, outsider politics, there isn't another
field of activity that has more words and
fewer deeds and more wind and little rain
as we have in evangelical churches these days.
Amen.
Now, it's an awesome and beautiful thing, this
worship.
I'd rather worship God.
I'd rather worship God than any other thing
I know of in all the wide world.
I have hymn books piled up in my
study.
I wouldn't even attempt to tell you how
many hymn books I have of all sorts.
I can't sing a lick, but that's nobody's
business.
God thinks I'm an opera star.
And who listens while I sing to him
the old French hymns in translation, the old
Latin hymns in translation, the old Greek hymns
from the Eastern Church, and of course, the
beautiful songs done in meter, as well as
some of the simpler songs of Watts and
Wesley and the rest.
So I would rather worship God.
But you say, if you worship God and
do nothing else, but nobody ever worshiped God
and did nothing else.
That's the beautiful part about it.
If you worship God, you will be an
active person.
I read somewhere today, I think it was
old Dean Ng of London, the gloomy Dean
who is now dead.
But he said something about worshippers, people who
worshipped and shut themselves up and worshipped.
They weren't very good Christians, they didn't get
much done.
Where has he been all his life?
Doesn't he know that practically every great deed
done in the Church of Christ back to
St. Paul was done by people blazing with
the fire of God?
Doesn't he know that the great mystics and
the great hymn writers and the great worshippers
were the one also who were the great
workers?
Doesn't he know that the great saints whose
hymns we so tenderly sing were active to
the point where you would wonder how they
ever did it?
George Woodfield and John Wesley and Charles Wesley
and St. Bernard and Terry Stegman, you can
name them off.
St. John Wesley They were the ones who
wrote our hymns of praise and also they
were the ones whose knuckles were skinned and
whose hands and palms were calloused with toil.
Hospitals grew out of the hearts of worshipping
men.
Insane asylums grew out of the hearts of
worshipping men.
The youth of the man who went off
in his mind used to drive him out
of the city and throw rocks at him.
Worshipping men and women learned to be courteous
and compassionate to those whose minds had failed
them.
So we have these institutions that take care
of people.
Some of the great advances in civilization were
made by worshipping men and women.
Wherever the Church came out of her lethargy
and rose from her sleep and into her
renaissance and into her revival, always some worshippers
were back of it all.
We are called to worship and we are
failing God in this, my brother and sister.
We are not worthy of worshiping God as
we should.
I was in a church once.
I was pastor of it.
I had nothing to do with it.
It was God.
A man came in from the West Coast
and he was a minister, an intelligent man
apparently, and he came to talk with me.
Now he said, I'd like to ask you
some questions, as I told you.
I said, all right, what is on your
mind?
He said, what is on your mind?
I said, what is it here?
Well, I said, I don't think I know
what you mean.
He said, I sense a presence here.
I said, the very wall seemed to reflect
it.
Somebody's here, he said.
I sense it.
Well, I backed out of that.
I couldn't answer.
I knew what it was.
I knew.
I knew because I remembered that when the
glory of God was revealed and God came
down to the temple in olden days, the
priests couldn't stand the ministry.
I knew that.
And I remembered that when the traveling salesman
went into the town where the revival was
going on in New England, that when he
came into the little town, utterly innocent of
what was going on, the first man he
met, he said, tell me, what did I
feel?
What is this?
He said, when I drove into the city,
the town, I felt something get hold of
me.
He said, this is one of the things
What is it?
Well, he said, there's a revival on in
this town.
He said, God is here.
People are getting converted.
Saloons are being closed up.
Halfway houses are being, the doors are being
nailed shut.
Evil women are cleaning up.
Evil men are quitting their daily habits and
getting right with God.
He says, God's in this place.
Brethren, this is what we lack in the
evangelical circles.
We don't have them in our Bible conferences.
We don't have them in our camp meetings.
We don't have them in our churches.
This I mean in our churches.
We're running our church the way you would
run a club.
It leaves me in my heart.
I wish that we might get back again
to worship so that when people come into
the church they sense instantly they're in where
are holy people.
Where God's people are.
And they fall on their faces and say,
surely God's in this place of the truth.
As it says in 1 Corinthians 1, 1
Corinthians, God's in this place of the truth.
Dear friends, the presence of the Lord is
the most wonderful thing in all the world.
A great American preacher said he went out,
one man said he went out with a
great American preacher and he said we talked,
we lay down on the grass, it was
a summer evening and he said we sat,
we lay down there in the afternoon and
we talked about God and we talked until
the shadows fell and we talked until it
got dark and we talked until it was
late and we said, well, we must take
this off and go home.
And the great saint said, let's pray before
we go.
And so he broke into prayer and the
friend who was telling it said, a sense
of God shut down around us until he
said, I pulled my arms tight around my
body, I was afraid to stretch my hands
out before I touched God.
I told you once that I had prayed
under a tree with some preachers and a
Salvation Army captain.
And I prayed and the others prayed and
we all prayed.
You know, we have our prayers.
We laugh at those who have liturgical prayers
and formal prayers and then we have prayers
just as formal, only they're not good, not
pretty, they're not well done.
Anyway, we all prayed our prayers, including me,
and then the Salvation Army began to pray.
Now, they're not all like that, but he
was.
And that's when I remember that prayer.
I don't know what he said, can't remember
the word that he said, but I knew
that here was a man engaging God in
the awesome, marvelous, elevating, healing, holy act of
worship.
And I was a member of the Methodist
Church as a lad, a young fellow, and
I got converted, and then joined the Methodist
Church in Gosprin, too.
And they took me in, and I got
busy, and they helped me, and all right.
One night, a little lady got up to
sing.
She was a hunchback, a little woman, and
she had a sick face, a face that
looked as if she had suffered a lot,
but oh, what a beautiful little face it
was.
She stood there and sang with a child's
voice.
That's been forty-some years ago.
I can close my eyes still and hear
that little birdlike voice singing about Jesus Christ.
She was worshiping, you see.
She got through, where the learned pastor never
did get through.
She got through.
This is missing in churches.
You say, but if we give ourselves to
this, nobody will do anything.
Oh, brother, if we give ourselves to this,
everybody will do more than he's doing now.
Only what he does will be more than
he's doing now.
He's more than he's
doing doing more than he's doing now.
better than
I was able to do before.
he's doing than he can and silence and
forgot.
Let the whole earth his power confess, let
the whole earth adore his grace.
The Gentiles, with the Jews, shall join in
work and worship so divine.' Over in New
Jersey, where I sometimes go to the New
Jersey Chesapeake and preach for them there, they
closed the service with a communion service, and
then they clasped hands all around the building.
Everybody takes a hold of everybody else's hand
all the way around the building and the
scene.
The Gentiles and the Jews, the Calvinists and
the Arminians, the Episcopals and the Presbyterians, the
Baptists and the Congregations.
Not all are all, but those out of
all of those churches will clasp hands round
the world, and the Gentiles with the Jews
shall join in work and worship so divine.
I'd love that, wouldn't you?
I'd like a colored man in my left
hand, and a Jew in my right hand,
and a Chinese on one, and a Japanese
on beyond that, and a Ghanaian on over
here, all with their faces black and yellow
and red and whatever ours are, all looking
up with our hands clasped round the world
and saying, Bless, O my soul, the living
God, for whom my thoughts are overburdened.
That's true togetherness, and it's the only kind
that is.
The togetherness that's by law and the integration
that is by supreme court rule is no
integration at all.
But when a man, I have a little
friend who comes to this church sometimes when
he's in town.
In fact, if he's anywhere within walking distance,
he's here, and he's just as black as
his Bible.
But he's my dear, loving friend.
I like to put my arm around him
and hug him until it hurts.
He's a man of God who happens to
be of the descendant of Ham.
I'm the man of God, I hope.
I happen to be the descendant of Japheth.
Then my Jewish friend with the crooked nose,
he's a descendant of Japheth.
So we sons of Adam, redeemed by the
blood of the Lamb with our faces up,
from three races and three branches of the
human race, but all one in Christ Jesus,
we call whom our thoughts are overbroad, and
we sing the glory of him who made
us, who loved us and who redeemed us
and who now saves us.
That's what a church is supposed to do
with its friends.
Not a big ecclesiastical machine turned by a
crank, and some pastor turns the crank with
a big smile which he couldn't wipe off.
He loves everybody, and everybody loves him, he's
got to do it, he's paid for it.
He turns the crank and the machine runs.
Oh, this kind of thing grieves my heart.
I want to be among worshipers.
Do you know what?
I'd rather you people would all get filled
with the Holy Ghost and be a worshiping
people than anything that I know.
I'd rather.
Are you interested at all?
Dear Lord Jesus, we love thee and we
love thy Holy Father.
We love the blessed Holy Ghost, the Comforter,
the Lord and Giver of life, who with
the Father and Son together is worshiped and
glorified.
We love thee, O God.
We expect to spend eternity with thee, not
standing in a trance, worshiping always, but like
the creatures out of the fire, worshiping with
trembling joy and then rising to go to
do thy service.
Somewhere in the far reaches of the creation,
hurrying back to the throne to report, O
God.
We look forward to this.
I don't feel what I used to feel.
Death is a terrible, dark, ugly, cold river,
but in another way it's a door into
a new life.
We wait to look upon thy face, to
see thy people, to see Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob and sit down in the kingdom
of God with thy people of every tongue
and tribe and nation around the world.
O Lord, prepare us now for that hour.
Teach us the protocol of heaven.
Teach us the etiquette of the kingdom.
Teach us now, so we won't be doing
anything strange when we take up our harp
and join the company innumerable, or sing in
the choir invisible.
Bless this people, Lord.
Holy Ghost with light divine, shine upon this
heart of mine.
Holy Ghost with power divine, come we pray
thee, and give power and grace and strength
to these hearts of ours, for Christ's sake.
Dear friends, these talks are not specifically evangelistic,
that is, they're not aimed to sinners specifically.
But do you remember that in the Welsh
Revival, when the Christians began to get filled
with the Holy Ghost, sinners began to get
converted, and the Lord wouldn't let anybody preach
on anything else, except worship and righteous living
and holy walk with God?
When the sinners got converted, they sort of
tumbled in automatically because the Christians got right.
So, that's my reason for featuring this series.
Now, I want you to sing with me,
and join in singing an old song.
Matthew Beggs has wrote it.
What number is it?
382?
382.
I think we sang it last week, if
we didn't, we'll sing it this week.
382.
I want you to sing all stanzas, and
lift your heart to God, and see whether
God won't give you the gift of worship
while we sing number 382.