In the fourth chapter of the book of
John, John 4, the gospel of John, that
is, fourth chapter, we break into the narrative
at the nineteenth verse.
The woman said unto him, Sir, I perceive
that thou art a prophet.
Our Father is worshipped in this mountain, and
we say that in Jerusalem is the place
where men ought to worship.
Jesus said unto her, Woman, believe me, the
hour cometh, and we shall neither in this
mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father.
Ye worship ye know not what.
We know what we worship, for salvation is
of the Jews.
The hour cometh, and now is, when the
true worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit
and in truth.
For the Father seeketh such to worship him.
Then the text will be, verse 24, God
is spirit, and they that worship him must
worship him in spirit and in truth.
My message tonight will of necessity be shorter
than the others, I think, as I plan
it to be.
But I want to talk about the internality
of true worship.
And of course, I have here for my
text, God is spirit, not a spirit, but
spirit.
That is, the substance of God is spirit.
Therefore, they that worship him must worship him
in spirit and in truth.
Now, in that text there is found a
sample of the revolutionary quality of Christ's teaching.
Just 16 words are here, 17 if you
put the A in, which doesn't belong in.
Just 16 words are here, and yet into
these 16 English words are compressed truth.
The most liberating, the most illuminating, and the
most elevating.
Religious people have always been a bound people.
Religious people all over the world are bound.
It is a very significant fact that the
word religion means to bind back.
And religious people have laid off one set
of chains and taken another as a rope.
Except where there is true worship, and that's
what we're getting at tonight.
But I'm talking about religious people generally, people
who are worshipers, supposedly, all over the world
of every religion.
And along comes our Lord and puts into
16 words an emancipation proclamation and signs it
in blood, so that the people of the
world, bearing the heavy yoke of religion, might
know that instead of religion being a yoke
upon our neck, religion is weighing on our
souls, if we only knew it.
Then our Lord Jesus put in words that
were illuminating.
By that I mean that the light shines
upon us so that there is light in
our spirits, and this elevates and gets us
up out of the mud.
The people of God are never called to
walk knee-deep in the mire of the
world, nor are they called to walk knee
-deep in the traditions of man.
So our Lord sets us free here, and
to change the figure, opens a fountain of
healing water for the healing of the wounds
of the world.
They tell us in India, that this is
only one sample, but in India they believe
that the Mother Ganga, that is, the Ganges
River, has power to cleanse people.
So there are certain ones, certain saints, they
call them, holy men, who make pilgrimages to
bathe in Mother Ganga, one of the dirtiest
rivers in the world, incidentally, they say, again.
And they will fall down fully, and then
mark with their finger where their forehead was,
and then step forward and put their foot
where the mark is, and then fall full
length again, and thus literally fall across scores
of miles to Mother Ganga, the river Ganges,
and bathe themselves there, and go away and
be no cleaner than they were before.
In fact, not as clean as they were
before, maybe, but certainly wounded and bruised, bitterly
in their souls.
And our Lord puts into one sentence the
words of worship, and says, you don't please
God by abusing your body, nor by bathing
in this or that river, but those that
worship the Father worship him in spirit and
in truth, so that this is healing water
for the sores of religious men.
And our Lord tells us here that worship
is natural to man.
I mentioned that before, and I explained that
I have been taken to task for saying
that, but I don't mind it, because it's
true.
That worship is natural to men, and natural
to man.
It was perfectly natural for Adam to walk
with God in the garden in the cool
of the day, and the ears of Adam
were blessed by the velvet, soft, healing voice
of God.
Then when Adam sinned, he hid from the
presence of God among the trees of the
garden.
He was hiding, he was conscious of God,
but he was not free to worship God
now, because sin had come in between and
torn the strings off of the harp.
Nothing was left but the outline.
The music of his soul was muted now,
and there was cacophony and discord where there
had been harmony before.
So he lost the proper object of his
worship, and he was looking about for people
or something to worship.
But man worships nevertheless, and he worships by
the necessity of his being.
He worships by the necessity of his being.
He looks around for something to worship, and
he recognizes mystery and wonder.
Every time you wonder about something, every time
you wonder.
The other day I was down on my
knees praying in my study, and I got
to thinking about the speed of light.
I reached up and got a pencil and
a pen, and I began to figure out
how fast light travels in the course of
a day and a year and so on.
I know that it travels 186,000 miles
a second.
Then I know that if you multiply that
by 60, you get how fast it travels
in a minute, and if you multiply that
by 60, you find out how far it
travels in an hour.
If you multiply that by 24, you know
how fast it travels in a day.
If you multiply that by 365, you will
find out how far it travels in a
year.
By that time I had reached the edge
of my card on both sides, just multiplying.
There is something wonderful about that.
They count the galaxies out there in billions.
Now, not thousands or millions, but billions, that
is thousands of millions of millions, thousands of
millions.
They count them in billions, and the galaxy,
they say, is a central sun with satellites
revolving around it, such as our sun around
which the nine planets revolve.
Well, your mind is enlarged and lifted, and
you are filled with wonder.
This very wonder leads you to worship.
It beats you down and opens mystery to
you.
We must recognize mystery, and we do recognize
mystery.
Men used to stand on the seashore and
hear the moanings of the sea and watch
the gulls turn and see the white clouds
float, and they would cry, Oh, what is
all this?
What is all this?
And they called that something out there Neptune,
and they said, This is our God.
And they got on their knees and made
sacrifices to Neptune, for they saw the sun
rising in the morning and making its journey
across the sky and setting in a sea
of blood and oil rose at night.
And they said, What is this shining thing
that rises always in the same place and
goes down and never fails?
And they called it Phoebus Apollo.
You named Phoebe, you got close to this.
And there we have Apollo, a great, beautiful
God.
They made him to be a God with
silver wings on his feet that went so
fast across the sky.
And they worshiped because they said, This is
wonderful.
They didn't know what it was, but it
was wonderful.
And the Parsis got on their knees before
the sun, and they called it Mazda.
And the light that shines down here tonight
is Mazda light, named after the God of
the Zoroastrians, the Parsi fire worshipers.
Well, now why am I telling you this?
To show you that if we don't know
how to worship through Jesus Christ our Lord,
the human heart will break out somehow like
a flood that goes over its banks, and
it will worship.
And if it doesn't get going the right
direction, it will go the wrong direction, but
it will worship.
The human soul will worship.
Then they also said, Well, look at love.
Look at this powerful, tremendous thing for which
men and women die and think nothing of
it.
Look at this which binds a man and
woman together, which binds family together, which binds
men to the love of their country until
they will give themselves freely.
What is this?
And they called it Venus.
We've named one of the planets after that
goddess, incidentally.
Well, you can go on.
There's Ceres, the goddess of life, and there
are many others.
But beauty and art, I wonder what it
is that makes a man want to do
something beautiful.
Why does he want to write a poem?
Why does he want to paint a picture?
Why does he want to compose a piece
of music?
Why does he want to do this?
I believe that fallen man has got in
him somewhere in the deep of his soul.
He has in him that cry after mystery,
that longing after wonder, that uplifting something.
Deep calls unto deep, but the noise of
God waterspouts, and the deep voice of God
calls, and the little deep of man answers
back.
And so deep is answering deep, and every
time a Greek got on his knees at
the seashore and offered his sacrifice to Neptune,
it was the little blind deep within him
answering back to the deep of God.
And every time an American Indian stood on
the shore of the river and put reverently
the bones of the fish back into the
sea and apologized to God for killing it
and eating it, every time he looked up
and said, Gitche Manitou, praises be, he was
giving up to mystery within him.
And every time that great death genius, Beethoven,
turned out a page of immortal music, he
was feeling something within him, even that man
who wasn't, I think, a Christian.
At least he never said he was, and
you don't want to make Christians out of
people who never bothered to say they are.
But he said, I know God who is
nearer to me than he is to other
artists.
I know this God, and then he wrote
his imperishable music.
What was he doing?
He was clinging out wildly, wanting to worship
something.
He said, wonder, mystery, wonder!
He said, ask Gitche, he understands it.
This great man who hovered back and forth
between suicide and life until you gave up
and went the way of all flesh.
He was only a sample.
I mention him only because I happen to
admire him and his music very much.
But this is it.
Man has got it in him to do
this.
He's got to admire, he's got to fear.
So there are many religions.
Again, going to India, they tell us that
there is a God for everybody in India.
And didn't our sister Muriel Clemenger say this
morning there are 450 million in India?
Maybe I'm mistaken there, but I think that's
it.
Well, then you've got that many gods.
You've got a God for everybody.
They've got to worship.
Man's got to admire, he's got to fear,
he's got to adore.
And if he's lost his ability to adore
in his spirit and soar in his heart,
he will soar in a rocket.
He'll get out there somehow.
And I believe that the impulse back of
the longing to explore other worlds and ride
out into the vast spaces is an evidence
of something within us.
No other creature does it, and no other
creature wants to do it, and no other
creature thinks of doing it.
Only man, said the poet Ovid, only man
looks up, all the other beasts look down,
and man alone wants to worship.
Now, you will notice what this woman in
the text said.
And you will notice how she revealed what
is wrong with the whole religious world.
She said, sir, and that was incidentally, I
won't press that because I haven't time tonight,
but that was to get herself off the
hook, you know.
He told her, he said, go call your
husband, and she fell into the trap and
said, I don't have any.
He said, you can say that again.
You've had five, and the one you have
is not your husband.
Well, that was getting embarrassing, so she turned
the subject.
She said, sir, I understand from what you
say that you're a prophet.
She said, you know more than the average
man would know, you must be a prophet.
So she said, I've got a question for
you, and this question was not simply a
frivolous one.
It was one that separated Jew from Samaritan,
even though they were related by blood.
The question was, here in Samaria, in our
holy mountain, we worship.
Across there a little way in Jerusalem, the
holy mountain of the Jew, they worship.
And we say this is the place to
worship, and you say Jerusalem is the place
to worship.
Now, you're a prophet, tell me.
I might have an answer.
The people can't agree, and there's always argument
between Jew and Samaritan, where is the right
place to worship?
So this woman fell into her own little
trap, and she revealed the chief role of
the religious world.
Do I worship here, or do I worship
there?
Do I worship in this church, or do
I worship in this church?
Do I go here, or do I go
there?
That's the difficulty and the problem.
And the whole problem then was externality of
worship.
That's the whole problem, externalism.
And that's our problem now.
That's the biggest problem that church faces now,
is the problem of externalism.
We ran an article in a little magazine
that I edit, Are We Building Too Much?
Somebody got tired seeing these fabulously luxurious religious
country clubs we call churches going up out
all over the suburbs, and they wrote about
it.
She said, I'd like to vote against it
and think we ought to give more admissions.
Well, you know, my ears are still burning,
and my whispers are still singed from that
thing.
They're writing from everywhere, committees and groups writing,
and people from everywhere.
What's the matter?
What happened to you that I dare say
a thing like that?
Shall we worship here, or shall we worship
there?
I didn't write the article, but of course
I'm responsible for it because it went in
the magazine, and I take full responsibility for
everything but typographical errors, and we can't explain
them.
Well, this is it.
Shall we worship here, or shall we worship
there?
Now, Jesus, our Lord, said this beautiful thing.
He said, Sister, the time is fast approaching,
in fact it's already here, when worship won't
be tied down to any location.
For the Father touched to worship him in
spirit.
For God is spirit, and therefore you've got
to be spiritual worshipers.
If God were a local deity confined to
a hill, you'd have to go to that
hill to worship him.
If God were a river deity confined to
the river, you'd go down to the bank
of the river and worship him.
If God were a mountain deity or if
God were a plains deity, you'd have to
go where he was.
But Jesus gave us the marvelous lesson that
God is spirit and therefore God's everywhere, and
we don't worship in places anymore, that is,
not necessarily in places.
You can worship, I'm worshiping God here, have
worshiped, I think in some measure, God here
today in this church in Toronto, Canada.
Tomorrow night at this time, at about this
same hour, everything goes well, I'll be preaching
in Greensboro, North Carolina, down among the hills.
And I will be worshiping God.
Now, if I believed that God was confined
to this so-called sanctuary, I'd be in
a fix.
I'd have to stand outside and apologize to
God for leaving the sanctuary.
And I would have to say, Now, God,
you know I've got business down in North
Carolina, but if you'll excuse me, I'll be
back late Friday and I'll be out to
the sanctuary next Sunday and I'll worship you
some more.
But the beautiful thing that Jesus taught us
is that we are portable sanctuaries, and if
we are worshiping in spirit and in truth,
we can take our sanctuary around with us.
Some will say, Oh, the chandels are getting
off the roof all right, and the nave,
and forget all the parts of the sanctuary,
I remember them all, but they all name
them, and they've got to be there to
worship.
Jesus said, Don't you see that if God
is spiritual, worship is spiritual, and anything spiritual
has no location in space, and it has
no location in time.
Therefore, you don't get up in the morning
and look at your calendar and say, Is
this the time to worship?
And you don't go out and look around
and say, Is this the place to worship?
You worship God now, anywhere, any place, any
time, because worship is spiritual.
Now, people have made a comedy of religion,
a comedy of errors, it has been true,
because men have enslaved themselves to externals, they've
enslaved themselves to objects.
I remember a dear fellow who had been
on the board that had called me to
Chicago 31, 2 or 3 years ago.
He didn't have them now, but he got
into the hospital down there some years ago
in Chicago, and it used to be Old
Auburn Park, but the Catholics bought it and
called it St. George.
They put a big stone statue outside the
window, and I could see it from my
friend Darry's bed, and I went to see
Darry.
I went in, and I said, Good morning,
Brother Darry, how are you feeling?
Well, better, thanks.
We had a little chat, and he smiled
and said, Do you see Old George out
there?
I said, Yes, I see him.
He said, You know, the nice little sister
was in the scene, and I was suffering
a little bit, grunting a little, groaning, and
she said, When you're in pain, look out
the window, you'll get comfort from George.
Ah, you'll get comfort from a piece of
stone!
Well, Jacob took a stone and put it
for his pillows, and I've always wondered about
why Jacob did that.
If there's anything in the wide world I
wouldn't want for a pillow, it would be
a rock.
But Jacob put it up for his pillows,
and there was St. George made out of
a rock outside that window.
They got George all around there.
Now, that's worshiping, you see, and it's locating
it in an object.
On the wall, of course, there would be
crucifixes.
So, objects are holy.
These dear friends, and God bless them, if
there's one of you who doesn't get mad
at me, I don't mean to hurt anybody.
It's not the individual.
I pity the individual, but it's a big
mistake that is being made.
You take a fellow whose hands have beer
mugs and whisky glasses and cards and dice
and written crooked letters and all the rest,
all his lifetime, when he dies, to put
a crucifix in his hand and fold it
on his breast.
And he's got to leave this object to
have some kind of a vial of hope
that it will be all right with him
when the world should come.
I am perfectly happy by the grace of
God to die without a crucifix in my
hand, because I've got the cross in my
heart, perfectly willing that I should die without
seeing a statue of St. George or any
other saint, because I have it inside.
They that worship him, worship him in spirit
and in truth.
So, there are no religious objects.
There may be objects that have certain tender
memories for you.
Somebody may have given you something.
I have mentioned before that I have a
whole manila envelope full of little things that
our daughter, Becky, gave me over the years.
As I trace them down, they get worse
and worse and worse and worse down until
she's just able to write to me.
Those are precious things and objects like that.
But don't imagine they are religious, because they
have no religious significance whatsoever.
In objects we have locations, as I mentioned
before, and some make their religion to consist
in foods.
Some things they don't eat, and some things
they do eat.
The result is that if they do eat
it, they are holy, and if they don't
eat it, they are not holy, and vice
versa.
But Paul said that what you ate didn't
make you better, and it didn't make you
any worse.
It might make you sick, but it won't
make you holy, and it won't hurt you
nor help you.
If it is decent and good, you can
digest it and help yourself, because religion doesn't
lie in your food.
God is spirit, and those who worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.
And then there are times when worship is
not in times.
I respect our Brethren of the Church calendar
year that begin with one thing and end
with another, but I don't follow it at
all.
Can you imagine that six weeks out of
the year I repent, and then after that
the lid is off?
No, it couldn't be.
I couldn't imagine myself tied down to times.
Any time before now is the accepted time,
this is the time.
So any time is all right.
You can say, Good morning, God.
Any time you can say good night to
God at night, you can wake in the
night and think of God, and you can
even dream of God ahead.
And you can have God any time, any
place, so there are no seasons or days,
or there are times of the year when
I supposedly think a little more.
I personally like Easter.
Easter is my time.
If I were to go and have a
time of year, it would be Easter, because
that's when birds are returning from Florida, and
the people of Garba are looking up and
we're hearing, Christ the Lord is risen today,
hallelujah, hallelujah.
I like Easter, and I think it's a
beautiful thing to have that, to celebrate that.
But I have a tough time preaching Easter
sermons, because all of my sermons are based
upon his resurrection.
And if you take away the resurrection of
Jesus Christ, my sermons collapse all about me,
there is nothing that I can say to
anybody, only be good and you will be
happy.
I wouldn't know what else to say, because
it's all based upon his cross and his
open grave and his session to the right
hand of God the Father Almighty.
Yet it's nice at Easter time, because women
get nice colorful clothes and it isn't so
cold.
But apart from that, I don't see that
there is anything particularly holy about that time
of year, because he came into the world
and he made every place holy, if you
are a holy man.
You can sit in a restaurant where they
are drinking around you, and if you don't,
in the States you don't eat, brother, that's
about it.
So if you question some people, do you
go in where they serve liquor?
Well, I settled that with my heart long
ago.
I don't drink it, and I don't choose
to go into those places, but I'm not
going to starve just because some fellow is
guzzling booze in there.
I don't have to guzzle it, and it
isn't catching, you know.
It isn't catching.
So I go in and order something good
to eat, and eat it and go out.
Even in drugstores in some other parts of
the United States, they sell liquor in drugstores.
Go in there and stalk up.
Take it home with you if you want
it, out of a drugstore.
There is no place to eat on trains,
and I long ago gave that up.
If you are going to eat on a
train, you might just as well sit down
and let them serve you what you want,
and let the others drink.
So I don't think that there is anything
holy about places.
Every place is holy if a holy man
is there.
And no place is holy if there isn't
a holy man there.
The Jews made the mistake of thinking the
temple was holy, and because the temple was
holy, nothing could happen to the temple.
And Jesus said, Here I am.
Do you see this temple?
Do you see these stones?
Oh, lay a bit of it away in
the dust before very long.
And he did.
Titus shook it down to the ground.
In the year 70 A.D., he said,
Israel is like a tree.
Your religion is like a tree.
He said, See that axe?
It will produce fruit or it will go
down and be cast into the fire.
So the Lord was perfectly free to turn
from anything.
That's why I warned the Christian missionary alliance.
I think I preached at every council but
one for twenty-some years, and I have
prayed to tell our brethren, Don't lean on
A.D. Simpson.
Don't give a pious look on your face
and talk about our beloved Father.
He's dead, what have you got?
That's all that matters.
God took him home after he had done
his work gloriously, fell asleep and was lying
on the hillside above Nyack.
And I can't wrap myself in his mantle.
He's gone, this sweet man of God, born
out here in the Maritimes, but he was
a holy man because a holy ghost lived
in him, for no other reason.
Not because he was Scots, not because he
was Canadian, not because he went to the
United States and established the alliance, but because
God lived in him.
He knew that.
If a young fellow wants to make an
impression on the alliance, he talks solemnly about
this great worldwide organization and our beloved founder.
I never let any of that get into
the alliance with us.
We've got something bigger than that.
We've got God, we've got the Holy Ghost,
we've got a living Lord Jesus, the right
hand of the Father.
We've got the world for our parish, and
we've got every man for our brother who
knows Jesus Christ the Lord.
And while I've been, since I was 21
years old, a loyal member of this organization,
and nobody has ever dared challenge that I
am a loyal member of this organization, I
know the difference between organization and free worship.
It takes in every man.
We have some Anglicans come into the Church
here and sit sometimes, shake my hand and
tell me how they enjoy my messages.
Thank God for my brethren of the Anglican
Church.
I want to hear them.
They call them Episcopalians down in the States,
same people.
I went to hear them in Indianapolis.
Rector Brown of Baltimore gave a series of
talks on what is Christianity all about.
I was a young fellow.
I tell you, I got help from that
man, such help as I hadn't found scarcely
anywhere else at all.
I remember his great messages down to this
hour.
So with all of my Presbyterian and Baptist
and associated gospel and all the rest, we
are a fellowship of people in whom the
Spirit dwells, and if the Spirit dwells in
us, we break over all the bounds.
Last Wednesday noon I spoke at Ryerson Institute
of Technology.
I didn't want to go, and then after
I got there I didn't want to leave,
and I wanted to go back.
We had a great time there.
Then at night my wife and I went
down to the Harbor Light, and I preached
to a whole lot of alcoholics.
One M.B. sitting down in front of
me, a medical doctor, who had drunk himself
under the table and was down at the
Salvation Army getting bailed out.
Excuse the change of figure.
But I like that sort of thing.
Pretty soon I'm going to speak at United
Church in the City of Toronto, and they
have asked me to speak on the cross
of Jesus.
And they said, Come and preach the cross.
And I said, the only thing I know
is the old-fashioned gospel.
And they said, Come and preach it.
I said, I'm going to preach it.
I got the text and I got the
sermon.
The text is, God forbid that I should
glory and save in the cross of Jesus
Christ the Lord.
And I'm going to preach on why I
glory in the cross.
They have asked for it and they are
going to get it, and I think they
will enjoy it.
Then very shortly I'm going to speak in
a Baptist church up here in Willowdale.
So I get around, and I don't know
one from the other.
Get a man on his knees and you
have to listen awfully closely to know what
school of religious thought he belongs to.
I'm talking about worship now, and saying that
worship is a spiritual thing.
It's internal and the external, while they are
necessary.
For instance, we couldn't sit here on the
corner tonight and preach and sing and pray
without walls to protect us from some heat.
You have to have buildings.
So I'm for buildings.
You have to have books, and I'm for
books.
God has blessed external things, but the trouble
is we make them our slaves instead of
our servants.
This building should be your servant, not your
slave.
That piano or that organ should be servants
of the Most High God.
We should not be slaves to them.
So with times and truths and everything else,
they are our servants.
I'm a prince of the house of God,
brother to Jesus Christ the Lord, and so
is every true Christian.
Therefore we rise above all the little things
of religion and look down from our place,
blessed all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places
in Christ.
We look down and not up at things,
but down on them.
It's wonderful how little things look when you
are up high enough.
You always know you are losing altitude when
things begin to get big.
When fields get the size of Canadian postage
stamps, you are up there.
When they begin to get a little bigger,
you say to yourself, we are losing altitude.
You look at your watch and say, sure,
we're going to land.
And the further down you get into the
world, bigger things look, and the higher up
you get, the smaller.
I recommend to you tonight, dear friends, that
big problem that's facing you, rise above it.
Take off and get up there, and rise
above it.
Tomorrow I'm going to have another experience.
I'm going to ride an eggbeater, one of
these helicopters.
I've never been in one, and I'm not
sure how I'll feel when they turn you
over on your side or tip you up
on the end and take you along.
I hope they go high enough and come
down when they should.
But I like to fly now because I
like to see things that get small.
I like to rise in God, where the
little things of life aren't big after all,
but as small as they are.
God is spirit.
I think I've got to close.
It's 829, and that's time to close.
Now, do what they tell you in Bible
school is never to do.
Break off a sermon and finish it next
week.
But I have much more to say about
this.
I want to talk further about the internality
of worship and what spirituality means.
I've told you tonight what it isn't.
Next Sunday night I want to tell you
what it is.
Do you know what I thought you would
do tonight?
We've had a baptism of service.
Seven people have followed the Lord in baptism.
There's a parsonage, two studies here, offices.
You can meet and talk with us, you
can come to see us.
Sometimes people do, and I have talked with
them, and they have more than I do.
So I'll not press an invitation tonight, but
I'll tell you what I want you to
do.
I want you to stand and sing, and
sing well, lustily and in reverently in the
chorus.
Holy, holy, holy.
What's the number?
347.
Day is dying in the west, heaven is
touching earth with rest.
Worship all the night, set your evening lamps
alight through all the sky.
Let's worship the Lord in the beauty of
holiness.
If your sins are gone, and Christ lives
inside of you, you can sing that song
with awful, wonderful meaning tonight.
Let's stand and sing it.