From the 45th Psalm, as a point of
departure, So shall the King greatly desire thy
beauty, For he is thy Lord, worship thou
him.
Now, I want to talk a little bit
tonight about what worship is.
And necessarily I'll have to do some defining,
but it'll be my hope that my definitions
won't be as dry as some I've heard
and some that I have given, but that
they will contain some truth that will help
you.
Now, in the first place, worship is an
attitude, it's a state of mind, and it's
a sustained act.
God has created us that we might be
worshipers, and we have become everything else but
worshipers.
And when we are brought back to God
through Jesus Christ our Lord, and restored into
the fellowship of the Godhead again through the
miracle of the new birth, and our alienation
has been conveyed away, and we were made
friends of God through royal atonement, we are
then to worship again.
And now what does it mean?
Unless we know what it means, we can't
do it.
And if I'm using a word and you're
hearing it in a sense that I don't
mean it, then we're not communicating, if I
may use the word that's used so often
today.
We're not communicating at all.
So worship is an attitude.
That is, it's an inward attitude.
It is not a physical attitude, but an
inward attitude.
And it is a state of mind, there's
no question about that.
And it's a sustained act, for worship is
an act.
Well, I suppose that I should say, and
repeat it before I'm finished, that this is
subject to degrees of perfection and intensity.
You cannot always worship with the same degree
of wonder and love that you do at
other times, but it's always got to be
there.
A man may not love his family with
the same intensity when he's low and he's
tired and business has gone bad and he's
feeling blue.
He may not have a feeling of love
toward his family, but it is there because
it is not a feeling, only it is
an attitude and a state of mind and
a sustained act, subject to varying degrees of
intensity and perfection, intensity in the same person
and perfection among the people that compose the
church.
Now, it embodies a number of factors, mental,
spiritual and emotional.
And I want to talk a little about
them.
And here's a definition.
I don't know that ever I've given this
definition here.
I don't think that I have.
I have several dictionaries, one of them the
Unabridged.
And yet sometimes I have to make my
own definitions if I'm going to mean what
I mean instead of what Webster meant or
somebody else.
So I want to give you a definition
of worship as it ought to be found
in the church.
And you take it down and think it
over because you won't find it in any
book.
It's not been written into any book.
First of all, worship is to feel in
the heart.
Now, I want you to hear that word,
feel, and I'm saying it boldly and without
apology.
I do not believe that we are to
be a feeling-less people.
I came into the kingdom of God the
old-fashioned way and believed that I knew
something of the emotional life that goes with
being converted.
Then I brought in with people who rather
gave us the notion that feeling was just
a little bit off.
It was something that nice biblical Christians didn't
fool around with.
And we were told that there was only
one man that ever went by feelings, that
was Isaac, who felt Jacob's arms and thought
they were his brother's, Esau's, and he said
the only one man who went by feeling
was mistaken.
That sounds awfully cute, but it isn't so
because it's written in the scriptures that she
feeling in her body that she was healed
fell down on her knees before the Lord.
I believe in feeling.
I don't think we should follow feeling, but
I believe that if there is no feeling
in our hearts, we're dead.
If you woke up in the morning and
suddenly there was no feeling in your arm
at all, you'd call the doctor and you'd
dial with the left hand because you couldn't
get dead.
And anything that has no feeling in it,
you may be quite sure that it is
dead.
So I do not hesitate to say that
real worship is, among other things which I
shall explain as I go along, a feeling
in the heart.
It is to feel in the heart and
express in an appropriate manner.
I don't go along with those who hold
that we worship by certain attitudes.
I heard of an old bishop who had
a friend who hunted with him upcountry, and
they hunted together several years, and finally the
old man came to the city where the
bishop conducted his services.
And he said, Now, Bishop, I'd like to
come to your church, but I don't know
how to act.
Well, he said, Just come and do what
the rest of us do, and you'll be
all right.
So Monday they met again.
And he said, Well, I was at your
church yesterday, Bishop.
He said, I didn't know what was going
on, and I didn't know what you were
talking about, but I rose and sought with
you.
I always thought that was a nice expression.
He said, I rose and sought with you.
That is, I rose and sat down with
you, that old-fashioned American.
I rose and sought, and I got up
with you, and I sat down with you,
and I suppose I kneeled with you.
But I believe that you can worship God
in any manner that's appropriate to you, and
then it's to feel in the heart and
express in some appropriate manner a humbling but
delightful sense of admiring all.
That is, worship humbles you.
The proud man can't worship God any more
than the proud devil can worship God.
There must be humility in the heart before
there can be worship.
It is humbling, but it is delightful, and
it is a sense of admiring all, an
astonished wonder.
You know the difficulty with us in this
day of being sure of everything.
When everybody's an engineer now, I'm just waiting
for the time when they'll change the name
of a minister of Christ to a spiritual
engineer.
I'm looking for that.
I remember when an engineer used to be
one or two fellows.
He was a stationary engineer, which means he
ran a machine that stood still.
Or he was a locomotive engineer, which meant
that he ran an engine that ran down
on track.
And that's about the only engineers we had.
Then we began to multiply engineers.
We even got to calling the man who
cleans up the church a sanitary engineer, and
the man who feels your head, the head
shrinker, we called him a human engineer.
We have human engineers now.
Well, I'm waiting for that time when we
will be said to be spiritual engineers.
But we have reduced things to engineer's terms
and to scientific terms and psychological terms.
But in the scriptures I find this which
I have called astonished wonder.
That astonishment and wonder, you found it in
the book of Acts, and you'll always find
it where the Holy Spirit is, and you'll
not find it where he isn't.
But the Holy Spirit, when he comes, opens
heaven until people stand astonished and wonder at
what they see.
And our astonished wonder meant, we confess, an
uncreated loveliness.
So this astonished wonder and overpowering love in
the presence of that most ancient mystery, there
we have a word again without which there
can be no worship.
If it isn't mysterious, there can be no
worship.
If God can be understood by me, then
I cannot worship God.
But one thing's sure, my friends, I will
never get on my knees and say, holy,
holy, holy to that which I can figure
out.
That which I can explain will never overawe
me, never fill me with astonishment or wonder
or awe or admiration, so that in the
presence of that most ancient mystery, that unspeakable
majesty which the philosophers have called a mysterium
tremendum, but which we who are God's children
call our Father which art in heaven.
This ought to be present in the Church.
You know, I have tried to figure out
what revivals have been down the years, and
I have rather come to this conclusion, possibly
it could be modified somewhat.
But I think that generally this is true,
that revivals have been a sudden bestowment of
the spirit of worship.
Where people worship God, a sudden spirit of
worship comes on them.
There is a bestowment of it.
It is not something you work up to,
but something God bestows.
And where it is present, then you have
a revival immediately.
I lived many years ago in France, a
man by the name of Pascal, if you
like, and he was one of the greatest
minds that ever lived.
Generally said to be, when the great thinkers
and heavy-domed brethren are trying to figure
out who had the heaviest dome, they usually
say there are six of the great thinkers
of the world.
I am not one of them, brother, but
they say that there are six of the
great thinkers of the world.
St. Paul, incidentally, is usually placed among them.
And this man is said to be one
of the six great thinkers of all time.
He was one of the greatest mathematicians.
When he was only a boy in his
teens, he was writing advanced books on mathematics
that astonished people.
He was a great philosopher, mathematician, and thinker.
But one night he met God.
And they tell me that he wrote down
his experience briefly on a piece of paper,
and he folded up that paper tenderly, and
he put it in his shirt pocket or
the pocket that lay close to his heart,
and he kept that paper there until he
died to remind him in some sort of
way of that experience.
But here's what he wrote.
He said, from about half past ten at
night to about half after midnight, that would
be two hours, then he had one word,
fire.
Now, here was not a fanatic.
Here was not an ignorant farmer with hayseeds
back of his ears.
Here was not somebody that had climbed up
out of the ghetto or out of the
slums.
Here was a man who was a great
brain, a great thinker, a great mathematician, and
who was given to thinking mathematically and mechanically
about things.
And yet God broke past that and threw
that into his life so that for two
solid hours he could only characterize what was
going on in him as fire.
Then he prayed, O God of Abraham, God
of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the
philosophers and the wise, security, security, feeling, joy,
peace, understand, this was not a sentence for
somebody to read or sentences.
This was the ecstatic utterance of a man
who had had two wonderful, awesome hours in
the presence of his God.
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
the God of Jacob, not the God of
the philosophers and the wise, God of Jesus
Christ, he says, thy God shall be my
God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of all save
God, who can be found only in the
way taught in the gospel.
O righteous Father, he prays, the world hath
not known thee, but I have known thee.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
And he put an Amen after that and
folded it up and put it in his
shirt pocket and kept it there until he
died.
This praying man, this thinker, this great mathematician
who had been moved so in the presence
of God that he wrote it down and
the philosopher that he was, he said, I
don't mean the God of the philosophers, Father,
I mean the God of our Lord Jesus
Christ who can be known only in the
ways of the gospel.
Now, this is what I mean.
Now I want to break down a little
further of what worship is and show you
that it is about four things.
Now, it's lots more than that.
I've given a running definition.
Now I want to break it down and
find four major factors, ingredients in worship.
One is boundless confidence in the character of
God.
We can't do very much worship these days
because we have not a high enough opinion
of God.
God has been talked down and reduced and
modified and edited and changed and amended until
he is not the God that Isaiah saw
high and lifted up, but something else again.
And because he has been reduced in the
minds of the people, we don't have to
have that boundless confidence in his character that
we used to have.
Confidence is necessary to respect.
You can't respect a man in whom you
have no confidence.
And when you extend that respect upward to
God, if we cannot respect God, we cannot
worship God.
We cannot have confidence in him because where
there is no respect there can be no
worship.
And worship rises or falls in the church
altogether depending upon whether the idea of God
is low or high.
So we must begin with God where everything
begins.
You know everything begins with God.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and
the earth.
And it's at the beginning of your Christian
life there is God.
At the beginning of the gospel was God.
At the beginning of the incarnation, God.
At the beginning of the end, God.
Everywhere and always, God has to be.
God is always antecedent.
God is always there first.
God is always previous.
God is always prior.
God must be there first.
And the God who is there is not
the home-made, cheap God that you can
buy these days and mark down because he's
shelf-worn, but the God and Father, the
awful God, the awesome God, the mysterious God,
the God who arches over the world and
folds the universe in his great wing, this
God we must worship.
And we must rescue our own concepts, not
rescue God.
God needs no rescuers.
But we must rescue our own concepts from
their fallen and frightfully inadequate condition.
So that boundless confidence is one thing.
If I haven't absolute confidence in God, I
can't worship him.
You can't sit down with a man and
have fellowship with him if you have reason
to fear that he's there out to get
you and that he's tricking you or deceiving
you or cheating you.
You can't do it.
You have to respect him before you can
sit down quietly.
You have to trust him before you can
have human fellowship.
So when we go to God, we have
to raise our affections and our confidence to
God.
And in the presence of God without doubt
and without nervousness and without worry and without
fear that God will cheat us or deceive
us or let us down or break his
covenant or lie or do something wrong, we've
got to be convinced to the point where
we can go into the presence of God
in absolute confidence and say, Let God be
true, though every man be a liar.
And the God of the whole earth cannot
do wrong.
And when we can do this in the
presence of God, we're at the beginnings of
worship.
Boundless confidence in the character of God, I
say.
The second thing is admiration.
Now, admiration for God, you can have respect
for a man and not admire him particularly.
And so I suppose it would be remotely
possible to have some kind of theological respect
for God and yet not admire what you
saw particularly or have inability to admire.
But when God made man in his own
image, as I've said, I think, every sermon,
he gave him a capability of appreciation.
He gave him the ability to appreciate and
admire his creator.
I heard old Dr. George D.
Watson, I know Dr. Shaw too, but Dr.
George D.
Watson, one of the greatest old Bible teachers
of his generation, heard him many years ago
talk about the love that we had for
God.
He said there were two kinds of love,
at least two kinds of love, the love
of gratitude and the love of excellence.
He said we could love God because we
were grateful to him or we could go
on past that and love God because of
what he was.
Just as it's possible for a child to
love his father or mother out of gratitude.
And that's proper and right, he should of
course.
But years later when he gets to know
his parents or maybe after they're gone, then
he'll remember that he loved them also out
of a love of excellence, if there was
any excellence there.
There are some people that we're supposed to
love but there's no excellence there.
You can't love them.
You have to love them with an infused
love.
You can't love them with a love that's
called out by their excellence.
But God Almighty is excellent.
Beyond all other beings he's excellent.
And so the love of excellence surpasses the
love of gratitude.
The love of gratitude is the love we
have for him because he's been good to
us.
And you know God's children rarely get beyond
that.
You rarely hear anybody pray admiring God and
worshiping the excellence of God and talking to
God about his own excellence.
Now the Psalms do and Christ did and
the apostles did and do, but we don't
hear it much now because we are strictly
Santa Claus Christians.
Strictly we look to God to put up
the Christmas tree and put our gifts under
it.
And we're grateful to God and we should
be grateful to God.
It's right and proper we should be grateful
to God for all the things that he
does for us and all the gifts that
he gives us, large and small.
But that is, I say, only the lower
elementary kind of love.
There comes a love then of excellence that
you can go into the presence of God
and not want to rush out again.
But stay in the presence of God because
you're in the presence of utter infinite excellence.
And so naturally you admire and this can
grow on you, this knowledge can grow, the
knowledge of God, until your heart has been
lifted into an excellency of love and admiration.
Now the third ingredient that I find in
worship is fascination.
That is, fascination is to be filled with
moral excitement.
I'd like to stop here and just let
that sink in and I'd like to underscore
it, not put footnotes down disclaiming it.
I want to insist upon it.
Fascination.
You can't read your Bible very long until
you find that God fascinated some people in
that Bible.
They were fascinated by him.
They were filled with a high moral excitement.
There's not much of it.
Now really there's not much of it.
I'm not coming to you saying, for I
used to preach, I had it, and you
don't have any of it here.
I'm a little weary of that.
The man who can always have a revival
somewhere else and then comes home and says
there's none here, leaves with me the suspicion
that what he had there wasn't a revival.
Any new voice, you know, stirs somebody up.
But that's something else again.
I'm going down to Gordon Seminary tomorrow.
Be back Thursday, God willing, and preach here
next Sunday.
But I will spend three days down there,
Gordon College and Seminary in Boston.
I'm just out of Boston.
I'll be a new voice down there, and
at least, I suppose, they'll be sitting up
to wonder what this new thing is that
has come in.
So I can come back and tell you
next Sunday about how many people came to
me and asked me questions and wanted me
to pray with them, but it won't mean
too much.
I'm not coming and saying, in the olden
days, it will be to us now.
Not that at all.
But I'm saying wherever God is known, indeed,
by the Holy Ghost's illumination, there is a
fascination and a high moral excitement.
That is, that fascination is to be captured
and charmed and entranced by the presence of
God and by the person of God.
It's to be struck with astonished wonder at
the inconceivable elevation and the magnitude and the
splendor of God.
I don't know how you feel about it,
but for me it's either God or else
it's agnosticism.
I don't know many churches that I'd want
to join and get into the rat race.
I don't know very many of them.
I don't know that I'd want to be
part of any religious group that each person
is a cog in the wheel and the
pastor turns the crank and if it comes
out all right at the end of the
year and there's no deficit, he's a good
man.
I don't think I'm interested in that at
all.
I want to begin with God and I'll
end with God and I want to know
that I'll never end with God because there
is no end in God.
And this fascination, this sense of worship, we
wonder where the hymns came from, why the
hymns came out of this sense of admiration
and fascination that was in the hearts of
men.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus, dearest Lord, forgive me if
I say for very love thy precious name
a thousand times a day.
Where did that come out of?
It came out of a man who was
fascinated by what he saw.
He admired God until he was charmed and
struck with wonder at the inconceivable elevation and
magnitude and moral splendor of the being that
we call God.
And then the fourth ingredient that I would
mention is adoration, which is all else brought
to white heat and made incandescent with the
fire of the Holy Ghost.
That is to love with all the powers
within us.
It is to love with fear and wonder
and yearning and awe.
I tell you, I get goose pimples when
I think of this modern way of doing.
I preach about Jesus dying for me and
I say, Now, if you believe that and
accept him, all is well with you.
So a lot of people believe that and
accept him and there's no fascination, no admiration,
no adoration, no love, no fear, no wonder,
no yearning, no awe, no longing, no hunger,
no thirst.
I wonder if they've met God at all.
A young couple that have their baby and
lay it in little warm, twitching, kicking form
there.
They love it and continue to love it
more and more.
They love it because it's alive.
There never was a doll made anywhere.
This most skillful, artistic thing ever turned out
the most beautifully painted and human-looking thing
that could bring out the shining-eyed wonder
in a couple's face that a newborn baby
can bring out.
It doesn't have to be pretty, there never
was one yet that was pretty, I think,
at first.
But it just has to be there, their
baby, alive and warm and breathing.
And there's a difference between this botanical, nickel
-and-the-slot Christianity that's passing for Christianity
now and that Christianity of our fathers where
men worshiped God in awful wonder and adoration,
to love and yearn and work on God.
Bishop Usher used to go down by the
bank of the river, kneel down there Saturday
afternoon and spend the afternoon on his knees
in the presence of God in awesome worship.
John Edward's son-in-law, David Brainerd, said
that he would kneel in the snow and
be so lost in worship and prayer and
intercession that when he was through, the snow
would be melted around him in a circle.
And the man he called the horrific Fletcher,
the saint of Methodism, used to kneel in
his little bare room on the floor.
When he'd lived out his life and gone
to be with God, they found that he
had made a concave place in the floor
where his knees actually wore out the boards.
And they found the wall of his room
stained with his breath, for he'd waited on
God and where he had worshiped his God
in the beauty of holiness.
This adoration, Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart and with all
thy mind, can only mean one thing, and
that means to adore.
So adore is a word that I use
most cautiously.
I never say about any person, Oh, I
adore him, I adore her, I adore it.
Never.
I love babies, I love people, but I
never adore them.
Adoration I keep for the only one who
deserves it.
In no other presence is before no other
being can I kneel in fear and wonder
and yearning and awe and feel a sense
of possessiveness that cries mine, mine.
There are those who are so theologically stilted
that they feel it is not right to
say mine.
I have even read, I've even gone through
hymn books, at least one or two hymn
books that I have seen worthy editors, the
cold, chilly editors who got out of their
deep freeze and shook off the scaly ice
and got their pen and dipped it in
blue ice water and edited the hymns of
Wesley and Watts and they took away the
I's and the me and the mine and
they put ours in.
I love thee, O God, and we love
thee, O God, and so on.
Because they're so modest that they can't imagine
they're saying I.
But my brother, your friend, that I always
heard you worship, they cry out, O God,
my God, only will I see thee.
And so it becomes, it becomes, it becomes
a love experience between I and God so
that it's I and thee.
Paul was like that in David and Isaiah
and Moses and the rest.
And that desire to possess God, that I
will, God is my God, the Lord is
my shepherd, I say not one.
He made it me to lie down in
green pastures.
Can you imagine what an ice water editor
would have done with that?
The Lord is our shepherd, we say not
one, he made it us to lie down
in green pastures.
That's togetherness, you know.
And so we all lie down together, but
nobody has got anything that means I.
Whether in faith you can say God and
I, or you can't say us and me
and anything.
Until you have been able to meet God
in loneliness of soul, you and God as
if there is nobody else in the world,
you'll never know how to grace the love
of the other people in the world.
I wonder if your Irish saint here in
Canada pulled a hand of which they're out
and said, she talks to God as if
there is nobody else but God and he
had no other children but her.
So that's selfish, you know.
That's not selfish at all.
Grump dynamics.
Hundred dead people sit down and try to
generate life.
Can't do it.
They put one more man.
You'll get some kind of reaction anyhow.
In this adoration, we desire to be poured
out at God's feet.
We desire.
We want to be poured out at God's
feet.
Remember David?
When David suddenly got a touch of nostalgia.
Used to call that homesickness.
I think it's a nicer word.
Let's call it homesickness.
He got a touch of homesickness.
And he said, oh, that I might have
a drink out of the good old well
of Bethlehem, hidden under his boyhood.
And one of his fellows, who was looking
for a promotion, he grabbed up a teacup
and started for the well.
And he ran in there at the risk
of his life and got some water and
brought it back.
And David picked up the water, but instead
of drinking it, he said, I can't drink
this.
This is blood.
He said, this costs you the rest of
your life.
So he poured it out as an oblation
to his God.
And when you've known God enough, when you
come to have faith in him, found his
confidence in his character, and when you come
to admire him and love him for his
excellence, when you become magnetized by his beauty
and adore him, we want to pour ourselves
out at his feet.
We don't have to be urged to do
it.
David didn't say, come and consecrate, come and
consecrate, come and consecrate.
Oh, it's a do-right affair.
Come and consecrate.
The person who has ever really met God
wants to pour himself out at God's feet.
Consecration is not difficult for the person who
has met God.
He won't insist upon giving himself to God.
Now, I say that in this that I
have described imperfectly, these mental emotions and spiritual
factors are present continually in varying degrees of
intensity, of course, but present.
And so on in faith and prayer and
mental prayer, they condition our thoughts, our words
and our deeds.
They hallow every place and time and task.
And they give back the glory which Christ
had before the world was to the Christian.
You in him and you in us.
And the glory that he had, I have
given unto him.
Now, when I come to Jesus Christ, if
we understand the scriptures right, not that we
might stop smoking, although we certainly ought to
do that immediately.
God had meant a man to smoke, but
he turned his nose upside down and broke
his nose.
But not that we may stop drinking, though
certainly no man ought to drink liquor.
Not that you might stop beating your eyes,
if you do.
I don't know if you do, but I
suppose you don't.
But why do we come afloat?
We come in order that we might be
brought back into and reinstated in that place
that we were brought in and fell out
of when we were lost and had them.
Back into the place where we adore and
admire the great God who made us, and
where we are prepared to live in forever
without embarrassment.
To live in his awful presence with uncovered
faces, and look upon his face and be
like him, and his name be enough for
us.
If you listen to me now, I went
to the creature once.
I've mentioned this before, maybe, but let me
call attention to it again.
I went to the creature once whom God
created to seal up the sun.
He was full of wisdom and perfect in
beauty.
God placed him in Eden, the Garden of
God.
He is described as having every precious stone
as his covering.
Sardis, 10,000 in Eden.
In Eden is the anointed cherub that covers.
God says, I have set thee so.
Thou art upon the holy mountain of God.
Thou hast walked up and down in the
midst of the storm and the fire.
Thou art perfect in thy ways from the
day that thou was created till, an awful
word, till iniquity was found in thee.
Thine heart was lifted up because of thy
beauty.
Thou hast corrupted thy wisdom and reason by
thy brightness.
I will cast thee to the ground.
I will lay thee before kings.
I will destroy the old covering cherub.
I will cast this profane out of the
mountain of God.
That's in the Old Testament.
That tells of some way out there beyond
where the fireless rocket can go.
God had a cherub created for the purpose.
He was a creature who could, without embarrassment
or fear, burn, burn, burn the presence of
God, covering the stones of fire before the
throne.
He fell in love with his own beauty.
God said, Thou art profane, and God felled
him down.
Many Bible teachers believe that was the devil.
The devil is a creature created to worship,
who turns his worship on himself, and God
felled him down.
I want to read now in the New
Testament, under the angel of the Church of
Ephesus, right?
These things says he that holds the seven
stars.
I know thy works.
I approve some things you do, but nevertheless
I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast
left thy first love.
They hadn't left their activity.
They had left their first love.
They had works, verse 2.
They had even labor, verse 2.
They had patience.
And they couldn't bear them that were evil.
They lived right, and they were theologically sound,
and they threw out everybody that didn't teach
apostolic doctrine.
I nevertheless have somewhat against thee, because thou
hast left thy first love.
Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and
repent, and do the first works, or else
I will come unto thee quickly, and remove
thy candlestick out of its place, except thou
repent.
I am not a schoolboy of Canada, of
course, as I am of the States, having
lived down here so long.
But I suppose it's true here as well.
You can travel out to the countrysides, and
you'll see nice windmills, cattle grazing, occasionally a
horse, little flocks of sheep living there, grain
growing, fruit trees, and you'll come down the
side road and here stands an old church.
Nobody attends it anymore.
You get out, open and close the door,
but it's padlocked.
And more and more you walk around the
church to the back, and there you see
the two sons.
The youngest father, the youngest the wife, and
their little baby, too.
I always feel bad when I look at
the tombstone and say, Well, there he is,
born Mary 4th, of Jesus.
This one here, the daughter.
And they're George and I.
The old building grandfathers that used to pump
that big cold heavenly clay till the morning
shook were sleeping the sleep of the just.
Waiting for the resurrection of the dead.
If you can get into the building, you'll
find dust a quarter of an inch thick,
the old pulpit cloth is faded now and
the old pulpit Bible is turned down.
Thou hast left thy first love.
In Ephesus they tell me that six years
or so after this was written, not a
Christian church stood in Ephesus.
God removed it, canceled it.
You can ride through Toronto with a man,
an older man who knows Toronto, and you'll
think to a church and say, that church,
Mr. Joseph, it was a building the fire
of God burned there and sold to a
convertant, but they left their first love.
The old godly pastor is long gone, the
young man who is there now, not a
bit of gospel, nothing.
That church stands there as an awful monument
to what happens when we don't know why
we were born, and don't know why we're
Christians, and don't know why we're met together.
We have forgot to worship God, and God
has allowed our church to peter out and
die.
And they're petering out and dying all over.
The man came from India, the city of
Chicago.
He wasn't Peter Carson, he wasn't Kenneth Bregman,
he wasn't Anglican or Baptist or Presbyterian.
He had met God through the New Testament.
And I was awestruck with him.
I let him preach, and he spoke fairly
good English.
And I learned more about it.
This man was a Hindu, converted to Christ
by reading the New Testament, come to America
as a missionary.
And thus, we here, arouse ourselves and wake
up, that Jesus tells of our Lord, the
Lord is coming from the Valley, to try
to show Canada what real Christianity is.
If that makes you mad, you'll desperately need
this soon.
He may be going to New York and
Chicago and Buffalo and Boston from the Valley,
from Los or Vietnam.
But God has no particular fondness for nations
or buildings or denominations.
He wants to be worshiped.
He is thy Lord, worshiped are him.
Say unto the King, Greatly desire thy beauty.
And when the Church loses her love, she
begins to slip.
Little by little she'll slip.
And for another generation, people will have to
come to her to tell her the gospel
again.
And maybe they don't.
My dear brethren, I've tried to say tonight
what worship is.
I've tried to say again that we are
born to worship, and if we're not worshiping
God in the beauty of holiness, we have
missed the music of being born.
I've tried to say that worship is a
delightful, awful awesome, awful humbling, wonderful experience which
we can have in varying degrees, but have
always, even living in the middle of it.
We never need to leave church with the
worshipers.
When we've locked the building and we've driven
out away from the place and it's dark,
we're not left church at all.
We carry our sanctuary with us, and we
never leave it, because worship is a continual
thing.
I have said that in the Old Testament
we learned a mysterious creature who forgot why
he was created, turned his eyes on himself,
and perished.
I have said in the New Testament there
was at least one church that forgot why
she was a church, began to admire herself,
fell in love with the Lord, and the
Lord said, I'll take the king and stick
out.
And the church figured out.
My friends, there are some of you that
have been stirred over the last weeks when
you've talked with me about this building.
I think tonight would be a wonderful time
to take hold of ourselves and say, I'm
sick of my coldness of heart.
A man spoke to me this morning, a
fine young man.
I can't give a verbatim what he said,
but the gist of it was that he
was deeply concerned for his own spiritual life.
He had been in this church 17 years,
but felt in his deep heart that he
wasn't fulfilling the will of God for himself.
And he was cold and relatively powerless.
And I quoted to him a sentence from
Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard of Clairvaux writing to a man who
talked like this young man, who was afraid
his heart was hard.
He said, my brother, only the heart is
hard that doesn't know it's hard.
Only he is hardy who doesn't know he's
hardy.
If you know that your heart is cold,
it isn't a hard heart yet.
God has the gist of it.
So that if there's a yearning within you,
God put that yearning there, and he didn't
put it there to mock you.
He put it there that you might rise
to it.
God puts the date of yearning in your
heart.
He doesn't turn his back and mock you.
He puts it there because he's there smiling
to meet you.
And if you have this night, just this
night, return it, that you're going to get
rid of this business, this coldness, this mediocre,
half-dead way of living.
And seek the face of God in repentance,
and long until he comes and fills you
with himself.
Come to nature, all right.
And I think by the end of the
day this will be a good night.
Let's see, is it 285?
Number 285.
What's the song about the blood?
Now the problem is, of course, the problem
of cleansing, the purity.
Let's see about it.
Now, let's go to this prayer room over
here, and if your heart has waked you
up, I'm proud of you.
Let's go to the prayer room, and let's
have a little prayer together tonight.