In the 45th Psalm, Psalm 45, here's a
man of God so delighted with God and
his relation to him.
It doesn't say David wrote it, but I
think I can smell David's garment here and
sense David's presence.
Whoever it was, he was a great worshipper,
and he says, My heart is indicting a
good matter.
I refer to things I have made touching
the king.
My pen is the pen of a ready
writer.
That's introductory.
Then he turns to God himself and says,
Thou art fairer than the children of men.
Grace is poured into, or some versions say,
poured forth by thy lips.
Therefore God hath blessed thee forever.
Now it becomes king, son of God.
Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most
mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty.
And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of
truth and meekness and righteousness.
Thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.
Forsake thy throne, O God, is forever and
ever.
The scepter of thy kingdom is a right
scepter.
Now loveth righteousness, and hateth wickedness.
Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with
the oil of gladness above thy pillows.
All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes
and cashew out of the ivory palace, whereby
they have made thee glad.
Kings' daughters were among thy honorable women.
Upon thy right hand did stand the queen
in gold of Ophir.
Hearken, O daughter, and consider and incline thine
ear.
Forget also thine own people and thy father's
house.
For our ties that are closer than the
ties of blood.
So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty.
For he is thy Lord.
Worship thou him.
Here is the truth upon which we build.
Simply this, that God made everything for a
purpose.
And the purpose in making man was to
have somebody capable, properly and sufficiently, to worship
him.
To satisfy his own heart.
But that man fell by sin, and now
is failing to carry out the creative purpose.
He is like a cloud without water, gives
no rain.
Like a sun that gives no heat, or
a star that gives no light.
Or a tree that no longer gives any
fruit.
Or a bird that no longer sings.
Or a harp that is silent and no
longer gives off music.
Now that is the thesis which I am
developing.
And I want to go on from there
and talk about worship tonight.
He is thy Lord.
Worship thou him.
Now here is something that we want to
settle.
And that is that God wants us to
worship him.
The devil would like to tell us, or
our own unbelieving minds, that God does not
particularly want us to worship him.
We owe it to him, but that God
isn't concerned.
But the truth is that God wants us
to worship him.
We are not unwanted children.
God wants us to worship him.
I repeat, why else would it be when
Adam had sinned and broken his fellowship, and
the harp of Adam had become unstringed, and
the voice of Adam had died in his
throat, why was it that when God came
in the cool of the day to talk
with Adam, he couldn't find him and cried,
Adam, where art thou?
It was God seeking worship from an Adam
that had sinned.
And our Lord in Luke 4 says, Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him
only shalt thou serve.
It is not only desired that we worship
God, but that he has commanded us to
do it.
And have you noticed in the Psalm 45
here, So shall the king greatly desire thy
beauty.
God finds something in us.
It is something that he put there, but
it's there.
My friends, unbelief is of several kinds, or
rather there are several phases or facets to
unbelief.
And one of them is that we don't
think we're as bad as God says we
are.
That's one.
And if we don't have faith in God's
word concerning our badness, we'll never repent.
Then there is another facet of faith.
It is this, that we don't believe that
we're as dear to God as he says
we are.
And we don't believe that we're as precious,
nor that he desires us as much as
he says he does.
If everybody listening to me tonight, and myself
included, could suddenly have a baptism of pure,
cheerful belief that God wanted me, and that
God wanted me to worship him, and that
God wanted me to pray and admire him
and praise him, it could transform this Christian
fellowship and change us overnight into the most
radiantly happy people on the North American continent.
So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty,
and he is thy Lord, so worship thou
him.
And it's written in 2 Thessalonians about when
the king shall come, when Jesus shall come,
to be glorified in his saints and admired
in all that believe.
That is, God is admired.
Not the people admired, but God is admired.
And then more than these proof texts that
I have given, is, and more convincing, the
whole import and substance of the New Testament,
of the Bible, of all the Bible is,
that God made us to worship him.
And when we are not worshiping him, we're
failing in the purpose for which we were
created, that we're stars without light and sun
without heat and clouds without water and birds
without song and harps without music.
We simply are failing and falling short.
But I want to be very clear about
this, and I want to say now that
we cannot worship him as we will.
The one who made us to worship him
also has decreed how we shall worship him.
We cannot worship God as we will.
God does not accept just any kind of
worship.
He accepts worship only when it is pure
and when it is indicted, to use the
scriptural term, by the Holy Ghost.
You see, God has rejected almost all the
worship of mankind in our present condition.
Though God wants us to worship him, and
commands us to, and asks us to, and
obviously was anxious and hurt when Adam failed
to worship him, yet nevertheless, God condemns and
rejects almost all the worship of mankind for
reasons which I am going to show you
now.
Let us break up the worship of man,
the rejected worship, the worship that God won't
receive.
Let us break it up into Cain worship
and Samaritan worship and pagan worship and nature
worship, for there are at least those four
kinds of worship that are brought in the
earth, and God rejects all of them.
There is Cain's worship.
You know well what that was, I assume
you are a Bible reader, and you know
that while Abel offered unto God a sacrifice
of blood, Cain offered no sacrifice of blood,
he came with a bloodless sacrifice and offered
flowers and fruit and of the growth of
the earth to the Lord.
And this attempted worship rested upon three errors.
It rested upon a mistaken impression of the
kind of God God is.
Cain was born of fallen parents, and Cain
had never heard the voice of the God
in the garden, and when Cain came to
worship God, he came to a God other
than God, he came to a God of
his own imagination.
And then the second error is that man
occupies a relation to God other than what
he does.
You see, a lot of religious people are
mistaken.
They assume that we humans, as humans, that
we occupy a relation to God which we
do not occupy.
They think we are God's children, and we
talk about, oh God and Father of mankind.
When the Bible does not teach that God
is the Father of mankind, then the third
error is that sin is less serious than
it is in fact.
So that Cain made all of these mistakes.
He thought God was a different kind of
God from what he is.
He thought he was a different kind of
man from what he was, and he thought
sin was less vicious and serious than God
said it was.
So he came cheerfully bringing his sacrifice and
offered God worship, which we simply call Cain
worship.
It was the worship without atonement.
So always keep this in mind, that while
God says, He is thy Lord, worship thou
him.
And while he calls, where art thou?
And while he commands we must worship him
in spirit and in truth, he bluntly and
summarily rejects worship that is not founded upon
redeeming blood.
And then there is Samaritan worship.
You know about the Samaritans.
How under Omri and Ahab and others, the
city of Samaria became a religious center, and
Jerusalem was rejected as the place.
God said, In this temple, in this place,
I will put my name, and there you
shall come, and there you shall, I shall
reveal myself, and turn this way, and hear,
said Solomon, from thy place in heaven, O
God, and forgive.
And the temple in Jerusalem was set up
as the place where men should worship.
But the Samaritans were heretics, and they were
heretics in the right sense of the word,
because heretical doesn't always mean that we are
false.
A man can be a heretic and not
teach anything particularly false.
Did you know that?
A heretic is not necessarily one who teaches,
say, that there is no trinity, or that
God did not create the earth, or that
there is no judgment.
They are heretics too.
But heresy doesn't mean to teach wrong.
The very word heretic means one who picks
and chooses.
So that the Samaritans were heretics in that
they chose certain parts of the Bible, the
Old Testament.
They had a Pentateuch, the Pentateuch, and they
said, Now we accept the Pentateuch, but we
reject David, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel,
and Daniel, and 1st and 2nd Kings, and
the Song of Solomon, or they named all
of the rest of the scripture except the
Pentateuch.
And they said, We believe, and then they
did some translating.
You know you can translate anything and prove
what you have to prove.
Anybody can do that.
All you have to do is to say,
I know the Greek, or I know the
Hebrew, and after that they are on their
own.
So they translated the Old Pentateuch in a
manner that made Samaria the place of worship.
And they said, Here is Samaria the place
of worship.
And of course they were hostile to the
Jews who said, No, no.
Our fathers worshiped in Jerusalem.
God gave them this hill Moriah.
And here on this hill, this hill, David
took this Zion hill, and there he made
the temple.
Lord Solomon, his son, built the temple, and
there is the place where people should worship.
There Christ came.
They said, No, no.
We are to worship in Samaria.
But yet they accepted the Pentateuch.
They accepted as much of the Bible as
they wanted.
Now, I don't think that I will have
to spell it out and mark it in
red ink for you to see how much
heresy there is these days, believing what we
want to believe, emphasizing what we want to
emphasize, and following along in one path but
rejecting another, doing one thing but refusing another,
and thus become heretics in that we are
pickers and choosers among the truths of God.
And that is Samaritan worship, and then there
is pagan worship.
It would take a five-foot shelf of
books for me to attempt, even if I
were able to do it.
I could do the way the rest of
them do, take a course of reading for
a year and then write the book.
They all do that.
But I could go back, if I wanted
to, and search into the worship of the
early Egyptians.
In fact, I do have their books, the
Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Upanishads
and the writings of Zoroaster and Buddha.
You know he didn't write, others wrote for
him.
And the Laws of Manu and all the
rest.
If we wanted to do it, we could
make a case and preach for two weeks,
if anybody would listen, about the worship of
the pagans, the heathen worship.
Paul talks about it, and Paul hasn't a
kind thing to say about it.
He condemns it outright and downright, and says,
When they knew God deglorified him not as
God, neither were thankful, but became vain in
their imagination, and their foolish heart was darkened.
And down they went from God to man,
and from man to bird, and from bird
to beast, and from beast to fish, and
to creeping things that wriggled on the earth.
That was man's terrible trip downward in his
worship.
And then there is nature worship.
I admit and frankly say to you that
I have more sympathy with this than I
do liberalism.
But at the same time it won't do.
For nature worship is but the poetry of
religion.
You know, religion does have a lot of
poetry in it.
And it properly does have, and should have.
We sang a lot of poetry tonight, didn't
we?
A lot of poetry.
And most everybody smiles and shrugs and says,
Oh, I'm no poet, I don't care for
poetry.
But the do.
The do.
You get a fellow excited, and let him
tell you something he's seen, and instantaneously you'll
fall into metaphors and similes and figures of
speech.
He's a poet, and he, as they say,
doesn't know it.
And we're all poets.
We're all poets.
And religion brings poetry out more than any
other occupation that the mind can be engaged
in.
And there's a lot that is very beautiful
about religion.
There is a high enjoyment in the contemplation
of the divine and sublime.
And the concentration of the mind upon beauty
always brings a high sense of enjoyment.
Well, that's nature worship.
And some mistake this nature worship, this rapt
feeling, for true worship.
You remember that Emerson said, and Emerson was
an old Christian, Emerson said that once he
had on occasion, walking across a field at
night after a rain, with the sun shining
on the little puddles of water out over
the meadow, he had suddenly been, his mind
had been elevated to a place of such
happiness that he was full of fear.
He said, I was so happy I was
afraid.
He was simply a pagan poet is all.
And a lot of, a whole lot of
worship that's going on these days is nothing
else but pagan poetry.
Nature worship.
Some mistake the music of religion as true
worship, because music elevates the mind.
Music raises the heart to near rapture.
Music can lift our feelings to ecstasy.
Music has a purifying, a purging effect upon
us.
So that it's possible to fall into a
happy and elevated state of mind with a
vague notion about God.
And imagine that we're worshiping God when we're
doing nothing of the sort.
We are simply enjoying where it is that
which God put in us and which even
sin hasn't been able yet to kill.
I don't think there's any poetry in hell.
I can't think there's any poetry in hell.
I can't believe that among the terrible sewage
of the moral world, there's going to be
anybody break into similes and metaphors.
And I can't conceive of anyone breaking into
song in that terrible hell.
We read about it in heaven because it
belongs there.
But as far as I know my Bible,
we never hear about it in hell.
We hear about conversation in hell.
But we don't hear about song because there's
no song there.
There's no poetry there.
There's no music there.
But there's plenty of it on earth.
Even among the unsaved persons because they were
once made in the image of God.
And so while they have lost God from
their mind, they still appreciate the sublime.
Certain men have written books.
Edmund Burke wrote a book on the sublime.
Another fellow with a long name that sounds
like a watch, an old Latin, wrote a
great book on the sublime.
And there's much that's sublime in the world
and beautiful.
For beauty, you know, the sublimity is beauty
of the mind.
In contrast, distinction too, to use a long
word, beauty of the eye and ear.
Music is the beauty that the ear recognizes.
And certain other beautiful things the eye recognizes.
But when the heart hears nothing and sees
nothing but only feels, then it's the music
of the heart.
It's beauty within the spirit.
And so we can have that and still
not worship God at all or be accepted
of God.
I repeat that we can be nature lovers
and nature worshipers and music worshipers and poetry
worshipers and pagan worshipers and Samaritan pickers and
choosers and Cain worshipers without blood.
And God Almighty sternly rejects it all and
says, I'll have nothing to do with it.
Jesus our Lord said, God is spirit and
day that worship him must.
Now I want you to see that word,
that imperative there.
God is spirit and day that worship him
must.
The word must clears away all mist of
obscurity and takes worship out of the hands
of men.
You know, man wants to worship God, but
he wants to worship God the way he
wants to worship God.
So did Cain, so did the Samaritans, and
so have they down the years, and God
rejected it all.
And our Lord Jesus said, God is spirit
and day that worship him must.
Now there's your imperative.
There's no tolerance.
There's no broad spirit.
There's the sharp pinpointing of fact so that
every man in his own way fallacy is
completely rejected.
I thought I would like to read in
your hearing.
Now I don't think, don't brace yourself and
say, I wish I'd stood and stayed home
because it won't be long.
I think there are only nine verses, eight
or nine lines.
I picked this out because I said I'd
like to have these friends of mine know
what I'm talking about when I talk about
the worship that God rejects, the worship that
God doesn't receive, the every man in his
own way kind of worship.
Now here it is at its purest.
This was written by Edwin Markham.
Edwin Markham was a Western man, an American.
He's dead now.
He wrote The Man with a Hoe and
Lincoln and a few other great poems.
But when he started talking about God, he
talked just like Cain and just like the
Samaritans and just like everybody else who hasn't
been renewed by the Holy Ghost.
Here's what he said.
I choose this as symbolic of, or typical
of rather, typical of a whole world of
poetry.
I have big books of religious poetry.
It goes way back into the beginning when
man first began to write poetry about his
gods and comes down the years.
Now here we have an American who lived
over, lived in the 20th century and was
brought up where churches' steeples were everywhere, jumping
up into the clouds and where church bells
could be heard every morning.
And here's what this fellow wrote about his
search for God.
And this indicates what the human mind can
do, even surrounded by Bibles and church bells.
He said, I made a pilgrimage to find
the gods.
Now this is an American talking, mind you.
And I say that every man in his
own way, every time our dear friend in
the White House has any occasion to mention
religion, he's always careful to grumble before everybody
and say, not every man in his own
way.
Remember, every man in his own way.
God bless him, he's a good man.
But he's in a tight spot there.
So it's every man in his own way
worship.
That's the religion of Washington and I suppose
most everywhere else.
I made a pilgrimage to find the God,
he said.
And I listened for his voice at holy
tombs.
I might comment here, if you'll allow, that
it seems an odd place to go to
hear God.
But he was looking for the God, he
says.
And he listened for his voice at holy
tombs.
I don't know where there's any holy tombs.
And there's nobody in the tomb that could
say anything.
I think you'd get less conversation in the
tomb than anywhere else.
But we'll pass that up.
I searched for the print of his immortal
feet in dust of broken altars.
Yet turned back with empty heart.
Now this is typical of about a thousand
poems that have been written by more or
less frustrated frustrated women.
And men who came up to Kadesh Barney
and wouldn't cross over.
People who came to the altar and wouldn't
die.
So they write themselves plain few poems about
how they searched for what they called the
God.
But he says, now it always turns out
this way.
I could finish with the last lines of
these poems.
It always turns out this way.
But he says, on the homeward road a
great light came upon me.
And I heard God's voice singing in a
nestling lark.
First place nestling lark don't sing.
But in the second place, in the second
place, he said he heard God singing like
a bird.
And then he said I felt his sweet
wonder in a swaying rose.
And received his blessing from a wayside well.
And looked on his beauty in a lover's
face.
Saw his bright hand send signals from the
sun.
Now there you have it, brethren.
Now that I'm no crazy man.
And that was no medicine man from New
Guinea.
Here's a man whose poetry is in every
anthology.
He writes among the minor poets of the
world.
And he goes out looking for God.
The God, he says.
And he searches for him first place in
graveyards.
Didn't find him there.
And then he looked at broken altars.
Didn't find him there.
Then on the way back he hears a
bird sing and says, that's God.
And he sees a happy-faced lover holding
hands with his girlfriend and says, that's God.
And he sees a rose waving in the
wind and he says, that's God.
And so he comes home and writes himself
a poem.
Now that, my dear friends, is what you
call nature worship.
That's finding God everywhere and, incidentally, finding God
nowhere.
For that is Cain worship.
That is the worship without blood.
That's worship without knowledge.
Jesus said, they that worship him must.
And he settled forever that he's going to
tell us how we should worship God.
And here's a man who said, God formed
the living flame and he gave the reasoning
mind.
Then only he may claim the worship of
mankind.
So that instead of our worship of God,
worshiping God, every man after his own fashion.
Now remember, there's only one way to worship
him.
I am the way, the truth, and the
life, and no man cometh unto the Father
but by me.
And so instead of being kindly and charitable,
by allowing an idea to stand, that God
accepts worship from anybody anywhere, I am injuring,
jeopardizing the future of the man that I
allow to get away with that.
And I was not, I could not possibly
be a politician.
I could not.
When they met in Chicago here, who met?
The Democrats met in Chicago.
They had different preachers open with prayer every
day, you know.
And I confess that my heart curled up
in scorn when I heard these preachers' prayer.
They were so afraid that they were going
to insult a Jew or make a Mohammedan
feel bad, that they picked as carefully as
though they were walking among apes, for fear
they'd hurt somebody's feeling, and mention Jesus in
their prayer.
But when they got out to San Francisco
in the cow barn, and they asked a
Presbyterian preacher to pray, I could, I think
I was lying down listening to the radio,
listening to a rebroadcast at night.
And I almost jumped out of bed with
joy.
That Presbyterian preacher ended, This we ask in
the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
You Jews can take it, you Mohammedans can
take it, you atheists can take it, you
pussyfooters and every man in his own way,
you can take it, says the Presbyterian preacher.
This I ask in the name of Jesus
Christ our Lord.
And I'd never make a politician, never.
Because if I have to scratch the back
of every Samaritan, I can't do it.
And if I have to scratch Cain's back
and say, you'll make it too, boy.
And if I have to pick up the
nature lover and the music and poetry lover,
thinking he's worshiping God because he feels good
inside, and pat him on the back and
say, it's all right with you, I would
be violating my commission as a child of
God and a prophet of the Most High.
So I could never stand and deliver a
whole speech.
I'd get something in there about the blood
and the Redeemer.
I'd do like Isaac Watts did when he
tried to put the Psalms in the meter.
He'd just get into a psalm where there
wasn't anything about Jesus, he'd put a verse
in it.
Remember that?
He'd always have a stanza in there before
he'd get through.
Well, amen.
And now, God is spirit, and they that
worship him must.
And these altars of Baal, these churches where
they pray in the spirit of Jesus, and
in the spirit of good, and in the
name of the great All-Father, and in
the name of brotherhood, they even pray in
the name of brotherhood.
Well, it's too bad.
And here now, the truth, the truth itself,
the truth himself, incarnated, says, God is spirit,
and they that worship him must worship him
in spirit and in truth.
The worshiper must submit to truth, or he
can't worship God.
He can write poems, and he can get
elevations of thoughts when he sees the sunrise.
He can hear the fledgling lark sing when
fledgling larks don't sing.
And he can do all sorts of things,
but he can't worship God acceptably.
Because to do so means that he's got
to submit to the truth about God.
He's got to admit God is who he
says he is, and God is what he
says he is.
And he's got to admit that Christ is
who he says he is, and what he
says he is.
And he's got to admit the truth about
himself, that he's as bad a sinner as
God says he is.
And he has to admit the truth of
atonement, that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses
and delivers from that sin.
And he has to come God's way.
He must have been renewed after the image
of him that created him.
Only the renewed man can worship God acceptably.
Only the redeemed man can worship God acceptably.
So these people who have churches and pray
in the name of the All-Good and
the All-Father, I'd rather go out and
walk in the park with my New Testament
in attendance.
I don't know how you feel about it.
But I could find my God, not the
God in a rose, but I could find
the God who sits enthroned on high, and
by his side sits one whose name is
Jesus, having all power in heaven and in
earth.
And I could commune with God walking out
on the street rather than worshiping at the
altar of Baal.
Man must have been renewed.
He must have had an infusion of the
spirit of truth.
Somebody prayed somewhere tonight.
I heard it in one of the meetings.
Somebody prayed and said that if the Holy
Ghost doesn't do these things, it will be
wood, hay, and stubble.
And he's certainly right.
Wood, hay, and stubble.
My worship will never reach higher than the
top of my own head.
And the God in heaven will refuse it
as he refused the worship of Cain.
For the effort to worship, Cain's effort to
worship, though created to worship God, sin has
made it impossible for me to know how
to worship God except truth enlightens me.
And I have in my hand a book
that enlightens me.
Here is the light that lighteth every man
that will read it.
And Jesus Christ is the light that lighteth
every man that comes into the world.
And the light of the human heart and
the light of the book harmonize.
And when the eyes of the soul look
to the book of God and to the
living word of God, then we know the
truth and we can worship God in truth.
And we can worship God in spirit.
Well, remember that in the Old Testament, no
priest could offer a sacrifice until he had
been anointed with oil.
He had to be anointed with oil symbolic
of the spirit of God.
No man can worship out of his own
heart.
Let him search among the flowers.
Let him search among bird's nests and tombs
and wherever he chooses to worship God.
He cannot worship out of his own heart.
Only the Holy Ghost can worship God acceptably.
And he must in us reflect back the
glory of God.
The spirit comes down to us and reflects
back to God.
And if it does not reach our hearts,
there is no reflection back and no worship.
Oh, how big and broad and comprehensive and
wonderful the work of Christ is.
That's why I can't have too much sympathy
for the kind of Christianity that makes it
out that the gospel is to save a
fellow from smoking.
Well, I think so too.
Anybody smoking, he's on fire.
And I think that we ought to put
that out.
Or that it saves a man from drinking.
And I think that any man that will
take into his stomach what will knock brains
out of his head ought to quit that.
So I don't believe in drinking either.
But my friends, is that all Christianity is?
To keep me from some bad habit so
I won't play the pony, beat my wife,
or lie to my mother-in-law?
Of course regeneration will clean that up.
Of course a new birth will make a
man right.
But the purpose of God in redemption is
to restore us again to the divine imperative
of worship.
So that we can hear God say again,
So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty.
Psalm 45.
For he is thy Lord, worship thou him.
We're to be worshippers, my friends.
Methodists conquered the world with their joyous religion
because they were worshippers.
When they ceased to be worshippers, their religion
ceased to have the same effect and power
that it used to have.
But how big and broad and comprehensive it
is.
God wants you to be regenerated in order
that you might be capable of worship.
And on these succeeding nights I want to
tell you what worship is.
I want to tell you how worship is
admiration.
How worship is adoration.
How worship is fascination.
But I'll close tonight.
I read in your hearing about that man
who looked for God everywhere and didn't find
his print of his immortal feet among the
broken altars for the simple reason God isn't
running around there.
And there's a whole lot more like it.
But it all goes the same way.
But listen to this man.
Glory be to God the Father.
Glory be to God the Son.
Glory be to God the Spirit.
Great Jehovah three in one.
Glory, glory while eternal ages run.
He knew his worshiping, didn't he?
He knew how.
He knew why.
Glory be to him who loved us, washed
us from each spot and stain.
Glory be to him who bought us, made
us kings with him to reign.
Glory, glory to the Lamb that once was
slain.
Who wrote that?
Wesley didn't write that.
Horatio Bonar wrote that, the Scotch preacher.
Glory, blessing, praise eternal.
Thus the choir of angels sings.
Honor, riches, power, dominion.
Thus it prays, creation brings.
Glory, glory, glory to the King of kings.
There's worshiping.
He knew what it was all about.
They that worship him must worship him in
spirit and in truth.
When you begin to talk about the Lamb
that was slain, and the blood that was
shed, and God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Holy Ghost, then you are
living in truth.
You are worshiping in truth.
When the Spirit of God takes over, we
worship in spirit.
So we worship in spirit and in truth.
O friends, God created you to worship him.
And when fundamentalism lost her power to worship,
she invented religious clap-clap to make her
happy.
And that's why I have hated it, and
preached against it, and condemned it all down
these years.
And they're coming around to my position now
by the dozens and scores who used to
be afraid to say, or open their mouths,
or used to be afraid to stand against
this clap-clap.
They're interloquists with wooden dummies on their knee
and wood on top of their necks.
Worshiping God, supposedly.
Worshiping God and claiming to serve the Lord.
And having the only joy they have is
the joy that is of the flesh.
Elvis Presley is a happier man after he
gets through with a number than a lot
of Christians are after they've worked themselves up
for half an hour.
You don't have to do it, brother.
The well of the Holy Ghost is an
effervescing, artesian well.
And you don't have to prime the pump.
They that worship him must worship him in
spirit and in truth.
And the silver waters of the Holy Ghost
flooding up out of the redeemed and cleansed
heart of a worshiping man is as sweet
and beautiful to God as the loveliest diamond
that studs his throat.
We need to learn how to worship.
I'm going down to Norfolk, Virginia one of
these times.
Not too long.
I'll only be gone a short time.
But I'm down there for two days.
And they tell me that the Indra Varsity
in three states are going to converge on
Norfolk.
And you know what they're coming?
They want you to teach us to worship.
Oh, brother.
God will never bless me for that.
That is, he'll never reward me for that
because I have a theory God doesn't reward
you for doing something you like to do.
And I'll never get any reward for going
down there and preaching about something I love
to do.
But to talk to young college people about
worshiping God.
What archangel wouldn't want to do that?
What cherubim before the throne wouldn't envy me?
Happy past.
Trying to turn our young people away from
nonsense to worship the living God.
So shall the king greatly desire thy duty,
for he is thy Lord.
Worship thou him.