I have been speaking from the voice of
God's love, the voice of Jesus' blood, the
voice of wisdom, the voice of conscience, and
tonight on the voice of judgment.
In attempting to prepare this message for tonight,
I searched the word and found myself, strangely
enough, unable to get past the, away from
the house of God.
So I must speak tonight about judgment as
it pertains to the house of God, to
Christians, rather than to sinners.
And I want to read a number of
passages of scripture, Romans 14-12, so then
every one of us shall give account of
himself to God.
First Corinthians 3.13, Every man's work shall
be made manifest, for the day shall declare
it, because it shall be revealed by fire,
and the fire shall try every man's work.
First Corinthians 4.5, Therefore judge nothing before
the time, until the Lord come, who both
will bring to light the hidden things of
darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of
the hearts.
And then shall every man have praise of
God.
Second Corinthians 5.10, Following through, for we
must all appear before the judgment seat of
Christ, that every one may receive the things
done in the body, according to that he
hath done, whether it be good or bad,
knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord we
persuade men.
And that's part of the scripture that I
shall use in speaking tonight of the voice
of God's judgment in treating us.
Now, let me begin by calling attention to
a well-authenticated historic fact, and it is
that religious people are prone to select a
favored truth and to hold that truth at
the expense of other truths.
You say, maybe in your heart, I know
that's true because I know a man.
No, I don't mean that.
I mean that we, the sheep of God's
pasture, the children of his love, the so
-called Orthodox people who believe the truth and
hold to traditional Christianity.
We are prone to select and favor,
say, one truth at the expense of the
other truths that are in the Bible, and
to overemphasize that one truth so as to
obscure other truths which are just as important.
I can't think of anything drier than this.
A young fellow, Brother Sandrock's boy, was telling
me with much delight today, because the joke
was on me.
I mean, Mr. Sandrock's boy said, Let's go
down to Junior Church.
It's not so dry down there.
I admit it's dry, but if you listen,
you'll get something.
And that is that the historic record show
that we are prone to take certain truths
and favor them at the expense of others.
And by overemphasizing them, we obscure other truths
which are just as important, so that they
actually disappear for generations.
I want to tell you what I mean
by disappear.
I mean that they fall into disuse.
Suppose that there was a key on the
piano over here, a middle-axe.
And let us suppose that it just didn't
play.
It just didn't play, that's all.
It didn't play.
It's out.
And now somehow our friend could get on
of an evening.
But if it was somewhere up near the
middle of the keyboard where it's often used,
he'd have a time of it.
And he'd always be wincing under the fact
that he hit the key and that nothing
happened.
It wouldn't be removed from there.
And if you'd photograph the keyboard, you'd find
it in the picture.
And if you were to run up and
down the scale, you'd find your finger would
touch it, but it didn't play.
Now, that's what I mean by certain basic
doctrines of the Christian faith that have been
allowed to fall into disuse, so that they
just don't play.
You don't hear them.
They're not talked about.
They're there.
And if you go to the Book of
Discipline, the Statement of Doctrine, you will find
it there, because it'll say that we do
firmly hold this truth, and they'll have it
number seven there in their creed.
But it has fallen into disuse.
It just doesn't play.
And it has no emphasis and no power,
because it is slurred over and forgotten.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, there are certain great
Bible truths which fall into disuse because certain
other truths which lie close to them have
been overemphasized to the obscuring of those truths.
And then those truths, the absence of them,
begins to do its deadly work.
And down and down and down we go,
until finally some prophet of God has to
come and reassert those truths and emphasize them
and trumpet them forth.
And at first, he's considered a heretic, because
he hadn't heard that for a generation or
two.
That hadn't been heard since great-grandpappy's time.
And I didn't hear it at camp meeting
last year.
I didn't hear it at that Bible conference.
I didn't hear it over here at this
convention.
I didn't hear it out at that council.
I didn't hear it here at the playground
of the Christian world.
I just didn't hear it.
Therefore, it isn't so.
But the prophet of God keeps on blasting
and trumpeting until the church wakes and adopts
that truth and does something about it, and
then some kind of a life comes from
the dead.
What did Luther do?
Invent a new doctrine?
He did not.
He dug a doctrine out which had fallen
into disrepute and never was heard.
And by sounding the trumpet blast of justification
by faith, he brought about the Reformation.
What did Wesley do?
Not invent any new doctrine, but by sounding
forth a forgotten doctrine that it was possible
to have purity of heart, he roused the
church.
And so with every man who has ever
been used of God tremendously in any generation
from Calvary down to this hour, they have
not preached any new truth.
They have simply had the anointed vision to
discover truths that had been obscured by the
overemphasis of certain other truths.
And at first they were considered heretics and
stoned out of town.
But after a while, the church listened to
them and began to wake up, and they
slept right from the dead, and God gave
them life.
Now, that's introductory to say this.
The justification by faith has become such a
doctrine as this.
It has been emphasized to a point where
it has obscured certain other close, related truths,
and we have lost the power of those
truths because we have overemphasized one truth.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, it would be very
difficult for any man to be eloquent enough
to overstate the vital importance of justification by
faith.
The man shall live by his faith.
And it is not by works of righteousness
which we have done, but according to his
mercy he saved us.
And it is through faith that we come
into this state wherein we now find ourselves.
Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace
with God.
Now, I say it would be very difficult
to overstate the importance of the doctrine of
justification by faith, because it delivers us from
the fruitless struggle to be good.
It delivers us from the bondage of the
Pharisee, and the bondage of the ritualist and
the legalist, who attempt by certain foods, or
by abstaining from them, by counting or telling
deeds so many times before breakfast, and keeping
certain holy days and certain feasts, to make
themselves resentful to God.
It is old Adam decking himself out in
his best religious garments for the sake of
impressing God Almighty and getting an end, so
that he'll be taken in at last as
having been a man who served the Lord
faithfully all the days of his life.
Now, that is the bondage some of our
fathers fell into, because the doctrine of justification
was obscured.
It was dropped out of the teachings of
the Church, and they tried to make themselves
acceptable to God by money and by all
sorts of methods.
Then along came a man, and with no
new truth, but digging up an old one,
buried and forgotten in the Bible.
He said, It's not by works of righteousness,
but it's by faith that we are pleasing
to God.
And immediately the Reformation was born, and the
Church of Christ got up out of long
sleep, and like the dry bones in Ezekiel's
vision, she walked and stood up a great
army.
And then the doctrine of justification by faith
has been emphasized until now.
It has been thrown out of focus as
badly as the opposite was before Luther's time,
so that as it is now understood, and
preached, and emphasized, and hammered on, and twanged
on by everybody and his brother up and
down the country, here is what has happened.
All responsibility has been thrown over upon God,
and we conceive ourselves to be happy little
Christians without a responsibility in the wide world,
except to give out a tract occasionally.
And all sense of accountability has been lost.
We no longer sing, except with our fingers
crossed, a charge to keep our hat, because
we have emphasized the automatic quality of faith
to a point where, if you believe and
accept Christ, all responsibility goes off your shoulder
for all time to come, and all accountability
passes from you to the Savior, and you
are not accountable to God anymore.
You simply get in the Pullman sleeper, pull
down the roomette, the bed out of the
wall, and wake up in a deep hole
in heaven.
And also, all judgment has been bypassed.
Christians aren't thinking of judgment anymore.
They're not worried about judgment.
The only thing I can ever get a
Christian worried about is that he might lose
what we call fellowship, that he might not
be as happy tomorrow as he was today,
or happy day after tomorrow as he was
yesterday.
He wants to be happy, happy, sing it
all together now, happy, happy, happy.
He wants to be a happy little moron.
And so the result is that he says,
now I've got to learn to keep my
fellowship up so I'll be happy.
But the idea of a probationary period, that
there is a judgment to come, that he
is accountable to God for the deeds done
in the body according to these texts, has
completely passed out of the theological thinking of
the modern fundamentalist church.
And faith has become a kind of magic,
having beneficial properties which accrue to the man
who believes.
And they accrue to him no matter what
his state of life may be.
They're automatic.
They accrue to him.
He believes, therefore it accrues.
And regardless of the moral condition of the
man, whether he's obedient or not, how faithful
he is, or what kind of Christian he
is, he believes, or has believed, and therefore
the automatic benefits of this magic faith accrue
to him now and in the world to
come.
Now, this has obscured a Bible truth, the
Bible truth that I want to deal with
tonight.
It is a true doctrine pushed out of
focus.
It is the doctrine of faith and grace
and justification by faith alone, pushed by uncorrected
logic to a ridiculous and grotesque extreme.
Now, let's talk about this doctrine of probation.
I say that we don't hear this very
often, and I admit that in standing before
this intelligent audience tonight, Bible-taught audience, I
feel very much like a heretic.
I feel as if I should be branded
and perhaps put in the stalks.
Maybe I would have been in the early
days of our country.
But the Bible still teaches the doctrine of
probation.
Now, what do we mean by probation?
We mean that this life is a preparation
for the next, and that that preparation is
not concluded when I believe on Jesus Christ
for my salvation.
There is a preparation that goes on beyond
that.
We take the thief on the cross who
believed in Jesus Christ and met him in
paradise the same day, and we make that
to be the criterion by which we judge
the whole thing, and so we believe in
Christ, and that prepares us.
We are then prepared, and there is no
such thing then as probation, as testing, as
judgment to come, nothing like that now in
modern theology.
And the man that will rise and declare
it may throw himself open to bitter attacks
by persons who have forgotten the beginning of
this sermon, the truth of it, that it's
possible to take a good doctrine and to
push just as good doctrines out of the
Bible with it.
And that's what happened in our day, I
don't think I'll ever be the man to
reform anything.
I'm getting too old, and I've sinned too
much against God in my time.
I don't think he'll trust me with it.
But I do say this, somebody may yet
arise in America who is willing to be
unpopular and to be thought a heretic and
a fool, who will be willing to endure
the heartache and agony and misunderstanding of daring
to face out and stare down the hierarchy
that has said that the doctrine of probation
is not biblical, that we are everything is
taken care of by one act of faith,
and there's no such thing as a judgment
nor an expectation of the judgment to come.
Now I say that the doctrine of probation
teaches that life is a preparation, this life
is a preparation for the next, and that
accepting Jesus Christ settles some things forever.
It settles forever my past sins.
It settles forever my justification before my Father.
It settles forever that my name is written
in the Lamb's Book of Life.
It settles that I am a regenerated man,
and the seed of God is in me.
It settles that.
That's what accepting Christ does.
But our mistake is that we forget that
we Christians are on probation.
All Christians are now on probation to prove
character and to test us for the world
to come, to see what we'll do with
the life that we've been given, to test
our repentance, how real it is, to test
our obedience, whether we plan to be an
obedient Christian or not, to prove our faithfulness,
to see what we'll do with time and
gifts and opportunities and money.
But because we have emphasized the doctrine of
justification by faith to the obscuration of this
doctrine, there's practically nothing at all said anymore
ever by anybody about the fact that you
and I are going to have to give
an account to God for our time, your
years and my years.
We're going to have to give an account
to God for the gifts we have, for
the gifts we have.
We're going to have to give an account
to God for the opportunities, that is, the
situations which enabled us to act that we
didn't take advantage of.
We're going to have to give an account
to God for the money we have.
We're riding high in America now.
Our fifty-four-cent dollar, they just lie
and just fly around like leaves in the
fall.
Everybody's got money now.
I know a boy that wanted to get
a little quick money in the summertime between
semesters so he'd go back to school, got
a laborer's job in a factory, worked overtime
one day and made thirty dollars, which was
two weeks' wages in 1933.
Thirty dollars in one day, a laborer.
Now, we got all kinds of money.
And most of us are overlooking this, that
we are on probation and God is testing
us to see what we're going to do
with that money.
Nothing to giggle about, boys, nothing to smile
about.
This is a serious and grave situation.
God has given to us Americans more money
than to any other people in all the
world, in all history.
And we have taken it as a matter
of course and toss it around as loosely
as dandelions.
Now, there's nothing I can do about that.
I might just as well sit down and
shut up.
Because I know you people, you'll do as
you please anyway.
But you're on probation.
And God is going to hold you accountable
for what you do.
And he's going to hold you accountable for
what you do with your abilities.
Every man according to his ability, said the
Holy Ghost.
And he's going to hold you accountable for
what you do with your time.
You say, now, Brother Tozer, you stay out
of our business.
I'll do what I please with my time.
Well, I know that.
But I also know you're on probation.
And God is now testing you to find
out if you have moral sense enough to
know what to do with time.
Time is a creature gift which God has
given you.
But he hasn't given it to you foolishly.
He has given it to you to see
whether you have moral wisdom enough to know
what to do with it.
And the result of that testing will be
seen in the judgment of the great day.
I say that every Christian is saved but
on trial.
And every Christian is awaiting the final severe
test.
Look at this test.
Every man's work shall be made manifest, for
the day shall declare it, because it shall
be revealed by fire.
Now, he's not talking about Communists here.
He is talking about born-again believers.
He's talking about his own children.
He's writing to the Corinthian church.
And he's even talking in this instance about
the servants of the Lord who teach.
And he says that every man's work shall
be made manifest for the day.
Paul used that word as a solemn catchword.
The day, he would say.
The day.
One man said that Paul lived with one
eye on the judgment seat of Christ and
one eye on the perishing world.
Only we've forgotten the judgment seat of Christ.
And we're so happy that we're saved that
we have forgotten that we are men and
women on trial.
Not for our sins, for our past record.
That would damn us forever, too deep ever,
to find our way out of the hell
where we'd be placed.
But we're on trial for whether we have
moral wisdom enough, and moral courage enough, and
faithfulness sufficient to be able to know what
to do with this hour, and these moments,
and this day, and time, and money, and
opportunity, and the times in which we live.
A great deal of groaning and bemoaning the
times crushed between the nutcracker of communism on
one side, liberalism and Catholicism on the other
side.
And I could spend the next five hours
describing the dark side of the times in
which we live.
But they're God's gift to you, sir.
God sent some Jews down into Babylon where
they knew not the language.
Hung their harps, some of them did, on
the willows.
But there were certain ones that were tested
there.
Daniel and his brethren, they were tested men,
and the times they lived in became the
very acid, the very acid to test them
and prove to God what kind of men
they were.
And I won't be coward enough to wish
for one minute that I lived in any
better times than these.
I don't wish for one minute that I
lived in any better city than Chicago.
I know it's rotten.
I know it.
And I know that we're a great, top
-heavy country, and we might come crashing down
as other empires and nations have done.
But I don't wish myself in any other
period of the world's history.
These times are God Almighty's gift to me
as a Christian, and I'm on probation and
God-seeing.
What one of the least of these servants
is going to do about the times in
which he lives?
Justified, saved, but on trial.
There's where the Christian should hold himself.
But we're so eager to get out from
under all responsibility.
And like an unbroken coat, romp from one
side of the field to the other, kick
up our irresponsible heels in the sunshine, and
snort our defiance of all judgment.
Ladies and gentlemen, we had better, while we
can, listen to this rather pessimistic preacher and
be warned in time that you and I
are on probation.
Now, you can get away with almost anything
now.
And the reason we Christians can get away
with almost anything is that this is not
a period of judgment.
This is a period of probation.
If this was a period of judgment, you'd
sin and the Lord would let you down.
The Lord would punish you immediately.
The Lord would prove to you immediately that
you weren't worthy of his kingdom.
But this is not a day of judgment.
This is a day of probation.
This is the period of probation.
And the Holy Ghost says, "...therefore judge nothing
before the time, until the Lord comes, who
will both bring to light the hidden things
of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels
of the heart.
Then shall every man have praise of God."
So this is not the judgment day.
This is a period of probation.
If I were to put it around like
this, this is not the trial.
This is the preparation for the trial.
This is not the last examination.
This is the getting ready for the examination.
Now, doesn't this sound like strange doctrine to
be coming in a fundamentalist church in the
city of Chicago in the year 1953 A
.D.? For it is simply all out of
harmony with everything you hear.
Pauli and the cracker.
Pauli wants a cracker, he says.
And he'd put a ribbon around his neck
and teach him to say, Pauli wants a
cracker, in a high-cracked voice.
You get a reputation of being somebody.
And the crowds will rush in to hear
this Pauli and say, Pauli wants a cracker
as no other Pauli ever said it.
You should come and hear that bird.
You should come down and hear him.
He's wonderful.
He says Pauli wants a cracker in a
tone and with an inflection you've never heard
before.
But he's awful careful to stick to his
one lone text.
Pauli wants a cracker.
He doesn't dare get out of that.
He doesn't dare change his text.
He has to say the one thing that
he's been told to say and taught to
say.
So the idea of probation and a period
of trial when God gets us ready to
be judged in that day, not for our
salvation, understand, I insist justification makes us justified,
and that settles that.
But whether we're fit to live in God's
heaven among God's grace, whether we're morally and
spiritually wise enough and good enough, that you
say we've got to be because we're clothed
in his righteousness alone.
Yes, sir, clothed in his righteousness alone, thoughtless
to stand before the throne.
And if it were not for that, you
wouldn't appear before the judgment seat of Christ.
You'd appear before the judgment of the great
white throne and with the lost of all
the ages be judged.
But I'm talking about something else altogether.
I admit that sometimes, according to the Bible,
God's people can get so out of hand
that God has to precipitate judgment.
1 Corinthians 11 says there that a man
examine for he that eateth and drinketh unworthily
eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning
the Lord's body.
For this cause many are weak and sickly
among you, and many sleep.
And if this teaches anything, it teaches that
at the Lord's table, at least at one
time, things had become so sacrilegious, so irreverent,
that God did not wait for the day
of judgment, the testing day, to decide what
to do.
He precipitated the judgment and allowed some of
these Corinthians to become physically weak and sickly,
and some of them to die before their
time, because they handled holy things in an
unholy manner.
At the Lord's table they were irreverent and
drunken.
And because they were, God reached out and
pulled the judgment in little for them.
I say sometimes God does that, but for
the most part he does not.
For the most part, he simply lets us
go, because we're on trial, saved but on
trial.
This is a period of probation for the
world to come.
You say, Mr. Tozer, if I thought that,
I never could be a happy Christian.
If I thought that there was a time
coming when my deeds were to be tested
and judged, my life was to be examined
by the eye of God, I never could
be quite a happy Christian.
Well, there are two or three answers to
that.
One of them is that the Bible makes
a great deal less of your being happy
than it does of your being holy.
The Bible doctrine is a doctrine of holiness,
not necessarily a doctrine of happiness.
And to my mind, one of the proofs
of the infantilism, the spiritual infantilism of the
Church of Christ today, is that we insist
upon being happy and let hell freeze over.
We'll be happy any time.
We had better not seek to be happy,
we had better seek to discharge our spiritual
obligations, and then believe that in so doing,
God will allow an overtone of spirituality to
accrue to us, and the joy of the
Lord will come.
Paul used to write his letters weeping and
wet the paper with his dropping tears, and
at the same time have a joy that
wouldn't stay down.
There's your paradox, beloved friend.
It's possible to be solemn and serious and
grave with the thought that I am in
a period of probation, that I am a
probationer, and that sometime I'll stand before the
judgment seat of Christ to give an account
of the deeds done in the body, at
the same time to have a well of
joy springing up within my heart.
But the average Christian in our day trusts
to what he believes to be the magic
of faith that automatically fixes everything up for
him for all time to come.
So he's on board, streamers waving, whistles blowing,
and the band playing.
No, that's not Christianity, brethren.
Read your Bible with the thought in mind
that I've given you tonight.
Read it.
Try to think your way past all this
notion that's been funneled into our heads in
the last few years, and try to remember
that a Christian is one who is justified
but on trial, who is saved but on
probation.
You're following me?
You say, all right then, Mr. Tozer, are
you saying that I won't know whether I
am saved or not until the judgment day?
If you still think that's what I mean
after all I've said tonight, you and I
might just as well shake hands and quit
because I never can make you see it.
I have said boldly that that's not what
I mean.
I mean that I am saved by faith
and forgiven and justified and regenerated and protected
by the Advocate at the right hand of
the Father, all by faith.
But at the same time, I'm a man
on trial still.
For all shall appear before the judgment seat
of Christ to receive the things done in
the body, whether they be bad or good.
And every man's work shall be tested by
fire, for the fire shall declare it.
Now that's in the Bible too.
But we've obscured that doctrine.
Our blimmin' brethren friends occasionally refer to it.
They call it the bema, the judgment seat.
That's, I guess, the original Greek, and they
like to use occasional original Greek.
You know, we all do to make folks
believe it.
Well, anyway, we, this bema business, you see.
But you don't hear it emphasized much.
The average man isn't worried half as much
about the bema as he is about Life
magazine and how popular he'll be and how
much money he'll have and all the rest.
But this bothers me.
I don't know about you, but it bothers
me.
Now, this whole doctrine is set forth by
our Lord in Matthew 25.
He tells there the story of the man
who went into a far country.
Before he went, he called his servants in.
He had just had three.
He gave one of them five talents, he
gave one of them two, and he gave
one of them one.
Each one according to his ability.
They couldn't complain, because each one had, one
man had five talents worth of ability.
One man had two and one man had
one.
Each got what he deserved.
Now he said, use these, I'll be back.
The man that got five began to use
them.
The man that got three began to use
them.
The man that got one buried his.
After a while, the Lord returned.
This man returned, called his servants in.
Now, while he was gone, they could have
done just as they pleased.
They could have spent that money at a
card table.
They could have done what they pleased with
it and nobody would have judged them.
They could have written books, led singing, sung
solos, preached sermons, been on boards, run prayer
bands, young folk society, Sunday schools, edited magazines.
They could have done all those things and
still squandered their master's money and foolishly betrayed
his trust.
Still, they could have been as religious as
a cross between a Mohammedan and a Buddhist.
But when he came back, he just called
them in.
They were on probation during his absence.
Two of them knew it and one of
them didn't.
One of them, two of them, one said,
I used your money wisely, here it is,
with interest.
The other one said the same.
The other one said, I was afraid, and
so I hid the money.
And the Lord said to the ones that
he approved, he said, well done, good and
faithful servant.
You've been faithful over a few things.
I will make thee ruler over many.
Now, those three servants didn't know that they
were on trial.
He didn't tell them that.
He just said, here, use this, and went
away.
But they were on trial, and the servant
had promotions ready for those men.
And when he came back, he promoted two
of them and cast the other one out.
What are you going to do with that
past?
Now, the ultra-dispensationalists, they have gotten rid
of it by saying that Matthew doesn't belong
to us.
I'd just as soon believe the modernists when
he says Isaiah doesn't belong to us, as
to believe the dispensationalists when he says Matthew
doesn't belong to us.
I'm not going to have books of the
Bible ripped out from under my nose just
when I'm getting a stomachful of the green
pastures by some dispensationalist who says, that's not
for you, brother, just a minute, you need
not Abraham's book.
Abraham and I are brethren, and he lets
me come to his table and nibble with
him, sure.
And I don't believe any dispensationalist needs to
get excited for fear I'm going to get
blessed on a verse that he has marked
verboten.
I thought I had.
But this verboten business, I forbid you to
use that, brother, it's not for you.
Rightly divide the word of truth.
Oh, get on out.
I'll take the word of God, and this
book of God was given me.
It's not all about me, but it's all
for me.
It's one of the rules at Moody Institute,
and it's a good rule.
Now I ask you tonight, brethren, whether this
is not an eloquent voice.
It is an eloquent voice to me.
People say to me, why don't you take
it easy, get rid of some jobs and
take it easy.
I can't do it.
I wasted so much of my time.
People say, oh, you're such a busy man
that they knew how much time was wasted.
I ask you if this is not eloquent,
his voice, not mine, but the voice of
probation, the voice of judgment.
And remember that there is not and there
will not be one lonely friend.
See, when we get under conviction now and
get feeling low and feeling bad, we can
run to our friends.
Little religious talk, little chitchat about the church,
about the evangelists, and about this and that.
Pretty soon we feel better.
But in that day there won't be a
friend, for every man shall give an account
of his own deeds.
And there won't be one lonely friend to
go to for help in that hour when
our smiling but serious Father and our gracious
and kindly faced but serious Savior call us
to their feet and say, now, my redeemed
children, I must have an account of the
deeds done in the body since you were
saved.
I must now have an account.
What about the money that you got in
your lifetime?
I gave you a lot of it.
What about the ability that you had?
So many more abilities than lots of people.
What about times in which you lived when
you could shine as a star in the
darkness?
What did you do about it?
What about it?
No place to hide then, brethren.
No run to a soda fountain and nurse
on the malted milk while we laugh away
and joke away the seriousness of it.
You can't do it then, too late then.
You can do it now.
Some of you don't do it.
Just as soon as this, we're over here
now in the next few minutes.
Maybe you'll go home because it looks as
if it's going to storm, but normally you
wouldn't go home.
You'd go somewhere and joke off.
Because you've forgotten you're on probation.
You have tried to settle everything by one
act of believing.
You settle some things by one act of
believing, I've insisted.
But there are some that are ever settled
until death cuts us off or until the
Lord comes.
Now, what is the way of all this?
The way is the way of self-judgment.
If we should judge ourselves, we should not
be judged.
Self-judgment and obedience.
I want to warn against one thing.
I want to warn against the tragic moral
error of always confessing and yet never making
any change in the life.
When you confess a thing, it goes without
saying that you intend to abandon it.
So instead of forever confessing, I must confess
and abandon it if God is going to
believe my confession.
So self-judgment and obedience.
Oh, I say we don't sing anymore the
song that has this stanza in it.
Arm me with jealous care as in thy
sight to live and oh thy servant Lord
prepare a strict account to give.
Someone says if I believed I had to
give a strict account and serve in the
eyes of God, I never could be happy.
The man that wrote that was only one
jump short of hysterically happy.
That was Charles Wesley.
That man was so spiritually happy and old
Dr. Samuel Johnson, the English philologist and critic,
said of John Wesley, he is the loftiest
example of complete moral happiness that I have
ever seen.
And his brother Charles was happier still, if
there could be any difference.
Happy in God and in Christ.
And yet he said, arm me with jealous
care as in thy sight to live and
oh thy servant Lord prepare a strict account
to give.
He believed he was on probation.
He could sing, arise my soul arise, shake
off thy guilty fears.
The bleeding sacrifice in thy behalf appears.
Before the throne my surety stands, my name
is written on his hand.
He could sing that, but he could also
sing and oh thy servant Lord prepare a
strict account to give.
We're having ourselves a time, it never came
down from heaven, it doesn't sparkle with the
pure shine from the waters underneath the altar.
We're determined to be happy if we burst
a lung and we forget we're on probation.
And that your day by day service to
God and your fellow man will be sharply
scrutinized and severely judged before the feet of
Jesus Christ in that day.
To me that's an eloquent argument.
What do you think about it?